The manosphere uses the same tactics as cults by regulating behavior, information, thought, and emotion.

Loaded language like “red pill,” “cope,” and “AWALT” simplifies complex ideas and sabotages critical thinking.

Framing women as the enemy isolates men from anyone who might challenge the ideology.

Healthy masculinity resources exist and promote confidence through unlearning unfair societal pressures.

A young man is struggling to ask out a woman he likes and searches online for “how to get a girl to like you.” This is fairly typical behavior for a young man excited to ask out his first girlfriend.

Within minutes, an algorithm serves him a charismatic influencer who seems to understand his pain. The content starts with fitness tips and financial motivation.

Within weeks, that same young man is using words like “alpha” and “beta” to categorize every man he meets and “hypergamy” to explain why women use men for financial gain. He doesn’t ask the woman he likes out and is now disgusted that he ever considered her a friend.

He did not join a cult.

I have spent decades studying how authoritarian groups radicalize, and the more I examine the manosphere, the more I recognize the same patterns as those I encounter in the cults I’ve helped survivors recover from.

The manosphere is not a single group but, rather, an interconnected ecosystem of communities that includes men’s rights activists, pickup artists, and incels (involuntary celibates), among others.

What unites them is a shared conviction that feminism has rigged society against men and that “waking up” to this reality requires adopting a new way of seeing every relationship between men and women.

Research has documented a radicalization........

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