A Narrow Frame
I recently watched Inside the Manosphere documentary on Netflix. I must confess it’s a subject I have spent time with myself, having sifted through hours of online content in an attempt to understand the psychological mechanics underpinning it. As a psychotherapist, I am also interested in how cultural shifts show up in the lives of the people I work with.
What struck me was not that the film was wrong, but I felt it flattened a far more widespread relational and psychological shift, one that is now expressing itself in exaggerated forms online, including, but not limited to, the manosphere. I wanted to try and articulate this more fully.
What the Film Gets Right
Louis Theroux is a documentary filmmaker I grew up watching. He has a unique way of holding tension, standing between awkwardness and authenticity just long enough to disarm his subject for something interesting and revelatory to emerge. The film does not disappoint in this regard and it does capture something real: there is a growing chorus of men, particularly younger men, who describe feeling voiceless, misunderstood and highly suspicious of narratives that portray them as already problematic or in the wrong.
It also touches on some of the deeper structural issues: the influence of internet culture, the pursuit of money and status, and the erosion of stable male role models. What comes through isn’t simply aggression or misogyny, but often bravado that’s masking something more fragile: shame, confusion, and a real sense of being unmoored.
The Broader Crisis
What is striking about the film, however, is its narrowness. It presents the manosphere, a growing subculture of men influencing other vulnerable men, primarily as a pathology of masculinity, when it might actually be an exaggerated expression of a much broader shift.
It’s tempting to explain this through familiar frameworks, for instance, the idea that masculinity is performed primarily for other men within a patriarchal system. But that assumes male social life still has a stable structure. What we are seeing now in the hyper-digital age, and within a wider climate shaped by pandemic, economic instability and war, feels much more fragmented. Masculinity is no longer shaped only in male spaces, but in a highly visible and often anonymous online world, shaped by algorithms, metrics, and constant evaluation by both men and women.
The same forces producing male withdrawal and radicalisation are also shaping female responses. A recent piece in The New Statesman, Meet the Angry Young Women, suggests that young women are not immune to these dynamics. What we are seeing is not a male problem in isolation, but a wider pattern of polarisation, withdrawal, and ideological hardening across both sexes.
Simply put, this isn’t best understood as a problem located in men alone, but as a shift in the way men and women relate to each other.
Quantification and Exposure
I believe we are living through a transformation in how people experience and judge their own and each other’s value. Increasingly, identity, status, and desirability are measured through numbers, what René Guénon called the “reign of quantity”.
As Jonathan Haidt has observed, the mental health of adolescents started to decline sharply around 2013-2014, a period that coincides with the rise of social media metrics such as “likes” and “shares” as central features of social life. This marked a shift toward the quantification of identity itself, and crucially, a young person’s developing sense of self.
Nowadays, in 2026, almost every interaction between people is filtered through metrics: followers, income, appearance, desirability. The fetishisation of numbers permeates every corner of modern life, from social media to online dating where individuals are reduced to swipeable profiles. Social recognition becomes a matter of numerical feedback. Even what happens in a therapy room is not untouched. In some contexts, it too is being pushed towards measurable outcomes rather than seen as a complex process of change in the context of a lived relational experience.
Prospective patients now swipe through therapist profiles, often choosing as much by appearance and online visibility, as by qualifications or experience alone.
This same dynamic shows up even more clearly in the more extreme forms of online culture. In one example, a porn influencer who had sex with thousands of men for clicks, turned visibility and numerical engagement into ends in themselves. I’ve written about this case in more detail elsewhere. This can be understood as the logical conclusion of a broader shift toward algorithmic, numbers-based value, what Kierkegaard described as “leveling”, where everything unique and personal gets flattened into abstraction.
Under these conditions, relationships and identity become something to be evaluated and transacted through numbers rather than felt through presence. Self-worth becomes externalised, increasingly mediated through online validation and seductive influencer lifestyles. An example of this can be found in many creative industries. Where once the quality of your work was evaluated for its own merits, now, you won’t even get a look if you can’t show your follower count on social media first.
Repression and Expression
At the same time that the pressure to be visible intensifies, the range of what can be expressed narrows. Social and psychological life becomes more cautious, more policed, more morally flattened. Even the smallest transgression in public risks being filmed and subject to online scrutiny. There is even a word for being overwhelmed by negative public opinion online: a “shitstorm”. This, along with a more moralised environment, leads some to fear speaking out and expressing themselves authentically. The result is a pressure system: heightened exposure combined with restricted expression.
In clinical work, this is very real. Many people are increasingly anxious about speaking freely. It can take months before individuals feel able to express their true views or taboo thoughts, for fear of being judged, corrected, or rejected. Therapists themselves have become increasingly public about who they consider ‘harmful’ and even the types of people they won’t treat, often along political, religious, or gender lines. Colleagues tell me the same thing: a subtle pressure to align, to avoid saying the “wrong” thing, even within the therapeutic space.
Freud warned of the psychological costs of repression. Jung described the dangers of the disowned unconscious. Under conditions where expression is constrained, what is not integrated does not disappear, it returns in distorted forms.
Some of the more extreme aspects of online culture can then be understood, in part, as an outlet for this. Extreme speech, sexualisation, and exaggerated identities often act as a kind of release valve, a way of expressing what cannot be articulated within more regulated spaces where cultural taboos are harshly condemned. The concept of ‘cancellation’ has become a ubiquitous part of the cultural lexicon.
What Theroux picks up on, the proliferation of conspiracy thinking and extreme content, is real. What he underestimates is how constraining the wider cultural environment can feel for many people. In many mainstream contexts, of which Theroux is a part, expressions of masculinity are framed in increasingly narrow or moralising ways. For some, this creates a sense that there is little room to speak openly or be oneself. When that happens, the expression does not disappear. It moves into less regulated spaces, where it often returns in more exaggerated and raw forms.
This creates a vicious cycle. The more extreme online behaviour becomes, the more society responds with control, censorship, and moral outrage. And the more expression gets restricted, the more likely it is to burst out later in even stronger and more troubling ways.
The Manosphere as Symptom
Seen in this light, the manosphere is not the origin of the problem, just one of its expressions.
In a context where traditional pathways to identity and recognition have weakened, for men and women, there is an understandable search for structure, meaning, and direction. Online communities that offer clarity, however simplified, become very attractive, as we have seen with the rise of various other online subcultures that sometimes border on the downright cult-like. The manosphere, in this sense, provides a language for experiences of confusion, rejection, and loss of status that are otherwise difficult, and often socially frowned upon, to articulate.
At the same time, these spaces are reshaped by the conditions in which they emerge. What may begin as an attempt to make sense of lived experience does not remain reflective for long. In an environment that rewards visibility and engagement, ideas are pulled toward what is more extreme, more exaggerated, and more easily shared over time.
The manosphere, as presented in the film, is both a response and a distortion. From my own research, it is not one single uniform space, nor is it limited to the most visible or provocative figures. Alongside the more performative content, I hear quieter versions of this in my work, men reflecting on withdrawal from dating, relationships, and social expectations in more subdued and sometimes more hopeless ways. Movements such as MGTOW (“Men Going Their Own Way”), for instance, frame themselves as attempts to make sense of these shifts, often presenting arguments that feel internally coherent.
The Relational Field
Crucially, these dynamics are not confined to men.
Women are dealing with the same breakdown in the social and cultural conditions that once structured relationships: increased visibility, commodification, and changing expectations around work, sex, independence, and relationships. These changes bring real gains, but also new uncertainties around partnership, commitment, and trust.
In some domains, the role of quantification becomes especially visible. Online platforms such as OnlyFans, which now host millions of creators, the majority of whom are women, illustrate the extent to which intimacy, sexuality, and identity can become entangled with economic incentives and numerical metrics. For some, participation in this digital economy reflects broader shifts toward financial diversification and platform-based income, especially as traditional ways of earning money have become more unstable.
At the same time, men increasingly encounter these developments through screens: dating apps, pornography, and social media, which makes real intimacy and connection more complicated. These conditions can contribute to an increase in avoidance dynamics.
This unfolding dynamic is further shaped by the rapid spread of therapeutic language into everyday discourse. Terms that once stayed within clinical contexts now circulate widely online, often in simplified or shorthand forms. On platforms like YouTube and TikTok, it is not uncommon to see phrases such as “my narcissist” or “no contact with the avoidant” used to interpret and categorise others, particularly in moments of disappointment or conflict. What begins as a language of understanding can become a way of fitting the other into a diagnostic category and avoiding the messiness that real relationships require. In the consulting room, I sometimes see how this can limit curiosity and deepen a kind of certainty that makes it harder for grief or self-reflection to emerge.
For some people, this contributes to withdrawal from relationships altogether, which only deepens the alienation and misunderstanding further. For others, it leads to attempts to reassert structure through rigid or caricatured models of masculinity and femininity, you can see this in various online subcultures, from the manosphere to “trad wife” communities
What is often missed on both sides is that these processes are not independent; they constantly influence and feed each other. As men become more ambivalent or withdrawn, women may become more selective, self-reliant or demoralised. As women become more self-sufficient, men may experience further loss of role and status. The result is a self-reinforcing cycle of mistrust, adaptation, and disconnection.
What some call the “gender war” is better understood as a breakdown in the shared expectations that used to hold intimate relationships together.
What We Risk Missing
We are witnessing a period of profound transition. A culture increasingly organised around quantification, visibility, and control is also producing fragmentation, disconnection, and forms of expression that can appear chaotic or extreme from the outside. If we try to explain all of this only through the lens of pathology, whether male, political, or moral, we miss the deeper conditions that are actually producing it.
None of this is a justification for harm or hostility. But it is an argument for understanding. If we respond only with condemnation or oversimplification, we risk making the very problems we want to contain even worse.
What cannot be spoken directly will find other ways of speaking.
Sophie Frost is a depth-oriented psychotherapist based in Berlin, working with individuals and couples in-person and online. She writes clinical and cultural essays on psychotherapy and the psychological conditions shaping contemporary life.