TL;DR
The manosphere presents itself as the salvation of men. In reality, it often functions like a market for male hurt: loneliness, shame, status anxiety, and attachment insecurity are translated into fantasies of dominance, devaluation of women, and patriarchal order — and then sold. It becomes particularly dangerous where boys learn early on that toughness counts more than relationship and control more than dignity. What looks openly vulgar and embarrassing on the digital fringes has long since returned in more serious form at the center: in companies, in power cultures, and above all in a politics that once again confuses toughness with leadership.
The problem is not just the ideology. The problem is the business built on it.
I have two little daughters. Five and eight years old. And maybe that is exactly the point at which comfortable adult cynicism stops. Because from then on, the talk about red pill, alpha masculinity, and the manosphere no longer sounds like an absurd internet cabaret, but like what it has long since become in truth: a cultural production machine for future disparagement, future hardening, and future claims to power.
The real problem is not just the content. The real problem is the business model. Because this scene does not sell insight. It sells an interpretive framework for wounded masculinity. It takes insecurity, gives it an enemy, baptizes it as truth, and then sends the bill.
These men are not being liberated. They are being managed.
The manosphere claims to open men’s eyes. In reality, it treats many men more like an emotionally exploitable sales market. First, the lack is named: you are passed over, soft, replaceable, disempowered. Then the culprit is delivered: women, feminism, equality, modern relationships, political correctness. And in the end, salvation appears as a product: dominance, self-optimization, toughness, control, status, rank.
This is not liberation. This is management.
Anyone who sells such boys and men a ring light, a podcast microphone, an alpha course, and a dominance narrative is not helping them. He is making their wound marketable.
Dominance is sold as healing
This is precisely where the perfidy lies. This scene does not offer men relationship, maturation, or self-respect. It offers them a pose. Not healing, but choreography.
Not: learn to deal with rejection.
But: become harder.
Not: understand your loneliness.
But: despise neediness.
Not: become capable of forming bonds.
But: win the hierarchy.
This is how shame becomes a posture of superiority. Uncertainty becomes a commanding tone. Inner emptiness becomes an external style of power. And because the whole thing is charged with pseudo-biology, evolutionary jargon, and market metaphors, to many it no longer even looks like ideology, but like common sense.
That is precisely why it is so effective. Because dominance here is not simply sold as practical, but as true, natural, and morally necessary. Anyone who contradicts it is not seen as reflective, but as weak. Anyone who defends equality is not refuted, but ridiculed. Anyone who considers care important is immediately suspected of sentimentality.
Anyone who feeds boys with toughness should not be surprised by authoritarian men
At this point, things are often obscured, because many adults can only bear the connection in softened language. So, precisely: not every boy without a present father becomes authoritarian. Not every violent father produces the same consequences. Not every wound ends in ideology. But it would be just as wrong to pretend there is no recurring connection here.
Where boys learn early that their worth is precarious, that closeness is unsafe, that authority appears cold, shaming, violent, or simply absent, susceptibility grows to worldviews that confuse control with dignity. A boy who is not mirrored but constantly tested easily learns that he only counts if he asserts himself. A boy who is not held but hardened later confuses emotional numbness with strength.
And this is exactly where the manosphere comes in. It does not offer healing for old wounds, but a costume. Not relationship, but hierarchy. Not a stable sense of self, but an enemy.
Old hurt becomes new domination
That is why this is not just about a few unlikeable influencers. It is about the political form of old hurt.
Fantasies of dominance are often not strength, but the opposite: the attempt to compensate damaged self-worth through superiority. Not dignity, but overpowering. Not maturity, but armor. Not sovereignty, but a poorly dressed fear of being small again.
Authoritarian politics often begins culturally right here: where men have learned that vulnerability humiliates and control redeems.
What this has to do with my daughters
Everything.
Because my daughters are not growing up in a world where such ideas circulate without consequences in a few obscure forums. They are growing into a culture in which boys and men can learn to see women either as trophies, opponents, providers of male ego, or props for male self-assurance.
No girl needs a society in which relevant parts of male socialization are permeated by the notion that female equality is a fraud and male dominance is the truly natural order.
No girl needs a culture in which empathy is considered weakness, reciprocity naivety, and care an inferior style.
And no father who is still halfway in his right mind should dismiss this as mere internet folklore.
The fringes only exaggerate what already holds at the center
Perhaps the most uncomfortable sentence in this text is: the fringes are not foreign. They are just more honest.
On the fringes, people say openly that men should lead.
In the middle, this is called leadership.
On the fringes, people say openly that women are too emotional for power.
In the middle, people talk about a lack of toughness or insufficient assertiveness.
On the fringes, care is openly despised.
In the middle, care work is simply structurally devalued.
On the fringes, it is called alpha.
In the middle, high performer.
That is exactly why it is so convenient to treat the manosphere as bizarre special waste. You can then laugh at it and do not have to look at the more respectably dressed version of the same problem. But the vulgar fringe form is merely the unvarnished sharpening of an order that has long been established in the economy and public life.
In politics, the same reflex just sounds more respectable
This becomes particularly clear in politics. There, the same affect runs under better lighting and in more expensive suits: order, strength, clarity, determination, leadership.
What appears on the fringes as a raw male cult appears at the center as raison d’état, leadership strength, or regulatory sobriety. But the emotional core often remains the same: the longing for the strong man who does not hesitate, does not doubt, does not soften, does not mediate, but decides, orders, cracks down.
Trump embodies the noisy theatrical form of this masculinity. Putin its cold, threatening form. Xi its controlled, disciplined state form. And Merz is not the same as these three, but he stands for a German, bourgeoisly smoothed variant of the same temptation: toughness as seriousness, emotional distance as maturity, authority as a male-coded normal form. These figures are not identical. But they live off a shared cultural grammar: toughness is considered more credible than care, dominance more resilient than doubt, masculinity the more natural bearer of leadership.
The point is therefore not equating. The point is pattern recognition.
Patriarchy is not the past, but operating logic
Anyone who thinks patriarchy is a historical word that you only still need in seminars should look at the present.
Patriarchy today lives on not only in open commands or crude legal power. It lives as operating logic. In the devaluation of care. In the glorification of aggressive leadership styles. In the cultural lie that toughness is more objective than care. In the continued confusion of dominance and competence. In the quiet self-evidence with which male-coded authority appears more serious than relational intelligence.
The male industry of the net did not invent this. It merely monetizes it. That is exactly why it is so politically compatible.
The abolition of patriarchy does not begin with appeasement
There is a false moderation that in truth is only intellectual cowardice. It goes like this: one must not scare young men even more now. One must above all be understanding. One must not be too harsh, otherwise one will drive them even more into these milieus.
Of course, we must understand why boys are susceptible. Of course, we must take loneliness, shame, fear of loss, and devaluation seriously. But understanding is not appeasement. And taking seriously is not giving in.
Yes, many of the boys and men who slip into such spaces are not first perpetrators, but prey.
Yes, their hurt is real.
Yes, their loneliness is real.
Yes, their damaged self-worth is real.
But that is precisely why we must say with maximum clarity: anyone who translates this weakness into dominance does not heal it. Anyone who turns hurt into domination produces new harm. Anyone who feeds boys with toughness should not be surprised by authoritarian men. And anyone who also makes money out of all this is not their savior, but their exploiter.
The abolition of patriarchy therefore does not begin with appeasement. It begins with naming the pipeline: early devaluation, digital marketing of male insecurity, dominance as compensation, authoritarian compatibility in business and politics.
I do not want my daughters to grow up in a world in which this connection continues to be trivialized as a matter of style.
And I also do not want boys to continue to be lost to an industry that first explains their pain to them, only to then sell them the poison as a remedy.
