Becoming Hard: The Manosphere as Radicalization Conveyer Belt for the Neofascist Far Right

The rise of the “manosphere” online, bringing together “pickup artists” (PUAs), “incels” (involuntary celibates), “men going their own way” (MGTOWs), men’s rights activists (MRAs), and an array of online “influencers” led by figures such as Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson, has been directly contemporary in the last decades with the rise of forms of authoritarian ethnonationalism in the U.S., Russia, and more widely. It would be easy, but I would argue inaccurate, to suppose that the two phenomena are unrelated. The rise of the manosphere is one more chapter in a longer history of the interconnection between forms of male protest and far-right politics, in ways that ought to concern conservatives and liberals alike.

Let me start from the side of understanding the far right and its history. The “f-word,” “fascism,” has become a polemical weapon hurled by political agents on all sides at foes, emptying it of much of its meaning. Contemporary political movements like MAGA (“Make America Great Again”) in the U.S. undoubtedly echo many of the features of the interwar fascist movements and their “palingenetic ultranationalism” (Roger Griffin). Yet, many supporters of these movements take offense at critics who call attention to this ideological kinship, accusing them of hysteria (or “Trump derangement syndrome”).

It is therefore helpful to use Robert O. Paxton’s definition of fascism as a guide:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy, but effective collaboration with traditional beliefs, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Perhaps the only thing missing from Paxton’s definition is fascism’s distinctive gender politics. Interwar fascisms’ “compensatory cults” of national or racial regeneration each also turned centrally upon a rejuvenated hyper-masculinity, primed for war and for domination over emasculated mass society. As Emile Gentile explains in Fascismo, the new fascist man is:

a believer and combatant for the religion of the fatherland, wholly devoted to fascism, body and soul, champion of virile virtues, young bold, courageous, full of life and enthusiasm, healthy in his instincts and his feelings, ready for violence.

First-generation fascist masculinity was a protest construction, shaped along two oppositional axes. The first axis is the opposition to “rootless” (in Nazism, “Judaized”) liberal, urbanized, cosmopolitan pre-fascist modern “last humans”, with their effete over-intellectuality and their office jobs, their timid longings for “peace” and “security,” their emasculating idealism (alongside their spiritless “materialism”), and their meek acceptance of lifeless compromise. The second axis is the opposition to all things coded “feminine,” including the democratic “masses,” refined urban life, welfare, socialism, pity, intellectuality, liberalism, communism, “humanitarianism” (always in mocking scare quotes), homosexuality, etc., as well as opposition to women themselves, as in any way more than wives and “breeders” of the next generations of youthful male warriors.

Again and again in fascist writings and speeches about the “new man,” we therefore find the same adjectives monotonously marshalled and combined: youthful, energetic, hard, proud, realist, dynamic, fearless, primed for action, strong, scornful of weakness, impervious to any tender affect; iron-willed, resolute, like steel, like stone, manly, forceful, faithful, heroic, virile; and brutal, ruthless, violent, pitiless, and barbaric (with these last terms coded positively).

So, what does any of this have to do with the manosphere? Clearly, many young men today who are drawn into the “manosphere” may be looking for personal solace, social connection, and a framework to explain their difficulties in finding sex or love, stable work, and they may be consolidating a sense of self, purpose, and the future. What they typically will be ill-equipped to grasp is how the grievance narratives that shape the manosphere introduce them to a series of directly fascist-adjacent ideas:

• that “all women” not subservient to male authority are faithless, soulless creatures obsessed with sex with “alphas,” status, and money;
• that hierarchy is natural and ubiquitous (and should be gendered);
• that all life is a Darwinian struggle for domination, in which prosocial feeling is “weakness,” and all other-directed ideals are illusions;
• and that the present liberal and multicultural world maintained by “cucks” and “normies,” in which women soullessly exploit honest men, is profoundly anti-natural and needs to be overthrown, by violence if necessary.

Of course, neither the contemporary forms of protest masculinity in the manosphere, nor today’s far-right movements, are somehow identical with the forms of the past—whatever that could mean. In a way that contrasts with interwar predecessors, neofascist groups have today leveraged the neoliberal obsessions with health, fitness, beauty, and “wellness,” as individuals look to elevate themselves in the ubiquitous competition that characterizes our lives in neoliberal capitalism. There is a clear tension between the individualistic dimensions to today’s social-mediatized hyper-masculinity and the collectivist impulses at the heart of all fascisms. Male “looksmaxxing” is as unthinkable in first-gen fascism as calls to martial self-sacrifice are in parts of the manosphere. The transparent narcissism of men’s health and body building and gym culture (iPhone cameras in hand) arguably represents an at-times almost parodic cosplay exaggeration of the older fascist body ideals.

But it is no coincidence that the ideological convictions of the “Proud Boys,” the far-right paramilitary group closely affiliated with the present U.S. administration intersects with the ideas championed by leading manosphere influencers. A recent study by Samantha Kutner, querying Proud Boys why they joined the paramilitary group, revealed that, alongside political hostilities to “the Left” (especially around “free speech”) members cite the same reasons that we might associate with someone “following” a Jordan Peterson: personal crises, the desire for male bonding, and:

The deterioration of traditional gender roles. I agree with Gavin [McInnes] that women probably are happier as housewives. I think men ought to be free to act like men without being corrected by the nags and the busybodies that our society has produced. I think kids ought to be allowed to make mistakes, get scraped knees, play with BB guns, and that sort of thing. (Participant 15)

Kutner concludes the study: “[The] Proud Boys represent a new face of far-right extremism, one that recruits through shared precarity and male grievances.” The sets of the manosphere and the neofascist far right are not insulated from each other. They are intersecting. And we know that the social media and YouTube algorithms, favoring sensational and divisive materials to drive “user engagement,” will often push young users from manosphere to far-right “content,” even without them forming that intention.

What is the result of this analysis? It is not that every youth who is impressed by a show of authenticity from a manosphere influencer will end up marching in a paramilitary group or beating up liberal protestors. But some may. And many more will embrace deeply misogynistic and anti-liberal political views. As Australian researcher Ben Rich has argued, to continue to ignore the manosphere as a deluded subculture is no longer possible or wise, given the sheer scope of the phenomenon. Every initiative to reshape our societies’ social contracts, so that the young of both genders feel that they can see a future for themselves, will need to be fostered. For it is ultimately from the deep wells of alienation and hopelessness that both the manosphere and the far right draw their myriad recruits.