Four mismatched picnic blankets are laid out, trees scattering dappled light across an array of thoughtfully chosen drinks and snacks. About 30 or so men stand around them, chatting, and one reaches into his backpack and pulls out the hand-knitted jumper his grandma just made him, tugging it over his head for everyone to see.
A curious crowd of geese, and their teeny-tiny fluffy goslings, come over to see what’s going on. The men begin to coo, one – an environmental scientist, I later hear – gently picks up a gosling, managing to do so without setting off the mother’s strong instincts to keep her child out of danger. She must have sensed the safety of the group, known that they meant no harm. I feel that, too – safe in this group of strange men. Then, as we settle down on to the blankets, conversation quickly turn to charity and giving back. ‘What causes can we support?’ one asks, and another raises his hand. ‘I’m a primary school teacher; we need to combat this online content,’ he says. ‘The boys aren’t listening to their female teachers; I had to give a talk to try to them to [be more respectful].’
Our society feels increasingly overrun with manosphere ideology and incel rhetoric right now. It’s found in that man’s school and it’s even there when we think we’ve dodged it (see: swiping right on a man because he said he was a feminist, only for him to call you a b*tch for not sleeping with him). So, this spring afternoon might sound like fiction. But is it? To answer that question, I set out to meet the anti-Andrew Tates trying to fight the toxic tidal wave facing men right now and unpack whether they stand a chance.
Viral damage
Three 14-year-old boys found guilty of 10 counts of rape between them. A global rape academy, with 62m visits per month. Every day, I open my laptop to a news story that makes me want to slam it shut again. Then there’s the individual stories that are so commonplace that they simply become statistics. Statistics such as 73% of Gen Z social media users have witnessed misogynistic content online; girls aged 10 to 15 are particularly vulnerable to online abuse; teenagers aged 16 to 19 are now the fastest growing age group to report domestic abuse. Piece them together and you have a gruesome picture: an epidemic of violence against women.
And while not the only driving factor, the proliferation of online content that promotes and rewards violence and degradation towards women, known as the manosphere, is poisoning the minds of men at a rapid rate. ‘We’re seeing it in more [mainstream spaces], where increasingly aggressive and violent content is seeping through the cracks of moderation, and [what is acceptable] has shifted,’ explains Dr Allysa Czerwinsky, who, as AI trust and security research fellow at the University of Manchester, has spent her entire career tracking how violence in online spaces seeps out into the real world.
‘I’ve seen uncensored gore content [raw material that depicts severe injury]; doxxing happen in real time; AI nudify women.’ And, more broadly, ‘there is a platforming of a lot of male supremacist, anti-women, transphobic, racist narratives in the online sphere’, she adds. ‘This intersects with some areas of men’s interests, such as gym culture, self-improvement and dating advice.’
Of course, women’s rights groups and charities have been doing life-changing work for decades. But often, when stories like the rape academy hit the press, there’s a resounding call-out online – we want to hear from men: where’s their outrage; what are they doing? After all, the average young adult male’s screen time is six to seven-and-a-half hours a day and we know that Tate, and thousands of others like him, hold nothing but disdain for women. (I use his name as a catch-all term for this sort of creator, as he’s the most well known, but, to note, I’m told he’s becoming irrelevant in the very spaces he created.) So, who’s out there showing the men and boys in our life a different, more healthy view of masculinity?
Community thinking
Tom Stroud did not expect to go viral. He had just appeared on the Netflix show Love Is Blind with a storyline ‘that was around gender roles in relationships’, and one clip of him, where he discussed how proud he is of his feminine traits, reached half a million views. He now has 88.8k followers on Instagram and hosts Why Do I, a podcast that explores patterns and behaviours that show up in our relationships.
‘In that viral clip, I’m discussing how great it is to have traits like empathy, compassion, kindness,’ he explains to me, with his business partner Dan Shrigley (who shares openly with his 26k followers how vulnerability helped him survive two redundancies and a breakup) nodding along beside him. Similarly, Rory Bradshaw’s 156k following built slowly as he shared what he’d learned from his background in youth work, schools and prisons.
‘I want to talk about the nuance of being a man, which is far less rigid than the manosphere suggests,’ he says. All three believe this work can’t happen purely online, though. Rory runs Pilla Community and hosts events for men that centre around movement, mindfulness and connection. Dan and Tom set up Shoulder to Shoulder, the ‘anti-manosphere community’ that holds weekly walks and other events; it was on a picnic for Shoulder to Shoulder members that I, alongside that flock of geese, learned about the work the pair do.
‘It’s about friendship and allowing these men to be vulnerable and share the things that they find challenging,’ explains Tom. ‘The things men struggle with are: “Do I have self-worth? Do I have status? How can I have more purpose?” [Gaining these] is what the manosphere promises; it’s just in our experience, that’s not the way you’re going to meet these needs.’ Each man I met that day shared just how life-changing coming on the walks had been for them. One joked, ‘It was an adjustment to actually show guys I cared about them, instead of just kicking them in the balls!’
A few days after my picnic, I chatted on the phone to Dr Mandeep Bachu, a clinical psychologist who works both in the NHS and in private mental health, and who sees ‘a lot more teens and men in their early 20s feeling more lost, more angry, more anxious, experiencing loneliness, shame and sexual insecurity… There’s a lot of uncertainty [for men] about their place in the world.’
It’s during these vulnerable moments that the manosphere content pounces. All the experts I spoke to for this feature agreed that it’s very rare for men to explicitly be searching for misogynistic or violent content, but that, instead, they begin searching for something simple, such as ‘how to make money’, and are then hooked into a world that’s designed to keep them glued to their phones, rather than looking up and out into the real world.
‘Greed has created a real distortion of something that can be quite important for men to have,’ explains Dr Bachu. ‘There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to have value, purpose, ambition and a place in the world. But it’s packaged and sold [online] in this way that says that money is the only purpose, and if you don’t make six figures a month, you’re a loser. It’s creating insecurity and then exploiting that insecurity for their own gains.’
The opposite can be found in Shoulder to Shoulder. ‘So much of what’s in the men’s mental health space is focused on crisis point,’ explains Dan, who, in the past, has worked in groups that encourage men to open up and has brought that experience into the S2S walks. ‘What we’re doing is catching men when they have a little wobble.’ But can they catch men who are being indoctrinated into manosphere content? ‘I feel like I am a strong role model,’ notes Tom. ‘But I’m probably not going to be a role model for a 16-year-old boy. Athletes and musicians are the ones who are really going to influence teenagers.’
He’s right. And it’s the struggle I came up against throughout the research for this feature. When I mention some leading names in the space to the women I know, I hear a resounding, ‘Oh, I love hiiim.’ But mention those same names to men? They haven’t heard of them. Who I like and resonate with as a feminist woman is not going to be who can – and is – actually breaking through to the men who need to hear it the most. So, who is?
Formula One driver Lando Norris; footballers Bukayo Saka, Marcus Rashford and Harry Kane; cricketer Joe Root; adventurer Luke Tarrant; musicians Lewis Capaldi and Dave were all names that came up from the young men we spoke to. And it makes sense. While promoting more open and healthy conversations around mental health and masculinity, they also have the symbols the manosphere often use as bait to pull vulnerable men in – cars, money and the attention of (wrongly grouped and objectified by the men in the sphere) stereotypically ‘attractive’ women.
They are all ‘things’ that Stephen Manderson, also known as Professor Green, rapper and men’s mental health advocate, has had during his life. ‘[They] are vacuous and don’t result in happiness,’ he says, over a video call to me, his washing drying in the background. ‘Anything in my life that brings any kind of sustained or continued reward takes time and effort.’ Stephen’s journey into talking about his mental health began in 2012, during the release of his song Read All About It, which discussed the impact his dad’s suicide had on him. What followed was a documentary, Suicide And Me, in 2015.
‘I remember thinking, “I don’t want [rapper] Giggs to see me crying on TV,” then I was like, “This is the exact issue,”’ he says. ‘I don’t talk about what people should or shouldn’t do. I just talk about what I’ve been through and where I’ve gone wrong. I’ve been toxic at points; there have been behaviours and toxic dynamics. When it comes to the patriarchy, we don’t often look at what the impacts are on men, and how we need to address that arm in arm,’ he says, noting that getting outside, away from screens, is the best thing he has done for his mental health. (Which is why he's teamed up with Blacks, with an edit of outdoor wear.)
‘Therapy can be quite confrontational for some people, but clearing your head and going for a walk, shows that it’s a faux connection that we have by the way of the devices in our hands.’ I agree that men need to get out, go on walks and build friendships that allow them to be open about their problems; essentially, do all the things that women have been doing for years. But while I’ve spent a few weeks speaking to lovely men about what can be done to tackle men’s problems, my angry side has also begun to shout.
It’s the side that’s been reporting on domestic and sexual abuse for nearly two decades and wonders: are we just centring men again? What is all of this doing to address the issue at hand, the one that’s literally killing women? It was time for me to leave my fluffy-duck, kind-man world to find out.
In the sphere
Halfway through writing this feature, I boarded a flight to Ibiza, a place where (in some clubs) status reigns supreme, and that status is derived differently depending on your gender. Women must look pretty enough to be invited on to a club’s table; men must overtly display their wealth, with popping bottles of champagne and cigars to get them there. It’s like stepping into the manosphere itself – all these videos take extreme wealth and make it the carrot at the end of the stick. Content that researchers say creates a ‘triadic nexus’ of class privilege, toxic masculinity and misogyny that structurally normalises the exploitation of women for financial gain.
After weeks of speaking to men trying to effect change, it was hard not to feel deflated. Is there really any hope in the fight against such pervasive, age-old stereotypes of what success and masculinity should look like? Every expert I spoke to reassured me that the online and offline approach of those I’d spoken to would work. It wasn’t just surface level. But ‘we need services that enable younger men who feel they’ve got a problem to be able to seek confidential and sustained help in a context that doesn't penalise them’, explains David Gadd, a professor of criminology who has spent 25 years speaking to domestic abusers. More change needs to come to the top, too, he added.
So, I spoke to Jake Richards MP, who (at the time of writing) alongside then-Deputy Prime Minister David Lammy, was leading the government’s work on improving outcomes for men and boys.
‘The government is taking stock to make sure we get it right rather than just rushing into something. They are investing in online literacy and education, with a big investment into local youth clubs, which have basically been decimated over the past 20 years,’ Richards says when we chat, in the MP offices of the Houses of Parliament. Our chat came a week before the UK government announced a landmark policy banning children under 16 from major social media platforms. Politicians believe this move will help combat the growing radicalisation of young men online, while charities and other voices fear it shifts responsibilities away from the tech companies.
My concern also goes to those already brainwashed, who may go on to offend. How can we stop those who escalate to breaking the law? We need to ensure punishments are given out that send a message to society that violence, both online and offline, is unacceptable, but, by doing so, we aren’t just sending men into a prison system where toxic misogynistic ideals thrive and are rewarded. Both Richards and I agree that so much has to be done offline for change to truly happen. However, with that, as Richards says, ‘We can’t leave the online space just for the bad guys to thrive.’
But how do we really know who is ‘good’ and who is ‘bad’? There’s profit to be made from positioning yourself as a role model, and with that come the wolves in sheep’s clothing. As my research continues, my DMs fill up with stories of men who seem to have learned the language of feminism but are abusive to the women in their lives behind closed doors. One had over a million followers; another half a million. One was supporting women in sport while reportedly sexually harassing female employees.
Then the Ashley Cain story hit the press, where historic tweets resurfaced showing he used vile language against women while being promoted as a positive voice in masculinity. This made me panic – could we trust anyone thriving in this space when it’s so easy to use the ‘halo’ effect to groom women into a false sense of security?
I realise I’ve been getting it wrong by looking for the perfect anti-Tate figure. The truth is he doesn’t exist. And if he tells you he does, be wary.
Because the men I found to be genuine are the ones who are open and fearful about making mistakes; those who grapple with their own issues and complexities as to what ‘good’ masculinity can look like, when it looks different to everyone. They all feared that because the algorithms prefer simplistic answers, their content – with all its nuance – would never have a chance of breaking through. It can, just not necessarily in a way that will go viral to manosphere-like levels.
Breaking Out
Catriona Innes is Commissioning Director at Cosmopolitan, you can follow her on Substack and on Instagram.
Catriona Innes is Cosmopolitan UK’s multiple award-winning Commissioning Editor, who has won BSME awards both for her longform investigative journalism as well as for leading the Cosmopolitan features department. Alongside commissioning and editing the features section, both online and in print, Catriona regularly writes her own hard-hitting investigations spending months researching some of the most pressing issues affecting young women today.
She has spent time undercover with specialist police forces, domestic abuse social workers and even Playboy Bunnies to create articles that take readers to the heart of the story. Catriona is also a published author, poet and volunteers with a number of organisations that directly help the homeless community of London. She’s often found challenging her weak ankles in towering heels through the streets of Soho. Follow her on Instagram and Twitter.
