Soraya Chemaly on Adolescence and Masculinity
*From Chemaly’s substack, this is a long post yet 1000% worth reading because it’s so on point, and important. I too watched Adolescence this week – and the disorientation I often feel in the face of new ‘media’ and the hyper-internet world we’re all living in (most more than I do, for sure, as I’m part-Amish in my approach to being on-line), was disturbingly familiar. Chemaly’s 2018 book Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger, from Atria Books is a must-read, as is the article below.
I watched the Netflix series Adolescence this week. It’s both a moving and chilling depiction of how a 13-year-old named Jamie, accused of killing a girl in his class, is influenced by the Manosphere. The series’ power isn’t in what it does to unveil the misogyny that boys are steeped in online but rather in what it doesn’t do: point fingers or isolate blame. Jamie isn’t exceptional in any way. He isn’t an outlier or a monster but just a boy shaped by everything around him. Parents, especially fathers, are trying hard to be loving and attentive. Teachers are harried but caring. Other adults in the story – counsellors, siblings, friends – are all working hard to have compassion and achieve just outcomes.
The primary focus of much of the four episodes is adult disorientation. Despite doing everything they believed was right and trying their hardest, they don’t know how events like these happen.
I’ve spoken to many parents who expressing being powerless in the face of the Manosphere. Like educators, they are unsure about how kind, “normal” boys end up cheering publicly for rapists and quoting and defending misogynistic influencers. When a boy parrots a toxic influencer, calls girls and women “females,” repeats cherry-picked evo-psych stats to justify sexism, and says troubling things about women, it’s tempting to think, “Something went wrong.” Surely, Manosphere spaces are dank extremes, and boys and men are being manipulated and radicalized by corrupted forces on The Big Bad Internet.
But the truth is that many parents aren’t powerless—they’re just patriarchal. They’ve already taught their boys, often without realizing it, to equate masculinity with dominance, emotional suppression, and entitlement. When boys absorb more extreme versions of those beliefs online, parents are shocked—but the foundations are laid at home, in classrooms, on sports fields, in places of worship. It’s in who got to speak at the dinner table, who did the emotional labor, who took time off for child care and school volunteering; chores, allowance, what boys were praised for and what girls were punished for. It’s in the jokes, the clothing, the family friendly entertainment. It’s in the fact that we generally don’t think of our traditions and habits as what they are: outcomes of ideology.
Maybe it would help if we stopped asking what went wrong—and started asking what is working instead?
The rise of the Manosphere is often described as a disease infecting boys who were or are otherwise fine and “normal.” The truth is more uncomfortable: what is said in the Manosphere isn’t an anomaly—it’s just what the culture teaches in its most distilled, angry, and hostile form. There are degrees, to be sure, but where do you draw the lines on culturally acceptable male supremacy?
There are definitely ugly extremists (who also have millions of followers, btw), but a lot of what is being said in anti-feminist spaces online is not new or qualitatively different from what many people think and still openly say.
What boys are experiencing isn’t indoctrination; it’s clarity and relief.Manosphere creators and content use familiar, even comforting ideas about manhood—how to be strong, get control, compete, and win- money, cars, status, fame, and women. They posit male worth through performance. They speak a language most boys already speak in their own heads – anger, confusion, and loneliness; status anxiety and sadness; feelings of loss and aggrieved entitlement. The real key, though, is that these spaces turn all of these feelings into purpose. It tells boys that disorientation, confusion, fear, and pain are evidence of betrayal, loss, and the theft of what should be rightfully theirs. That ruling women is destiny. They’ll be defeated and erased if they don’t fight to reclaim their “natural” dominance and are freer to compete among men, as it should be.
And boys listen—not because they’re weak or stupid, but because few adults talk to them about any of this from a feminist perspective and with honestly about power and gender. They’re curious, want to be good people by the terms of their society, and are human. Also, clearly, because so many are chronically emotionally deprived and because habits, relationships, institutions, and structures of thought are still socializing them to build adult identities based on control instead of connection and on the basis of women being dependent, vulnerable, and less capable.
The Manosphere’s Greatest Hits:
“Dads protect; moms nurture.” “Men should be the breadwinners; women should serve them.” “Men don’t show weakness.”“Women are nags, men are chill.” Every time a father makes a final decision alone or tells a son as ‘the man of the house,’ children learn to think leadership, by default, as men’s property. Every time a child hears “Wait till your father gets home,” they learn discipline is masculine, compassion is feminine. Every time an adult tells a boy not to cry, he learns vulnerability is shameful. Every time he breaks a rule and gets a pass, but his sister or classmate doesn’t, he learns accountability is gendered. Every time a mother has to charm, cajole, or nag a spouse to do housework or a Dad offers to “help” or jokes about “being chill,” he learns that chores, mental load, and emotional labor are both a woman’s job and a joke.
“Women should listen and do what a man tells them.” In addition to ideologically justifying the ideas above, patriarchal religions go further. Every time you take a child into a Catholic Church, for instance, you teach them that it’s not only already but desirable to ritually silence women, bar them from authority, and subject them to a world defined purely by men and a narrow hegemonic masculinity. Evangelicals openly say wives should submit to their husbands. Across Abrahamic faiths, women’s obedience, modesty, and sexual availability are stressed moral duties in ways that make women responsible for men’s purity, family harmony, and honorable status.
“A woman’s place is in the home” is the core of religious complementarianism, but most children, especially those who lived through Covid lockdowns, see women and girls — through defaults to gendered childhood chores — doing the majority of unpaid domestic and care work because, they learn, it’s biology instead of gendered and racialized wage gaps, pervasive workplace sexual harassment, or male supremacist economic metrics, and government policies.
“A man should be in control.” I honestly don’t know what more can be said about this one that most people don’t know or experience, or understand. This TV show, however, was written with so much nuance that the slide from a person being bullied to becoming a bully happened as subtly and as naturally as it does in life. The hierarchy, control, drive to dominate that is intrinsic to male supremacist ideology and masculine identity suffused the the boy, his life, body, and relationships; his father’s life, body, and relationships.
“A woman’s value is in her youth, beauty, and fertility.” “Men are entitled to sex, especially if they’re ‘nice guys.’” “Alpha men get the girls.” “Women only want rich, high-status men.” Mainstream media – sports, music, gaming, YouTube – teaches boys aging makes men powerful and attractive but women irrelevant. Women are constantly cast as trophies and, in gaming terms, NPCs. We may have, for instance, had a brief period – literally about six years, in which feminist movies were funded and shown and popular, but look at a list of multiplex movies today, and you will see that pop culture, especially movies, are once again, churn out stories where the ratio of men to women is 8-10 to 1 or 2, reducing women to either “Mother,” “Lover,” or “whore” stereotypes. Every time a boy or young man watches a movie and sees 55-year-old men paired with younger and younger women, they think it’s normal. Charts depicting this aren’t about skeezy older men but status and wage gaps – you don’t have to pay young women what you pay older and more famous men and, see, famous men keep getting luscious, dewy girls, like the Manosphere says.
“A woman who is knowledgeable or authoritative or has power is a bitch or a witch,” either way, dangerous to society. Every time a woman is called “too emotional,” “shrill,” “unlikeable,” or “hysterical,” boys learns power can’t be feminine or that cognition can’t be complex, nonlinear and intuitive. For every big Man on Campus, there’s a smart, opinionated girl whose well-rounded capabilities are punished instead of rewarded.
“If a woman rejects you, she’s just playing games because women are fickle and manipulative.” “Women use sexual power to manipulate men.” “Women are liars.” “Women who wear makeup can’t be trusted.” From Disney classics to romantic comedies, pop culture often romanticizes male persistence, erodes consent, and frames female rejection as playful resistance. Children watch some variation of The Beast winning over Belle hundreds of times before they’re 18. If a woman rejects you, keep pushing—she doesn’t really mean it. Rejection isn’t a boundary; it’s a challenge. Consent is always negotiable and probably a lie. People absorb patriarchal lies, norms, and hierarchies through headphones and hand-held controllers long before they start talking about the Red Pill. The bible, popular literature, music, and media convey these ideas all the time. Think about something as common as dress codes and sexual purity rules – in school, in religious communities, in families — suggesting that boys and men are incapable of resisting dangerous girls and women whose bodis and wiles will hurt them in some way.
“Men are naturally dominant.” “Women are irrational and need to be led.” “Women are not good at technology, math, coding.” We’re constantly debating pink brain/blue brain myths that exaggerate gender differences and ignore how much more we have in common. When boys hear “male and female brains” online, they believe it—because adults say it’s science. And schools reinforce it, subtly teaching that men get math and science, while women belong in caring roles. Kids see this everywhere: in textbooks, teacher roles, salaries, and the stories we tell. Our entire intellectual tradition has framed men as rational and women as emotional, casting female intellect as either rare or dangerous. That’s the same logic the Manosphere runs with—only men can see “the truth,” and if a woman disagrees, she’s just too emotional to get it. By age six, kids already associate brilliance with men, especially white men—and the world keeps proving them right.
“Men are victims of women who now have power, and feminism has gone too far.” Personal fave. Across all parts of the Manosphere the idea that the world has been built from women’s perspective and to their advantage is common. This has also been, however, a common thread in how the boy crisis in education is understood in schools. The idea that schools are built for girls and then boys can’t thrive and compete in them is a common one so it’s not hard to see how this idea can be malevolently extrapolated and enlarged on by a Manosphere claiming to be objective and data-driven. In both contexts, women’s gains/ feminism are often framed in oppositional and zero-sum terms, dangerous causes hurting boys and unravelling society. Essentially, Fox News, every conservative shock jock and too many “both sides, we’re neutral” media, for the past 30 years. Family discussions, school debates, and almost all boy crisis conversations about gender, feminism and boys in education, for example, use this rating and feature diversity and “identity politics” without naming whiteness or maleness or heterosexuality as ethnic, gender, or sexual identities to which power has accrued through historic oppression. Many resist acknowledging that men still hold, an incontestable reality, most power and control over resources and this has been true despite 100 years of women besting men in schools. In the absence of information about the past, or about how systemic oppression works, a child, especially if he’s a white boy, is, practically speaking, ignorant, and easily feels as though equality simply means he is, as an individual, a bad person and being left behind.
Lastly, the Manosphere is often depicted as a white male Western phenomenon, definitely true in relation to its overlaps with Christian nationalist and white supremacist spaces, but male supremacy online is ethnically, racially, and globally diverse. Sure, technology facilitating anti-feminism may have started in Silicon Valley, but the networks themselves fluidly adjust to local contexts that, while culturally diverse, all share a core ideology. Men’s patriarchal right to power is a message that cuts across racial and cultural lines.This digital movement has gained force by successfully absorbing and accommodating regional grievances related to race, caste, class, and colonial legacies.
None of this is new or radical.
Patriarchy has always relied on people learning its norms slowly, effortlessly, and invisibly through parenting, family structures, storytelling, education, marriage, work, religion, and love. Today, however, there’s more awareness and criticism and what once took decades of subtle messaging and reinforcement happens through an algorithmically driven, politically exploited, high-speed firehose in which cognitively disruptive and emotionally overwhelming information moves at the speed of light.
Adolescents and Gen Z have been exposed to more information in a half a day, during their formative years, than most of their adults have been exposed to in more than forty years. They are experiencing both qualitative and quantitative shifts in enculturation, and yet most adults I speak to believe we can parent and socialize children like we did in 1955, 1973, 1990, or even 2005. We can’t. Kids aren’t just exposed to “bad” or more content, but more diffuse, addictive, and ideologically honed content. They are processing a lifetime’s worth of experiences, information, and change in a time of also accelerated crises.
Misogyny online is popular and seductive because it feels like order in chaos. It’s a nexus for community and power because misogyny has always been in fraternities worldwide. It’s not just the Manosphere. From economic instability and global pandemics to nonstop digital overload and climate anxiety, they’ve come of age years saturated with adult-level knowledge and stress. You can’t actually accelerate cognitive and emotional maturity, however, a vulnerability, particularly for boys.
Think of the Manosphere, to use the dominant analogy, as a rash—inflamed, painful, and impossible to ignore. It is, however, a symptom of a much deeper, untreated condition: a culture that hasn’t inoculated boys quickly enough against male supremacy. Without early emotional inoculation, boys are left vulnerable to people who are saying the quiet parts of our beliefs and culture out loud. (All of this is also a way to think about the complexity of pornography and identity.)
As caring adults who want to help boys and men lead happier and healthier lives with other people in them, we can no longer pretend that tradition and religion and culture are neutral or that progressive family values can shield children from wider socialization. We have to adopt, systemically, intersectional frameworks that teach children to think critically, to learn and believe that there can be no double standards for dignity, autonomy, safety, intelligence, love, or work. This isn’t a conversation, but a way of living that models relationships, compassion, accountability, vulnerability, and shared power.
Protecting male supremacy as a legacy – what the Manosphere is about – is the First Rule of Flight Club whether it’s men’s flight from emotionality, accountability, education, equality, or, today, flight from democracy.
Boys don’t need more control or traditional purpose. They need liberation—from the very system everyone was taught to uphold and many – with the strategic political deployment of the Manosphere – are violently trying to impose on us all.
