Felix* remembers feeling lost when he first got drawn into watching videos by anti-feminist men’s rights influencers on YouTube. ‘I’ve never had a girlfriend,’ he says, ‘never had any success with women. Never known how to fix it. Things like “being myself” didn’t work. So I wanted answers.’
For Felix, who is 27, those answers arrived with the discovery of the ‘manosphere’ – a collection of websites, blogs, and online forums promoting masculinity, misogyny and opposition to feminism. Communities within this network include men’s rights activists (MRAs); incels (short for ‘involuntary celibates’); Men Going Their Own Way (male separatists); ‘pick-up artists’; fathers’ rights groups; and ‘passport bros’ – men from the Global North angling for ‘traditional’ and ‘submissive’ wives from Brazil, Ghana, the Philippines and other Global South countries. The rise of Andrew Tate, a British-American men’s rights influencer and self-proclaimed ‘success coach’ who was arrested in December 2022 as part of a human trafficking and rape investigation, has once again propelled misogynistic subcultures into mainstream consciousness, including among young boys. A recent poll in the UK found that 21 per cent of 16 to 17-year-olds were more likely to know who Tate was than Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.1
