‘It’s important not to belittle young men’: Red pills, ‘god pills’, and the manosphere | Interview with James Bloodworth

With more young men than ever drawn to Internet subcultures that preach misogyny, racism, and extreme politics, we spoke to the journalist and author of Lost Boys, James Bloodworth about the phenomenon. On 4 December, James will be giving Humanists UK’s prestigious annual Holyoake Lecture, exploring the rise of the misogynistic online culture known as the ‘manosphere’. 

In this interview, James explains how the manosphere evolved, how it intersects with the upsurge in popularity of medical conspiracy theories and Christian Nationalism, and just why so many young boys are feeling left behind.

Thanks for speaking with us today, James. Your book Lost Boys is subtitled A personal journey through the manosphere. What exactly is the ‘manosphere’? How do you define it? 

The manosphere is made up of a handful of anti-feminist subcultures. It encompasses pickup artists, incels (so-called involuntary celibates – i.e. men who make an identity out of being unable to get a romantic or sexual partner), men’s rights activists, male separatists, and red pill content creators like Andrew Tate. 

You write that the manosphere started taking off on the back of the ‘selfhelp’ and ‘pickup artist’ booms of the 2000s. Briefly, can you tell us what was going on 20 years ago, and how did it evolve into the more conspiratorial, misogynistic culture you write about today?

The manosphere started in the 1970s and 1980s with entrepreneurs in North America putting out video cassettes and books promising to teach other men how to meet and attract women. Typically, these products would be advertised in the back pages of men’s magazines. It’s really with the advent of the Internet that this stuff takes off and gains a wider cultural resonance. In the late 1990s and early 2000s you see the rise of these soi-disant pickup artist gurus using internet forums to promote their methods of how to meet women. The Internet made it possible for men from all over the world to come together and share advice on how to ‘pick up’ women. The early pickup artist scene was documented by the Rolling Stone journalist Neil Strauss in his 2005 book The Game, which was a huge bestseller.

The pickup artist culture came marinated in misogyny. The gurus would teach clients that if you followed certain scripts, women would respond in a robotic fashion. And yet for the most part the seduction community wasn’t overtly anti-feminist. You didn’t hear a lot of political ranting. It was more pragmatic. Some of it was relatively harmless and some of it was more misogynistic and manipulative. But over time it evolved into something darker. In the early 2010s you started to see these anti-pickup artist websites appear that had been set up by men who believed they’d been scammed by the pickup artists. Sometimes they had been: they’d paid lots of money to men who had promised to make them irresistible to women and it hadn’t worked. Some of these men began to call themselves ‘incels’ (a contraction of involuntarily celibate). They hated the pickup artists but they also hated women for turning them down. And they created an identity around the idea that ‘game’ (pickup artistry) didn’t work because women were too shallow and superficial.

Around this time (the 2010s) you also see the manosphere becoming more political. They start to call themselves ‘red pilled’. The concept is taken from the film The Matrix. It’s the idea that you’ve discovered the truth about the world which is hidden from everybody else. For the manosphere, the red pill is the idea that men are actually oppressed by women, rather than vice versa. Later on you see the emergence of people like Andrew Tate: charismatic, larger than life cartoon characters who use short form video to promote misogyny. 

Whereas the pickup artists wanted to turn themselves into the objects of female desire, nowadays the manosphere is more about performing for the male gaze: i.e. broadcasting status to other men. 

How insidious is misogyny in the ‘manosphere’, and to what extent does involvement tend to push men toward more extreme and hostile views of women?

Misogyny is the white wallpaper of the manosphere. So there were certain things that the old school pickup artists would teach – like scripted conversation starters, or how to dress better, or how to be more assertive – that were fairly harmless. That stuff really did help some people. But it also came with misogynistic baggage which said basically that men were from Mars, women were from Venus etc. It was all very reductive and used a kind of bastardised evolutionary psychology to put men and women in these different boxes.

But insidious as that was, it’s really nothing compared to what we see in some red pill spaces or incel spaces today. If you look at influencers like Andrew Tate, he’s preaching coercive control of women; he’s saying that a man should dictate what a woman should wear, who she can be friends with; he also encourages men to pimp women out as sex workers. Women are viewed as nothing more than status objects and resources to control and extract money from.

It’s not as if the men consuming this content are going to suddenly go out and commit murder or something (though there have been a few instances of that). It’s more subtle and insidious than that. It’s more about imbibing certain ideas from the manosphere which then creep into your everyday interactions with women. For example, according to an Ipsos poll taken earlier this year 53 per cent of Gen Z men think that women are only interested in high status men. That’s a manosphere trope right there. Moreover, Gen Z males are the only age group besides Baby Boomers who think that feminism has gone too far. Attitudes from the manosphere can bleed into the mainstream like that. 

Why do you think boys and young men are being drawn into this world? Is it much harder to be a young man now than it was 20 years ago?

Social media is an obvious one. Today’s masculinity entrepreneurs use technology to circumvent whatever socialisation one might get from parents and teachers. They use it to communicate directly with young men. The manosphere is like a sales funnel. The modus operandi of masculinity entrepreneurs is to make men feel insecure. They will berate them and say that no woman is ever going to be interested in them; or they will say that no man is ever going to respect them. They also present this very ostentatious, aspirational lifestyle – fast cars, private jets, women as status objects. They make men feel bad before presenting themselves as saviours and guides who can fix them. It’s hard for parents and teachers to compete with that. 

When I became interested in the seduction community briefly in 2006 there was no algorithm to draw me deeper into that world. I could log off once I’d had enough. Nowadays there’s an algorithm that keeps feeding you more and more of the same content. 

Men have also lost status relative to women. That’s not automatically a bad thing, but for some men it’s been discombobulating. They feel unsure about their identity and their role in the world: the ‘protector’ and ‘provider’ labels are no longer necessarily valid. So they are looking for a new role and identity. This can leave them vulnerable to nostalgic, simplistic narratives about how life was so much better in the past with these ultra-conservative gender roles. The fact that we’ve lived through a long period of economic stagnation can also make men more susceptible to these masculinity hucksters who will say, well, actually, the reason your life hasn’t turned out as you hoped it would is because women are hoarding all the treasure. The manosphere holds out the prospect of transforming insecurity and doubt into certainty and control. 

What help or support can we as a society, or as individuals, offer young boys today?

I think it’s important not to belittle young men but to listen to their concerns. I think dismissing all men as toxic and dismissing masculinity as toxic can drive people further towards the manosphere. 

I think a huge problem for men and women (all of us really) is spending too much time on phones, on social media, looking at these perfect images and feeling like we don’t measure up. There have been studies on the effect that has had on teenage girls; but it affects men too. There’s been an increase in the number of teenage boys with body dysmorphia or taking anabolic steroids. There’s young men signing up to ‘alpha male’ boot camps costing thousands of pounds because they don’t think they feel insecure about the imagery they’re seeing on platforms like Instagram. I actually spent time on one of these courses as part of the research for Lost Boys. 

So encouraging people to disconnect a bit more and to stop living life through the computer is important. That’s a responsibility that falls both on society and individuals, whether via the rules we have around smartphones in schools but also the ground rules that parents set for social media use in the home. Because what’s happening at the moment is you have this material online that’s benignly called ‘content’ when really it’s a form of advertising. Masculinity entrepreneurs are selling courses directly to young men by making them feel insecure. We don’t allow tobacco companies to market directly to young boys like that. It’s something society will have to tackle properly at some point. 

I’m sometimes asked ‘What’s the antidote to the manosphere?’ One of the more obvious things is just logging off more, because a lot of the ideas that are popular in the manosphere are very online ideas. So you have incels who believe that unless you’re six foot five and look like a male model you’re never going to get a girlfriend. Whereas, if you actually spend time outside, you will see all kinds of different couples. 

The more time you spend in the real world, the more it can inoculate you against some of these simplistic narratives that appear online. It sounds so basic but it’s extremely difficult because we live in a culture where everybody is seemingly glued to their devices 24/7. These boys shut away in their bedroom, spending nine hours a day on the internet, are more likely to get a warped sense of what the world actually looks like. They’re no longer interacting with human beings in all their complexity; instead they’re inhabiting a world where men and women are reduced to stereotypes. 

What insecurities and vulnerabilities are influencers most adept at exploiting – and how are they turning personal doubts into loyalty, clicks, or profit?

It’s often about gaining a sense of control. So whether it’s the pickup artists with their scripted routines or Andrew Tate teaching men how to be ‘high status’, it’s about controlling your environment in order to feel secure. Masculinity entrepreneurs prey on insecurity and doubt and provide a phony solution. 

What role have you seen religion play in the ‘manosphere’?

There’s increasingly a ‘God pill’ where you see manosphere influences turning to Christian Nationalism having previously lived a philandering lifestyle. They will all of a sudden turn to God and say they’ve had enough of promiscuity. That’s a bit of a trend at the moment. Some of it has to do with politics. 

With Christianity adjacent to right-wing politics, particularly in America, you see some red pill influencers becoming more political and supporting Donald Trump. You also see some of them embracing religion too. Both ‘red pill’ and Christian Nationalism movements take a very conservative view of women so there’s already ideological alignment. For others it’s more of a grift: influencers who’ve been exposed for wrongdoing suddenly discovering religion. Which is not new at all. In many ways they’re simply reverting back to the original grift.

Has the ‘manosphere’ influenced mainstream politics?

I think the manosphere has influenced mainstream politics in the way I talked about earlier about how certain social attitudes are seeping into mainstream discourse. There’s also a symbiotic relationship between right-wing populism and the manosphere. For example, Donald Trump has been popular in the manosphere ever since he first announced he was running for President back in 2015. And Trump has talked about women in a very abrasive and misogynistic way. That can make it more socially acceptable to talk about women in that type of language. On the flipside, young men who like Trump may gravitate toward the manosphere because they see that he is popular there. 

There are elements of the MAGA (‘Make America Great Again’) movement that are also quite red pill-adjacent. Vice President JD Vance has described himself as ‘red pilled’ in the past. He’s also been on several manosphere podcasts with some of the characters who feature in my book. The red pill subreddit was even set up in the 2010s by a Republican politician. Put it this way, there isn’t much of a cordon sanitaire between the two worlds. 

As humanists, we try to be critical thinkers, but it’s intriguing how often the ‘manosphere’ and related movements have seemingly co-opted the language of logic, reason, and scepticism into a new form. Ironically, in the book, you cite some examples of where the manosphere really doesn’t seem to care a great deal about facts, argument, misuse of statistics, or bad science. Do any examples of this stick out to you?

The manosphere gurus style themselves as purveyors of reason and logic and facts and uncomfortable truths and so on. However, they actually operate in the realm of emotion and hysteria, deploying inflammatory anecdotes to rile up audiences of men. As an example, the manosphere likes to make out that men are at high risk of being falsely accused of rape. 

What they don’t say is that, in Britain at least, a man is more likely to be raped by another man than to be falsely accused of rape by a woman. Or that there are more women who are raped who don’t get justice than false accusations of rape directed at men. That’s one example.

Another is paternity fraud. The manosphere portrays women as scheming and hypergamous (only interested in high status men). Following on from that, they promote the idea that 30 per cent of men are unknowingly bringing up children who aren’t theirs (because women are cheating with these high status men behind their backs). The actual figure is around two per cent. It’s very small and has been consistent over time. But these zombie statistics are used to make men afraid so that they will consume more content and give these influencers money. 

For teenage boys today, who are the content creators, role models, or influencers you’d recommend? Why?

I may be the wrong person to ask about content creators because I don’t watch a lot of online videos. I’m consciously trying to spend less time on the internet because I think that some of the cleverest people in the world are trying to keep us glued to our phones, consuming brain rot. That’s their business model. And so I’m trying to spend more time reading books and magazines and stuff like that instead of consuming endless slop from the internet. I hope that doesn’t sound too pompous.

In general, I think role models can be good on a micro level. I think it can help to have a male figure to look up to. They can set a better example than some of the characters that appear in my book. But I don’t think one should listen to celebrity role models uncritically simply because they have a bit of status. There’s a George Orwell quote about how ‘Saints should be judged guilty until proven innocent’, which I think applies here. It’s important to keep your critical faculties about you. One may be drawn to a certain role model because of a shared interest. Which is fine of course. However, I think one has to be careful when people stray outside of their areas of expertise. 

This is part of the problem with long-form podcasting at the moment. You have people like Jordan Peterson who may have interesting things to say about self-improvement or Christianity or Jungian philosophy. However, because of the length of some of these podcasts, he will invariably stray onto topics he knows less about –things like vaccines and Covid – and wind up spreading conspiracy theories. It’s more important in my view to teach critical thinking than to uncritically elevate celebrity ‘role models’.

That said, I do occasionally watch the Youtuber Vlad Vexler and listen to the Decoding the Gurus podcast. I think the humanist academic Richard Reeves has interesting things to say about masculinity and male role models, particularly on the policy side. 

Are you a humanist, if so, what is it about humanist values that resonate with you?

I would call myself a humanist on the basis that I don’t believe in supernatural explanations for things. I don’t accept the idea that in order to have a strong moral and ethical framework for living one must draw on religious dogma. The Golden Rule means more to me than the Gospels. 

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James Bloodworth will give Humanists UK’s annual Holyoake Lecture in Manchester on 4 December 2025, where he will be awarded the 2025 Holyoake Lecture Medal. Tickets are available to purchase at humanists.uk/holyoake2025.