Don’t fear the manosphere

Article here. Excerpt:

'I asked pertinent questions and watched selected content. On investigation, these bodybuilders turned out to be harmless bozos: they, too, ate their veg and loved their mums.

‘Is this the “manosphere”?’ I teased. ‘Are you being sucked in, do I need to turn off the router?’

‘No,’ said Sam. Then, bombshell: he declared the manosphere doesn’t really exist – that it’s a convenient label which doesn’t mean anything. Andrew Tate, he says, was a passing fad that shone for a while but then went phut. Did I know it turns out that Tate rented all those cars he had in his vids?

I did not know this. Interesting. Say more!

OK: the fuss about the manosphere was mostly because everyone in authority so comprehensively wet their pants about it. This was interpreted as a direct order to all schoolboys to start bellowing how much they loved these cross-eyed conmen. But in reality, Tate is over and those like him will follow suit. He’s as passé as Dubai chocolate or Labubus. Even the ‘six-seven’ thing is more enduring.

Of course, absurdist, clickbait, shock-jock influencers still exist online, but the point is they are unlikely to pose a genuine threat to your boy these days, if they ever did. Your son became aware, a long time ago, well before Louis Theroux’s exposé documentary Inside the Manosphere, that these influencers use tough language to get a following, which they then ‘monetise’ by flogging a range of crap: ‘business’ courses, green powders, scam-adjacent investment platforms, crypto etc.'