As a youth counsellor in Christchurch, Mac Stephenson found that every single young man he came into contact with had discovered the manosphere.
“A hundred percent of the young men that I’d worked with were radicalised – were seeing insane things online.
“Every single young man had a view that I would consider anti-social, or bad, or negative, or just in some way hurtful to their long-term prospects. It was everyone.”
It’s what made him found the charity Iliad Youth, an organisation that deals with the fallout of the misogynistic ideas the manosphere preaches.
“I just felt that this problem was so prevalent,” he tells The Detail.
They came from a broad cross-section of society, including from “good” families with really good parents.
“They would just say, just offhandedly, ‘Yeah I hate women’,” says Stephenson.
He says the thousands of hours these kids are spending on their phones every year are pushing ideas into their heads and feeding them a message they have very little ability to think critically about.
“They’re just absorbing these ideas, and at some point one of them might make sense to these young people. Or they might have this connection and just go, ‘I’m in a bad place right now, and this person is offering me a really, really elegant solution … which is let’s blame somebody. I went on a date, or I tried to talk to a girl and it went really, really badly. Why is that? Oh … women are all horrible. All they want is money and cars, and if you don’t have money and cars they hate you.'”
Stephenson says it was terrifying, and the influencers behind such behaviour are predators.
But one of the problems in dealing with these kids is that most mental health professionals are women, “and these people will just not engage with someone who they see as less than themselves … someone who they, off the bat, hate and resent and fear.”
He says the issue is so prevalent now that it needs to be discussed at schools in much the same way anti-smoking messages used to be. The key is to get them to start thinking critically about the messages they’re parroting so they can control the algorithms they’re being fed.
The manosphere surfaced in New Zealand political conversation last week when the Prime Minister said New Zealand First Napier candidate Stuart Nash had channelled the manosphere in his “sexist” comments about his electoral rival, National’s Katie Nimon, over her maternity leave.
His comments were universally decried, and University of Auckland criminologist Claire Meehan says they rightfully should have been. But she says we are seeing the increasing social acceptability of saying misogynistic or sexist things out loud.
“I think some men – it’s not all men – but some of them have been empowered to say such things in a public arena. It’s what a lot of them are thinking, but just not saying out loud.”
We’re seeing this in public life in America: when self-described US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth ordered testosterone screening for older servicemen as part of their health assessment, commentators said he’d embraced the manosphere.
The recent season of reality show Love Island USA was said to be infiltrated by it.
Christian nationalists there, such as pastor Doug Wilson, have said women shouldn’t vote, and there’s now a movement to repeal the 19th amendment, which gives women that right. The rise of looksmaxxing and tradwives go hand in hand with the manosphere movement.
Young female teachers around the world, including in New Zealand, are bearing the brunt of dismissive attitudes from their students, who are often bigger and stronger than they are, and who are under the influence of online gurus.
Meehan has been working with young people over the past 15 years to gain insights into their digital and offline lives, cultures, and relationships, largely in the area of consent, body image and the like. In the past few years the rising issue has been how the manosphere is influencing those cultures.
“Three years ago many people still viewed the manosphere as some sort of fringe online phenomenon, whereas now it’s become much more mainstream.
“We’re seeing it in politics, in different language that people are using … even in the Iran war … ‘lethality maxxing’ – straight out of the manosphere playbook in terms of language.
“One of the big things that happened last year was the Netflix TV show Adolescence. I think that was a bit of a cultural turning point because it brought the word misogyny into our language and dialogue in a way that it wasn’t really used before.
“I think it opened people’s eyes to what is happening online, what sometimes young people are encountering, and some of the issues around that.
“What concerns me most about this is most of these messages are increasingly normalised. Young people don’t seek out ‘How to hate women’ or ‘How to be a misogynist’ … they don’t seek out this content. So usually they encounter it through humour or memes, or even searching for self-improvement or gym advice, or dating advice, all those kind of things.
“The messaging around misogyny has become more subtle and embedded into everyday online culture.”
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