The Pipeline. Dawn Intelligence.

The pipeline does not announce itself. That is its job.

You scroll. You see something. You laugh. You scroll. You see something else. You laugh, slightly less. You scroll. The third thing is harder to laugh at, and somewhere in your gut, in a place older than language, your body registers that something has shifted. But you are tired. You are scrolling because you are tired. You keep going.

Six months later you are looking at content that is no longer funny and you cannot remember when it stopped being funny. You cannot remember the path you took to get here. The algorithm has been refining your taste so steadily, so quietly, so professionally, that the version of you who is now nodding at things would have been horrified, six months ago, by where you ended up.

That is the pipeline. That is what it is. That is what it does. And it is happening, right now, in the bedrooms of millions of teenage boys in this country, while we sit downstairs and reassure ourselves that we have raised them well.

This essay is about Andrew Tate, who is the face. About the manosphere, which is the body. About the algorithm, which is the engine. And about what is happening to young men in this country right now that almost nobody in a position of authority has any idea how to address.

The first time I noticed

I want to start with my own scrolling, because none of us are above this. The algorithm tested me. The algorithm tested you. The only difference between any of us and a thirteen year old boy in his bedroom is that we have, by virtue of age and context and luck, a little more capacity to notice when the test is happening.

The first time I really noticed it, I was about twenty. I was on TikTok. I had been watching, harmlessly, a series of clips from a UK reality show. The algorithm interpreted my interest in young British men on television as a more general interest in young British men. The next clip was a fitness influencer. Then a clothing influencer. Then a man giving advice about confidence. Then a man giving advice about women. Then a man saying, in a tone of strained patience, that women in the modern dating market had become unreasonable.

I was, I want to be clear, on a feed I had built around music, fashion, and political commentary. I had not searched for any of this. The algorithm had simply observed that the demographic profile of my engagements suggested I might be receptive to manosphere content, and it had begun, gently, to test the hypothesis.

I noticed it because I was, even then, paying attention to this kind of thing for work. So I marked the videos as not interested. I cleaned the algorithm. The content stopped. The test had been brief.

Imagine you are thirteen. Imagine you have no professional reason to be paying attention. Imagine you have no older woman in your life who is regularly explaining to you what manosphere content is and how to recognise it. Imagine the test does not end after one round, because you do not know how to end it. Imagine the test continues for a year. For two years. Imagine the algorithm is still observing your engagement, still refining, still finding the precise content that holds your attention longest, and still feeding you more of it.

That is most of the boys in this country. That is, statistically, what is happening on most teenage phones right now.

About a year ago I was on a train and there were two boys, maybe twelve, sat opposite me. They were sharing a phone. They were watching what I, with my professional eye, immediately recognised as second-tier manosphere content. A man explaining, with confident pseudo-data, why women had become unsuitable for relationships. The boys were not laughing. They were nodding. They were absorbing.

I did not say anything. I want to be honest about that. I had a thirty minute train journey. I was not their mother, their teacher, or their auntie. I was a Black woman in her twenties on a train, and the small voice in my head that said “intervene” was overruled by the larger voice that said “this is not your job, in this carriage, with these strangers, today.” I sat with it. I have sat with it since.

What I keep thinking about is that those boys were, in their own way, Cassandra in reverse. They were receiving a prophecy about women and the world that was not, in fact, true, but that was being delivered with such confidence and such consistent reinforcement that it was becoming, for them, the truth. The opposite of the curse Cassandra suffered. They were not being disbelieved. They were believing too easily, in too coordinated a way, in something none of them had thought to question.

That is the radicalisation. It is not, primarily, a content problem. It is, primarily, a credulity problem. The content is the symptom. The credulity is what the algorithm is engineering.

The shape of it

Let me give you the texture of the pipeline as it actually flows, because most people who do not spend time in these spaces do not realise how it moves.

It starts with content that is plausibly innocent. Fitness. Self improvement. Money. Confidence. The aesthetic is gym-bro adjacent. The captions are aspirational. The vibe is, you can be more than you are, and we are going to help you. There is nothing in the first wave of content that any reasonable adult would object to.

The second wave introduces a frame. The frame is that modern men are in crisis. The crisis has multiple causes. Soft parenting. Failing schools. Feminism. Pornography. Processed food. The phone in your pocket. The frame is, in some ways, accurate. There are real things to discuss about the difficulties facing young men. The diagnosis is not entirely wrong, which is part of why the content travels.

The third wave introduces a culprit. By this point, the viewer is invested in the diagnosis. The diagnosis needs an agent. The agent, almost always, is women. Specifically, modern women. Women who have rejected their natural roles. Women who have become demanding, unreasonable, hypergamous, ungrateful. The crisis of men, the third wave teaches, is downstream of the corruption of women. Fix the women, and you fix the men.

The fourth wave introduces a strategy. The strategy is dominance. Take what you want. Refuse to be soft. Build wealth aggressively, accumulate status visibly, treat women as objects to be managed. There is a vocabulary by this point: alpha, beta, sigma, high value man, low value woman, Stacey, Chad, Becky. The vocabulary signals belonging to anyone else who has been through the pipeline. The vocabulary alienates anyone who has not.

The fifth wave is the real fringe. Open misogyny. Open racism. Open advocacy of violence. Most boys do not get to the fifth wave. But by the third or fourth wave they have absorbed enough of the worldview that the fifth wave does not look as alien as it should.

The thing most parents miss is that the pipeline is not, primarily, about producing fifth-wave attackers. The pipeline is about producing third-wave normals. The Plymouth case is the headline. The third-wave normal is the iceberg. Millions of boys have been pulled to the third or fourth wave and are now operating, day to day, with a worldview in which women are essentially the obstacle to male flourishing. They are not going to commit attacks. They are going to be coworkers, husbands, fathers, friends. They are going to make decisions about hiring, about parenting, about politics, about who to vote for, on the basis of the worldview the pipeline has shaped. The structural impact is enormous, and it is invisible, because no individual third-wave normal looks like a problem.

This pipeline has been mapped. This is not a moral panic. There is real research on this.

The most cited paper in the field is Mamié, Ribeiro, and West, published in 2021, titled “Are Anti-Feminist Communities Gateways to the Far Right? Evidence from Reddit and YouTube.” The team analysed approximately 300 million YouTube comments and Reddit posts. They found clear evidence that engagement with anti-feminist communities is, statistically, a pathway into wider far right communities. The pipeline is not a metaphor. The pipeline is observable in the data.

A 2024 paper by Baker, Ging, and Brandt Andresen, published in the journal Information, Communication and Society, looked at TikTok specifically. They found that hashtags like #gymtips and #selfimprovement, which most parents would consider innocent, are now serving as gateways to manosphere content within the platform’s recommendation system. The journey from #gymtips to #redpill, in the data they examined, was distressingly short.

Hope Not Hate, the UK anti-extremism organisation, has been polling teenage boys about manosphere influencers for the last several years. Their most recent reports show that around three quarters of UK boys aged sixteen to seventeen are aware of Andrew Tate. A meaningful minority view him favourably. The percentage who reject manosphere influencers entirely is far smaller than parents would assume.

The researchers at the University of Birmingham, Carmichael Murphy among others, have written about this in terms of adolescent boys’ structural precarity. The argument is that boys are not being radicalised because they are bad. They are being radicalised because the world they have been handed is genuinely hostile to them in ways the previous generation of boys was not. Job markets are harder. Housing is harder. Relationships are harder. The promises that were made to their fathers about adulthood have not been kept. Into that vacuum, the manosphere arrives with a coherent narrative, a community, and a set of practical instructions. The narrative is wrong, but it is coherent. The community is toxic, but it is real. The instructions are damaging, but they are clear.

Mainstream institutions, by contrast, offer boys very little of this. School does not produce a coherent story about what it means to be a man in the twenty first century. The state does not. The church, in this country, increasingly does not. The family, in many cases, does not. Into that absence, the algorithm pours an alternative.

This is not the boys’ fault. They did not build the pipeline. They are not, mostly, evil. They are children, in environments adults have built and adults are failing to repair, and they are reaching for the meaning that has been put within reach.

The Centre for Countering Digital Hate published a study in 2024 looking at TikTok’s recommendation algorithm specifically. They created blank accounts presenting as thirteen year old boys with no prior search history, no follows, no engagement signals. They had the accounts watch one or two pieces of fitness content. The accounts were then presented, within minutes, with manosphere content. Within hours, with explicitly misogynistic content. Within days, with content that the researchers categorised as gateway to far right ideology.

The accounts had done nothing. They had not searched for anything. They had not followed anyone. They had simply been observed engaging with one or two pieces of mainstream fitness content, and the algorithm had inferred from that engagement that they were the demographic profile that would be most efficiently retained by manosphere content. The algorithm was, in a precise sense, working as designed. The design is the problem.

This is what compounds the parental difficulty. You cannot tell a thirteen year old that they should not look at fitness content. You cannot tell them not to use TikTok at all without removing them from their entire peer group’s primary communication channel. You cannot reasonably expect them to recognise the pipeline as it is happening to them. The infrastructure has been built to capture them, and it is significantly more sophisticated than the infrastructure that exists to protect them.

That does not, however, change what the radicalisation does. Once a boy has absorbed a manosphere worldview, he becomes harder to live with, harder to teach, harder to befriend, harder to date, and, in the worst cases, dangerous to women. Compassion for how he got there does not mean indifference to what he has become. Both have to be held.

Andrew Tate

I want to spend a section on Tate specifically because he is the most efficient way to explain the shape of the problem. He is also, importantly, only the surface. The cultural conversation has too often treated him as the cause. He is not the cause. He is the most successful current product of the structure. If he were removed tomorrow, three more would replace him by the end of the year.

Tate’s biography is well documented. Born in Washington DC, raised in Luton, professional kickboxer, Big Brother contestant, removed from the show after a video emerged of him appearing to attack a woman with a belt. Moved into webcam camming and money laundering accusations. Built a social media empire. Was banned from most major platforms for hate speech in 2022. Was arrested in Romania in late 2022 on charges of human trafficking, rape, and forming an organised criminal group. Is now, as of writing, still entangled in legal proceedings in Romania, with related extradition processes affecting the UK.

I am not going to walk you through the legal detail in real time, partly because it keeps changing, partly because the legal proceedings are not the point. The point is what happens around him, irrespective of the verdict.

Tate’s content was banned from the major platforms three years ago. His audience has continued to grow. The content has been carried by his followers, by clip channels, by Telegram groups, by Discord servers, by TikTok accounts that recycle his material faster than it can be removed. He is, in some sense, an audio-visual lineage now, a tradition that operates independently of any single account or platform. You can be banned and continue to grow. The platform deplatforming model assumes a centralised content distribution that no longer exists.

His influence in this country is significant and quantifiable. Surveys repeatedly find him to be one of the most recognised figures among UK teenage boys. His specific catchphrases have entered classroom vocabulary. Teachers report his framing being used to dismiss female teachers. Female teachers report being mocked using language traceable to his content. Safeguarding leads in schools report a meaningful increase in incidents involving manosphere ideology since around 2022.

The Netflix drama Adolescence, which came out in 2025, fictionalised this dynamic in a way that did real public good. The show was about a thirteen year old boy who murders a female classmate, and the slow horror of his parents realising what their son had become while they were not watching. It was watched by tens of millions of households globally. It surfaced the pipeline conversation in a mainstream way that no government report had managed.

But the show also, and this is important, made it about one boy. The dramatic structure of a fictional narrative requires a specific protagonist. The structural problem the show was diagnosing is not about a specific boy. It is about millions of boys. The narrative form invites the audience to identify the warning signs in a single child. The structural problem is that the warning signs are everywhere and the structures we have to address them are not adequate to the scale.

Adolescence was a great piece of television. It was also a Trojan horse for a conversation we have been refusing to have. Whether the post-Adolescence conversation is going to lead to actual structural change in how we resource schools, social services, men’s mental health support, online safety enforcement, parental education, the early years, or whether it is going to fade like every other moment of cultural recognition in this space, remains an open question.

The early signs are not encouraging. The post-Adolescence panel discussions, the parliamentary debates, the think pieces, have mostly been good. The actual policy response has been, by the standards of the situation, marginal. The Online Safety Act enforcement has not been meaningfully strengthened. The funding for school safeguarding has not been meaningfully increased. The youth services budget has not been restored. The conversation has happened. The structural response has not.

This is the pattern, by now, that you should be tracking. Cultural moment, parliamentary acknowledgement, brief flurry of analysis, a few new pilot schemes, no sustained funding, the next cultural moment arrives, and we start again. The repetition of this cycle is itself the political fact. We have, in this country, learned to substitute cultural recognition for structural change. The recognition feels like progress. It is not progress. It is, in some ways, the absence of progress disguised as the presence of it.

I want to flag a wider constellation of figures, because Tate is the most famous but he is not alone, and the distribution of types matters.

Conor McGregor. Civilly liable for rape. Now part of an international far right speakers’ circuit. Has done events in support of Donald Trump. Has positioned himself as a spokesman for working class Irish men against, in his framing, mass immigration. The specifics of his case, and the way the verdict has been processed by his fanbase, tell you almost everything you need to know about how the manosphere absorbs and metabolises legal accountability.

Sneako, a younger American streamer with a substantial UK teenage audience, who has trafficked variously in incel content, manosphere content, and far right content. Less famous than Tate. Probably more dangerous in some ways, because he is younger and his content travels further among younger boys.

The Fresh and Fit podcast, which has been one of the more consistent sites of manosphere content in the post-Tate era, with an aesthetic of two men interviewing women in front of an audience and then aggressively cross examining them. The dynamic is performative. The audience knows the script. The structure is the product.

Various smaller figures who matter only in aggregate. The looksmaxxing community on TikTok. The “high value man” coaches. The dating coaches who range from anodyne to overtly predatory. The bodybuilding influencers who flirt with manosphere ideology without committing to it. The fitness coaches whose nominal content is workouts but whose real content is a worldview.

This is the constellation. It is enormous. It is multilingual. It is platform-agnostic. It is faster moving than any policy response.

I want to spend a moment on UK drill, because the conversation about masculinity in this country cannot avoid it and the conversation tends to be done badly when it is done at all.

Drill is a genre with a particular sonic and lyrical signature. It came out of Chicago and was reshaped by London, principally by Black British artists in south London neighbourhoods, in the mid 2010s. It is, often, brutally violent in its lyrical content. It often references specific gangs, specific postcodes, specific named individuals. It has been the subject of unprecedented police intervention in this country, including the use of court orders to ban specific artists from performing specific lyrics, the takedown of specific YouTube videos at police request, and the use of drill lyrics as evidence in criminal prosecutions.

The drill conversation is one of the places where left-wing critique has been most consistently incoherent. The same critics who, correctly, call out manosphere content for promoting violence against women have, sometimes, defended drill content that explicitly celebrates violence against rivals as authentic working class expression. The double standard is real and it is worth noticing.

What is also worth noticing is that drill is, by far, the more heavily policed of the two. Andrew Tate has not had a single court order banning him from naming specific phrases. Drill artists have. The disparity in enforcement is, partly, a story about race. White American manosphere figures get to traffic in violent ideology with relative impunity. Black British drill artists get the full weight of the criminal justice system applied to their lyrics.

Both can be true. Drill can be, in some of its forms, lyrically problematic, and the policing of it can be racially disparate. Holding both at once is the only honest position.

Drill, as a genre, is also one of the most direct artistic expressions of the structural precarity Carmichael Murphy was describing. The young men making this music are growing up in conditions of genuine economic and social abandonment. Their music is a response to those conditions. The response is sometimes ugly. The conditions are uglier. We should be able to talk about both without flattening the artists into either victims or villains.

The relationship between drill and manosphere content is more direct than people sometimes realise. The same algorithms that move boys from gym content to red pill content also move boys from generic rap content to drill content, and from drill content to ideologies that celebrate dominance, hierarchy, and violence as paths to status. The radicalisation pipelines are not separate. They overlap. A boy who has been shaped by both is shaped, twice over, by content that tells him violence is how men become real.

What we talk about when we talk about boys

I want to do something complicated here. I want to hold two things at the same time. The first is that boys are being radicalised at unprecedented rates and that this is, structurally, very bad, including for the women they will encounter as adults. The second is that boys are children, that they did not build the conditions they are growing up in, and that the conversation about what to do with them has been distorted by both the right and the left in ways that are not serving anyone.

The right’s distortion is to treat the manosphere as legitimate. To say that boys are being told the truth about modern womanhood. To affirm the diagnosis. This is the Nigel Farage approach. The Reform UK approach. The Trump approach, in its various flavours. It is wrong because the diagnosis is, in fact, wrong, but it is politically powerful because it tells boys their resentment is justified and that their leaders agree with them.

The left’s distortion is harder to name, partly because I am, broadly, on the left. The left has tended to respond to manosphere radicalisation by framing it primarily as a threat to women. Which it is. But framing it primarily as a threat to women has had the unintended effect of treating the boys themselves as primarily threats rather than primarily victims of a system that is failing them. The left does not, generally, have a coherent positive story about what it means to be a young man in 2026. The left has analysis. The left has critique. The left has, in some quarters, contempt. What the left does not have, and the right does have, is a vision boys can live inside.

This is not a small problem. Stories matter. Boys need stories. If the left does not give them stories, the right will, and the right’s stories are toxic.

The progressive thinkers I find most useful in this space are, weirdly, often the older ones. bell hooks, who was already writing about masculinity in the 1990s and 2000s. Her book The Will to Change, published in 2004, is one of the few feminist books I have read that takes seriously the proposition that men, including boys, are also harmed by patriarchy and need a way out. She does not let men off. She also does not write them off. The book is the closest thing I have read to a feminist guide for raising boys.

There are contemporary thinkers doing this work too. Richard Reeves, whose book Of Boys and Men came out in 2022, has been writing seriously about the structural difficulties facing young men. He is not a feminist exactly. He is not the enemy either. He is making arguments that the feminist movement has been, in my view, too slow to absorb. We are going to need to sit with people like Reeves whether we are entirely comfortable with him or not, because the alternative is leaving the field to the manosphere.

Caitlin Moran’s book What About Men, published in 2023, is an attempt to do this from inside the feminist tent. Worth reading.

This is a genuinely hard conversation, and I want to be honest that I do not have a clean position on it. What I have is the conviction that the conversation needs to be more honest than it currently is, on all sides. The boys are being lost. They are being lost to the manosphere because the alternatives are not adequate. The work of building adequate alternatives is, partly, a feminist work. We do not get to outsource it. We do not get to declare it not our problem.

I want to add something specific about Caribbean masculinity here, because I have a particular angle on this that the wider conversation does not always include. My family is from St Lucia. The cultural specifics I am about to talk about are not uniform across the region. Different islands, different histories, different versions of the same problem.

Caribbean cultures broadly have their own complicated histories with masculinity. Dancehall has been, at points, a deeply misogynistic genre. Reggae has been, at points, deeply patriarchal. The hyper-masculine ideal of the “bad man” or the “rude boy” has roots that go back through Caribbean musical history and forward into UK drill.

What Caribbean cultures have also had, and this is important, is a tradition of women calling that masculinity to account directly. The matriarchs in Caribbean families are not subtle. The aunties are not subtle. The grandmothers are not subtle. There has, in many Caribbean households, been a continuous practice of older women publicly correcting young men’s misogyny, in a way that the wider British culture does not, in my experience, support.

There is something to learn from that. The corrective tradition matters. The willingness of older women to be loud, to be unembarrassed, to refuse the cultural scripts that say women should not interfere in young men’s development, is a model worth attending to. We have, in the British context, partly inherited a politeness that prevents older women from intervening in the radicalisation of young men around them. The Caribbean tradition has fewer such inhibitions. I am not romanticising. There is plenty wrong with Caribbean masculinity. I am pointing at a specific feature that we could, productively, learn from.

What to do if you love a boy

Most readers of this essay are not policymakers. You are mothers, sisters, aunts, teachers, friends, neighbours, partners. You have boys in your life. You probably love them. You do not know exactly what is happening on their phones. You probably suspect more than you have wanted to admit.

A few things, derived from people who do this work, including the safeguarding leads I have spoken to over the last two years.

First, do not panic. Panic does not produce useful interventions. A boy who feels that he has been lectured at is a boy who will stop talking to you. The conversation has to be sustained, not crisis-driven. You are building, over months and years, a relationship in which it is normal for him to talk to you about what he is seeing online. That is the project. The project is not a single big conversation in which you fix him. The project is a permanent ongoing dialogue.

Second, do not pretend you have not seen what you have seen. If a boy has said something that troubles you, name it. Calmly. Without escalation. “I noticed you used that phrase. Can we talk about where you got it.” Boys, especially teenage boys, are extremely sensitive to adults pretending. They will respect honest naming. They will tune out polite avoidance.

Third, watch the content yourself. This is unpleasant advice. The content is bad. You will not enjoy it. Watch it anyway. You cannot have a useful conversation with a thirteen year old about Andrew Tate if you have never watched five minutes of his actual videos. You need to know the vocabulary. You need to know the specific arguments. You need to know what he is offering and why it is appealing. You can find ten minutes a week. Do it.

Fourth, give him alternative stories. This is the harder one. Boys, like everyone, need narratives they can live inside. If you take away the manosphere narrative, you have to put something in its place. The candidates are out there. Athletes who are not toxic. Musicians who are not toxic. Writers, scientists, comedians, public figures who model a version of masculinity that is not built on dominance. Find them. Share them. Talk about them at the dinner table. This is not propaganda. This is parenting.

Fifth, support the institutions that are doing this work. Most secondary schools in this country are now dealing with manosphere content as a routine safeguarding issue. Most are under-resourced for it. Many teachers do not have any specific training. The pastoral system in your child’s school is, very often, asking for parental support. Provide it. Show up to the parents’ evening. Read the school’s policies. Ask whether the safeguarding lead has had specific training on manosphere ideology. If not, ask whether the school is planning to. Your interest, as a parent or carer, increases the likelihood that the school will prioritise it.

Sixth, vote like the radicalisation of boys is a political issue. Because it is. The funding of youth services. The funding of schools. The funding of mental health services for young men. The regulation of social media platforms. The enforcement of the Online Safety Act. The state of the BBC, which is one of the few public service broadcasters still capable of producing alternative narratives at scale. All of these are political. All of these are contested. A government that takes the radicalisation of boys seriously will resource these things. A government that does not will leave the field to the algorithm. We have a choice in this country, every few years, about which kind of government we have. Use it accordingly.

There is a body count. There has been a body count. Misogynist radicalisation has been the proximate driver of multiple high profile attacks in this country and elsewhere over the last decade.

Plymouth, August 2021. Jake Davison shot and killed five people, including a three year old child, before turning the gun on himself. He had been active in incel communities online. The inquest found that his radicalisation in those communities was a relevant factor in the attack. The case was treated by the coroner as a wake-up call. The wake-up was partial. Funding for prevention work in this space remains marginal.

Toronto, April 2018, the van attack. Alek Minassian drove a van into pedestrians, killing eleven, mostly women. He had been radicalised in incel communities. He had explicitly cited Elliot Rodger, the 2014 Isla Vista attacker, as inspiration. The case was a turning point in international understanding of incel ideology as a security threat in its own right.

These are the headline cases. There are others. Many others. The lower profile attacks that do not make international news. The school shootings in the United States that have, in their manifestos, drawn on the same content. The domestic violence escalations that, when investigated, reveal a perpetrator who had been deep in manosphere content for months or years.

The radicalisation pipeline is a security issue. It is also a public health issue. It is also a feminist issue. It is also a youth issue. It is, in some sense, the master issue, because so many other issues sit downstream of it. Treat it seriously, and many other things become tractable. Refuse to treat it seriously, and the body count grows.

I want to end with something I do not know how to fully say.

I love my brother. I love my cousins. I love my friends. I love the men in my family who have, mostly, navigated this stuff with grace. I will, in some future I cannot quite picture yet, love the boys I might one day raise or be aunt to. The work of this essay is not work I do because I hate men. It is work I do because I love them, specifically, and because I am furious at a system that is failing them as catastrophically as it is failing the women they will go on to harm.

Andrew Tate is a symptom. The pipeline is the disease. The cure is structural, and it requires every adult woman in this country who has any contact with any teenage boy to take seriously her role in the alternative narrative. Mothers. Aunts. Teachers. Coaches. Friends’ mothers. Older cousins. The neighbour. The librarian. The bus driver. The world is built of women who, in the best version of this country, refuse to let the boys get lost without a fight.

I am twenty four. The boys I am writing about are eight, twelve, fifteen years younger than me. They are not yet adults. They are not yet unsalvageable. The window is still open.

It will not stay open forever.

Reading list

On the manosphere and radicalisation

Mamié, Ribeiro, West, “Are Anti-Feminist Communities Gateways to the Far Right?” (2021)
Baker, Ging, Brandt Andresen on TikTok and manosphere pipelines, Information, Communication and Society (2024)
Hope Not Hate, annual reports on teenage boys and far right content
Centre for Countering Digital Hate, TikTok and the radicalisation of teenage boys (2024)
Laura Bates, Men Who Hate Women (2020)

On masculinity and boys

bell hooks, The Will to Change (2004)
Richard Reeves, Of Boys and Men (2022)
Caitlin Moran, What About Men (2023)
Carmichael Murphy and others on adolescent boys and structural precarity

Cultural texts worth engaging

Adolescence (Netflix, 2025)
Mr Bates vs The Post Office (ITV, 2024) for the broader pattern of institutional failure

Calls to action

Watch five minutes of manosphere content. You cannot challenge what you cannot recognise.
Read bell hooks’s The Will to Change. It is the best feminist book on raising boys I have read.
Show up at your child’s school. Ask about manosphere safeguarding. Ask whether teachers are trained.
Vote for politicians who fund youth services and online safety enforcement. This is a structural problem. It needs structural responses.
Share this essay with one man you love and one woman who is raising a boy.
Subscribe to keep reading the rest of this season.

This essay accompanies Episode 4 of Sacred Space. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Sacred Space is a feminist podcast and Substack written by Leah Garrett. New episodes Wednesdays. New essays the same day.