One afternoon, while walking along a beachside street with my family, we saw a car stall in traffic. My husband and two other men appeared at the driver’s window within seconds, offering to push the vehicle to a nearby parking spot. I watched as they quickly slipped into action mode, working in unison. That particular moment got me thinking about masculinity, which in recent years has often been treated almost as a pathology, something problematic that needs to be managed, or something blatantly toxic. But what do we call that reflexive generosity, that unspoken choreography of protection?
These questions about masculinity have this year, acquired a new urgency. Following Trump’s re-election to the White House journalists noticed something unsettling: the emergence of a sharp gender split among young voters. Younger generations tend to lean left politically, regardless of gender. And young women continued trending left. But many young men swung to the right, and signalled something new. As Jonathan Yerushalmy wrote in The Guardian, this was Trump’s ‘victory in the manosphere.’
The term caught on. The ABC noted a similar pattern in Australia, with disproportionately high levels of young men voicing support for Trump and anti-woke politics. It was clear that something deeper than party preference was in play. A sense of grievance, identity, and alienation had found a new home online and it was reshaping politics.
But what is the ‘manosphere’, and why was this term so prominent in post-election coverage and even attributed to Trump’s victory? Simply put, it’s an umbrella term for an ecosystem of disparate online influencers, pick-up artists, men’s rights activists, whose blend of fitness advice, anti-feminist rants, and wealth flexing have found massive male audiences. And they might have little in common except that their content seems grounded in a belief that the modern world is hostile to men.
In her 2017 paper Alphas, Betas and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere, Debbie Ging defines the manosphere as ‘diverse assemblages [which] are generally united in their adherence to Red Pill “philosophy”, which purports to liberate men from a life of feminist delusion’. The ‘Red Pill’ metaphor, implying an awakening to a false reality, is borrowed from the 1999 film The Matrix, where everyman Neo is offered a red pill that will open his eyes to the world as it truly is. In the case of the manosphere, taking the ‘red pill’ opens your eyes to the ideological