Andy Woodward has just returned from an an investigative journey into 'the manosphere', the male world as lived and expressed through social media. As he tells us in his first blog of 2025, he was disturbed by the toxic digital landscape he found.
Many times I have tried to write about the ‘manosphere’ on here – the world of the male lived online that is causing such alarm as it seems to drift ever further towards the misogynistic and paranoid, and ever more into the real world around us… but I’ve never quite brought it to completion. The results tend to sound too preachy, alarmist or ill-informed… like, funnily enough, a 45-year old (for 2 more weeks at least) man trying to express the unlived experience of boys 30 years his junior.
If, now, I feel any more qualified, it’s because I feel I actually did live a little of it over the recent holiday season. This is because I found myself lapsing back onto social media. I don’t mean that to sound judgmental. Indeed, it may well be that your own social media feed is well established, helpful and honed to your interests… you may even be a strong and positive voice within it. Healthier still, you may be used to it and able to use it in balance and within your control.
All productive life goes on hold as my autopilot self goes seeking the dopamine hit of ‘what’s next?’, even if what’s actually next tends to disappoint or appal.
Andy Woodward, Head of Senior School
But I am not a social media native. I have rarely dabbled since the Facebook era, and this means a couple of things. Firstly, it means my brain is unused to the endless scroll feed, and tends to react to it like to crack cocaine. All productive life goes on hold as my autopilot self goes seeking the dopamine hit of ‘what’s next?’, even if what’s actually next tends to disappoint or appal. But secondly, it means that the algorithms of Instagram or X are primed to ‘win me back’. Seeing me as a prodigal son returning to the fold, they try to ensure I stay there by deploying their most generic tools of engagement for the online chap. In short, I get a blast of what a man is fed when first approaching social media.
Let’s be frank. The first play in the book is what youngsters call the ‘thirst trap’ – sexualised images or clips designed to get the male to click on and see more (in every sense). A great deal could be said at this point – about the ready availability of pornography via social media (and, in the likes of Reddit or X, fully within it, meaning monitoring software is unlikely ever to flag such content as being on a blocked site). What I didn’t expect, however, is what happened when I resisted the click-through and managed not to engage with this rudimentary tactic. At this stage, the algorithm now has a new trick that I hadn’t seen before. It supposes that, as I must disapprove of such things, I will therefore wish to blame and judge the women involved. Thus, while I never saw any content criticising the male producers or profiteers behind adult platforms, a strange trope of misogyny emerged condemning female adult performers in the most derogatory terms, outlining the embarrassment and shame they must be bringing to their families and calling them names. This sat comfortably alongside accounts with names such as ‘Women Deserve Less’, inviting me to laugh at the idea women can do things without men or deserve equality. Laugh soundtracks played over a clip of a female driver trying to put petrol in the wrong side of the car (something I still do on occasion, forgetting that my current car is filled on a different side to the old one). Without a doubt, the internet, for a man in whom social media is trying to get its hooks, appears to have become a more openly woman-hating place.
Without a doubt, the internet, for a man in whom social media is trying to get its hooks, appears to have become a more openly woman-hating place.
Next, there was the spectre of violence. I am very much a football fan. My starting point will generally be to seek out clips of the football that has just happened, that happened in the 1990s, or that might be linked to my favourite team. Thus, I am fed more football – one key thing that keeps me scrolling. But as a football fan, it seems I am also expected to hate. To hate rival teams, players and fans but - most disturbingly – also to want to see them hurt. And so there are fights between fans, or fans who tried to ‘f*** around and find out’, knocked out with a single punch or humiliated on the terraces as they drunkenly fall or are set upon. Somewhere in the machine, it has been decided that to love a sport is to crave violence and retribution on the margins of the game.
Somewhere in the machine, it has been decided that to love a sport is to crave violence and retribution on the margins of the game.
However, if social media failed to make me angry or hateful, it sure succeeded in making me feel inadequate. This aspect is certainly not new. Capitalism has always needed people to feel the lack of something, that they might spend money to address it – this is advertising across the ages. But where adverts may have flattered you before, trading on excitement or the desire to join in, the scrolling version seems to want to tell you just how much less you are than what you should be, because... Real men get up at 5am. Real men trade crypto. Real men eat a paleo diet. Real men have boats and a collection of watches. Real men work out. Real men keep ‘their’ women in line and take no disrespect. Real men ‘find multiple ways to make money’. Never did I see kindness listed. These men are generally topless, humourless, and maintain beards as sculpted as their abs. Presuming that few actual - as opposed to ‘real’ - men succeed in achieving all this (and I’m sure I wouldn’t want to hang out with them if they did), this is a diet for low self-esteem, and for boys and men deploying their best efforts toward outcomes entirely unlikely to make society a more friendly or equitable place.
The Origin Story podcast recently suggested that the two great competing groups of our day are not right and left, but the paranoid and the mainstream. This is where we find the battle raging...
And finally, the political direction of travel is clear. This is not by accident. My own politics are not for public broadcast. I will share only that, as I tell my Politics students, I have at some time voted for all three mainstream UK political parties. But I do resent that Elon Musk promoted his own content at the very top of my X homepage, regardless of whether I wished to see it. And that, through this, he pushed Donald Trump’s agenda mercilessly, along with that of his chosen UK surrogates, through which he tried actively to subvert and disrupt our own elected government. This is not even the famous ‘echo chamber’ whereby we find our own views and prejudices confirmed, this is his echo chamber, forced upon us all. Therefore I encountered a constantly-stated distrust of mainstream media and the BBC and multiculturalism and climate change and the ‘woke agenda’ and more besides. The brilliant Origin Story podcast recently suggested that the two great competing groups of our day are not right and left, but the paranoid and the mainstream. This is where we find the battle raging – between those (right or left) who believe all accredited institutions, scientists, politicians, banks and ‘experts’ are essentially lying to us… who have taken the ‘red pill’ to see through it and find the darker conspiracy theories lurking behind. And those who still basically adhere to fact-checked media, peer-reviewed academia and elected representatives as our best chance for stable society. I am unashamed, party politics aside, to actively push the latter approach in school.
And so I left social media all over again. Even though there were lovely bits too - Radiohead gigs, clips from the US Office, teaching tips and transfer updates. But there was too much, far too much, that was toxic.
Just as studies have shown that girls are likely to find the unasked-for traps of self-harm or disordered eating, our boys are very likely to be discovering nationalism, misogyny and violence.
All our boys will begin a relationship with social media over these formative years. And I am convinced that, as they begin, they will quickly encounter this landscape of the manosphere. I hope they can displace this by proactively establishing their own better list of interests and accounts to follow (something I admittedly didn’t take the time to do). But, because they’re young and less aware, they may instead dwell on the default content, click through, and then get more and more of what is ultimately harmful to them. Just as studies have shown that girls are likely to find the unasked-for traps of self-harm or disordered eating, our boys are very likely to be discovering nationalism, misogyny and violence. The manosphere is now at the forefront of life online – grown beyond any seeds once sown by Andrew Tate or his fellow dark pioneers. Moreover I fear it has merged dangerously with the world of pornography – to the extent that shocking recent Times articles by Helen Rumbelow have found that the most popular adult content is now frequently depicting violence towards women (strangulation, chiefly) as normal, and that this is influencing real world behaviour in young relationships.
Boys themselves are not the problem. This is being done to them, less now by people than by an automated machine they set up to maximise profit and addiction,
Boys themselves are not the problem. This is being done to them, less now by people than by an automated machine they set up to maximise profit and addiction, exploiting the most primal of instincts and insecurities. I have a 9-year old son and he is lovely, affectionate and kind. But if he encounters and engages with these messages over the years to come, he will be impacted and changed by them as he grows and forms into his young adult self. It is vital that I have eyes on his social media use, that I talk to him about it often, and that his smartphone, once he is allowed one, is not with him in the bedroom at night when such engagement or regulation on my part is less likely.
The manosphere is real, and we need to be wise to it before it does its work to those we love, male and female.
Andy Woodward, is Head of Senior School.
He welcomes feedback to this blog at website@harrodian.com