COUNTERING THE MANOSPHERE: SUPPORTING YOUNG MEN AGAINST TOXIC ONLINE NARRATIVES. A NEW ZEALAND TEACHER’S PERSPECTIVE.

About Charlotte

Charlotte Forster has worked with young men as a teacher of English Literature in New Zealand. During this time, she developed an interest in radical alt-right and misogynistic online spaces, and their deleterious impacts in terms of shaping young men’s attitudes and behaviours. She presented on issues of online radicalisation in ‘incel’ and ‘red pill’ communities at the International Boys School Coalition Conference in 2021, and was recently involved in the drafting of the New Zealand curriculum. She holds a Masters in Teaching (Secondary) (First Class Honours) from the University of Auckland is currently completing a Masters degree in Philosophy at the University of St Andrews.

Lived experience: Relatability with “challenging” young people.

Recent cases like the group of high school boys in Australia that rated their classmates on a scale from “wifey” to “unr*peable”, Elliot Rodger’s vengeful murder-spree against the “bi*ch*s” that rejected him, and the 70,000 member strong Telegram group that traded tips on se*ual*y assaulting women are frightening evidence that something is rotten in the state of online discourse globally. Indeed, many educators have seen a significant shift in how their students speak of themselves and women in the past five years. Whether hearing of careless declarations that a woman’s appearance is ‘mid’ or hearing reverence for Andrew Tate — who famously claimed that women bear “some responsibility” for being r*ped — many educators are rightly concerned with the consequences of the ‘Manosphere’, a collection of online cultures of misogyny, on young, teenage men.

As an New Zealand educator, based in the UK I am well apprised of the anxiety that occurs when the terminology and ideology of these kinds of online communities is parroted by my secondary students in the classroom. Online misogynistic communities — out of nowhere — seem to have saturated the digital landscape, and even the most conscientious students are apparently aware of their offensive content. Naturally, there is a fear that the damaging views and ideologies of these communities might become normalised and popularly adopted, with dangerous consequences both in and out of the classroom.

In the academic literature, schools are repeatedly emphasised as the most promising site of resistance against misogynistic radicalisation. In this post, I offer some practical steps as to how educators might work to inoculate their students against the influence of the narratives perpetuated by these online communities.

Deradicalisation isn’t impossible but it’s harder than inoculation

Acting preventively on issues of online radicalisation can seem overzealous. After all, teachers’ workloads are already bloated, and it seems uncharitable to presume that the students we know and like have either consumed or been influenced by the Manosphere. However, the academic literature makes clear that anticipatory inoculation of students to radical influence is both necessary and the best approach to managing the virulence of online misogyny.

While it’s a distasteful fact, exposure to explicitly radical or gateway online content is near total amongst young men (for instance, an Australian survey found 92% of young men had been exposed to Andrew Tate’s content online). A random individual clicking through YouTube’s recommended video section will view such content within 23 minutes after creating a new account. Online platforms that work via predictive algorithms (nominating content for users based on age, se* and location) are more likely to generate misogynistic content if the user is a young man, particularly if that user is also struggling with mental health difficulties or social isolation. My own students have reported that TikTok shows them Manosphere-adjacent content “at least once a day,” even after they have informed the algorithm that they are “not interested” in such videos.?

Of course, exposure to radical content does not necessitate ideological conversion to extreme views. However, repeated exposure to radical ideas can alter thought over time: indeed, the normalising effect of repeated exposure to extreme views is cited in The Daily Stormer’s style guide as a useful radicalising tool. On this basis, it is both naive and negligent to operate in ignorance of misogynistic online culture: even casual consideration of the Manosphere can compromise students’ self-concept and relationships with others. Importantly, young women — who might lack the confidence to report their experiences to leadership or to respond directly — often bear the brunt of the normalisation of misogynistic language and attitudes: a 2021 Ofsted report found that 9 out of 10 girls reported experiencing sexist or image-based harassment in school. Female teachers, too, feel the effects: many report being increasingly subjected to sexual and sex-based harassment.

Furthermore, it’s far easier to intervene early than it is to offer an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. Extreme belief-systems online contain in-built mechanisms that resist deradicalising counter-narratives. For instance, by dehumanising women’s intelligence and dignity, the Manosphere ensures that pleas to women’s common humanity will have a limited impact on young men that have ‘fallen down the rabbit hole.’ This is not to say that deradicalisation is impossible, but that it is significantly more difficult than the act of inoculation. Therefore, it’s best if we can prevent damaging ideas from taking root in the first place and act preventively.

Some practical steps for teachers – and a thank you to my students!

In this post, I offer some guidance for the kinds of actions that educators can take to support their students in cultivating the capacity to resist the influence of online misogyny. In providing this advice, I owe a great deal to my own students for their frankness, self-reflection and intelligence in discussing their own experiences with extremist content online. What my students have shared makes clear that there is no one-size-fits-all-approach to resisting the Manosphere’s influence: educators’ knowledge of their own students and contexts must inform a flexible application of generic principles.?

Furthermore, my students have made clear that there is a powerful drive amongst young men to work against the demeaning narratives of extremist communities. I would encourage educators, therefore, to engage with their students with generosity, faith and esteem: if we want to ensure that students are primed to resist the devaluation of others’ dignity, we must first ensure that they feel their own.

(1) Teaching ‘Critical Thinking’ – obviously!

‘Just teach critical thinking!’ is such an oft-repeated maxim that it has lost its teeth. It’s easy to say that educators should teach students to independently assess the robustness of an argument, but it’s harder in practice: there aren’t many examples of what a ‘critical thinking’ programme should look like, it’s not clear which subject-disciplines should take responsibility for teaching such skills, and teachers are already over-burdened getting through curriculum content.

The slipperiness of the task shouldn’t disincentivise us from trying to perform it. A student once told me that learning to debate was what allowed him to see extremist content for what it was: as the logical fallacies of Manosphere content-creators became increasingly apparent, their intellectual hold lessened.

But where to start? The good news is that teaching critical thinking doesn’t require the design of a brand-new curriculum. Subject-disciplines already teach relevant skills: literature classes teach rhetoric’s manipulative power, history classes teach students to assess sources’ credibility, and science classes demonstrate that poor experimental design can produce spurious results. Teachers don’t necessarily need to teach more about critical thinking (although I highly recommend teaching a short unit on logical fallacies if you have the time and inclination: my own students were highly engaged in this content, and it really improved their essay-writing). However, we do need to explicitly teach students that critical-thinking skills are not domain-specific: the same skepticism that a student applies to scientific data should be applied when considering Myron Gaines’ claims that women are inferior to men on all crucial metrics.?

It can be useful to carve out classroom time to allow students to apply their critical skills to ‘real world’ issues that have some social currency. This doesn’t mean that educators need to lead discussion on sticky issues: there are plenty of ‘safe’ topics that can teach this kind of transferability. In my experience, students will make the jump to applying their skills to online extremist culture of their own accord. As an example, I recently taught a unit in my literature classroom on ‘cultish language’, in which students learned to break down the tricks deployed by multi-level-marketing schemes, health scams, and manifestation gurus. After the unit was over, a student approached my desk and asked (unprompted!): “Do you think Andrew Tate uses these tricks too? I was watching a video of his last night, and I noticed he uses quite a few thought-terminating cliches….”

Importantly, when providing this kind of teaching, educators must role-model intellectual openness and a willingness to scrutinise their own views. This has two benefits. First, it provides students with a vicarious example of what critical thinking looks like. Secondly, it counters the common extremist claim that schools are working to indoctrinate and brainwash students into intellectual agendas that are unfavourable to them. Being ‘intellectually open’ doesn’t mean that we need to tolerate topics or views that risk demeaning others or ourselves in the classroom. In fact, I recommend that educators direct discussions towards ‘safe’ but meaty issues, that inspire lively debate without affronting others’ dignity. As a vocal vegetarian, one of my favourite tasks is to provide students with a task in which they break down an article supporting vegetarianism, identifying its logical failures and rhetorical sleights-of-hand. Many are surprised that I would be willing to critically assess the presentation of a view that I hold or would be willing to entertain counter-arguments: but this is precisely the point of the exercise. We need to look for opportunities to demonstrate to students that they should only accept arguments or positions where they are well-substantiated, and any blind adherence to any ideology is ill-advised.

(2) The Language of Toxicity

The online space is presently awash with justified rage at the ongoing objectification of and violence against women: #MeToo, the 4B-Movement, and ‘man or bear?’ discourse rightly highlights and criticise systems of patriarchy that demean all those that sit outside a dominant paradigm of masculinity. The discourse of these spaces is sophisticated: terms like ‘toxic masculinity’ and ‘rape culture’ are used to criticise a particular mode of masculinity that is too-readily normalised and passively accepted.

#Notallmen has made clear that this kind of specialised terminology is readily misunderstood when it makes its way to the mainstream. While the adjective ‘toxic’ necessarily implies there are other variants of masculinity which are held in higher regard, young men are prone to reading such language as suggesting that they are either incurably toxic or will be forever seen as such. The Manosphere explicitly encourages this exact kind of misreading, characterising feminists as man-haters and suggesting that society at large has no care for male victims of mental illness, domestic violence and sexual violence.

The correctness of students’ understanding of these terms is far less important than the consequences of their misunderstanding. Isolated young men are particularly vulnerable to the influence of the Manosphere and its associated grifters: when young men believe that society-at-large has little care for them, then the false community of online spaces becomes their only option. This desperation for accepting community is all too apparent in various online ‘looksmaxxing’ forums, where young men voluntarily submit to scrutiny of their physical appearance: it is difficult to imagine how rejected a young man might feel such that attacks on his ‘incel chin’ might sound like the language of a caring community.

For educators, this means we need to be incredibly thoughtful with the language that we employ, remembering that students have been primed to misunderstand what we might think are uncontroversial ideas. To the extent that we use such language in the classroom, it is important to check for understanding and over-explain relevant concepts: students must be made aware that ‘toxic masculinity’ has a counterpart of ‘positive masculinity’ (and that they are presumed to occupy the latter). My personal preference is to avoid jargon altogether and talk about these kinds of ideas in context. For instance, when talking about John Thorpe in Northanger Abbey, I don’t criticise his ‘mansplaining’. Rather, I point out that he talks down to Catherine, assuming that she lacks basic knowledge (and that this condescension limits his romantic aspirations with her). When students are presented with this kind of behaviour in an exemplar that feels remote, it is far easier for them to criticise and identify against it. Whereas, if ‘maleness’ is married to this behaviour in the terminology ‘mansplain’, then space is left open for the obvious complaint: but women can be condescending too! This doesn’t mean we can’t extrapolate from specific examples to larger trends, but it’s important to talk about these phenomena in a manner that makes clear to students that they can (and should!) choose to think or act against them. When we tether undesirable traits to masculinity, we risk a self-fulfilling prophecy that isn’t productive.

(3) Role Models

Narratives of ‘toxic masculinity’ can only inform how men shouldn’t behave, and such negative prescriptions offer little in the way of a template for guiding how young men ought to take their place in the world. It’s little wonder, therefore, that many online misogynistic communities have been successful precisely because they fill this vacuum by providing positively-framed advice to young men on how to achieve success in financial or romantic terms. Figures like Andrew Tate frame themselves as pinnacles of masculinity, defining ‘male success’ as courting female attention, acquiring social notoriety, and flaunting material wealth. Any other vision of success, they denigratively claim, is the purview of ‘betas’, ‘cucks’ or lesser men.

The importance of role models to young men cannot be overstated: almost every young man that I have taught has cited a public real-life figure that he holds in high regard. The task for educators, therefore, is to ensure that young men are provided with a range of role models that embody positive visions of masculinity, which steers them clear of worship of false idols like Tate and his ilk.

Male teachers have a particular role to play in this regard: while male teachers are highly influential to young men in general, they are particularly important as aspirational figures for students that lack such role models in their home and community. For this reason, male educators need to be particularly sensitive to the kinds of values and beliefs that they espouse in the classroom and be sensitive to how they can role model power-without-domination, confidence-without-arrogance, and intelligence-with-humility, as well as generosity, gentleness and a sense of social responsibility.

Female teachers can also support students by pointing them towards examples of positive masculinity in fiction or in the public sphere, from which students can extract moral leadership. Such role models can come from unexpected places: last year, Pride and Prejudice’s Mr Darcy was a fan-favourite in my classroom for his protection of the Bennet family from reputational ruin and his refusal to take credit for his actions. Real-life anecdotes of behaviour deserving of emulation are useful too: I once told my students about how a kind man protected my friends and I from some street harassment in New York by simply standing silently with our group until the harasser left. My students were particularly impressed by the fact that this man left as soon as the harassment ended, without even waiting for our expression of gratitude. These kinds of stories have their advantages, in that they provide a template for realistic exercises of social responsibility, bravery, empathy or other virtues, without making students feel that they are required to act supermeritoriously in order to ‘do good’.

Inevitably, discussion about role models might bring up figures that are either members of radical online communities, or else are considered gateway figures to those communities. It can be tempting to challenge these figures as legitimate role models, especially if we know that their notoriety grifts on false narratives (for instance, many of my students believe that Elon Musk invented Tesla cars). In general, however, I have found that the better strategy is curiosity: find out what that student admires about a particular figure, and then offer them examples of (more appropriate) public figures who also emblematise that quality — a kind of ‘if-you-like-X-then-you-love-Y’ model. This does mean that educators need to have a reasonable repertoire of potential role models on hand, but it’s fairly easy to assemble this kind of list. I’ve yet to meet a student that resists veneration of Steve Irwin, for example. If correction is required, tone is important: saying “My understanding was that Elon Musk bought Tesla. Shall we look it up and find out?” creates an entirely different outcome than “No. That’s a lie. You’ve fallen for his tricks.”

It’s a disempowering mistake to assume that role-modelling is an exclusively male domain. Figures that we propose for emulation need not be male: my students have responded positively to examples like Simone Weil, Leah Williamson, Ilona Maher, and Dora Moon Nyambe. The key to providing female role models is to focus on their attainments or value systems: what is it about their example that a student can hope to emulate? There is a tendency to define successful or influential women under the moniker of ‘girlboss’, and I understand the appeal of such terms: however, I think it is important not to ghettoise female success — young men should be taught to revere all heroes.

Female teachers should also consider themselves role models. Like male teachers, we offer our students a template for moral action and belief-systems and should be attentive to ways in which we model social responsibility. In addition, female teachers are important in that we can inoculate students against the influence of the Manosphere by standing as counter-examples to extremist narratives about women in online communities. By proving our intellect, we prove that narratives regarding female intellectual inferiority are untrue. By looking out for the mental health of our students, we prove that feminists are not uncaring about ‘male issues’ (notably, there’s interesting recent data that suggests feminists are more esteeming of men than non-feminists!). By performing outside expectations of stereotypical femininity, we prove that ‘feminine’ traits are not evolutionarily essential. It is crucial, therefore, for female teachers to keep track of online narratives regarding women and think about ways they can reject them in their own behaviour, deconstructing the Manosphere’s fictions through action.

(4) Empowerment Through Community and Responsibility?

As I have already noted, the Manosphere preys on those young men that have low self-esteem, weak self-concept, or feel isolated from their communities. For this reason, inoculating young men against the influence of the radical misogynistic communities requires that they feel a sufficient sense of confidence in themselves and embeddedness in their community, such that the recommendations of the Manosphere become superfluous.

The academic literature suggests that young men respond well to being offered positions of responsibility, which coheres with my anecdotal experience as an educator. I have seen young men respond positively to both small responsibilities (like taking care of classroom plants or taking responsibility for researching a topic on behalf of the class) and larger responsibilities (like mentoring younger students in study clubs, or coaching sports teams). In particular, I have witnessed young men flourish when volunteering in their wider communities, particularly when engaging in provision for the vulnerable: animals, young children, and elders. A sense of usefulness and responsibility can increase students’ confidence, making them less inclined to seek out the easy approval of online communities that are seeking to profit off their following. When a young man self-identifies as humble, charitable, inspiring, responsible (or with any other number of positive qualities), the label of ‘Alpha’ or ‘Chad’ means very little to him — in fact, such terms can even become laughable as terminology that only those without meaningful achievements use to describe themselves.

Educators should also be alert to moments where students — of their own initiative — act with social responsibility, and praise them accordingly. Instances of natural leadership provide other students with a positive roadmap for how they might meaningfully distinguish themselves. I once taught a delightful young man in a learning-recovery class, who organised a lunchtime homework club with a few friends that took place in my classroom most days. I repeat his story every year to my new intake in the same class as a positive example who not only mobilised his own efforts to achieve his goal (he did indeed move out of academic recovery), but also inspired his peers to come along with him. I have never met a class since where at least one student — being provided with this template — hasn’t taken up the mantle of continuing this tradition.

Where possible, I recommend looking for examples of quiet leadership too. At the end of every term, I nominate three students as informal ‘leaders’ for one of the class’ three main values: diligence, respect and courage. Each student gets a little two-dollar-shop trophy and their picture on the wall, and they become a go-to model for their peers for how to engage positively in the classroom. These little moments are incidental and easy to offer, but they mean the world to boys finding their place in a senior school and trying to discern a positive identity. For this reason, I encourage educators to praise and compliment wherever possible and provide students with a set of positive adjectives that they can lean into when they are working through teenage crises of self-esteem and identity. Many educators have had the experience of a student returning to their classroom years later, recalling a single comment that made an impact on them: wherever possible, we have to ensure that these are the kinds of comments that sustain a young man’s energy for virtuous action.

(5) Talk About the Issues

In many instances, it’s well-advised to avoid discussing the Manosphere for the purposes of inoculation. Affording these communities attention only increases their legitimacy and provides them airtime they don’t deserve. Furthermore, many radical communities actually provide argumentative scripts for young men to follow if directly questioned about the content of their beliefs. This means engaging in direct conflict over certain issues is risky: educators are primed to ‘lose’ debates if they take a critical approach, which not only entrenches this belief system in the minds of radicalised students, but also provides it with counter-cultural credibility in the eyes of others.

That said, educators do not need to avoid discussion of sticky issues altogether. In fact, many young men are only too eager to engage in critical discussions about online content. When engaging in conversations about the issues, it is important that educators engage in good faith, with genuine curiosity, and avoid overbearingly prescribing acceptable views on certain issues. As I’ve stated above, the Manosphere perpetuates the narrative that ‘feminised’ educational institutions are attempting to coerce thought, so too dogmatic an approach can end up serving these narratives and entrenching their belief-systems. This doesn’t mean that teachers shouldn’t share their own views. The voices of male teachers, in particular, can be powerful in dispelling the Manosphere’s claims that they are simply espousing what “all men think”, and many students actually appreciate the opportunity to piggyback off their teacher’s views and exert positive peer pressure to help their peers move away from Manosphere-style thinking — often, they are simply waiting to ensure that they will have their teacher’s backing if they do so.

One way of avoiding difficult confrontation is to depersonalise the issues, using stories or examples from popular culture as examples for debate. I once asked the mother of a rather excellent student about how her son had come to be so confident, mature and empathetic when discussing relationships between men and women (we were studying The Handmaid’s Tale in class, and he had offered some insightful responses). She answered that she and her son had a tradition of watching Married At First Sight together, and that she used the examples from the show to discuss gender roles, modern relationships and sexuality. The advantage of such an approach — for both parents and educators — is that depersonalised examples render conversations less loaded and allow for neutral discussions of issues.?

Examples also allow young men to express and project their personal feelings in impersonal ways, maintaining a plausible deniability about their own experience that may be the source of shame or embarrassment. This is particularly important when we consider that many of the young men that are lured in by the Manosphere are drawn in for deeply personal reasons: anxiety about being romantically or se*ually desirable, for instance. Professional boundaries on these kinds of matters are paramount, of course, but it’s also important to consider that many young men are worried or ashamed about expressing their anxieties to women in their lives, whether it be their mothers, sisters or friends (or even school counsellors!), so they operate in information vacuums.? The Manosphere knows this and purports to provide ‘the answers’, which become significantly more believable when young men don’t know where else they might look for support. Where possible, educators should be aware of external resources that they can direct students to, which can help them with these kinds of personal issues: on general issues of masculinity, Bell Hooks’ Men, Masculinity and Love is a text that resonates (and is recommended on a number of ex-incel or male community subreddits!) As a teacher of English Literature, I have found story to be a useful tool in this regard: many of my students were interested in the positive example of Henry Tilley of Northanger Abbey, who ‘got the girl’ precisely because he behaved outside of stereotypical gender norms, illustrating that the Manosphere’s notion of ‘what women want’ might be fictive.

There are also opportunities for educators to explicitly teach material that helps counter the Manosphere’s misrepresentation of feminist issues as monolithic man-hating. My students have responded positively when learning that feminism has occurred in waves, and that certain issues remain a live subject of debate within the feminist community. Dismantling the idea that feminist views are all-or-nothing can be powerful for young men who are afraid that the movement disdains them, or who are worried that they will ‘get feminism wrong’. As noted above, many young men are only too eager to prove that they resent the objectification and subordination of women and minorities, but they aren’t sure of how they might demonstrate this ideological commitment in a manner that will be welcomed by those communities. To this end, educators’ provision of positive templates and roadmaps towards exercises of social responsibility can provide channels through which young men can demonstrate their goodwill and find positive purpose.

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