I don’t pry too much into the online life of my son. At 13, Sam is a good boy. He does well at school, eats his veg, loves his mum and captains his county cricket team. What more could I want? I suppose he could be more accurate when lobbing his pants at the laundry basket, especially considering he’s a spin bowler, but that’s a small detail.
Last year, he started working out. He asked for weights and a pull-up bar. That was fine by me: boys have wanted big muscles since the dawn of time. Even my father owns a chest expander, that orangey-yellow and black one that was in every 1970s household. And Dad, who is now 91, taught history at Oxford and translates Goethe for fun, so it must be OK.
But then I started hearing a lot from Sam about bodybuilder influencers, which I did think was weird. Then about steroids.
‘Hey Mum, can I take a load of steroids?’
‘What?! Of course not.’
I asked pertinent questions and watched selected content. On investigation, these bodybuilders turned out to be harmless bozos: they, too, ate their veg and loved their mums.
‘Is this the “manosphere”?’ I teased. ‘Are you being sucked in, do I need to turn off the router?’
‘No,’ said Sam. Then, bombshell: he declared the manosphere doesn’t really exist – that it’s a convenient label which doesn’t mean anything. Andrew Tate, he says, was a passing fad that shone for a while but then went phut. Did I know it turns out that Tate rented all those cars he had in his vids?
I did not know this. Interesting. Say more!
OK: the fuss about the manosphere was mostly because everyone in authority so comprehensively wet their pants about it. This was interpreted as a direct order to all schoolboys to start bellowing how much they loved these cross-eyed conmen. But in reality, Tate is over and those like him will follow suit. He’s as passé as Dubai chocolate or Labubus. Even the ‘six-seven’ thing is more enduring.
Of course, absurdist, clickbait, shock-jock influencers still exist online, but the point is they are unlikely to pose a genuine threat to your boy these days, if they ever did. Your son became aware, a long time ago, well before Louis Theroux’s exposé documentary Inside the Manosphere, that these influencers use tough language to get a following, which they then ‘monetise’ by flogging a range of crap: ‘business’ courses, green powders, scam-adjacent investment platforms, crypto etc.
If your boy didn’t work out for himself that this is all just hot air and he is a mark, he was told so by beady-eyed fellow travellers, who live to point out this particular grift in the comments, or by other influencers who ‘take down’ manosphere influencers with ‘reaction posts’ on their own platforms.
These people have many millions of followers apiece and boys watch their content and are more than able to view the whole thing in a wider context. It uses the same part of the brain as source work in history GCSE and adolescent boys are perfectly deft at that. Especially if the source work is about nuances of the internet rather than whether in this cartoon from 1939 Hitler and Stalin actually like each other, or if they are just pretending.
To most boys, the ‘misogyny’ is very obviously a business strategy and should any try it on for size, they will find it shatters on impact with their more experienced teachers, parents, siblings, girls they would like to impress and so on.
Anyway, the idea that significant numbers of adolescents will be radicalised in the long-term by this is insulting. I can read The Communist Manifesto and remain a free-marketeer; I can watch The Kardashians without running screaming to the nearest beauty parlour. And it’s not like I’m some steely brainbox. I once bought a mascara because it claimed to be able to curl my eyelashes (it didn’t).
At its heart the manosphere, whatever that means, is a freak show. The sculpted facial hair, the bulging biceps, the spray-on suits, the gigantic watches… it reminds me a bit of WWE wrestling. And no one loves that kind of wacky tat more than teenage boys. Those who are really damaged by this nonsense, who act out on it more than fleetingly, are the ones who would be led astray by something else if the internet didn’t exist.
Here’s the painful truth: the critical threat to the success and health of any boy or young man has always been, and remains, fatherlessness. If anything, the superficial draw of manosphere-types is a symptom of this unfortunate societal inevitability. The lack of an honest male figure who can give a boy a friendly clip round the ear from time to time does far more damage than too much Joe Rogan. Or rather, one follows the other.
Your boy is just fine. Sam is fine too.
I still draw the line at steroids.
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