I read an article today in Wired about the creation of the “Inside the Manosphere” documentary on Netflix. I may have to watch the actual documentary now as the article intrigued me.
The ‘manosphere’ is an environment primarily within social media where toxic masculinity and racism are not just okay, but are actually celebrated. The big-chinned chads tell all the incels how to become proper alphas… for a fee, of course. Sometimes the “fee” is just attention: advertisements do the rest. And for reasons I fail to understand, millions of mostly young men jump on board with both feet.
This domain is the source of much of the energy behind the youthful participants in MAGA and its affiliates, and as such it bears at least some examination. Something in what the cheerleaders of the manosphere are selling is appealing to a distressingly large percentage of the young male population, a percentage that seems to be growing despite general and healthy negative backlash.
What really leaves me cold is just how mercenary the leaders of the manosphere are. Most of them know they are acting and saying terrible things, things they don’t even actually believe. Yet so long as the money rolls in, they will do whatever it takes to increase engagement by stoking fear and hatred.
Fear, hatred, toxicity- it is what draws the most eyeballs, far more than kindness or spiritually positive thought. How do we change this and unravel our population from going down the rabbit hole of communities like the manosphere? I have no idea, but maybe a first step is understanding what is driving it.
And it seems that the propagators of the worst of this kind of content are not ‘believers’, just amoral businessmen. Not really much different than the large corporations that are destroying our environment and driving new waves of unemployment through AI and similar changes. This suggests that at least part of the solution might lie in corporate or business regulation- somebody saying “no, this lie/hate/cruelty goes too far for social standards”.
I like the concept of free speech- but social media and the levers of engagement plus human nature are showing ‘pure’ free speech just doesn’t work in all circumstances. When hate and lies can spread so much more quickly and convincingly compared to the opposite, hate and lies must be regulated in some way. It isn’t easy, or efficient, or well-loved: but at least some effort must be made to make spouting lies and evil less profitable.
Humans have clearly demonstrated that, as a whole, we just aren’t very good at distinguishing truth from lies. We are even worse at telling when our fears and hatreds are being manipulated to make a buck or drive us running off a cliff of violence and retaliation for things that never happened. We must always allow more freedom of speech than is likely safe, but not so much that lies and harmful rhetoric begin to dominate. I do not envy legislators in figuring this one out.
I just hope the manosphere shrivels up and dies sometime soon. A bit of justifiable gonad-related shrinkage seems appropriate.
