The manosphere to man, is as feminism to women

The manosphere is a varied collection of websites, blogs, and online forums promoting masculinity, misogyny, and opposition to feminism.[1] Communities within the manosphere include men's rights activists (MRAs),[2] incels (involuntary celibates),[3] Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW),[4] pick-up artists (PUA),[5] and fathers' rights groups.[6] While the specifics of each group's beliefs sometimes conflict, they are generally united in the belief that society is biased against men due to the influence of feminism, and that feminists promote misandry (hatred of men).[7]* *

From Wikipedia.

In a sense 'The Manosphere' is similar to feminism from the viewpoint of a demand for self determination & what they claim is feminism's attempt to subdue it.

Men who wrote classic literature in past times weren't the majority, but I agree with your wider point.

It is true that despite boys being outperformed at school, they still tend to earn more and achieve higher positions, for various reasons, which would fir with getting on track later. Though Gen Z young men apparently earn less than Gen Z women, so that may not hold at least at the moment.

And yet a lot of the best literature in the world has been written by men, and so it’s not that they are not as good at English.
Perhaps they just get on track slightly when they are slightly older maybe?

Yes, definitely. On Soon-Yi, from what I've read it definitely seems like Allen played on her unhappiness in Mia's care to groom her. Allen of course whined a lot about his media treatment but honestly he seems to have been very leniently treated until pretty recently, even after the Dylan allegations he were initially made.

Soon-Yi's apparent words to Epstein about MeToo are both depressing & unsurprising.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/04/soon-yi-previn-jeffrey-epstein-emails

"deep rooted in the manosphere believe that the beliefs are equivalent to what the feminist movement is for women"

I think hink that's a flawed hypothesis / comparison. A more apt comparison would be with the tradwife movement...

Oh I agree about international adoptions. And I am not saying Mia Farrow was a saint/mother of the year. But she also wasn't as far as we know, a paedophile or someone who repeatedly hung out with paedophiles.
If she was a terrible parent to Soon-Yi or even an inadequate one then if anything that makes the fact her step dad later married her worse not better. It makes the argument that there was no grooming, they just fell in love as legal adults, even less believable.

I agree strongly with this. Parental Alientation Syndrome is dreadful, it's disgraceful it's been still used in courts for a long time. I do think parental alienation can happen (by a parent of either sex), but nit in the way the theory proposed.

Otoh, I'm not certain re Mia Farrow being a stainless parent. She was definitely right about Epstein, and probably about Woody Allen himself. But transracial, transnational adoption is often questionable at the best of times and I think there are valid questions about how well she treated Soon-Yi during her childhood. Imo it was a case possibly of out of the frying pan, into the fire, possibly.

Allen's oeuvre certainly has a preoccupation with his stand-in character getting involved with very young girls (Manhattan for one,,where Mariel Hemingway said he made a pass at her), unsurprising he and Epstein got on so apparently well...

Usually the courts try to let both parents have contact with a child. They have to be really really bad before it's completely blocked. Extremely bad. That doesn't mean one (or both) parent won't feel ill treated because they don't have the level of custody they want. But any story of a father unable to see his child because of a biased court will have a LOT of details missing. It's instantly suspicious. A more believable example is courts granting custody/visitation and one parent not cooperating meaning the other parent has to go through a lengthy process just ot have the original decision enforced. But if one parent keeps being uncooperative the end result is they lose custody to the other parent. Not that the courts say tough shit, she doesn't want you to see your kid.
There was parental alienation syndrome which was first invented by a psychiatrist who had previously argued that paedophillia wasn't always harmful. When that got push back he switched to saying that mother's often made up stories of paedophillia/abuse or used mind control to make their children allege it. Hmmmmmmm.
Parental alienation is completely disproven as a theory but continued to impact court decisions and public perceptions. It's not that mother's are always right. But it is still in some people's heads as a massive thing that happens and it isn't. It was invented by someone who was at best paedophile sympathetic.

As a high profile example- I think we can safely say Mia Farrow had a point about Epstein. But for a long time she was seen by many as the guilt parent.

Many fathers are excellent, and dad's have an important role to play in their children's lives. That should be celebrated. But I don't think the level of resentment.towards courts for being female biased in the family courts is at all justified.

Yes...I mean, from what I've seen on my forays into the Men's Rights subreddit, a lot of men on there are older. This ties into the issue pp mentioned of perception of custody bias towards women, this was an issue for many I saw too.

I say perception because I don't doubt that many men were treated unfairly but I have also read (and know personally) of many cases where contact was pushed at all costs with abusive partners despite distress to the child. Maybe the family court problems are not biased against either sex, so much as just signs of general deep flaws?

Thanks. That fits quite well with my experience of family members (who I always got on well with but it was odd when they went down their rabbit hole of being extremely angry at women because I'm a woman so it was a bit challenging). I think young men can struggle too. It's just interesting that there's an assumption the online groups are always angry young men.

Well, I'm about to turn 62, and this was up to 10-15 years ago. FWIW, it came at the end of my ongoing insecurity with the opposite sex from a young age. An easy coat to slip on. It didn't dominate my every moment but was a bit of a backdrop biasing my interactions and feelings I wasn't always in control. And nothing like weaponised incel culture today.

Oit of interest, how.old.were you at the time you were most embedded in the "manosphere"
you don't have to answer if you don't want- I certainly don't want to make people give away personal details.
I just have a personal theory (based on my own observations of people in my life) that many of the most unhappy, very much online men int why general space were middle aged.or older. Whilst a lot of focus was on disempowered young men/incel teenagers. But I could be completely wrong.
I think it's normal for men (and women) to hit a speed bump in the late 30s especially when you aren't super young any more and bits of culture stop making sense/seeming reasonable (usually because it isn't). I think that the whole manosphere area was quite fertile ground for that. And of course, it's understandable because a lot of changes to culture are stupid and unhealthy. But I think it's easier to blame women/feminism because they just are there...

That's a good point about the levels.
It goes for other stuff as well - I think that competitive people tend to get competitive over everything. And we live in a society where the media etc is literally telling men in particular that they should be competitive/strive to reach the top. So it's not just jobs/money/status. Also success with women/families. Hence someone who can't get a date will be angry. Someone who can get a date will be bitter they don't have a more attractive date. Or aren't dating multiple women simultaneously. Which feeds into this bitterness/angry mysogyny.

But even men almost "at the top" don't seem that happy. Eg Billionaires want to be trillionaires. Or are complaining about how they don't get to run things even though they have loads of power. And still come across as quite bitter at the world. It's not healthy.

Thanks, this is interesting info re the kinds of stuff that reinforced manosphere ideas etc I agree that reality TV etc did escalate crazily in those years & I can see how that would play into manosphere. Obviously shows like Big Brother, Love Island now etc had male contestants, male producers often etc but it's true women were often flagship figures, probably as pp said partly due to young, sexually attractive women attracting coverage.

Mary Harrington has an article about how women often include themselves when posting, say, a picture of a book online, and that men accuse them of narcissism due to this. She notes that it's generally only young, fairly conventionally attractive women who do that, mainly because they know including their face will get them more likes. Similar principle for a lot of things. A parallel could be Berlusconi use of 'veline' (showgirls) during his tenure as king of Italian reality TV. This wasn't engineered by women particularly, and while some took advantage of it, it didn't have positive effects on status of Italian women in general.

Re the 'young Asian women' thing, it's true that figures like Naga Munchetty, Reeta Chakrabarti, Mishal Husain, Babita Sharma, Dalia Sinha did become more prominent in early 2010s/they were only promoted for that reason. But that doesn't necessarily mean there was some push for that to happen. The BBC did start to focus more on diversity then, but otoh most of these women were in mid-30s at least by then (so not super young - unless you meant others?), and had been there for some time before, Husain and Chakrabarti since 1990s. And there were still many prominent male presenters: Clive Myrie, Simon McCoy, Gary O'Donoghue, Huw Edwards..

Plus they need to feel that they will rise up the ranks as a matter of course, as a given, so that even young ones at the bottom expect to gain some status.
Social stagnation and no progression seems to affect them worse than women.(IMHO of course)

So your take is that men need there to be people who are lesser than they are, in order to feel a sense of satisfaction about themselves? That would explain the way they, as a demographic, treat women and children, I suppose...

@OtterlyAstounding @persephonia

You refer to 'the bottom' and 'the top', as if there were only two (or perhaps a few) rungs to the ladder. But society is not just 'the rich and the rest'.

A quick search tells me the British army has about 19 levels, for example, then within each team at a formal level their will be informal hierarchies, perhaps multi-dimensional taking into account many different qualities and personal characteristics.
I am talking about male society in general being a ladder of 50 or 100 rungs - numbers just made up for illustration. The levels are not clearly defined, hard to describe, very subtle, but there nonetheless.
Perhaps women are generally not aware of how massively status-conscious most men are.

If a man feels he has a status of about 20 out of 100, that is fine because there are still 19 levels below him, and people tend to look down not up, and concern themselves more with the few levels immediately above and below in their daily life, rather than think about level 90 or 99.
Plus age and skill and seniority at work were valued, so over the course of your career (20 or 50 years at the same firm) you naturally moved up, like an inevitable law of nature.
Companies now don't value age and seniority at work.

Maybe part of what is wrong now is that with 24 hour celebrity-driven media, we are all shown far too much of the top rungs, so inevitably feel our low status in comparison. This is worse for men especially if their personal status is not daily displayed and reinforced by social contact away from screens.

I wasn't really happy in my relationships with women (got lucky, finally), which might explain a lot, but I'm wondering now if it was more the increasing aggressiveness of that age 2000-2015, and the change to a 24/7 and way more superficial media news entertainment complex, with a much more upfront female image that heightened my reactiveness? I suspect a mixture of everything.
I've had quite a few female family law barristers as clients of mine, and a majority of them feel that many husbands/partners/fathers were given a rough ride during that period, not helped by the secrecy of family courts proceedings.
Yes, I know the retort will be that men don't keep up maintenance payments or act as responsible dads after divorces. But my strong impression from my manosphere period was that many men got a very bad deal.
Tbh, I haven't followed this area at all since the early 2010s, I think that evolved into more of a general dark mood about the escalating female face of the media, culminating in my own personal brain worm, the Kardashians wall to wall exposure 10-15 years ago.
I also threaded this into the infantilsation of our media landscape, Big Brother, reality TV, Russell Brand in our faces, the apex of kiss'n'tell exposes. And hated it all.

I know you are out of that headspace now. But it's astonishing how fucked up and manipulative it was when you stop and think about it.

On the most basic level, the reason young, pretty women who were prepared to show flesh got so much visibility was largely because men like to look at them so it sells commercials/music videos/magazines. Women watched reality shows about the Kardashians which kept them at the top. But they first rose to fame when that porn video leaked. It wasn't women watching that and making it go viral.

On a more deep level men who do have power (in TV networks, the music industry, bussines) like having young, voiceless, easy to manipulate pretty women around. So they create opportunities using their existing power to do that. Which means a small number of women being pushed centre.

Im not saying some women weren't able to make that work for themselves, and play the game. But below that there was something much much darker going on. Think about Victoria's Secret shows which were a huge deal. It's literally (beautiful, thin, highly sexualised) women with Angel Wings walking down a catwalk. The surface level impression is a celebration of female youth and beauty. BUT the impossible beauty standards they set were criticised for giving young girls (who the brand was ostensibly targeted at) body image issues. And if it seems odd that a brand targeted at young teens was so highly sexualised... It makes sense when you realise that the owner, Lex Werner, was the close personal friend of Jeffrey Epstein for years. Giving him a role at the head of the company and eventually giving him power of attorney over all his business affairs. This was a business that sold underwear to teens and preteens and did so with a hypersexual, big-boobed thin everywhere else ethos. You could make a similar point about Abercrombie and Fitch which celebrated a hyper sexualised male body and whose owners later turned out to be raping the male models.

But if you looked at with a really surface level men's rights analysis the fact some women got to walk down a catwalk wearing angel wings would be proof women/young girls had more rights in society. Or that women were all willing whores. Meanwhile women, and young girls (and probably boys) were being raped and abused and trafficked by the men in that same company.

The problem is if you take the idea about men being happier in hierarchies:

1. All hierarchies have much more people at the top than the bottom
2. Men are unhappy/feel disenfranchised if they are in a hierarchy but not at the top. I would argue that women/people in general are unhappy being at the bottom of the hierarchy too. It sucks to be at the bottom

We still have a hierarchy today. The ongoing saga of the Epstein files shows there are still some very powerful, very immoral people. Who seem to have used that power to torture girls and quite possibly boys too. As well as to make lots of money for themselves, manipulate politics etc. Aside from the child rape, men and women have every reason to feel angry at the dominance of the system by people who use those networks to maintain their place and keep others down. It's a perfect working model of what classic feminism calls patriarchy. On a smaller scale, there are hierarchies in the workplace etc etc.

The way the problems of hierarchy were mitigated in the past was saying to men at the bottom "at least you are above women". At least that's an interpretation of how patriarchy functions. But if women start to get more rights, then those men at the bottom lose the status they did have. Which is probably difficult but doesn't make it OK to kick women. They aren't the real architects of those men's problems. But it probably does suit the Steve Bannons of this world to direct ire that way and not at the actual system.

It's the problem of Caesar and Anthony. One will tolerate no superior and the other will stomach no equal. So you will always have a clash between people who don't want to be at the bottom of an oppressive hierarchy, and people who have a strong desire to be at the top. You could categorise those groups as women and men but really it's more complicated because not all men are (wannabe) Bill Gates/Elon Musk/Donald Trump. Thank god. At least I hope most men's anger at the Epstein files is not "I wish I had a chance to be like those guy's".

@EuclidianGeometryFan
Because if you need status in a hierarchy and don't have it, that causes mental suffering

I'm sure that's terrible for the poor men.

But even more men don't have any public social status - and that matters to them more than it matters to women.

But in a hierarchy, most of them would have no social status either! They'd mostly be firmly at the bottom, so how would that be helpful? And where is the evidence that it matters more to men? Women seem to place more importance on establishing social hierarchy in wider friend/village groups if you go off stereotypes.

But there was hierarchy all the way down. Everyone had a place.

But how would that help the men who are angry now, that there isn't enough room at the top? Wouldn't they just chafe at their 'place' and think they should be at the top, instead of the bottom? I can't see why they would be happy about that.

The older men "socialised" the younger men, put them in their place if they were being arseholes or arrogant twits.

This sounds a bit like rose-coloured glasses to me - but if indeed they did that, then why did they stop? And I certainly don't think young men now would be happy to be told they're at the bottom of the hierarchy.

First statement: "There is only so much room at the top."

Second statement: "But men are more hierarchical in the way they see the world. They need it in a way that women don't."

You're saying that men are angry they're not 'at the top' but then you're also saying they need hierarchy...but that would just keep most of them at the bottom...and they're angry they're not at the top. So how would that fix anything?

I'm just not sure what the desire for hierarchy has to do with actual suffering.
Because if you need status in a hierarchy and don't have it, that causes mental suffering

I disagree with your first statement (more men than women have high social status and real power imo)
But even more men don't have any public social status - and that matters to them more than it matters to women.
Yes there are more men than women at the top, but what about all the men nowhere near the top? (This is not 'whataboutery', it is directly relevant to the themes of this thread).

but also your second sentence seems to contradict what you say about men being disgruntled they don't have hierarchical structures, as most men would (of course) be at the bottom.
But there was hierarchy all the way down. Everyone had a place. Men in a dockyard or car factory had hierarchy within their teams and shifts, both formal and informal, related to both skill and age. The young apprentices and school leavers were at the bottom, but that was okay, as it should be.
The older men "socialised" the younger men, put them in their place if they were being arseholes or arrogant twits.

I am a little unclear exactly which words you mean when you say 'your first statement, and 'your second statement' - are you talking about paragraphs or sentences, in just this post or in my previous one? It is easier if you copy and paste what you are referring to.

I'm just not sure what the desire for hierarchy has to do with actual suffering.

Not only that, but in your previous post you said, "Men suffer under a post-industrial capitalist system because so few men have any kind of social status. There is only so much room at the top."

I disagree with your first statement (more men than women have high social status and real power imo), but also your second sentence seems to contradict what you say about men being disgruntled they don't have hierarchical structures, as most men would (of course) be at the bottom.

But men are more hierarchical in the way they see the world. They need it in a way that women don't.
A lot of women don't want to achieve in a public social hierarchy in the same way, their social hierarchies mostly relate to status in extended family.
Women have public status as mothers. Men's status as fathers is nowhere near as socially prominent.

When men worked in male-dominated industries many decades ago (factories, docks, car-making, mines, ship-building, etc) there was a clear hierarchy - foremen, shift leaders, etc. and an informal one whereby old-timers with high skills were acknowledged and respected and socially deferred to.

I think it is an evolved trait, related to the way hunting bands and war bands in tribal society need hierarchy and roles and rules to be successful.

There is definitely something in modern society that is missing for men.

To get back to the original question, I think you have to define 'manosphere' a bit more clearly before you can compare it to feminism. And perhaps be clearer about which bit of 'feminism' you are talking about - I assume the political feminism of the second wave (1960s and 1970s) but that should be specified.

People suffer under a post-industrial capitalist system. There's not any more room at the top for women.