The Stats Guy: The manosphere didn’t appear out of nowhere 

The manosphere did not emerge in a vacuum. Here’s the real reason so many young men are choosing flawed role models, and how to change that, according to Simon Kuestenmacher.

Louis Theroux’s latest Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere has many viewers asking why so many young men are drawn to online influencers who mix self-help, grievance and misogyny.

Why are the Andrew Tates of this world even a phenomenon? 

A common reflex is to point at the loudest personalities in the manosphere and conclude that something has gone badly wrong with an entire generation of men to follow these knuckleheads. 

But that explanation is too easy. The manosphere didn’t emerge in a vacuum. 

It’s tempting to focus on these vulgar streamers and their outrageous behaviour and treat them as proof that young men have somehow lost their moral compass and blindly fell for the grifters. But doing so ignores the conditions that produced this culture in the first place. 

From a demographic perspective, the rise of the manosphere overlaps with something else I’ve written about in this column before – the growing cohort of young men who are disengaged from work, education and training.

Economists call them NEETs (Not in Employment, Education, or Training). In many Western countries, the share of men in their late teens and 20s who fall into this category has quietly increased. 

When a society produces large numbers of young men who struggle to find stable work, form relationships and feel socially respected, it should not surprise us that alternative communities emerge online.

Meaning and acquiring a sense of direction was always important for young people (even though we focus only on men in this week’s column, this is certainly true for women too). 

Young men today face structural challenges that previous generations didn’t have – life wasn’t easier in the past but new difficulties have........

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