Beyond blame: what the Manosphere reveals about all of us

I know I’m a little late to the party, but I wanted to add my voice to the conversation, inspired by the recent release of Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary “Inside the Manosphere.”

What I’ve seen a lot of - which is the default of what we see everywhere, no matter what the offence is - is judgement and finger pointing. We pay in clicks and attention and subscription fees to see a light shone on the ugly boils of humanity erupting to the surface. We feel our moral outrage, point the fingers at the lack of male role models, Patriarchy and Capitalism. In doing so, we can easily fall into the comforting illusion that we are somehow separate from the problem - that by naming it, condemning it, and locating it outside ourselves, we have made progress.

But ultimately we are siphoning off more of our power to conglomerates like Netflix and the “villains” that ultimately I believe, paradoxically, are expressions of conditions we have collectively helped to create.

Moments like these, where our collective attention is focused for a moment on an issue like the manosphere, could be pivotal in our collective processing and ultimately our evolution of consciousness. But in order for this to happen, we need to interrupt the reflex of outrage, at least for a moment, and ask a harder question:

How might this be an intelligent or adaptive response to the conditions we are living in? And how might each of us be implicated in the reality from which it arose?

It’s so easy to think that we are separate from the ails of the world, that we somehow rise above it. But we are not separate.

We are all participating, in one way or another, in the creation of a profoundly yin-deficient world: a world in which connection, belonging, and relationship are not treated as forms of wealth, while money, status, and domination are. Most of us find ourselves swept up in this game on some level, whether we want to be or not. Most of us have internalised and perpetuate on some level, the fear of vulnerability being weakness. Most of us have not done our shadow work on integrating the parts of that want power and to feel power over.

As women, there are difficult questions for us too. Many of us carry deep wounds around the masculine (and many of us have good reason for our mistrust). But sometimes, in focusing so intensely on our victimhood and the ways we’ve been harmed, we fail to see the very real ways boys are harmed too, or the ways we might be perpetuating that which we lament.

We have become fluent in criticising men, yet far less practiced in recognising, supporting, and amplifying healthy forms of masculinity.

We condemn misogyny in men - rightly, but we are often less willing to look at the bitterness, contempt, and essentialising of men that has also become normalised in many female spaces, including all across social media.

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I spoke to a friend recently in his early 60s who says that the women he meets in his local dating pool are interested in dating, but simply don’t need and aren’t looking for partners. This is mirrored in my friendship circles too - while many of us desire male partners, we’ve learned over time to live without them. We don’t ‘need’ them in the ways we collectively used to. I imagine men all over the world sense this and how massively disorientating it must be.

None of this excuses the obvious misogyny of the manosphere. None of it softens the need for discernment, accountability, or a clear naming of harm. But if we only respond with condemnation, we miss the deeper pattern. In a world where many young men feel unappreciated, that the playing field is broken, where belonging is scarce, where status is everything, where resentment is everywhere, and where visions of mature masculinity are painfully absent, it is not surprising that some of them turn toward the manosphere for belonging, direction, and the promise of power.

Among the obvious feelings of alarm and dismay, the overriding feeling I had while watching these young men trying to navigate life was tenderness and compassion.

I think of young men and their fierce, testing, risk-taking energy that is in no way inherently toxic, but extremely potent and needing of guidance and conscious direction. When channelled well, this is the energy that can be protective, creative, disciplined, devotional and world-building. It can also become destructive when it has no meaningful container, no elders, no initiation, no challenge worthy of it.

If that fierce young masculine energy is not given a path, it will find one.

One of the tragedies of the current moment is that we often seem unable to distinguish between male energy that is dangerous and male energy that is simply intense, wild, unformed, and in need of guidance. So instead of initiating it, we either fear it, shame it, pathologise it, or leave it to be shaped by the market. And the market is always happy to provide a counterfeit initiation: domination, status, sexual conquest, emotional numbness, optimisation, power over love.

Part of the manosphere’s appeal is that it functions like a counterfeit initiation. It offers a code, a hierarchy, a brotherhood, an enemy, a discipline, and the promise of transformation.

I imagine also how the confusion around gender that we’re swimming in also creates the conditions for young men to cling on to more outdated and narrow forms of masculinity. On the bright side, more and more young people are rightly questioning the limitations of rigid gender roles, but the shadows side is that in some spaces, we might wrongly negate gender as a concept, see it as entirely socially constructed and try and bypass it all together.

There is a polarity that arises, where one end moves towards softness, ambiguity and fluidity and on the other end we have young men overperforming hardness, certainty, and dominance.

Like all expressions of polarity, the more we judge one side as the ‘wrong’ one, rather than asking how it is an intelligent or adaptive response to something in its environment, the more extreme it will need to become.

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Underneath the tenderness I felt, there is also grief, for the mess that we’re all in, the world we have collectively created but don’t want to take responsibility for.

There was a scene in particular, when influencer Myron Gaines’s girlfriend (now ex-girlfriend) Angie says something like “I see a different side of him behind closed doors.” For me, that moment revealed how beneath even the most performative or defended identities, there is the longing to be disarmed - to drop the persona, to be met, to be seen, to be loved.

While I’m not immune to anger or frustration, I choose not to let that be my organising force. I return instead to my love and appreciation of men, to a respect for the complexity of what they are navigating, and to a curiosity about how we might meet beyond the patterns we are all, in different ways, caught inside.

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p.s I have three spots available for male clients to explore receiving support and growing in the realms of intimate relating and leadership . Click here to find out more.