I recently read a paper titled Mapping the Neo-Manosphere(s): New Directions for Research, published in Men and Masculinities. It was quite an experience.
The authors—Vivian Gerrand, Debbie Ging, Joshua M. Roose, and Michael Flood—describe what they call the “neo-manosphere,” an enormous collection of online communities, personalities, political views, and self-improvement practices supposedly united by misogyny and male supremacy.
As I read, I kept waiting for the evidence. And waiting.
Where were the statements demonstrating the misogyny being described? Where were the representative quotations? Where were the arguments presented in enough detail that readers could evaluate them for themselves? Where was the distinction between hatred of women, criticism of feminism, advocacy for men, political disagreement, traditional beliefs, and ordinary male self-improvement?
For the most part, those things never appeared.
Instead, the paper offered an intricate academic portrait of a dangerous ideological ecosystem. Nearly every form of male-oriented dissent, vulnerability, or self-help could be positioned somewhere inside it or along its borders. Then, near the end, the authors became quite serious about intervention and control.
That is where the paper becomes much more than a questionable academic exercise.
The Conclusion Appears in the Definition
The paper begins by defining the manosphere as an online ecosystem of anti-women actors. In the introduction, it becomes a collection of anti-feminist and male-supremacist groups.
Those are not conclusions reached after the evidence is presented. They are built into the definition of what is being studied.
This matters because antifeminism is not the same thing as misogyny. A person can disagree with feminist theories, oppose feminist organizations, criticize feminist policies, or document harms produced by feminist advocacy without hating women or believing that men should rule over them.
Yet the paper repeatedly allows these categories to bleed into one another. Anti-feminism becomes adjacent to misogyny. Misogyny becomes adjacent to male supremacy. Male supremacy becomes adjacent to violent extremism. Once this chain has been constructed, a person need not advocate violence or express hatred toward women to be placed somewhere within the threatening manosphere.
The classification does the work that evidence ordinarily would have to do.
A Map With Very Few Exhibits
The paper does refer to some questionable material. It mentions Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, and deepfake pornography. I can see how some folks might label some of this as misogyny.
But this paper ranges far beyond those examples.
It includes or draws into the orbit of the manosphere men’s rights advocates, Men Going Their Own Way, Christian conservatives, dating coaches, Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Ryan Holiday, Lex Fridman, David Goggins, Jocko Willink, NoFap communities, wellness advocates, evolutionary psychologists, psychotherapists working with boys, tradwives, and female antifeminists.
What particular belief makes all these people part of one male-supremacist ecosystem?
They don’t say.
The authors identified 430 articles about the manosphere published since 2019 and drew upon approximately 100 of them. They say they selected recent publications to keep their map current. But they do not give us a systematic account of why those 100 were chosen, what evidence standards were applied, how conflicting findings were handled, or how the quality of the selected studies was assessed.
Most importantly, the paper seldom brings the primary material into view. Readers are generally told what another scholar concluded about an online community. We are then given a citation to that conclusion.
A citation may tell us where an assertion came from. It does not by itself prove that the assertion is correct.
When Repetition Becomes Evidence
The paper contains an impressive number of references. But citations are not necessarily independent evidence.
Much of the literature comes from scholars working within the same feminist and critical-masculinities framework. They frequently use similar definitions, begin with similar assumptions, and reach similar conclusions. One scholar classifies a community as misogynistic. Another scholar cites that classification. A third cites both papers as evidence that a scholarly consensus has developed.
Eventually, an interpretation acquires the appearance of fact through repetition.
The process works something like this:
A contested interpretation is introduced.
Like-minded scholars cite it approvingly.
Later papers cite the growing literature rather than examining the original material.
Repetition is treated as independent confirmation.
The resulting “consensus” is used to justify intervention.
There is nothing inherently wrong with scholars citing one another. That is how knowledge develops. The problem arises when the scholars share the same ideological premises and rarely test their interpretations against primary evidence or competing explanations.
We see the same process in the news media. One outlet publishes a claim. Other outlets repeat it. Commentators then report that numerous sources have confirmed the story. But when the chain is followed backward, the apparent confirmation may lead to the same original assertion.
Say something often and people will eventually start believing you.
The paper does not so much map the manosphere as map what a network of similar-thinking scholars has said about the manosphere. The difference is enormous.
When Male Suffering Becomes Further Evidence Against Men
One of the most troubling features of the paper is the way it treats male suffering.
The authors describe theories suggesting that some men strategically adopt the language of victimhood and suffering to conceal existing systems of male power. That creates an almost perfect closed system.
If men express confidence or authority, that can be read as male supremacy. If men describe pain or disadvantage, their suffering can be interpreted as a performance designed to restore male supremacy.
What evidence could possibly prove the theory wrong?
Boys’ educational problems, male suicide, fatherlessness, workplace deaths, family-court experiences, loneliness, economic displacement, and men’s loss of social purpose receive little consideration as problems with standing of their own. Male distress matters mainly because dangerous influencers may exploit it.
The possibility that men might have legitimate grievances is never allowed to reorganize the analysis. Their suffering enters the model as another part of the pathway toward misogyny.
Imagine treating women’s suffering this way. Imagine an academic paper arguing that women describe victimization strategically to conceal female power and obtain greater institutional control. The authors would rightly be asked for extraordinary evidence. Not hard to imagine, is it?
Men are granted no such presumption of sincerity.
Self-Improvement Becomes a Radicalization Pathway
The paper is particularly suspicious of male self-improvement.
Physical fitness, discipline, purpose, Stoicism, financial advice, pornography avoidance, and wellness practices are treated as possible entry points into male-supremacist spaces. Even content carrying ordinary labels such as motivation, mindset, and money is described as potentially directing boys toward dangerous material.
Certainly, some influencers exploit insecure followers. Some sell worthless programs, make irresponsible health claims, or deliberately intensify fear to keep an audience engaged. This is hardly unique to men’s media. The internet is overflowing with wellness grifts, financial fantasies, political panic, and products marketed through insecurity.
But the authors do not treat exploitation as a general problem within the attention economy. They construct a particularly male ideological danger. Helping men develop strength, confidence, discipline, and purpose becomes suspect because it might “re-masculinise” them rather than lead them toward the authors’ preferred understanding of masculinity.
The paper even contrasts some evolutionary psychologists and psychotherapists working with boys with approaches grounded in social-constructionist and intersectional principles. The underlying assumption appears to be that social constructionism and intersectionality provide the only legitimate ways to understand men, boys, and the world around us.
That is not a neutral concern about hateful content. It is a dispute over which theory of men should be institutionally approved.
From Description to Control
Near the end, the paper moves from describing the manosphere to proposing what should be done about it.
The authors support educational interventions, disengagement programs, gender instruction, critical digital literacy, and broader structural responses. They then write:
Structural interventions must therefore include policy reforms that address not just content moderation, but also the architecture of virality, algorithmic bias, and platform accountability.
That sentence deserves much more scrutiny than the authors give it.
Architecture of virality
The architecture of virality consists of the systems that allow material to spread: recommendation engines, trending lists, hashtags, reposting, automatic playback, notifications, engagement-based ranking, and monetization.
Changing that architecture can mean slowing the spread of material the platform considers harmful. Content may remain technically available while being excluded from recommendations, search results, trending lists, or monetization. It has not been formally banned. It has merely been made nearly impossible to find.
That is censorship with softer edges and less public accountability.
Algorithmic bias
Algorithms often reward sensational or inflammatory material because outrage generates engagement. Examining that problem is entirely reasonable.
But what counts as the bias, and what would count as its correction?
Within the framework of this paper, the problem appears to be that algorithms recommend material the authors have classified as misogynistic, male supremacist, reactionary, or manosphere-adjacent. Correcting the algorithm would presumably mean turning it away from those ideas and toward content considered inclusive, social-constructionist, and intersectional.
In other words, the algorithm would be adjusted toward the authors’ preferred ideology.
Platform accountability
Platform accountability sounds reassuring. Platforms should enforce clear rules against threats, targeted harassment, doxing, and illegal activity. They should explain their policies and provide meaningful appeals.
But the paper employs categories far more elastic than threats or illegal conduct. What would platforms be held accountable for suppressing? Misogyny? Anti-feminism? Male supremacy? Traditional beliefs? Evolutionary explanations of sex differences? Criticism of feminist organizations? Male-oriented therapy? Stoicism? Advocacy for fathers?
The authors never establish a reliable boundary.
And they never answer the essential question:
Who decides?
Would it be technology companies, government regulators, feminist advocacy organizations, academics, fact-checkers, or privately funded extremism researchers? What evidence would they require? Could their decisions be appealed? Would the standards be public? Would criticism of feminism remain protected? Would identical standards apply to hatred directed toward men?
The paper does not tell us.
Apply the Same Standard to Feminism
The easiest way to expose the problem is to apply the paper’s method to feminism.
Imagine beginning a study by defining feminism as an online misandrist ecosystem of anti-male actors. Imagine grouping together radical feminists, mainstream women’s organizations, feminist journalists, gender-studies departments, female separatists, lifestyle influencers, abortion activists, and women who post angrily about dating.
Imagine treating female claims of suffering as strategic performances designed to conceal women’s institutional power. Imagine describing women’s wellness and empowerment content as possible gateways into misandry. Imagine tracing every shared citation, hyperlink, podcast appearance, and social-media recommendation as evidence of ideological cross-pollination.
Then imagine recommending disengagement programs, educational interventions, content moderation, algorithmic correction, and upstream regulation of the digital environment.
The methodology would immediately be condemned as guilt by association.
And yet finding direct expressions of feminist hostility toward men would not be difficult. Many feminist writers and activists have described men as violent, defective, dangerous, unnecessary, or collectively responsible for women’s suffering. Such statements have appeared in books, classrooms, journalism, advocacy, and popular culture. They are often defended as provocative social criticism rather than treated as gateways to extremism.
I am not suggesting that feminist speech should be suppressed. I am asking whether the people demanding controls on male-oriented speech would accept their own rules if those rules were applied evenly.
If they would not, they are not proposing a neutral system for controlling hatred. They are proposing ideological control.
Show Us the Evidence Before You Control the Conversation
There is misogyny online. There are men who say hateful things about women. There are disturbed communities, exploitative influencers, and individuals who encourage violence. Specific threats and specific acts should be confronted directly.
But none of that grants scholars permission to collapse an enormous range of men, beliefs, and communities into a single male-supremacist ecosystem.
Before regulating an ideology, we should require those proposing the regulation to define it clearly, identify who actually holds it, present representative primary evidence, distinguish hatred of women from criticism of feminism, and demonstrate that the proposed intervention targets harmful conduct rather than political disagreement.
This paper does not meet that standard.
It begins with a loaded definition, gathers a network of mutually reinforcing citations, treats male suffering as potentially deceptive, stretches the manosphere across an astonishing range of people and practices, and then invokes the resulting academic consensus to justify intervention into the systems that determine which ideas may spread.
The process is circular but effective:
First create the category. Then fill it with everyone you distrust. Cite colleagues who use the same category. Call the repetition a consensus. Finally, use that consensus to regulate the people placed inside it.
That is not simply mapping an online world.
It is constructing a threat—and then requesting the power to control it. Can you sense the desperation?
The paper discussed is Vivian Gerrand, Debbie Ging, Joshua M. Roose, and Michael Flood, “Mapping the Neo-Manosphere(s): New Directions for Research,” Men and Masculinities 28, no. 5 (2025): 443–464. https://doi.org/10.1177/1097184X251350277
Men Are Good.
