Opinion
A young man is scrolling on TikTok. This particular session started with a pre-workout video, moved through a clip about jaw definition, and arrived, without any deliberate navigation, at a podcast where a man explains that emotional sensitivity will make you sexually undesirable. He didn’t go looking for this. The algorithm walked him there, and he stayed, because something in it was speaking to something in him.
The conversation about the manosphere – a loose digital ecosystem of male-centred content and communities ranging from self-improvement to overt misogyny – has become circular: moral panic, political condemnation, a new name to demonise, a call for bans, and then quiet until the next incident breaks through. What we have conspicuously failed to do, as researchers, as policymakers, as people who care about young men, is sit with the more uncomfortable question of why this content lands, what it is answering, and what it tells us about the lives of the young men consuming it.
Our new research out this week at the Movember Institute of Men’s Health, has taken what should be an obvious but long-overdue step: rather than simulating what young men might encounter online, we looked at what they are actually watching. Using TikTok data uploaded directly by 142 young men aged 16 to 25, we developed the world’s first working structure for classifying manosphere content on a mainstream platform – decoding more than 2400 real videos from their actual feeds.
What we found complicates the story we’ve been telling ourselves. Explicit degrading content, including misogyny, violence glorification and suicide normalisation, made up less than 6 per cent of the content. The dominant category, found in nearly 38 per cent of videos, was what we’ve called “cultural touchpoints”: fitness, grooming, gaming, relationships, pop culture. More than half of the videos didn’t meet our manosphere criteria at all. On the surface, this looks like good news. In practice, it is a different kind of warning.
Cultural touchpoints are not manosphere content but are the underlying layer where manosphere ideologies become legible and appealing. They carry embedded assumptions that physical dominance is the measure of a man, that emotional self-sufficiency is a virtue rather than a defence mechanism, that relationships are territories to be navigated rather than connections to be built, without ever stating them outright. This is precisely what makes them effective, and what makes the algorithmic pipeline so insidious. Young men don’t need to seek out extreme content for it to shape their sense of masculinity. Once they engage with what interests them, the platform does the rest.
But here is our biggest mistake. We have focused so intently on the content, categorising it, condemning it, trying to legislate it away, that we have not asked what need it is meeting. The manosphere does not manufacture insecurity in young men; it finds insecurity that is already there and offers it a framework. Our research tells us that young men are spending upwards of six hours online daily, and a significant proportion of what they encounter is telling them that the solution to feeling lost, overlooked, or inadequate is a particular kind of hardness. That message has such reach not because it is true, but because nothing credible is competing with it.
Australia’s social media ban for under-16s, bold as the ambition was, has demonstrated exactly this problem. Several months in, compliance is low, circumvention is easy, and the young people who remain most embedded on these platforms are, by their peers’ own account, the socially influential ones. Banning the platform doesn’t address the conditions that made it necessary. When you suppress a symptom without treating its cause, it tends to find another way out.
What would it mean to actually engage with young men’s experience, rather than diagnosing from a distance? It would mean taking seriously that the manosphere speaks to real developmental needs, for belonging, identity, a version of masculinity that feels coherent and achievable, that mainstream institutions have largely stopped trying to meet. It would mean recognising that engagement exists on a spectrum: curiosity is not radicalisation, and most young men encounter these spaces looking for something human before they find something harmful. None of this excuses the misogyny or the real harm done, most often to women and girls. But understanding the draw is not the same as endorsing the destination, and collapsing the two has made it harder, not easier, to reach the young men we’re most concerned about.
Our framework was built to help researchers and policymakers understand the full spectrum of this content, from the innocuous to the harmful, so that interventions can be designed with precision rather than panic. Offline, that looks like meeting young men where their needs actually are: programs built around belonging and purpose, not just risk reduction; health practitioners trained to ask what’s going on rather than what’s wrong; and communities that offer a version of masculinity worth showing up for. Online, it means actively feeding algorithms better content, seeking out, watching and sharing creators who offer young men something worth their attention, demanding algorithmic accountability, and equipping young men themselves to notice what they’re being fed, question it, and choose content that actually reflects their values. The manosphere did not create these needs. It simply showed up when we didn’t.
Dr Zac Seidler is global director of research at Movember.
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