History of the Manosphere, Incels, & Toxic Masculinit
- Kevin Lankes
- Mar 31
- 9 min read
Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/LANuN7YFrTM
One of the most unfortunate cultural developments in modern history is the toxic masculinity of the manosphere. It’s rampant and it’s stupid. But if you’re a man watching this, a big strong manly man, or maybe a sad, lonely physically puny but mentally manly man, then you’re already sitting there questioning everything about my man qualifications because I’m throwing out ideas that threaten your identity. And I don’t entirely care about these things, but I know the drill, I’m putting myself out there for you as a trusted resource, and in doing so, I will give you my man resume. I started training in mixed martial arts when I was seven years old. Five different styles, armed and unarmed. I’ve kicked so many asses in my lifetime, the shear numbers would be so overwhelming for a lot of the manosphere to take in, like their tiny brains would not be able to hold a number so high, and they’d just kind of melt. These days, I win swordfighting tournaments. I literally study the blade, as the meme goes.
Why am I saying these things? Because the manosphere only responds to strength. And it quiets down in the face of loud noises and massive aggressive energy. So that’s what I’m putting out in order to get some big manly attention. Now having that attention, let’s work on expanding the male consciousness and open it up to ideas that might surprise and alarm, but hopefully liberate.
Let’s be manly about not being manly, goddammit. And let’s break down how this whole shit pot of hypermasculine nonsense even got started.
I’m Kevin Lankes, and I’m your host for our super unfortunate cultural regression into 1950s male stereotypes. God, make your own sandwich, Andrew Tate, you gigantic, frothing asshole.
Something that’s going to surprise the hell out of you is that the manosphere began during the second-wave Feminism movement in the 1970s, and not as a reactive sort of pendulum swing to antagonize Feminism, but the original Men’s Liberation movement, as it was called, was an ally of Feminism and extension of it. If women were trapped in the home, because of the cultural gender stereotype of homemaker, mother, and maid, then men were exiled from the home due to the expectations of their gender stereotype. Men’s liberation began as a way to genuinely free men from the weight of social pressures to not connect with their families, to toil away at jobs they hated and waste their lives in isolation and loneliness with no emotional availabilitiy to connect with those they truly loved. Men’s liberation admitted to the fact that the patriarchy wasn’t just bad for women, but for men, too. And the movement pushed for a complete rethinking of what it meant to be a man under modern American capitalism. A term used in men’s liberation movement, and also in minority empowerment movements, was “consciousness-raising,” which is a precursor to the term woke.
Jack Nichols, author of A New Definition of Masculinity, wrote that, “Tomorrow men will look back on the 1970s and remark on the constriction affecting their sex. In future decades today’s male role will be remembered as a straight jacket.” Unfortunately that tomorrow isn’t here yet, but let’s not tell him.
Because when the California movie star Ronald Reagan came to power in the 1980s, he conducted a culture war that shut down progress on conversations about improving conditions for everyone. He also wrote the playbook on cutting taxes for the wealthy and ratcheting up military spending, which tripled the national debt by the time he was out of office.
The problem is, “traditional values” are a myth, and they always have been. Life never looked like the story fed to us by the American right. There’s a great book on this called “The Way We Never Were” by Stephanie Coontz. It debunks the entire nostalgia trip about so-called traditional American values. At the very best, the picture that’s painted of the nuclear family from the 1950s was a supremely short-lived phenomenon, and of course, only for white middle-class people in one very specific sliver of society and geography. And most of the things conservatives tell you about how amazing this era made America are also just complete fabrications. It was around this time that Warren Farrell, a very public and prominent figure in men’s liberation, did a heel turn and became the figurehead for the polar opposite men’s rights movement. Farrell wrote the book that became the bible for the basement-dwelling neckbeards everywhere, and that book was called, The Myth of Male Power.
The biggest issue with the men’s rights movement then and now is that they don’t possess any win conditions. For pretending to be stereotypically masculine, they’re the biggest bunch of whiners around. And this applies pretty much across the board to all of the groups. But men’s rights advocates whine that women need to be put back in their place, which is the home. But if they’re there, then they’re lazy freeloaders, and they’re out spending the man’s money and eating the man’s food, nevermind that they’re also making the man’s food. If they express any agency and, god forbid, get a job, then they’re stealing work from the big strong men who need it.
Men’s rights advocacy is defined by a constant victim mindset threaded with a confused narrative that doesn’t have any basis in reality. The feelings are real, but they’re misguided and targeted toward women instead of the actual systems that oppress all people.
With the rise of the Internet, men’s rights groups found one another and began to splinter off into different factions that were defined by different beliefs, though always fundamentally centered around their hatred of women and equality.
Everybody’s favorite punching bag example of these newer men’s rights groups are incels, or involuntary celibates. The term incel was coined by a bisexual woman in Toronto who wrote a blog about people who wanted romantic relationships but couldn’t get them. But its current useage describes men who believe that women having rights means that they can’t ever get laid. Early men’s rights groups co-opted the ideas from the original blog and moved them to their own spaces, famously the platform 4chan when that launched in 2003. Incels developed the red pill philosophy, borrowing it misguidedly from the 1999 blockbuster sci-fi classic, The Matrix.
In 2014 in Santa Barbara, the first violent killings inspired by the incel community were perpetrated, but they would not be the last. Websites and forums were closed from the incident, but the killer wrote a manifesto and his online activity was found, and the damage was done. This is where incel culture became decidedly more violent and intolerant, with outright malice as the underlying motivating factor rather than existential sorrow.
Directly after this, Gamergate happened. An ex-boyfriend of game developer Zoe Quinn posted a 9,000 word rant that accused Quinn of questionable behavior like sleeping with an industry journalist for a positive game review. The accusations were debunked, but the floodgates opened in a desperate and devastating way. Multiple prominent women in the industry were harassed, doxxed, with personal details about their lives including their addresses, leaked, and while 4chan was the starting point for it all, soon the madness had taken over all of social media and the digital realm. Gamergate was absolute madness. It was a very ugly time to see firsthand. And it laid the foundation for every torch-bearing mob that assembles against media it doesn’t like today. See any Disney movie that’s been released in the last ten years and the alt-right backlash against it. Harassment, review bombing, with all of this intentionally fueled by AI bot activity to encourage the self-righteous, mob-mentality chaos. Steve Bannon leaped on this, he recognized and said outloud how efficient it was to scoop up the miscreants coming in through Gamergate and pivoting them a bit to latch onto the hateful politics of Donald Trump.
But there are many other groups besides incels. There’s the pick up artists, or PUAs. They’ve been around for decades in different forms, but more recently they’ve devolved into a movement that encourages deception in order to ultimately sleep with women. They live by the term “plowing through resistance,” which is another way of not understanding or respecting that no means no. This is echoed in the viral tweet from Nick Fuentes who wrote the phrase, “your body, my choice.” PUAs believe in a sexual marketplace where everyone has an assigned value, and that only 20% of men have a shot with 80% of women.
There’s the Men Going Their Own Way, or MGTOW. These guys are so extreme that the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated them a white supremacist hate group. They believe that third-wave Feminism has created a society that discriminates against men, so they advocate for dropping out of the world and creating a single-gender society just for men. And believe things like women are just all waiting to accuse men of sexual assault in order to destroy their lives.
There’s the Sigma Males, who are supposed to be the most super awesome version of a man you can get. They’re cool, withdrawn, super composed action movie assassins. Sigmas identify themselves with Keanu Reeves, who by all accounts, would want nothing to do with them if he knew that. Laying the foundation for this, the idea of Alphas and Betas came first, which established a hierarchy of men based on the debunked theory of wolf packs. In case you didn’t know, the alpha wolf study was concluded based on a misunderstanding of the behavior of mating parents in captivity. So of course it’s not true of people, because it’s not even true of wolves, where it’s supposed to come from.
All of these ideas and group dynamics have been pushed by a number of key figures over the years. And sometimes indirectly. Lots of people will say it’s not fair to lump Joe Rogan into the mix, for instance, but he platforms these people and has never challenged the misinformation they spew, and oftentimes his response is to validate what they’re saying.
Another major figure who legitimized the manosphere, maybe also indirectly, was Pewdiepie. In 2013, Pewdiepie became the most popular YouTuber ever. He started in game content and Let’s Play videos, but a few years later his content changed. A good example of that pivot is the time when he read erotic fan fiction about the Disney movie Frozen in one of his episodes. He also freely used slurs that described minority groups and antisemitic language and content and was generally very careless with the responsibility of having a massive and impressionable younger male audience. Pewdiepie was dropped from a Google advertising deal and a YouTube Red series after he ran an episode featuring two men holding a sign that said “Death to all Jews.” He may have laid a solid foundation for the later extreme provocateur personalities that would emerge to take the manosphere to new frequencies of stupid. Some of those provocateurs are people like Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and Andrew Tate.
Tate is by far the most extreme of the bunch, and you may recognize his name because he just spent a good while under house arrest in Romania after he was picked up by authorities there on charges of sex trafficking and organized crime. There aren’t enough words in existence to describe how vile this guy is, and I don’t really want you to look him up either if you don’t already know, so I’ll try my best. He rose to immense global fame by filming himself on frothy spitting angry rants about women, he was kicked off the show Big Brother for alleged domestic violence, he’s had multiple abuse allegations against women, he currently runs a so-called Hustler’s University pyramid scheme to take money from impressionable kids that he encourages to be as controversial as he is. Tate has said things like he is quote “absolutely a misogynist,” and “there’s no way you can be rooted in reality and not be sexist,” and was banned from Twitter for saying that women should quote “bear responsibility” for being assaulted. He’s been singled out as a source of growing violence in young men by counter terrorism task forces.
Tate is an idiot and that should already be apparent but there’s also the part where he was first located and arrested because he picked a fight on Twitter with Greta Thunberg on Twitter about the huge emissions from his 33 cars. And during the exchange, he accidentally tweeted out a picture of himself sitting with a pizza box from a pizza place around the corner.
Look, holy hell, we are in an uphill kind of battle against this stuff. And it’s a fact that we are not taking it as seriously as we should be. These groups and ideologies are not widely publicized. The most you hear about is the incels, who are just scratching the surface, and then maybe you hear about Tate when he gets arrested, and also when Trump just forced Romania to send him back to the U.S. because of course the two of them would have aligned ideologies. But there is a massive risk in not addressing this growing issue of the toxic masculinity of the manosphere. More people are jumping in, but it’s not enough. We need more people to be informed that this is even happening, and they need to understand the foundations and origins of it in order to talk to their sons, their friends, young men in their lives, and others who may also not know that any of this is going on. Or they see the violence that results from it and they don’t know why. It’s a lone wolf suffering from mental health issues. But it’s not. It’s the manosphere culture creating an environment that encourages anti-social rhetoric and behavior, and under the right conditions, that descends into violence.
I’m going to keep talking about this, and I plan to do a few more episodes surrounding the different movements and key figures, and what we can do about any of it. Please make sure to like and subscribe to the channel in order to see those when they come out. If you have things to add or personal experience with any of this, please comment below so that others can benefit from the insight you provide.
Thanks so much for having these hard conversations with me. Let’s do our best out there. Let’s do some f*cking good about extreme cultural regression and young male radicalization from far-right influencers and grifters.
Episode sources:
https://www.nhpr.org/politics/2017-05-09/n-h-rep-behind-red-pill-reddit-forum-gets-committee-hearing
Kommentare