Abstract
For many years, it seemed that a more progressive political subjectivity was, if not hegemonic, then at least increasingly popular among boys and young men in many Western societies. Young men were significantly more supportive of gender equality and women’s rights compared to older men (Tinklin et al., 2005) and often voted for more progressive parties than older generations (Rekker, 2024). Young men also participated in the diversification of gender and sexual identities (Allen et al., 2021), even demonstrating increased intimacy with other young heterosexual men (McCormack, 2012).
In recent years, however, there appears to have been a significant shift. Media reports document a widening gender gap in both attitudes towards feminism and gender equality (Cox, 2024) and in voting behaviour among young men and women across numerous Western countries, where young men have increasingly gravitated towards the far right, while young women have moved further left (Berger, 2024; Parker & Volk, 2025). However, research suggests that patterns and magnitude of these changes vary across different national contexts. While many countries maintain relatively stable gender differences in voting patterns, others have experienced a widening of this gap; the Nordic countries in particular exemplify this latter trend (Nennstiel & Hudde, 2025). Studies documenting attitudes towards gender equality and women’s rights indicate that it is particularly young men in high-unemployment regions that are most negative about these issues and are particularly susceptible to feeling threatened by gender change, perceiving a competition between the sexes that could impact their future opportunities (Off et al., 2022). While acknowledging national and regional variations and that young women’s leftward political migration is a contributing factor to the gender gap, evidence still suggests distinct patterns among young men today. They are more likely than young women and older generations of men to vote for far-right parties (Abou-Chadi, 2024; Milosav et al., 2025; van der Brug et al., 2025), and they show greater scepticism towards gender equality compared to both young women and older generations of men (Moon & Kim, 2024; Off et al., 2025).
Far-right parties and politicians across several Western societies have leveraged this gender gap to attract young male voters. This is especially evident with Donald Trump, who has drawn on content from the ‘manosphere’—a loosely connected network rooted in men’s rights activism and popular among young men (Ging, 2019; Johanssen, 2021). For example, during the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump referenced an internet meme called ‘Pepe the Frog’, originally created by cartoonist Matt Furie, by tweeting a ‘Trump-Pepe’. The Pepe meme was initially used in the manosphere to express both melancholy and resentment towards political correctness and ‘woke’ culture, but soon evolved into a far-right symbol frequently accompanied by racist and antisemitic captions. The increased popularity of the controversial cartoon frog during the presidential campaign led young manosphere activists to claim they had ‘memed’ Trump into office (Beran, 2019). While such claims may be exaggerated, what started as a fringe internet subculture among young men has indeed entered the mainstream, not only gaining massive popularity on platforms like TikTok but also garnering support from political leaders (Boutilier, 2022).
To understand the current historical conjuncture—marked by a growing number of young men adopting antifeminist and far-right ideologies—we must examine how manosphere discourses are evolving and spreading across both online and offline spaces. This special issue therefore centres on young men’s political understanding of gender and sexual relations, focusing on how they adopt and negotiate traditional gender identities in and beyond the manosphere. In the following, we present a brief overview of the manosphere’s history and central ideas. To understand what we might call a neoconservative turn among boys and young men, we also discuss the social, political, economic and ideological contradictions in Western societies that have enabled the manosphere’s misogynist and often racist discourse to become mainstream.
The Emergence of the Manosphere
The term ‘manosphere’ was coined in 2009, but the phenomenon traces back to the late 1990s and early 2000s when men’s rights activists and so-called ‘pick-up artists’ started to create meeting places online. The latter self-proclaimed dating coaches offer tips and courses targeting young men who feel unsuccessful in dating, promising to help them develop confidence and assertiveness with women (O’Neill, 2018). Disappointed in their low success rate, some young men gathered in other online forums where they directed their hate at the seduction community, but soon also at women. These ‘incels’ (‘involuntary celibates’) have perhaps become the most infamous manosphere group because of their celebration of mass shootings of women (Hoffman et al., 2020).
Over the years, the manosphere has consolidated through different online forums with increasingly well-defined groups and identities. While there are many differences between groups, they commonly adhere to a collection of antifeminist beliefs supporting male supremacy, drawing selectively on popularized forms of evolutionary psychology, claims that sexual difference is essential and that sexual relations are entirely governed by a market logic (Van Valkenburgh, 2021). Whereas most groups in the manosphere centre on the sexual market, others focus their grievances on men’s financial ties to women, urging men to distance themselves from women and a society they see as corrupted by feminism (Gottzén, 2025a). In recent years, the manosphere has shown significant ideological overlap with the far right (Bjork-James, 2020; Roose & Cook, 2025), leading scholars to argue that antifeminism and misogyny can reinforce racism and serve as a pathway to far-right radicalization (Mamié et al., 2021).
At the same time, manospheric discourse has become increasingly mainstream (Gerrand et al., 2025). A striking example is former reality TV contestant and MMA fighter Andrew Tate, who became TikTok’s top influencer and Google’s most searched person in 2022. Teachers soon reported that boys and young men were repeating his misogynistic messages, drawing on manosphere content and displaying sexist behaviour towards girls at school (Haslop et al., 2024; Wescott et al., 2024). While exceptionally popular, Tate is just one of many ‘manfluencers’ who present themselves as high-status ‘alpha’ men, combining advice about fitness, health, self-improvement and wealth building with misogyny and antifeminism—partly as a provocative tool for attracting media attention. The mainstreaming of the manosphere cannot be attributed to manfluencers alone as (online) misogyny has long been used by young men to construct masculine identities, for instance, through trolling practices used to challenge teachers and others (Areschoug, 2022; Condis, 2018). A recent development is that the manosphere has evolved beyond its original status as primarily a white, male and Western phenomenon. Now, boys and young men from diverse ethnicities and regions worldwide are involved in these online communities (Gerrand et al., 2025; Khosravi Ooryad, 2023; Uzun & Tiryaki, 2024).
A key question is whether the manosphere is driving the rise in masculinist discourses or whether the manosphere is instead converging with other long-standing masculinist ideologies. For instance, two recurrent themes within the manosphere—male identity politics and remasculinization—have been identified in both far-right and Jihadist extremism (Gottzén, 2025b; Jensen & Larsen, 2021), as well as in mainstream culture and media (Jeffords, 1989; Kelly, 2020) and in education (Lingard et al., 2012). Male identity politics portray men as victims whose rights are undermined by society, framing male vulnerability as a justification for resentment towards women, feminists and sexual and ethnic minorities (Gottzén, 2025a). The preoccupation with the victimized status of men may seem contradictory given that normative masculinity in the West has been linked to strength, self-reliance and independence—ideals that the manosphere also celebrates. A key paradox emerges: male identity politics presents masculinity as both fundamental and powerful, yet simultaneously fragile and under threat (Kelly, 2020). This contradiction fuels the call for remasculinization—the idea of restoring allegedly lost masculine traits and social positions from an idealized past when ‘men were men’. Remasculinization serves at least two purposes: it promises individual young men a way to reclaim their manhood while also functioning as a broader political strategy to restore male privilege in society (Gottzén, 2025b). Importantly, this quest for restored masculinity reflects a broader nostalgic political trend—one that yearns back for an idealized past rather than envisions a utopian future. Zygmunt Bauman (2017) links this trend to growing societal instability, arguing that in a world marked by uncertainty, people are drawn to the promise of firm foundations. For some young men, traditional gender roles and beliefs about essential masculinity can provide such an anchor.
Political and Economic Conditions
Bauman’s (2017) analysis suggests that to understand the current neoconservative turn, the emergence of the manosphere and the masculinist discourse among young men in Western societies, we need to understand wider cultural changes as well as socio-economic ones. While young masculinity has long been claimed to be in crisis (Kimmel, 1987), being a young man today nevertheless presents unique challenges. As youth studies scholars have demonstrated (Furlong & Cartmel, 1997), compared to previous generations, young people now face more challenging and delayed transitions to adulthood. Neoliberalism, deindustrialization, austerity politics and changes in the labour market have contributed to job insecurity and precarity, while economic, social and geographical circumstances are increasingly seen as the responsibility of individual youth (Kelly, 2003). These societal changes, coupled with women’s emancipation in the labour market, present particular challenges for young men as they have eroded the male breadwinner model, challenged men’s cultural and social privilege, and made traditional, ‘proper’ adult masculinity ideals less attainable. These shifts have reinforced inequalities based on race, class and geographic position, since traditional blue-collar jobs are no longer as readily available (McDowell, 2011; Roberts, 2018). Young men from middle- class backgrounds are also affected, as higher education no longer guarantees career-oriented employment and a middle-class position (Standing, 2011). While Wendy Brown (2019) has noted that ‘masculinity provides limited protection against the displacements and losses that forty years of neoliberalism have yielded for the working and middle classes’ (p. 175), this economic instability seems to make young men particularly susceptible to manosphere rhetoric, claiming to offer solutions to the challenges that boys and young men experience (Botto & Gottzén, 2024). But instead of critiquing neoliberal economic policies, the objectification of the male body or the marketization of intimate relationships, the manosphere’s solutions actually reproduce neoliberal logics—particularly its individualizing doctrine—while redirecting young men’s resentment towards various scapegoats.
This Volume
Against this backdrop of social and gender change, this special issue examines young men’s political subjectivities in and beyond the manosphere. Here, political subjectivities are understood not as fixed positions that simply mirror values or attitudes of individuals, but as formations shaped through—and often in opposition to—other identity categories and cultural expressions (Areschoug, 2022). Recognizing political subjectivities as unfolding within specific conjunctures does not diminish young people’s political agency or responsibility but underscores how power dynamics in everyday life influence young men’s capacity to adopt or express different political identities.
For instance, in his article, Jan Christoffer Andersen analyses incels as a subculture. Drawing on interviews with young men and theories from youth cultural studies, he explores identification processes and trajectories among self-identified incels. Andersen demonstrates that incel attachments are not fixed; rather, like other cultural and political engagements, they can vary in intensity over time. In a similar vein, Evelina Johansson Wilén sheds light on the work involved in achieving ‘the incel standpoint’ and constructing the incel identity as marginalized. Johansson Wilén argues that incels largely embrace vulnerability and, similar to some feminist and other social justice movements, use personal experiences of victimhood to legitimize themselves as privileged subjects of knowledge.
As mentioned above, the manosphere can no longer be seen as a fringe phenomenon but serves as an accessible discourse that young heterosexual men draw upon in everyday life. In their article about men’s mental health in Finland, Inka Tähkä and Kristiina Brunila identify such misogynist discourse both in anonymous survey data and in a popular online forum. They argue that young men today balance traditional masculinity—which disassociates men with vulnerability and inhibits them from seeking help—while positioning themselves as victims of a healthcare system they claim favours women’s access to care. The proliferation of manosphere discourse is also evident in Betsy Milne, Idil Cambazoglu, Craig Haslop and Jessica Ringrose’s methodological article dealing with dilemmas in researching boys’ views on gender equality, (anti)feminism and manfluencers. The authors reflect on the difficulties involved in ethically navigating young men’s political subjectivities, for instance, whether to speak up or to stay ‘neutral’ and, hence, silent in the event of misinformation and discriminatory language.
While the manosphere’s antifeminism, misogyny and—at times—racism are readily accessible to young men, and young men’s political subjectivities currently appear to drift towards the (far) right, this is not the complete picture. Contradictory tendencies can be observed as many young men embrace gender equality, mutual intimacy and progressive politics. The final two articles of the special issue illustrate this. In their contribution, Riikka Prattes, Steven Roberts and Karla Elliott explore how young men working in the Australian Health Care and Social Assistance Sector construct ‘caring’ political subjectivities. Unlike other forms of contemporary masculinity, these underprivileged young men did not appear to feel threatened by increased gender equality. While still navigating hegemonic ideals, they redefine care as gender-neutral and contribute to the construction of more progressive masculinities. Similarly, in their study on young Muslim migrant men in Sweden, Anna Baral and Åsa Trulsson illustrate how men navigate racializing discourses and conflicting ideals of intimacy. Rejecting stereotypical portrayals as either villains or victims, they craft alternative moral selves, emerging as political subjects whose positions, like those of others, are inherently tentative. What makes these two articles particularly interesting is how progressive political subjectivities are enacted by relatively marginalized young men—young men who have, in many ways, lost the most from neoliberal economic policies.
As noted in our introduction to the articles, this special issue lacks diverse representation of young men’s political subjectivities across many contexts and topics. The original call for papers was in fact broader, specifically requesting submissions on young trans men and female masculinities, but most submitted papers focused on the manosphere and young heterosexual men’s conservative political attitudes. This partly reflects current research trends, as studies on the manosphere—particularly incels—have rapidly proliferated in recent years, with the spread of misogynist and racist discourses among boys and young men becoming a key concern for many researchers and policymakers. However, this trend may also indicate that many aspects of young men’s lives and experiences are not recognized as political issues by youth studies scholars.
Although they cannot showcase the full range of contexts and issues, the articles of this special issue provide important case studies of how young men’s political subjectivities—whether progressive or reactionary—take shape in specific social and political contexts. Far-right politicians may increasingly draw on the language and worldview of the manosphere, but it is equally important to recognize that political decisions and policies shape the conditions in which the masculinities and political subjectivities of young men take form. The manosphere is not merely a matter of discourse and rhetoric, online or increasingly offline, but reflects how boys and young men interpret their experiences within a complex and deeply unequal world.