Experts say boys are watching porn rather than asking a girl out on a date because the real world feels so fraught.
What’s sucking boys into the manosphere vortex – and how worried should we be? Senior Herald writer Jo Wane delves into the online world and asks the experts what we can do to help our sons.
As the credits rolled on the final episode of the TV show Adolescence, Tess* fell to pieces. Overcome with emotion, she crawled into her son’s bed, held on to him tightly and cried.
It wasn’t that she saw her own Auckland family reflected in the disturbing story of a boy so lost in the dark alleys of cyberspace that he kills a girl from school.
She found the programme harrowing; the rise in misogynistic attitudes among some young men with a distorted view of masculinity worries her.
But the intense emotions Tess felt that night were a mix of grief over her son leaving home and anxiety over the complicated world he was heading into.
The mother of three sons in their teens and early 20s, she’s seen all of them struggle in different ways to find their place.
A lifelong advocate for equality and women’s rights, she says the tidal wave of negativity towards young men can be dispiriting. As a parent “just trying to raise decent human beings”, it almost feels as if it’s become shameful to be male.
Of course, most young men are doing just fine and have healthy, respectful relationships with the women in their lives. However, there’s no question that the rise in degrading online content has become alarmingly mainstream.
Moya, a 21-year-old university student, says some of the men her age have no idea how to be intimate in real life with women, acting out the dominance and aggression they’ve seen in porn videos.
Studies show predictive algorithms are more likely to generate misogynistic content if the user is a young man, even more so if he’s struggling with mental health difficulties or social isolation.
When researchers at Dublin City University created TikTok accounts for fake 16-year-old boys, it took less than nine minutes for “troubling” male supremacy content to appear in their social feeds.
The UK Government is so concerned by what’s happening that a review of its counter-terrorism strategy includes misogyny as one of the “extremist ideologies” on its watch list.
Set in the north of England, Adolescence struck such a chord with the public that Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer has supported the series being shown in schools to combat online male radicalisation.
Last month, it was announced that British students aged 11 to 18 would be taught about the dangers of incel culture (where men express extreme hostility and resentment towards women for their lack of sexual success) and the link between misogyny and online porn.
In Australia, too, teachers are being given new resources to counter the brand of toxic masculinity promoted by high-profile influencers such as Andrew Tate. The former kickboxing star, who has millions of social media followers, is currently facing rape and human-trafficking charges in Romania.
While the number of teenagers who take Tate seriously seems to be diminishing, his view of women as inferior sexual commodities has become staple fare in the modern equivalent of locker-room banter.
Last year, a cluster of boys at an elite private school in Melbourne were suspended after posting photos of their female classmates online and rating them on a scale from “wifey” to “unrapeable”.
The infiltration of the manosphere isn’t something we’re immune to here, either. Charlotte, a New Zealand teacher who’s written about “radical misogyny” for UK-based research and training organisation ConnectFutures, says educators increasingly face a culture of sexist hostility.
“In the last few years, I’ve met it in ‘joking’ memes (‘Miss, what colour is your Bugatti?’), querying of my professional competency (‘Miss, our science teacher said that women have fewer brain cells than men: does that mean you’re not qualified to teach us?’), assault-apologism (‘But, Miss, lots of women do lie about rape’), and open hostility (‘Miss, you’re a f***ing b****h!’).”
Students at the boys’ school where she teaches report being shown manosphere-adjacent content by TikTok at least once a day. At the same time, she’s seeing the boys starting to push back against the extremist messages they’re being sold.
While the #MeToo movement has sparked “justified rage”, she says inflammatory terms like rape culture and toxic masculinity can be alienating.
“Young men are prone to reading such language as suggesting they are either incurably toxic or will be forever seen as such. The manosphere explicitly encourages this exact kind of misreading.
“When young men believe that society at large has little care for them, then the false community of online spaces becomes their only option.”
Most teens say they don’t take alpha-male influencers such as Tate seriously, sharing offensive reels or memes for a laugh.
However, even that can validate behaviour that’s not okay, warns Claire Meehan, author of The Politics of Porn for Young People in New Zealand and a senior lecturer in criminology at Auckland University.
On August 26, she’s giving a public talk titled “Not Just Jokes” on how teen culture is being shaped by online misogyny, as part of the university’s annual Raising the Bar event – a free speaker series held at various bars across the central city.
Humour is often used to disguise offensive messaging, Meehan says, and as a defence mechanism against anyone who’s upset by it.
“They can say they were just joking, so it’s on you for being too serious, but all those little things add up to normalise sexual violence against women,” she says. “And it’s not just online; it’s sexist jokes at home. Some of our radio stations are appalling.
“It’s recognising that sometimes things aren’t funny, and a lot of this is on young men, because they have the power to say to their mates, actually, that’s not okay.”
Meehan says one of the “tells” among men’s rights activists and hardline groups, such as Men Going Their Own Way, is referring to girls or women as females, implying they’re an inferior or even subhuman species.
A recent study in the UK found Gen Z boys and men are more likely than Baby Boomers to believe feminism has done more harm than good. One in four believes it’s harder to be a man than a woman these days.
“So we’re seeing this massive regression,” she says. “The world’s in flux, we’re in a cost-of-living crisis, there’s high unemployment and people are feeling disenfranchised. It’s easy to have this notion that boys are being disadvantaged.
“We also know that in school, girls typically do better. But if you look at CEOs across New Zealand and elsewhere, girls just aren’t getting in. The glass ceiling is still there.”
Aggravating the problem is the lack of high-profile male role models providing a counter-narrative.
“Andrew Tate is rich, he’s successful, he’s hyper-masculine, he seems to have all these women on the go. And, it kills me to say, he’s incredibly charismatic. Like anyone, he has a shelf life, but once he becomes out of date, someone new will come in.”
Papatoetoe High principal Vaughan Couillault sees that vacuum already being filled by women promoting an image of sexual empowerment, such as controversial US rapper Cardi B and porn star Bonnie Blue, who launched her career on OnlyFans and was filmed in January attempting to set a world record by sleeping with more than 1000 men in 12 hours.
“You’ve got women with huge followings saying spit on this or choke that. Yeah, I’m ‘empowered’, but this is how I want someone to treat me?” he says.
“One of the things we’re trying very hard to do here is keep a lid on that kind of toxicity. We’re acutely aware of how quickly a message can spread and how hard it is for us to police that.”
The immediate past president of Spanz, which represents secondary principals, Couillault says there’s an increasing awareness of the negative impact of porn.
School nurses have seen a rise in the number of students needing treatment for anal fissures because inexperienced teenagers don’t know how to practise anal sex safely.
Papatoetoe High begins introducing modules on consent, respect and healthy sexual relationships from Year 9 and 10. The school has a unisex uniform and celebrates diversity. Their head boy wore a dress to the senior ball.
The beauty of young people, Couillault says, is that most of them are pretty good humans.
“But if you’re happy with the transgender and fluid sexuality side, you’ve got to be allowed to be a bloke, as well. It’s when you think your rights and beliefs are more valuable and need to overpower another’s that it becomes problematic.”
The politicisation of gender issues and what constitutes an acceptable male identity is a key theme in US-based journalist Ruth Whippman’s book, BoyMom, which was published last year.
The mother of three rambunctious, Nerf gun-loving sons, she’s found it challenging to raise them in what she calls “the age of impossible masculinity”, where her feminist peers often dismiss boys as little more than entitled predators-in-waiting.
While the left has branded masculinity as toxic, she writes, politicians and online influencers on the right are peddling a new brand of wounded, furious manhood that combines superhero fantasies with defensive rage.
“We never really fixed the old expectations of masculinity – man up, be tough, squash your feelings, don’t be vulnerable. That’s still very real,” she says from her home in California.
“Then this new set of pressures is telling boys it’s time to shut up and let somebody else speak.
“A lot of them are retreating into online spaces, watching porn rather than asking a girl out on a date because it just feels so fraught in the real world.”
Whippman’s research into hardwired gender differences found that while boys may be more aggressive than girls, they’re also more sensitive, fragile and emotionally vulnerable on almost every measure.
Dr Niobe Way, a developmental psychologist based at New York University, told her that boys at preschool and primary school demonstrate similar levels of empathy and emotional intelligence to girls the same age, and form emotionally connected friendships.
However, as boys reach adolescence, social expectations and masculinity norms start to get in the way. “They’re born as human and then we basically smack it out of them as they get older,” Way says.
Ironically, the one place Whippman found where young men experienced a sense of belonging and felt safe to share their struggles with other men was within online incel communities.
“Alongside all the horrible misogyny and racism was this real vulnerability and emotional connection, which was really surprising to me,” she says.
“Women are still disadvantaged in society in so many ways, and every conversation needs to be pulled back to that truth and injustice, but the rhetoric that all men are trash just pushes these kids away.
“If we don’t want our boys to look for belonging and connection in the manosphere, they have to be able to find it somewhere else.”
That resonated with many of the people spoken to for this story, who talked of a post-Covid loneliness epidemic among young men.
Women in their 20s on the dating scene say ideological echoes of the men’s rights movement have become more prevalent, with feminism being blamed for making life worse.
“Masculinity is having a very weird moment,” one says. “There’s a sense of victimhood among guys who feel a little bit forgotten by society and have slipped through the cracks.”
What this woman thinks men need is a sensible male version of feminism they can relate to. In Adolescence, the boy loved his sister and mother, but the only person whose opinion he really cared about was his father.
“[Actor] Emma Watson is like the Volvo of feminism, right? Mainstream, inoffensive, everyone loves it. There’s none of that for men.”
Samir, 22, works as a personal trainer at an inner-city gym in Auckland. He says social media is riddled with fitness influencers promoting their own brand of toxic masculinity under the guise of physical health.
For young men presented with an ideal male physique that is simply unattainable, issues around body dysmorphia and depression have become a real concern.
Samir and his friend, James, have no time for the misogynistic posturing by influencers looking to make money by manipulating their impressionable followers, although they don’t see a social media ban on under-16s as feasible.
However, they do have some sympathy for the view that a cultural shift to championing diversity has gone too far – creating a sense of self-loathing among some young men who feel they have no right to even express an opinion.
“The number of times you dial into politics and hear the phrase ‘straight white male’; it’s quite dismissive,” James says. “I understand the point they’re trying to make, but it’s like, okay, a quarter of the population isn’t allowed to have a voice anymore? That’s just not the solution.”
Megan McKee, a professional mentor and career coach, has worked with young men struggling to make sense of where they fit.
The world has become an uncertain place, she says, and men tend to have fewer resources when it comes to dealing with that. A report released this year by the Centre for Social Justice in the UK found boys were more likely to own a smartphone than live with their dad.
“Boys confront and are confronted by uncertainty in different ways,” McKee, who’s also an army officer, says. “And when they’re uncertain, they’re vulnerable.
“Girls talk and cuddle up on the sofa to watch a movie together. They wrap around each other in a way that boys just don’t.”
Men are hardwired differently, McKee says, and she thinks it’s important for women to make a genuine effort to understand and value that. She describes it as “constructive tolerance”.
“Let’s be aware of it, but not use it as a stick to beat them with or let them run the shop.
“Rather than crying and gnashing our teeth and throwing rocks at the Andrew Tates and Donald Trumps in this world, there’s a real opportunity to start a conversation that is hopefully nurturing and useful. As a society, I don’t think we do that very well.
“Young men are amazing and I’m wildly hopeful and excited about what I see. They fill me with joy, actually, and that’s a perspective that needs to get out there as well.”
* Name has been changed to protect identity. Some of those interviewed asked for their first names to be used only.
Joanna Wane is an award-winning senior lifestyle writer with a special interest in social issues and the arts.