The Manosphere, Men, and the Cost of Cutting Yourself in Half

I watched the Netflix documentary about the manosphere a few weeks ago, later than I probably should have. I’d been aware of it — you can’t work in psychology and not be — but watching it laid out so plainly, the pipeline from loneliness to grievance to ideology, I found myself sitting with it for days afterward.

Not just professionally. Personally.

I spent over two decades as a psychologist in Toronto working with both men and women. I’m no longer seeing clients directly, but the patterns I observed in that time don’t leave you. And the manosphere — the Andrew Tates, the red-pill forums, the incel communities, the quietly radicalised comment sections — it produces patterns I saw in my office, and I see their wreckage in the people around them, every single day.

What strikes me most isn’t the anger these men exhibit (which is vast and, often, unchecked rage). What strikes me is how much pain is underneath it, and how effectively these communities redirect that pain away from anything that might actually help.

Where the anger comes from

Let me say something that sometimes gets lost in these conversations: a lot of men are genuinely struggling.

Not in the ways the manosphere claims — the narrative that men are uniquely victimised by feminism, that women have rigged the system, that vulnerability is weakness being weaponised against them. That part is mythology. But the underlying pain is real. Loneliness is real. Disconnection is real. The feeling of not knowing how to be a man in the world without the old scripts, and not being offered anything to replace them — that’s real too.

I worked with a lot of men in my practice over the years. They came in for all kinds of reasons — relationship breakdowns, work stress, anxiety, depression. And somewhere in most of those conversations, we’d eventually get to the same place: a long history of being taught, explicitly or implicitly, that emotions were liabilities. That needing things was weakness. That the correct response to pain was to suppress it, push through, and perform competence until you forgot you were performing.

The manosphere doesn’t create that wound. But it finds it, and it exploits it magnificently.

What I saw in the documentary — and what it reminded me of

Watching the Netflix documentary, what struck me was how the recruitment works. It doesn’t start with hatred. It starts with acknowledging that something is hard. It says: you’re struggling, and no one is talking about it, and here’s why. That’s a genuinely powerful opening move, because for a lot of young men, it’s the first time anyone has seemed to take their pain seriously.

The problem is where it goes from there. Instead of helping men understand their pain and move through it, these communities redirect it outward — toward women, toward feminism, toward anyone who can be cast as the enemy. The pain stays frozen. It just gets a target.

I saw this dynamic with men who came into my office having spent time in those spaces. The anger was right on the surface — sharp, rehearsed, ideological. But underneath it, if you sat with them long enough, was something much more familiar: a boy who had been told, in a thousand small ways, that his emotional life didn’t matter. And who had found a community that confirmed his worst suspicions about why that hurt, while doing absolutely nothing to heal it.

What emotional suppression actually costs

The manosphere sells suppression as strength. Toughness. Dominance. It frames emotional openness as something that makes men weak, manipulable, less attractive. And that message lands, because it rhymes with what a lot of men were already taught growing up.

But here’s what I observed clinically, and what the research consistently supports: emotional suppression doesn’t make men stronger. It makes them sicker, angrier, more isolated, and more dangerous — to themselves and to the people around them.

I worked with too many men whose inability to access or express their emotional lives had curdled into aggression. Not dramatic, movie-villain aggression — the quiet kind. Chronic irritability. Contempt in relationships. The slow withdrawal that leaves partners feeling invisible. I worked with women who loved these men and couldn’t understand why intimacy felt impossible, why every attempt at closeness ended in an argument or a shutdown.

I also worked with men whose suppression had turned entirely inward — depression that looked like apathy, anxiety that had been running so long it just felt like personality, physical symptoms with no obvious medical cause. The body keeps score in ways the manosphere never accounts for.

And I worked with men who had crossed lines — into controlling behaviour, into sexual coercion, into violence. Not because they were inherently bad people. Because they had been handed a model of manhood that treated other people’s autonomy as an obstacle, and they had never been given tools to do anything different.

The manosphere doesn’t cause all of this. But it accelerates it. It gives it ideology. It makes it feel righteous.

What this does to women and girls

I want to spend some time here, because it’s easy to get so focused on understanding the men inside these movements that we lose sight of who absorbs the most direct harm.

Women and girls do.

I worked with women who had been in relationships with men whose worldview had been quietly shaped by this kind of content — men who hadn’t announced themselves as red-pilled, who seemed normal on the surface, but who over time revealed a deep contempt for female autonomy. Relationships where her opinions were steadily undermined. Where his anger was always somehow her fault. Where sex became something done to her rather than with her, and any objection was treated as evidence of her inadequacy. The erosion of self that comes from that kind of sustained contempt is profound. I sat with women who had been so thoroughly convinced that their needs were unreasonable that they’d lost the ability to identify what they even wanted anymore.

I also worked with younger women and girls who were navigating the manosphere’s influence in their schools and social circles — boys who had absorbed the language of alpha dominance and female hypergamy before they were old enough to have had a single real relationship. Girls being told they were too much, too loud, too opinionated. Girls learning to perform smallness not because of the beauty standards I wrote about in my last post, but because the boys around them had been marinating in content that told them women’s worth was in compliance.

The sexual violence piece is something I feel strongly about naming directly. Manosphere ideology doesn’t just produce contempt — it produces a specific logic that erodes consent. When women are framed as gatekeepers to be bypassed, when persistence is coded as masculine virtue, when “no” is interpreted as a negotiating position — that is a culture that produces sexual violence. I’ve worked with survivors of it. The harm is not abstract.

And yet — and this is where it gets complicated — the girls and women I worked with who’d had their worlds shrunk by these dynamics didn’t generally want the men in their lives destroyed. They wanted them to be capable of being human. They wanted the boy they’d loved before the algorithm got him back. That longing is real too, and it matters.

A generation of boys we’re losing

This is the part that kept me up after watching the documentary.

We are watching a generation of boys being recruited into a movement that will make them lonelier, angrier, more isolated, and less capable of the things that actually make a life feel worth living — genuine friendship, real intimacy, the ability to be known by another person. And we are not, as a culture, doing nearly enough to offer them something better.

I think about the boys I worked with — or the boys sitting inside the men who came to see me. The fourteen-year-old who learned that crying was shameful. The sixteen-year-old whose first sustained community was an online space that told him his loneliness was women’s fault. The twenty-two-year-old who had never once been asked by another man how he was actually doing.

These boys didn’t choose to be lonely. They were handed a model of masculinity that guaranteed it, and then handed an ideology that explained their loneliness in a way that required no self-reflection and promised belonging in exchange for rage.

What we owe them — and I mean this sincerely — is better. Not lectures about privilege. Not condescension. An honest acknowledgement that yes, this is hard, growing up is hard, loneliness is hard, figuring out who you are without inherited scripts is genuinely difficult — and also: the thing being sold to you will not help. It will make everything worse. And there is another way.

Boys who are given permission to feel things — in families, in schools, in friendships — don’t go looking for ideologies that weaponise their pain. That’s not a guarantee, but it’s a consistent pattern. The antidote to the manosphere isn’t punishment. It’s connection. It’s making sure that somewhere in a boy’s life, someone has modelled what it looks like to be a man with the full range of his humanity intact.

What I saw when men chose differently

This is the part I want to sit with for a moment, because I think it gets lost.

I worked with men who came in defended, dismissive, certain that therapy was something their partner had forced on them. And some of them — not all, but enough — let something shift over time. Slowly, carefully, with a lot of resistance along the way.

I think of one man, a tradesperson in his early forties, who came in after his second marriage had fallen apart. He was furious when he arrived — at his ex-wife, at the courts, at a world that seemed designed to punish him. We spent months in that anger before he was willing to look underneath it. When he did, what he found wasn’t weakness. It was grief. A father who had never once told him he was proud of him. A childhood spent learning that the only acceptable male emotion was controlled, productive anger.

By the time we finished working together, he described his relationship with his teenage son differently. He said he’d started just — talking to him. About ordinary things. About how he was actually feeling. He said his son had started calling him more. “I didn’t know it could be like that,” he told me once. He wasn’t emotional when he said it. He was just quiet, in a way that felt very different from the shuttered quiet he’d brought into that first session.

I think about another man, mid-thirties, who’d spent years in online spaces that I’d now recognise as early manosphere adjacent. Smart, isolated, deeply convinced that his loneliness was women’s fault. What unravelled, slowly, was a terror of real intimacy — because real intimacy required being seen, and being seen required risking rejection, and rejection confirmed the story he’d been telling himself about his own inadequacy. The ideology had given him a way to stay safe from all of that. It had also kept him completely alone.

He eventually got into a relationship. Not because he found the right woman, but because he became someone who could actually show up in one. That’s a different thing.

I also think about a man in his late thirties, a project manager, who came in describing himself as “not really an emotional person.” He said it like a neutral fact about himself, the way you’d say you weren’t a morning person. Over time what emerged was the memory of being told as a kid, repeatedly, that he was too sensitive — that he needed to toughen up. He’d done such a thorough job of it that by the time he came to see me he genuinely couldn’t identify what he was feeling in any given moment beyond “fine” or “stressed.”

What I remember most about working with him was the session where he talked about his friendships. He had plenty of acquaintances, colleagues, people to watch the game with. But there was nobody he called when things were hard. Nobody who knew what was actually going on with him. He described it carefully, almost clinically — and then stopped talking for a moment. “That’s pretty lonely, actually,” he said. Like he was realising it for the first time.

The last I heard, he’d started a monthly dinner with two old friends where they had a rule: no talking about work or sports for the first hour. Just — life. How they were actually doing. He said it felt strange at first. Then it felt like the most normal thing in the world.

The dehumanisation goes both ways

This is something I don’t think gets said enough: the manosphere dehumanises everyone.

It dehumanises women obviously — reduces them to bodies, to threats, to objects to be acquired or resented. The sexual violence, the aggression, the contempt that flows from these communities does real damage to real people, and I’ve sat across from enough survivors of it to feel the weight of that clearly.

But it also dehumanises the men inside it. It asks them to amputate half of their humanity — the relational, emotional, tender half — in exchange for belonging to something that calls itself strength. It tells them that needing connection is pathetic, that grief is weakness, that love is a transaction. And the men who believe it long enough don’t just become harder to be with. They become strangers to themselves.

The cost of that is immense. In mental health outcomes, in physical health, in the quality of relationships, in the richness of a life. You cannot selectively numb. Cut yourself off from vulnerability and you cut yourself off from joy, from genuine friendship, from the kind of love that actually sustains people.

I watched the Netflix documentary and I felt grief. For the women harmed by this ideology. For the girls navigating a world where too many boys have been taught to see them as obstacles or targets. And for the young men being funnelled into these spaces, who are being handed a prison and told it’s a palace.

What actually helps

From everything I observed clinically — and from what I see in the men who speak publicly about moving away from these spaces — what actually helps is almost the exact opposite of what the manosphere offers.

It’s connection, not dominance. It’s learning to sit with discomfort rather than discharging it as anger. It’s having at least one relationship — a therapist, a close friend, a partner, a community — where you are allowed to be fully human, including the parts that are uncertain and scared and grieving.

The men I worked with who found their way to that didn’t become less. They became more. More present with their children. More honest with their partners. More capable of real friendship. More themselves, in ways that the performed toughness had been quietly preventing for years.

That’s what I wish the young men finding their way into these communities could see. Not that their pain isn’t real. It is. But that the exit being offered isn’t freedom. It’s a smaller life, dressed up as power.

A note on where to find support

I co-own a psychology clinic in Toronto’s east end. Our team works with both men and women navigating the effects of these dynamics — whether that’s survivors of controlling or abusive relationships, or men themselves who are starting to question the models of masculinity they’ve been handed and what it might look like to do things differently.

If any of this resonates, you can find us at beachestherapy.ca.

Note: The clinical examples in this piece are composite portraits drawn from years of practice. Identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy and confidentiality of individuals.