‘Young men are disappearing into a swamp of video games, pornography, fast food and despair…’
The Manosphere is an increasingly influential and widespread catch all term to refer to a group of online communities and influencers who claim to be advocating for ‘men’s rights’, but, in reality, it’s another way for a bunch of grifters to make money from insecure men. While the idea of an ‘incel’ (someone who identifies as being ‘involuntary celibate’) was seen as a small subculture ripe for mockery until recently, their rhetoric is now everywhere from podcast studios to the Oval Office. Writer and journalist James Bloodworth is a former paid up member of the Manosphere (as a younger man he paid a couple of grand to do a seduction course) and he draws on this experience to produce Lost Boys – a book about his experiences within this troubling subculture…
Subtitled: ‘A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere’, Lost Boys explores how a tiny online subculture became ubiquitous throughout the western world. After Bloodworth describes his fairly tragic dalliance with pick up artists in his early 20s in the opening chapters, Lost Boys never really delivers on the promise of being a ‘personal’ journey. Instead, Bloodworth runs through all the usual suspects in this area (Jordan Peterson, Andrew Tate, Michael Sartain), and while his writing style is compelling and also informative, a lot of this analysis feels like its already been covered elsewhere. More interesting are the chapters in which Bloodworth explores examples of when the Manosphere rhetoric has led to actual real world violence (as in cases such as Elliot Rodger). As an educator, it’s troubling to here so many cases in which young boys and men have become radicalised, and the real fear is that this is just the tip of the iceberg.
Lost Boys serves as a useful introduction to exploitative, sleazy world of the Manosphere, but it feels like there is so much more still to be explored.