What are we missing about young men, because anger is rarely the whole story?
I watched Louis Theroux’s “Inside the Manosphere” documentary last night and, like many people, found parts of it deeply uncomfortable; the misogyny, the anger, and the certainty with which some of these views are expressed.
It would be easy to dismiss it as a fringe corner of the internet populated by angry men but that would be missing something important. These spaces are growing, and they’re attracting large numbers of young men every single day.
When you listen carefully beneath the bravado and hostility, another story begins to emerge: rejection, loneliness, confusion, shame, and a deep sense of not knowing where they fit in the world.
None of these excuse misogyny. Blaming women for personal pain is harmful and dangerous and the ideas circulating in some of these spaces clearly fuel resentment, hostility, and, at times, real-world harm.
However, mocking or shaming the men drawn into these communities will not solve the problem either. Pain that is ridiculed rarely disappears; in fact more often than not, it hardens and finds another outlet.
Many boys grow up learning to suppress vulnerability, push down emotion, and simply “get on with it.” When they later and inevitably experience rejection, loneliness, or failure, they have few tools to understand or process those feelings.
Into that gap steps the internet, offering belonging, identity, and a simple explanation for their pain. The message becomes seductive: you are not the problem, women are.
If we want to interrupt this story, we need to ask a harder question:
Where are young men meant to learn how to talk about rejection, vulnerability, relationships, and self-worth in healthy ways?
Right now, many of them are learning online, in spaces built on anger and misogyny.
What stayed with me most after watching the documentary was the sense that many of the young men drawn into these spaces are simply looking for somewhere to belong. Several spoke about difficult upbringings, rejection, and hurt. In that context, the manosphere offers certainty. It gives them clear rules about how the world works, and it highlights the people to blame.
As a society, we speak often about empowering girls. Those conversations matter deeply, but conversations with our boys matter too.
Boys need spaces where they can talk honestly about self-worth. They need to understand where feminism came from and what it was trying to challenge. And they need to hear, clearly, that vulnerability, empathy, and softness are not weaknesses.
There is nothing shameful about tenderness in boys, just as nothing is threatening about strength in girls.
If we want a different future for boys and girls, we need to start by changing the conversations we have with the men in our lives. If we don’t, the internet will, and its lessons are not always healthy.
