Inside the Indian Manosphere

It was not long after the pandemic, when the social audio app Clubhouse was still something of a rage, that Chinchu C, an academic and researcher who was part of a few Malayalam-speaking groups that delved into atheism and science on the app, joined some Telegram communities being promoted in these groups. Many online atheist groups in Kerala, curiously not unlike religious fundamentalist ones, Chinchu C points out, tend to possess a strong strain of animosity towards feminism. And when he got into these groups, more out of curiosity than anything else, he felt overwhelmed by the kind of content targeting female figures and male supporters of feminism circulating there.

They would share morphed and disfigured photographs of public figures, many of them women. Members were told to swamp the comments section of content they disliked. Individuals were organised to troll public figures for something they had said. It got to the point that Chinchu, a psychologist and assistant professor at the Centre for Women’s Studies at Pondicherry University, began to worry that the content being shared here and the coor­dinated attacks being planned could lead to something criminal.

“It seemed likely that cyber violence, or even physical violence could happen to some women because of these groups,” he says. He left the groups fearing a criminal case might lead to all members being hauled up by the police. He also got the distinct feeling that these groups were mostly filled by young males, between 15 and 20.

Chinchu had got an early taste of what is now increasingly being called the manosphere.

The manosphere, as it is often described with its strong male rancour towards women, has arguably been around for a long time. There have always been spaces on the internet that were misogynous, as anyone who has spent any amount of time on some online forums will attest. But these scattered regions of the internet have in recent years coalesced around a more specific and spelt-out ideology, one with its own language and jargon, and its own ecosystem of personalities and cults, and targeted to a very specific demography—young males.

It is today filled with its own influencers—sometimes dubbed manfluencers—whose reach spreads across the digital landscape. “If you were in college recently, you knew about it. If you’re over 35, probably not,” Blake Marnell, a figure from the manosphere, told the Washington Post earlier this year in an article that explored how Donald Trump, using a little assistance from his 18-year-old son Barron, successfully tapped into this world of internet bros during his campaign.

The manosphere however is a vast and hard-to-categorise space. It caters to a particular demography—disaffected males— but its cast of characters can be bewilderingly different, from the downright vile to those on the periphery, whose views attract the manosphere. There is Andrew Tate, for instance, the former Brit­ish-American kickboxer and self-proclaimed misogynist, who has been accused of rape, human trafficking and sexual assault, and who is arguably this sphere’s most notorious personality. Then there are figures like the podcaster Joe Rogan, the Canadian academic Jordan Peterson who is viewed as the manosphere’s intellectual, or internet personalities like brothers Jake and Logan Paul. Much of the manosphere, especially in the US, tends to be tilted towards the cultural and political right, but there are also popular figures on the other side of the ideological divide, like the popular Trump-hating Twitch streamer Hasan Piker. There may be little that is common between Tate and Peterson, or Rogan and Piker, but they all meet a particular demand in the cultural space right now.

It is the kind of world young boys might try to hide in their incognito browsers. And it would have probably stayed out of the larger public conversation but for a new Netflix show, Adolescence, which has become a global sensation. This show, which charts the shadowy world of the manosphere through the story of a 13-year-old boy who, influenced by these ideas, stabs a female classmate to death, has topped Netflix’s viewing charts in 71 countries, including India. Grown-ups have always tended to be the last to grasp teenage trends. But the success of this show, and the conversations it has generated, demonstrates just how unaware adults were of its presence—and its dangers.

Sometime last year, Nikhil Taneja, who was on a panel dis­cussing work-life balance at a top engineering college in Mum­bai, was stunned when a male student asked the only woman on the panel—a top executive from a large firm—why it was permissible for women to wear mini-skirts to work when men were barred from wearing shorts. “It is always women who are addressed these sorts of ridiculous questions. Here was a top ex­ecutive from a big firm, and this is what the student thought of asking,” says Taneja who, as host of the popular chat show Be A Man, Yaar! and co-founder and CEO of the youth media platform Yuvaa, is often invited to colleges and schools to address students. On another occasion, during a discussion on mental health at a well-known college in Mumbai, Taneja recalls a male student alluding to how men feel powerless today by telling a female panellist that the laws of the jungle dictate that the lion is more powerful than the sheep, but it is the lion who is the victim now. It might have been a joke and the students gath­ered usually break out in laughter, but by casting men as victims and sufferers of society’s perceived double standards, the sentiment echoed the core of the mano­sphere. Youths, like adults, in India and elsewhere, have exhibited conservative and troublesome ideas about women in the past too. But to Taneja, technology and the manosphere are breeding a particularly troubling misogyny among young males today.

“When it comes to the manosphere, according to me, we are just scratching at the surface. It is an enormous problem facing society today,” he says.

Nirali Bhatia, a cyber psychologist and the founder of an anti-cyber bullying organisation, Cyber BAAP (Cyber Bullying Awareness, Action and Prevention), is well aware of the impact the manosphere is beginning to have on young impressionable minds. Bringing up past inci­dents such as the ‘Sulli Deals’ and ‘Bulli Bai’ controversies, when images and personal informa­tion of several Muslim women were uploaded on apps for on­line mock auctions and ‘deals of the day’—both of which turned out to be the handiwork of young engineering students— Bhatia talks about how toxic aspects of the internet are breed­ing insensitivity and a lack of understanding about the conse­quences of their actions in boys and young men. She got a taste of just how popular the manosphere is becoming a few years ago when, after she uploaded a video warning parents about the dangerous ideas being disseminated by Tate, she got a call from the 16-year-old son of a couple she knew well. “The child was so blinded by Tate. He was very argumentative. He would ask, ‘How can you say that?’ How what I had done was wrong, how Tate inspires people like him,” Bhatia says. “It was really shocking to see this child whom I was speaking to, who was just 16 and had just finished Class 10, but who had such strong opinions and was against hearing anything that challenged his opinion about Tate.” Listening to him and then later talking to his parents, Bhatia realised that the boy, who used to be underweight and low on confidence, had begun to develop a better image of himself after following Tate. Many influencers like Tate do tend to push boys and young men to improve themselves, but along with their advice comes many problematic ideas.

On another occasion, one of the cases that came to Bhatia was that of a 17-year-old boy in Mumbai who had picked up images from the social media account of a girl from his school and fed them into an app that can generate nude photographs of individuals. “He keeps the images to himself at first, but shows them to a male friend the next day. Another individual comes to know of it, and eventually a complaint is filed,” Bhatia says. “What I am trying to draw attention to is that often the inten­tion is not to harass. In this case, the boy had not intended to harass but he had ended up doing so because there was a lack of understanding, a lack of respect.”

Why are young males falling to the appeal of the manosphere? “That’s because the manosphere pres­ents very easy answers to the questions men face to­day,” Chinchu says. He has been researching this phenomenon, especially its growth in the Malayalam-speaking online world, and published a pre-print paper on the subject last year. He says the crisis and insecurities many men, and especially young boys, face—whether their inability to get jobs or get into a relation­ship, or come to grips with women having more agency—are fuelling its growth. “There’s a lot of premium on the traditional forms of masculinity in our cultures. But life is probably becom­ing more different and difficult today. Many young men don’t have answers to these questions. What the manosphere does is provide them very easy answers. It will say you aren’t getting ahead in life because of feminism. You can’t get into a relation­ship because girls are becoming feminists,” Chinchu says.

Another significant factor is the divergence in opinion that appears to be taking shape between the sexes today. Historically, ideological divides have lain across generations, with men and women from one generation holding largely similar ideological positions. But today, research across countries shows that wom­en are increasingly taking more progressive and liberal stands whereas men are becoming more conservative and reactionary.

Masculinity today is in crisis. Gender dynamics are changing. And with that has come a shift in men’s roles and expectations from them. Many young men, finding it hard to accept the reali­ties of the modern world, might be getting attracted to the mano­sphere for the easy answers it provides. But there is also another element in this crisis. Those who identify with the ideas of the manosphere believe it is also because men are being constantly scolded and circumscribed, and masculinity itself is being almost pathologised. “Men today are discouraged from expressing them­selves. Masculinity is deemed toxic, even as women are pushed to express themselves,” says Amit Deshpande, founder of Vaastav Foundation, a men’s rights group.

There are also some grim statistics. Suicide rates tend to be high­er among men than women. In some countries, men also tend to fall behind in school or drop out of college much more in relative terms compared to their female contemporaries and even men from earlier generations. Men also tend to bottle up their emotions, with those they traditionally unburdened themselves to, their

mothers and wives, not being around as much because marriages happen late and women have stepped out into the workforce. But these problems, those within the manosphere say, are never ac­knowledged. Any talk of it is seen as an exercise in privilege and in opposition to women. “Men are seen as the problem, not people with problems,” says a 20-something man in Mumbai.

Could the classroom-monitor tendencies of the cultural left, constantly scolding and indiscriminately disbanding the label of toxic masculinity, also be contributing to driving young dis­gruntled men to the manosphere where they are reassured that it is not them but feminism that is the problem?

While many of the manosphere’s most popular personali­ties in the West have a large following in India, various regional versions have also cropped up. There are, for instance, popular influencers like Elvish Yadav and Lakshay Chaudhary with large male followings. There are also men’s rights advocates such as Deshpande who work towards changing laws they see as discriminatory towards men.

But one of the largest cohorts in this space is that of manfluenc­ers, all of them with big audiences, masquerading misogyny as self-improvement and relationship advice. Many of them also sell self-improvement courses and provide consultations that they claim would help young men and boys secure better jobs and more success in getting into relationships with women. One of them, who goes by the name of Harsh Strongman and claims to be a chartered accountant with a tax consulting firm, runs a website called Life Math Money which provides self-improvement courses and consultation services for men. He also has a large fol­lowing across various social media platforms. In a podcast, he says his website is about “saving men from bad choices in their lives.”

“You can’t stop the women from w*****g around,” he says at one point. “But what you can do is make sure the woman you marry isn’t a w****. You can pick the good woman.”

When I reach out to him, he appears to agree to an email interview. But the questions seem to trigger him and he delivers a short rant. “Have fun writing for overweight unattractive liberal women,” he writes back.

How do parents cope with the challenges of such a toxic space? We may warn our children of the dangers that lurk in the real world, arm them with whatever little our parents passed on to us, but to even the best of us, the internet remains a vast uncharted territory, its many messages and ideas flowing unchecked into young impressionable minds. Ritu Gorai, the founder of JAMM (Journey About Mast Moms), a popular net­work of online mommies’ groups across the country, tends to be well-informed about the goings on about children. Unbridled access to the internet, she says, is wreaking havoc across many families. She brings up the case of a 14-year-old whose parents she knows, who used to play games online and had developed a gambling addiction. “It got to the point where the child was ac­tually hiding facts, stealing things, misusing his parents’ credit cards. It got so out of control that therapy and basic counselling weren’t working. So he had to be put in a rehab centre,” she says.

Teenage has always been a vulnerable time. But there was never the internet to contend with. Mansi Zaveri, a parenting coach and writer, and a mother to two daughters, however, says it would be wrong to blame just devices for the problem. “In many cases, children are coming back to empty homes. So is the device to be blamed or is the parent?” she asks. “In schools, educators are not equipped to understand what children are facing today. So what are parents supposed to do? How are they supposed to keep pace because things are moving very fast?” Children today, she says, are growing up entirely online. As a result they are ignorant of many crucial aspects and unequipped to deal with them. They do not understand body language, she says, or boundaries. They do not even have the ability to understand and deal with ideas like consent or rejection.

Yukti Rajan, a Navi Mumbai-based mother of a 12-year-old boy, is well aware of the many dangers that lurk online. She talks about the issues she witnesses daily, of adolescents and teenagers who are secretly on social media, of children who have hit puberty early and are in relationships, and those who have phones and devices and have no restrictions on accessing content.

Yukti does not allow her son to come online, only permitting him to play video games on a console, but always under adult supervision. “I’m a bit old-school and don’t allow my kid every­thing. He is only 12 and, I know, looking at the children these days, there will be more difficulties later. Keeping their innocence intact is a parent’s job,” she says.

To Dr Zirak Marker, a well-known child and family psychia­trist in Mumbai, while the manosphere presents a problem, the biggest challenge affecting male adolescents and teens remains the same—the environment in which they grow up. Marker, who also serves as a senior psychiatrist and adviser to an initiative that promotes mental health, Mpower, points to the many cases he encounters frequently, of dysfunctional and broken homes where the women are treated poorly and there is a lack of good male role models, which act as what he calls “co-morbidities” that push young males to imbibe prob­lematic ideas or into the realm of the manosphere. “There are two things that I see a lot now,” Marker says. “There is this heart-warming part, where young men are trying to move away from that mould and you see this lovely young man emerge. And then there is the other end of the spectrum—young boys from dysfunctional families where there is aggression and violence at home and women are treated in a certain way. Many of them have radical views against women or homosexuality. And when you actually get into the nuances of their minds, they have issues themselves. They have no self-confidence, self-esteem or self-worth. They can’t take rejections, and they might feel unmanly, and sometimes there is even gender or sexuality-based confusion. Then it becomes almost like a reflection of their own insecurities.”

There are, however, attempts to provide an alternative form of masculinity, one that is more sensitive and caring, and not bit­ter towards the changing dynamics in society. Taneja started his chat show Be A Man, Yaar! where he discusses gender dynamics, and in particular masculinity, with well-known men to create something that could provide an alternative to the toxic mascu­line role model. “If we look at it, we don’t really have good role models for men. Yes, we have role models for finance, science, hustle culture. But how many of them talk about emotions, or vulnerability in men?” he says.

Taneja believes that the manosphere thrives on the loneliness of men. In his conver­sations at schools and colleges, young men constantly bring up how lonely they feel. They may grow up in homes where they are not discriminated against in the way girls often tend to be, but they experience what he calls an “emotional discrimination”, where love and tenderness, whether a hug or a kind word, are withdrawn from them. And unlike women, Taneja adds, men do not make allies with whom they share their emotions. “Traditionally the emotional labour of fixing a man fell on the woman. But that is changing today and men are at a loss. They have no one to open up to. They can get their male friends to go to a war with them if need be, but can’t open up to them about what’s troubling them internally,” he says. “We need to break that pattern. We need to normalise sensitivity and being vulnerable in the company of friends.”.

aggressive masculinityAndrew TateJordan PetersonManospheremisogynytoxic online communitiesYoung men