Cork Views: How online manosphere demeans men as well as women

It is blatantly clear that the manosphere is by no means a niche corner of the internet any more. Figures such as Andrew Tate have amassed enormous audiences globally and given rise to an army of copycat influencers. Louis Theroux’s recent Netflix documentary exposed the movement’s ideas to a mainstream audience.

Much of the criticism directed at the manosphere has rightly focused on the harm it causes women - its misogyny, objectification, and promotion of deeply unequal relationships. However, one aspect receives far less attention: the damage it inflicts on men themselves.

Insidiously, beneath the rhetoric of empowerment lies an ideology that is often just as demeaning, degrading, and damaging to men as it is to women.

At its core, the manosphere promotes the message that men possess little or no inherent value. A man’s worth is not presented as something intrinsic, but as something that must constantly be earned through relentless competition and acquisition. The value of a man is measured entirely by what he owns, what he earns, the car he drives, the body he builds, and the influence he accumulates.

Fail to acquire these external markers of success and, according to the logic of the manosphere, you deserve loneliness, rejection and irrelevance.

It is an extraordinarily demeaning and dehumanising vision of manhood. Men are stripped of their internal qualities and judged almost exclusively by their economic and social output. Character, humour, compassion, integrity, emotional intelligence and creativity become redundant and secondary to income and status.

The implication is that a man is not valuable because he is human; he is valuable only insofar as he can produce and outperform other men. This is not an affirmation of masculinity. It is its commodification.

Women, meanwhile, are supposedly born with the value that men must earn. Their beauty is presented as their greatest asset, granting them immediate social and sexual capital - hardly a more flattering worldview.

Beauty is simply another external marker, one that is inevitably temporary. By reducing women to youth and physical attractiveness, the manosphere objectifies them in precisely the same way it commodifies men.

A man’s value is tied to wealth and status; a woman’s value is tied to beauty and youth. Once those qualities fade - or fail to materialise - so, too, according to this worldview, does their worth. Both sexes are reduced to objects whose value depends entirely on what they can offer in a marketplace.

Ultimately, this is an entirely capitalistic view of the world that commodifies and degrades both men and women as objects to be exchanged. Relationships become transactions. Dating becomes a market.

Human beings become assets whose value fluctuates according to variables. It is a profoundly reductionist worldview that fails to recognise a person’s humanity.

The irony could hardly be greater. Many of the manosphere’s most prominent influencers insist they are helping men break free from ‘the matrix’ - rejecting mainstream narratives and the 9-5 working model of a modern capitalist society.

However, their proposed solution is anything but revolutionary. Rather than challenging the system, it actually encourages compliance within the capitalist system of consumption.

Men are instructed to optimise every aspect of themselves, maximise their earning potential, acquire luxury goods, build a personal brand, and constantly increase their market value. The answer to feeling inadequate is not to reject consumer culture, but to consume more of it.

Perhaps that is no coincidence. The manosphere has become extraordinarily profitable.

Influencers who tell young men they are fundamentally inadequate rarely stop there; they also happen to sell the cure. Online academies, coaching programmes, exclusive memberships, investment courses, self-improvement subscriptions and personal branding advice all promise to transform ordinary men into ‘high-value males’. Insecurity becomes a business model. The more deficient a young man feels, the more likely he is to buy the next course, subscribe to the next programme, or follow the next guru.

Far from liberating vulnerable young men, many influencers have built lucrative careers by monetising their anxieties. Ironically, it is extremely reminiscent of how the beauty industry capitalises enormously in fostering insecurities in young girls and then offering them products to solve the ‘problem’.

The consequences extend beyond men’s relationship with themselves. The manosphere frequently advises men to pursue younger, less opinionated and more submissive women, portraying equality as something to avoid rather than embrace. Women are framed not as partners but as strategic investments within a competitive marketplace.

Yet this vision also impoverishes men. It robs them of the opportunity to forge rich and meaningful relationships with an equal counterpart - relationships built on mutual respect, intellectual engagement, and emotional reciprocity. Instead, it encourages an adversarial relationship between the sexes in which dominance replaces partnership.

The manosphere therefore fails not only women, but men as well. It tells women they are bodies and tells men they are bank accounts.

It commodifies both sexes, reducing human beings to transactional value while ignoring the qualities that make life and relationships meaningful. In claiming to free men from the matrix, it merely reinforces its logic.

Far from offering an escape from modern capitalism, it asks men to become its most enthusiastic participants.

The inconvenient truth here is the manosphere did not invent these ideas - it simply amplifies belief systems that already exist within capitalist societies. It holds up an uncomfortable mirror to a culture that too often measures people by what they have rather than who they are.

The fact young boys are being drawn to these sites is also worth examining. Have we made boys feel so worthless that they feel that turning to these charlatans is the only answer? Food for thought.