Our new research shows how boys tumble into the manosphere

May 12, 2026 — 5:00am

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A young man is scrolling on TikTok. This particular session started with a pre-workout video, moved through a clip about jaw definition, and arrived, without any deliberate navigation, at a podcast where a man explains that emotional sensitivity will make you sexually undesirable. He didn’t go looking for this. The algorithm walked him there, and he stayed, because something in it was speaking to something in him.

The conversation about the manosphere – a loose digital ecosystem of male-centred content and communities ranging from self-improvement to overt misogyny – has become circular: moral panic, political condemnation, a new name to demonise, a call for bans, and then quiet until the next incident breaks through. What we have conspicuously failed to do, as researchers, as policymakers, as people who care about young men, is sit with the more uncomfortable question of why this content lands, what it is answering, and what it tells us about the lives of the young men consuming it.

Our new research out this week at the Movember Institute of Men’s Health, has taken what should be an obvious but long-overdue step: rather than simulating what young men might encounter online, we looked at what they are actually watching. Using TikTok data uploaded directly by 142 young men aged 16 to 25, we developed the world’s first working structure for classifying manosphere content on........

© The Sydney Morning Herald