‘I hadn’t gone out there to save anybody’: a deep dive into the manosphere fails to address its harms
- Written by The Conversation
New, extreme, and often bizarre social movements and communities are popping up around the world. As each one arises, journalists and academics are pumping out books that do “deep dives” into these communities.
In liberal sociologist Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, published in 2016, she looks at the Tea Party voters who who would become Donald Trump’s MAGA base. And in her 2021 book, QAnon and On, Australian journalist Van Badham investigated the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Such books can give us real insight into why these communities grow and develop – in turn, helping us address both extremism, and its impact on the broader community. Yet, such deep dives can be risky. At times, they turn into journalistic sideshows that simply give these communities more (unneeded) attention.
In his third book, Lost Boys, Guardian journalist James Bloodworth adds to this catalogue. As I did in my own, research-based recent book, he conducts a “deep dive” into the manosphere: a loose network of blogs, forums and social media channels dedicated to “men’s rights”, anti-feminism and extreme misogyny.
Review: Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere – James Bloodworth (Atlantic)
He attends a manosphere conference. He participates in seduction workshops: events where manosphere leaders teach men how to pick up women, often involving going onto the street or into bars, where men “practice” on women in real life. And he interviews manosphere leaders, seeking to understand this community.
He asks:
Why are so many men susceptible to the sinister beliefs these groups promote? What does the emergence of these communities say about Western society? And what can we do about it?
While the book asks these big, important questions, it struggles to actually answer any of them. Bloodworth doesn’t really formulate a clear argument about the manosphere, and it is unclear what his stance is in relation to the community.
Instead, his meandering book unfortunately tells us more about how not to do these types of investigations than about the manosphere itself.
Behind the scenes of the manosphere
Lost Boys begins promisingly. Bloodworth takes us back to being a 23-year-old, awkward, young straight man, when he spent thousands of dollars to take a seduction course. He reassures us he didn’t believe a lot of the manosphere stuff – but, like many other men, just wanted more confidence in picking up women.
His course ended up on a night out in the West End of London, where he nervously avoided trying to use the techniques he’d been taught, until his instructor encouraged him, using slogans like “your organ is a spear”. Despite his anxiety, Bloodworth eventually began approaching women in a bar, feeling deflated after he was pushed by his instructor, but was flatly rejected.
I hoped this was going to take us somewhere exciting and different. Accounts from men who have been sucked into these communities in the past are few and far between – particularly from someone who can then turn their experience into a major book. A genuine reflection on how Bloodworth ended up in this place at that time – and how we could take those lessons to other men – could be very interesting.
Unfortunately, that moment is left behind after the opening chapters. The rest of the book lacks this personal touch. Instead, we get a meandering and broad description of the manosphere that jumps from major player to major player.
He details the rise of Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and his campaigns against political correctness and examines the violent attack of manosphere adherent Lyndon McLeod, who murdered five people in Colorado in 2021. He concludes by documenting the accusations against notorious self-proclaimed misogynist and manosphere influencer Andrew Tate.
Yet, these descriptions add little to our knowledge. Bloodworth tells us who these figures are, what they believe and how they become famous, but not much more.
He interviews some of these figures, such as former pickup artist Anthony “Dream” Johnson – the so-called “president of the manosphere”, who organised the annual 21 Convention manosphere conference. Even these interviews, which are briefly described, offer very little.
They yield no actual new information about these men, how they operate, or what is going on behind the scenes.
Major sins
This isn’t the major sin of the book, however. This comes about halfway through, when Bloodworth travels to the United States. He starts with a trip to Florida, where he attends multiple talks at the 21 Convention, the so-called “Woodstock of the manosphere” (last organised in 2023, though cancelled that year). The 21 Convention included talks from manosphere leaders about the evils of feminism and how men can become masculine again, as well as tips for seduction and how to live.
This moment, I am sure, was full of trepidation and fear: conference participants would have been unlikely to welcome an undercover journalist seeking to document their ideas. But Bloodworth reports on it almost as if he is going to a science show: he details the content of each talk he attends, then moves on. Again, it lacks a personal touch, and there’s not even much reflection of what this content actually means.
Things get worse when he travels to Las Vegas to participate in a “Men of Action” course, hosted by dating and performance coach Michael Sartain. The course promises men to “learn how to meet incredible women, make high status friends, and attend exclusive venues”.
In Las Vegas, Bloodworth participates in a ‘Men of Action’ course teaching men to meet women and make ‘high status’ friends.
Isaac Brekken/AAP
Some academics, such as feminist media and culture studies scholar Rachel O’Neill, who embedded herself in seduction communities in London for her PhD, have taken this approach, to great effect. O’Neill uses her research to fully investigate the underlying economy of this community, exposing it for the business fraud it is.
Bloodworth, however, goes even further than O'Neill: he doesn’t just attend the course, but also takes up a role in coaching the young men. While he is a little unclear in the book about how he managed to get this role and what he was doing, in a later interview with GQ Magazine, he explained.
I was invited to do it by one of the people who was working for [Sartain]. I’d take a group of men to the club – the big nightclubs in Vegas, like Omnia, Encore, XS – supervise them and make sure they weren’t being weird.
He also explains that he never hid who he was; organisers knew he was a journalist.
As a coach, Bloodworth explains how he took men to clubs and provided them tips on how to approach women. (He does say, at times, he tries to guide students in a “certain direction”, less sexist than their official teachings).
In doing so, he provides some interesting titbits, including a section where students complain about how “shallow and disingenuous” the techniques are. In another moment, he overhears sexist commentary repeating classic ideas from within the manosphere. One man says “women nowadays only want attention from the most valuable men in the world”.
‘I hadn’t gone out there to save anybody’
Despite some of these minor insights, however, I found this extremely problematic. As Bloodworth himself explains, the techniques used in these courses are based on extremely sexist stereotypes, and often involve coercion and manipulation. “The problem with courses like this one is that men are essentially being taught to view women as prettifying props: ornamentation for their high-status content,” he writes.
These courses are also terrible for the men themselves. They teach unrealistic ideas about what it is to be a man, and terrible notions of how they should engage with women.
Despite acknowledging all this, Bloodworth still helps to lead a course. This could have been worth it if he explored some of these ethical qualms – or if he managed to gain some valuable new insight. But he doesn’t.
At the end of his trip to Vegas, for example, Bloodworth offers little actual analysis. He concludes:
It was time for me to leave Vegas. I hadn’t gone out there to save anybody; but I didn’t want to participate (inadvertently or otherwise) in making anybody worse either. I was exhausted by the merry-go-round of electric pastel clubs, narcoleptic bedtimes and pay-as-you-go sincerity. They could keep their Lambos, ripped jeans, velvet ropes, red-carpet events, bikini competitions, Playboy playmates, high-status social networks, Facetuned deltoids and Dan Bilzerian. I just wanted to get home and have a nice cup of tea, even if it wouldn’t generate a lot of heat on the “gram”.
This just leaves more questions. How did he feel giving men dodgy advice on how to improve their lives? Did he have ethical qualms about participating in an inherently sexist industry?
Bloodworth doesn’t even attempt to answer any of these questions.
How not to do it
This was the major problem with Lost Boys. For me, the book is a perfect guide on how not to engage in deep dives on extreme communities. For a book seeking to understand the manosphere, it seems to lack any purpose, let alone a point of view. It feels like the project of a journalist who gets a thrill out of “going undercover” and reporting his heroics.
This may be OK for other topics, but when it comes to the manosphere, it is not good enough. This community is creating real violence: primarily for women, the victims of the sexism emanating from it, but also for the men who get sucked into the space. To embed yourself within these spaces without any seeming attempt to do something about this harm may be a thrill for the journalist, but in the end it just adds to the pain these communities cause.
