The Manosphere – An Absurdist Joke We Haven’t Taken Seriously
Marketing Unfiltered #73 → The Warning Shot & Action Plan Ahead
Good morning!
Welcome back to #73, this week we switch up the pace with Harry tackling the making and marketing of the Manosphere.
If you missed last week’s MU, Paul delivered a great reminder of how internal boredom and chasing algos hits Marketing teams.
If You’re Sick Of Hearing About Moneymaxxing Manotools, You’ve Only Got Yourself To Blame
‘Absurdism’ is one of my favourite words. Albert Camus proposed the philosophical sentiment that us humans exist in a meaningless, chaotic universe, but have a passionate need to find meaning and purpose in anyone and anything that crosses our synapses. Absurdism Highlights the constant (and ultimately futile) conflict between our search for meaning and the irrational universe.
Camus suggested that to maintain sanity, we must embrace this absurdity – rather than becoming despondent because of it, we should find freedom and joy despite it.
So far, so Camus – he wasn’t always bang on with his hypothesising around sources of joy (I had to read L’Étranger for my French A Level, and it made me sad in both French and English). However, with absurdism, he may have stumbled upon something in 1942 which gets proven every minute of every day in the AI-enabled, socially amplified, divisively weaponised and intellectually divorced era of the mid 2020’s.
Absurdism is why the Manosphere such a powerful and influential phenomenon.
The Louis Theroux Effect
Much has been written about the recent Louis Theroux Manosphere documentary. I haven’t watched it and I probably won’t. If I want to spend an hour in the company of preening, misogynistic, brain-farting dickheads, I can just think back to the five years I spent as a student at Harrow in the late 1990’s.
What Theroux has done (which he does extremely well) is to take a disturbing segment of society and set it free – allowing it to self-immolate, fuelled by a mix of ego, perceptive wealth, social reach and baby oil.
The so called ‘manosphere’ (I disagree with this title on principal as IMHO, the bad actors in this space show all the manly traits of rice pudding) didn’t materialise out of nothing so much as it metastasised. You can trace its roots back to men’s rights forums at the start of the century and pickup artist communities (remember ‘negging’? Pfft…) that festered in some of the darker corners of the internet.
These were safe spaces in which male loneliness evolved from common or garden teenage angst (which has been around since Cain and Abel decided petulance was easier than puberty) into abject entitlement while nobody was paying attention.
Turbo boosted through gamer communities, the dark web and social media algos that fed such social discrepancies, these male hidey holes became petri dishes for incel culture, growing apathy, entitlement and rage like a Monty Don allotment.
The 2008 financial crisis acted as an accelerant, after which a generation of young men who’d been promised economic freedom found themselves out of work, out of ideas and fleeing reality online 18 hours a day.
Smart Tech Or Smart Business?
The proliferation of smartphones transformed any charismatic narcissist with a divisive playbook into a media powerhouse and big social tapped into this pulsing vein (eyeballs = revenue, after all) by rewarding outrage over nuance.
Throw in a pandemic that isolated millions of teenage boys in their bedrooms with nothing but WiFi, a dopamine deficit and a diminished sense of self-worth and you had the perfect storm – a vulnerable, lost audience of millions looking for someone – anyone – to make it all make sense.
Mocking ‘the manosphere’ as a fad or a joke is a massive mistake. Just because its proponents are clowns doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be taken extremely seriously. It’s evolving far faster than any regulatory or educational response to it. Tate gets arrested and his engagement goes up, and this hasn’t gone unnoticed by others in the space. Andrew Cortes may as well have ‘Outrage equals eyeballs’ tattooed on his forehead as a reminder of his business model every time he looks in the mirror (which, one assumes, is constantly).
So what if platforms occasionally ostracise creators who take their outrage schtick too far into the realms of the illegal? They just pack up their man bags and ‘women should serve me’ playbook and migrate to Rumble, Telegram, Discord or their own subscription sites, taking their audiences with them like a shiny, penis-wielding Pied Piper.
The result? They can stop pretending there are rules they need to adhere to, shedding the last pretence of societal moderation on their way out.
Next Gen
You can be sure the next generation of manosphere front runners won’t be as obvious as Tate et al. Instead, they’ll be AI-enabled, algorithmically fluent, and sophisticated enough to avoid the overtly crude misogyny that gets them shadow banned or blacklisted.
Regulating any industry where harm is a feature is notoriously difficult, but difficulty isn’t an excuse. These preening twats are able to lie, con, cheat and profit with impunity because they operate in an environment with zero accountability. They can say anything, to anyone, at any time, on platforms engineered to amplify the worst of it. Big Social is structurally incapable of giving a shit, because outrage is engagement, engagement is revenue, and self-regulation is just PR lawyer’s addendum.
That leaves legislation, and not the toothless ‘online harms’ frameworks that take years to pass and are obsolete before the ink dries. What’s needed is platform-level liability that makes the infrastructure as accountable for distribution as the creators are for production.
The next gen wankers (Manoprick 3.0, if you will) will be the T2000 wipe clean version -legally-Tefloned to protect their ‘brand’. They’ll replace old school rage bait with plausibly deniable self-improvement content that radicalises young men by inference rather than instruction.
Meanwhile, the disciples are getting younger and more engaged as the manosphere expands and optimises itself. Kids as young as ten are swallowing this bulls*t and asking for more, and the parental awareness gap is as expansive as it is unforgivable.
The Response Required…
Taking lessons from effective problem gambling support frameworks, sector specific regulation twinned with education and end user support, delivered in the right media at the right time with, crucially, the right TOV is a good start.
The response needs to be as multi-channel, socially adept and organically customised in the media where young men live online. Any workable solution must be as digitally and technologically literate as the problem itself, which means platform-level accountability enforced through legislation, not self-regulation.
It means age-appropriate media literacy embedded alongside Maths and English in schools.
It means constant and engaging counter-narratives delivered with the same production quality, tonal intelligence and platform fluency as the content they’re competing against.
The manosphere won’t be defeated by outrage or moral panic.
It’ll be outgrown when we give young men something better to click on.
The UK government is aware of this problem, but as usual they’ll approach the solution in all the wrong ways.
First, you need to understand WHY the audience of young men feels so lost that they’ll lap up any scurrilous bullshit offering an escape from eternal loneliness.
Then you need to educate young men - not by preaching, but by engaging and entertaining them, offering hope as an output, not the suggestion that they’re the ones at fault.
Finally, regulate the hell out of Big Social who clearly love breaking the world one piece at a time and selling off the parts for gold.
Monetised Issues
Until the cost of hosting this abhorrent content exceeds the ad revenue it generates, nothing will change, so we need to act as a society, swiftly, intelligently and decisively. Fail, and we’ll lose entire generations of young men for good, sending ourselves back to the 19th Century on a societal level.
Either that, or embargo the sale of jaw flexers, baby oil and penis injections - that might keep some of these odious turds offline for a few months while we try to put the brakes on our collective decent into hell...
Bonus Content / The Concisely Absurd Manosphere Glossary
Alphas and Betas — A binary wolf pack theory repackaged as a personality brinkmanship, where every man is either a dominant silverback (yay!) or a simpering doormat (boo!)
Chads and Stacys — The manosphere’s archetypes of peak desirability. He’s jaw-chiselled and dominant, she’s attractive but vapid. (See Ken/ Barbie for reference)
Cuck — A reignited medieval insult for any man who shows empathy or respect for women
Gymcel - A subset of the incel movement that promotes bodybuilding as a means to overcome celibacyTL;DR – guns without EQ aren’t always enough
High-value male - A reference to someone with superficial markers of value like fitness, wealth and, apparently, a rental Lambo.
AWALT — “All Women Are Like That” — the cheat code that lets Chads dismiss half the planet, including their own mother.
Red Pill / Blue Pill — A Matrix rip off, suggests the delusion that women secretly run everything to the detriment of men (or at least particularly fragile some men)
Sigma male - The Lone Wolf archetype – meant to be a metaphor for strength, instead suggests a lost, howling dog that needs a haircut
Simp - An insult targeting men perceived as excessively kind, deferential or supportive of womenAKA normal, egotistically secure men
Wagecuck - A slur mocking men with regular jobs who aren’t, you know, money maxxing in Dubai with plastic teeth, tits and tans and a credit card bill that would sink Coutts
Thanks for reading again this week, if you have something to say on this article hit reply or add a comment.
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Have a great weekend and we will see you next week!
Danny Denhard & Harry Lang
"It’ll be outgrown when we give young men something better to click on."
Sure but to do that you'll have to offer solutions to the specific problems that lead men to these groups. I don't think you are going to be able to do that. And why would anyone listen to you if you don't even address the problems that led them to their current positions in the first place?
"Then you need to educate young men - not by preaching, but by engaging and entertaining them, offering hope as an output, not the suggestion that they’re the ones at fault."
Hope has to be realistic. If you tell young men, "Just be nice to women, get good grades, and women will be attracted to you" then when inevitably it does not happen then they are just going to discard it along with everything else you have told them. Which is ultimately exactly how all of this happened in the first place, as it is a reaction to the narratives of the past, "Just get a good job, be a good boy, and women will be into you."
Honestly, I think if you want to understand these communities, you probably should spend some time in them which is something no one who writes about them seems willing to do because you clearly haven't even understood most of the lingo you've posted near the end of your article.