A new report urges governments, schools, social media platforms, and other stakeholders to treat the manosphere as a public health issue. Only by doing so, a coordinated response to what is an important societal threat might arise.
Although it has been gaining more attention over recent years, the manosphere isn’t new. The term was first coined in 2009 and has been growing ever since. In a paper published in the medical journal The Lancet, authors Professor Sarah Hawkes and Professor Kent Buse define it as “a diffuse commercial ecosystem and loose collection of online communities united by shared beliefs about masculinity, misogyny, and male victimisation”.
Since its beginnings, the manosphere has taken on many different forms. From men going their own way to looksmaxxers and red pill communities, the phenomenon spreads over a large selection of subjects. However, there is one issue connecting them all: a fear of an apparent “crisis of masculinity”, allegedly brought on by feminism. A preoccupation that seems to only be getting bigger.
“Explanations for the rise in engagement with the manosphere are diverse and include social, psychological, cultural, and economic domains. At a time when boys are disengaging from education systems, and men are over-represented in suicide statistics and in rates of incarceration, health and social care systems that can offer support are under increasing financial pressure and are struggling to deliver services, and narratives of male disadvantage gain a great deal of traction,” the authors write.Â
Although women nor feminism can be blamed for the sense of failure and abandonment members of the manosphere are experiencing, they are an easy scapegoat at a time when their needs aren’t met by health policies, systems, and services.
“This misattribution is precisely why content moderation alone is insufficient: restricting manosphere content does nothing to address the unmet needs that make its explanation attractive in the first place”, Hawkes and Buse write.
In order to address the manosphere and the many problems it is creating in society as a whole, the authors thus propose to address it as a public health harm. By doing so, it becomes possible to look beyond strategies of content moderation, access safeguards, or algorithm diversion.
Instead, governments, healthcare systems, schools, social media platforms, and all other stakeholders could work together to address the issue through population-level prevention, education and engagement, norm change, and the strengthening of health and social systems alongside regulatory and fiscal measures. Moreover, by treating the manosphere as a public health problem, it would make seeking and giving mental health support more accessible.
In their paper, Hawkes and Buse argue that public health approaches have previously been used to deal with other societal issues, such as gender-based violence and drug use, by targeting the underlying determinants, but also by reducing stigma and discrimination, reframing public narratives and attitudes, expanding equitable access to services, and moving beyond the carceral logic of policing and punishment as the primary responses.
With that in mind, the authors put forward six priorities allowing for a comprehensive public health response to the health harms of the manosphere.
1. “The upstream conditions that shape vulnerability and engagement should be addressed, including educational marginalisation, social exclusion, and isolation in boys and young men.”
2. “Multisectoral collaboration between health systems and other front-line sectors that routinely engage with boys and young men should be strengthened, particularly education.”
3. Communications strategies should be developed to avoid framing masculinity as inherently toxic or boys and men as inherently problematic. Positive and inclusive framing should be encouraged instead, such as those that promote so-called healthy masculinities.
4. Platform regulation should be considered analogous to other public health regulation strategies.
5. Governments should invest in monitoring, research, and evaluation to track evolving digital ecosystems, assess the effectiveness and impact of interventions, and identify unintended consequences.
6. Although the manosphere did not create misogyny, it could be normalising and amplifying it. If the attraction and impact of the manosphere are to be tackled, the underlying misogyny and anti-equality prejudices embedded in most societies must also be confronted.
While according to the paper, reframing the manosphere as a public health threat will initially face resistance, especially from platform stakeholders and content creators. However, given the potential benefits for boys and men, women and girls, and the wider society, a coordinated answer to the issue should be given as soon as possible.
