How the Internet Is Raising a Generation of Misogynists (And What We Can Do About It)

Adolescence, a liminal phase where identity is shaped by inner stirrings and external scripts, now unfolds in an age where the self is filtered, curated, and commodified online. Amidst this digital terrain, a powerful force has emerged in the manosphere. Beyond a mere collection of forums or influencers, the manosphere is a sprawling ideological ecosystem that promises belonging, purpose, and power to adolescent boys navigating uncertainty. But beneath the sheen of self-improvement and masculine solidarity, there lies a darker doctrine—one steeped in misogyny, fear, and the fetishization of control. This article peels back the veneer to interrogate how, and why, the manosphere has become such a seductive force culturally, economically, philosophically, and psychologically for boys teetering at the edge of manhood.

Adolescence, the show, captures this very threshold with startling clarity. Set in a suburban high school, it traces the inner lives of teenage boys as they confront fractured families, online echo chambers, and the constant pressure to “be a man.” Through moments of silence and sudden violence, vulnerability, and bravado, the show becomes a mirror of the contemporary psyche of adolescent boys. It does not offer easy villains or saviors—only questions, impulses, and consequences.

Culture, once rooted in tangible community rituals, inherited myths, and intergenerational dialogue, has fractured into algorithm-fed microcosms. Within this rupture, the manosphere presents a pseudo-cultural framework to adolescent boys disillusioned by the performative softness of mainstream narratives. Adolescence shows this cultural drift with subtlety—boys huddled over phones, mimicking alpha-speak, quoting Tate or Peterson without fully understanding the ideology they’re adopting. In one poignant episode, a character shares a manosphere-inspired rant in a classroom debate, only to be met with silence—not disagreement, but fear.

Platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and Discord serve as digital amphitheaters where figures such as Andrew Tate, Sneako, and others project a gladiatorial vision of masculinity—stoic, unyielding, unrepentant. To the adolescent boy, raised in an age of increasing institutional fragility and domestic emasculation, this ethos doesn’t just resonate, it sings. It becomes a script for manhood not handed down by fathers or mentors, but crowdsourced by avatars.

The cultural consequences are deeply corrosive. Femininity is rebranded as a threat; empathy is a weakness. Women become adversaries in a zero-sum game where vulnerability is ammunition. Love is no longer reciprocal but strategic, commodified, and gamified. In a world that often fails to offer rites of passage, the manosphere offers one: virulent independence. In Adolescence, this plays out as a character spirals after a breakup—not because he loved deeply, but because he believed he had lost control. The pain is real, but the coping mechanism—anger masked as dominance—is learned online.

Peel back the doctrinal layers of the manosphere and one encounters an almost Marxian undertone: the anxiety of economic disenfranchisement. These boys are not just angry, they are scared. Neoliberal economies have raised the bar of success while steadily eroding access to it. Homeownership, stable careers, and financial independence have become myths deferred to the future, if not denied altogether.

Within this pressure cooker, the manosphere doesn’t merely offer commentary; it offers a blueprint.

“Escape the matrix,” they say—code for abandoning conventional society to embrace entrepreneurial hustle. Crypto, dropshipping, and online coaching—all are rebranded as tools of masculine liberation. The hustle becomes sacred, and with it, the implicit belief that traditional women—nurturing, loyal, subservient—are a reward for economic conquest.

Economic failure, then, is not just a class issue—it becomes emasculation. This is where misogyny entwines with precarity. Women, especially empowered or financially independent ones, become symbols of the very system that has rendered men impotent. Thus, the hatred is not merely personality; it is structural, misdirected, and deeply tragic.

What the manosphere claims to be philosophy is, in truth, a mutation of older, nobler schools of thought. Stoicism, for instance—once about temperance, humility, and the acceptance of impermanence—has been disfigured into a cult of emotional suppression and domination. These boys are not taught to understand their feelings, but to outrun them. To “win.”

Philosophically, this creates a warped dialectic. Vulnerability is seen not as truth, but as exposure. Women, in this ontology, are not partners but puzzles, to be solved and subdued. Love is no longer a shared metaphysical journey but a power dynamic to be mastered.

There is also a profound nihilism at work. The adolescent steeped in manospheric content soon learns that morality is malleable, ethics are subjective, and success is the only telos worth pursuing. Religion, art, and literature—once beacons of introspective richness—are discarded unless they can be weaponized for status or seduction.

In this sense, the manosphere doesn’t just raise misogynists—it fosters anti-humanists. Those who believe connection is manipulation, community is weakness, and the world is a simulation best navigated through domination.

Behind every echo of misogynistic rhetoric lies a psychic wound—unseen, unspoken, festering. Boys today are growing up in emotionally inconsistent households, schools that often punish curiosity more than they nurture it, and peer cultures where silence is safer than sincerity. The internet becomes both a refuge and a crucible.

Psychologically, the adolescent boy is suspended in a strange purgatory—expected to perform emotional stoicism while grappling with an identity that hasn’t yet calcified. The manosphere exploits this instability, offering belonging without intimacy, guidance without nuance, and identity without introspection.

This is rendered with painful accuracy in Adolescence, where moments of emotional honesty—crying in a bathroom stall, sending a vulnerable text—are immediately followed by retraction, shame, and a return to performative toughness. The characters aren’t caricatures—they’re boys at war with themselves.

The phenomenon is deeply Jungian. The shadow self—repressed rage, insecurity, confusion—finds expression through performative hypermasculinity. Archetypes are invoked but distorted: the warrior without wisdom, the king without benevolence, the lover without vulnerability. It is not just that these boys are angry at women. It is that they have been taught to hate the parts of themselves that resemble them—softness, intuition, receptivity. The misogyny, then, is internal as much as it is external. It is a hatred for the “feminine” within the self.

So, what then? How do we interrupt this transmission of hate dressed as empowerment?

First, language must be reclaimed. Words like “power,” “masculinity,” and “discipline” must be severed from their manospheric interpretations and reintroduced in their original, expansive definitions. Power as creative agency, masculinity as ethical courage, discipline as devotion—not control.

Second, schools and homes must become sites of dialectical engagement, not moral surveillance. Boys must be invited to question, reflect, and articulate their fears, not be shamed for them. Curriculums need to include philosophy not as dogma but as inquiry. Boys should be taught Aristotle and bell hooks, Epictetus and Audre Lorde—not as binaries, but as coexisting frames.

Third, there must be the return of intergenerational mentorship—of real men, flawed and self-aware, modeling emotional fluency and ethical strength. The presence of men who cry, who apologize, who love tenderly, is more subversive than any hashtag. The antidote to toxic masculinity is not feminism alone, it is expansive masculinity.

Fourth, platforms must be held accountable—not simply through bans but through algorithmic reform. When rage is rewarded with reach, and misogyny is monetized, we are no longer dealing with culture but with architecture—an architecture of exploitation.

The adolescent boy does not dream of cruelty. He dreams of meaning. The tragedy of the manosphere is that it gives him the former, disguised as the latter. In a world that no longer tells coherent stories about what it means to be a man, the manosphere tells a story—brutal, binary, seductive. It is our responsibility to tell a better one.

Because this is not a war between genders—it is a crisis of imagination.

And Adolescence reminds us that the story doesn’t have to end in violence. It can begin, again, with truth.

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