The Product Is Inadequacy: What BIT and CARE Teams Should Know About the Manosphere

There is a lot of money to be made convincing young men that something is wrong with them. The trick isn't necessarily convincing them that they are hopeless. It may be more profitable to convince them they are almost there. A little more muscular. A little richer. Better looking. More dominant. Better with women. More respected. There is always someone online willing to sell them the thing that will finally get them there. A recent WIRED article, “The Manosphere Isn't a Movement. It's a Multibillion-Dollar Grievance Industry,” looks at research from Reset Tech and Equimundo suggesting that we should think about the online manosphere as something more than an ideological movement. It is also an industry, one in which male insecurity, loneliness, anger, and dissatisfaction can be converted into attention, followers, subscriptions, products, and money.

This article isn't really about incels. It's about a much larger online ecosystem that has learned how to monetize insecurity. The incel community is one expression of that ecosystem, but the underlying business model extends far beyond it. Understanding that distinction matters for anyone working in behavioral intervention, threat assessment, or student support.

Several years ago, Brian Van Brunt and I were looking at the growing incel community while writing Understanding and Treating Incels: Case Studies, Guidance, and Treatment of Violence Risk in the Involuntary Celibate Community. We were trying to understand how some young men moved from loneliness and rejection toward increasingly hardened beliefs about women, themselves, and the world around them. We spent a good deal of time looking at technology, pornography, online communities, and the ways people could be pulled deeper into an ideology that offered both an explanation for their problems and a group of people who seemed to understand them.

Looking back at that work now, alongside what WIRED is describing, I've been thinking about another part of the equation. What happens when there is money to be made from making sure some of these men never find their way back out?

We've Seen This Pattern Before

When Brian and I wrote about incels, we tried to make a distinction that continues to be important. Being lonely doesn't make someone dangerous. Neither does struggling with dating, watching manosphere content, expressing frustration with women, or spending too much time online. There isn't a straight line from troubling online content to violence.

What concerned us was what sometimes happened over time. Someone might encounter incel ideas and simply explore them. The ideas might begin to resonate. He may start talking with others who share them, connect with online communities, actively seek additional information, and eventually reach a point where competing explanations are routinely dismissed.

The internet can provide community, language, explanations, and reinforcement. For someone who already feels ignored or unsuccessful, finding a group of people saying, essentially, “we understand why you feel this way,” can be incredibly powerful. It can also give someone a vocabulary for experiences he previously didn't know how to describe.

And some of those experiences are real. Young men can be lonely. Some are struggling academically or economically. Some are having trouble dating. Pornography and social media have changed how young people encounter sex, bodies, relationships, and status. We don't have to accept the explanations offered by the manosphere to acknowledge that the underlying experiences may be genuine.

Helen Lewis gets at some of this in her recent Atlantic cover story, “The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet.” Lewis examines what she calls “masculinism,” a much broader anti-feminist ecosystem that includes political and religious figures alongside influencers and online personalities. Some of these are willing to talk directly about male dissatisfaction when others aren't. The problem is where some of those conversations eventually go.

A young man saying that he is lonely is describing an experience. If he comes to believe that women, feminism, or some other group is responsible for his loneliness, he has found an explanation. If that explanation hardens into the belief that he has been deliberately harmed, cheated, humiliated, or denied something he was entitled to have, we are getting closer to grievance. The original pain doesn't have to be manufactured. Someone only has to explain it, redirect it, and provide a place where that explanation gets reinforced.

The Manosphere's Business Model Is Inadequacy

One part of our earlier work looks particularly interesting now. We described red-pill efforts to increase perceived value through physical exercise, cosmetic changes, wealth, and status, based on the assumption that changing those things could increase a man's worth and his ability to attract women.

There is now an enormous marketplace surrounding many of those same insecurities. Looksmaxxing, fitness influencers, dating coaches, masculinity gurus, supplements, crypto, exclusive communities, courses promising wealth or sexual success, programs explaining how to become an alpha or finally understand what women really want. WIRED describes how young men searching for advice about dating, fitness, or money can be routed toward paid communities, coaching programs, supplements, and financial schemes. The platforms have their own incentives to keep people watching.

None of this means there is something troubling about a young man wanting to exercise, dress better, earn money, or become more confident. Some of that sounds like a pretty decent Saturday. It becomes more concerning when the underlying message is that he remains inadequate as he is, and the person delivering that message happens to have something to sell him.

It's a sustainable business model. If the customer becomes comfortable with himself, develops good friendships, finds meaningful work, learns to handle rejection without seeing it as a judgment of his worth, and develops healthier relationships, he may stop needing the person who has been explaining his inadequacy to him.

The product may look like masculinity, dating advice, fitness, wealth, or belonging. What keeps the customer coming back is inadequacy.

When Inadequacy Becomes Grievance

This is where I start thinking about BIT/CARE work. A young man struggling with dating can be told that feminism destroyed relationships. Someone insecure about his appearance can be told that his genetics have doomed him. A student struggling socially can learn that women only want a particular kind of man. Personal disappointment acquires a larger explanation, and sometimes that explanation includes someone to blame.

Brian and I saw parts of that process in the more extreme population we were studying. Rejection and perceived inadequacy could interact with isolation, hopelessness, grievance, online reinforcement, and increasingly hardened thinking. Negative experiences accumulated. Some individuals became angrier and spent more time in online groups populated by people who understood those experiences in much the same way. The newer grievance-industry argument adds money to that equation.

For BIT/CARE teams, though, I don't think the useful question is whether a student follows the wrong influencer. Consider what the case might look like on campus. A student spends hours consuming looksmaxxing or manosphere content. That alone isn't a BIT referral, and neither is complaining about dating or saying something stupid about women. But perhaps his roommate reports that he rarely leaves the room. A professor notices that he has stopped attending class. His friendships have disappeared. He increasingly talks about women, genetics, attractiveness, status, and unfairness. He describes himself as fundamentally undesirable. His academic performance collapses. He becomes fixated on people who have rejected or humiliated him, and the language he uses to explain what is happening becomes increasingly rigid.

Eventually, someone hears something that sounds like a threat. If that's the first moment the institution becomes interested, quite a bit has already happened. Our work on incels emphasized that individual risk indicators shouldn't be interpreted in isolation. They are more like puzzle pieces, with their significance changing as they accumulate and interact with one another. That principle applies well beyond incels or the manosphere. I also don't think the team's first question automatically needs to be whether the student is dangerous. Earlier in the process, I'm much more interested in what is happening to him and how he has come to understand it.

Don't Debate the Algorithm

There is a temptation, particularly when the beliefs are offensive, to correct them immediately. Sit across from a student immersed in this world and tell him everything he believes about women is wrong, though, and there is a decent chance the conversation is over. The online community may have already prepared him for your disagreement. Of course the university doesn't understand men. Of course counselors disagree. Of course administrators think this way. You may find yourself becoming evidence for an argument you were trying to challenge.

That doesn't mean ignoring misogyny, harassment, threats, or behavior that violates policy. Accountability still matters. But we can take someone's distress seriously without accepting the explanation he has built around it. This is where some fairly ordinary questions can tell us quite a bit. When did things start feeling this way? What happened? What are you hoping will change? Where did you first encounter these ideas? Who do you talk to when things are going badly? What does being a successful man look like to you? What has happened when you've tried to change things?

In the book, we argued that effective intervention requires understanding an individual's story. People organize experiences through stories and use those stories to explain what has happened to them. Those stories can change, but it is difficult to help someone reconsider a story if we haven't bothered to understand why it made sense to him in the first place. We don't need to win an argument with the internet. Understanding why the student found the argument persuasive is probably more useful.

Competing With the Grievance Industry

The grievance industry is very good at finding young men who feel invisible. BIT/CARE teams should probably be pretty good at finding them too, although what happens after we find them should look very different. Online grievance communities can offer something compelling to someone who is struggling. Other people understand what is happening to you. There is a reason your life feels this way. There are people responsible for it. There is also a community waiting for you.

A good intervention begins somewhere else. Something seems to be going badly. Someone noticed. We should probably figure out what is happening. That lines up remarkably well with what Brian and I identified as stabilizing influences in our earlier work: social and family support, empathy, school and work engagement, positive self-esteem, problem solving, resilience, healthy relationships, nonviolent outlets, positive masculinity, and affirmative sexuality. We also described positive masculinity as allowing for multiple ways of being a man while building self-worth and value, rather than defining masculinity primarily through dominance, sexual success, status, or control.

Higher education has plenty of infrastructure that can support those things. Counseling centers, recreation programs, student organizations, residence life, faculty mentors, career services, student affairs professionals, academic support, case managers, and BIT/CARE teams are already there. Of course, having a counseling center and a student organization listed on a website isn't quite the same thing as having somewhere you feel you belong.

Near the beginning of our book, Brian and I wrote about something easily lost amid the anger and ugliness associated with these communities. Underneath much of it was a very ordinary human desire to be loved, valued, and seen as a person with worth. That doesn't excuse misogyny, harassment, or violence. It does help explain why an ideology built around grievance can be attractive to someone who feels as though he has failed at becoming the man he was supposed to become. Somebody may now also be making money from making sure he continues to feel that way.

For BITCARE teams, there is an opportunity well before we get to dangerousness. Students can become increasingly isolated, hopeless, grievance-oriented, and disconnected while there is still plenty of room to do something useful. The manosphere figured out that young men are looking for answers about relationships, status, sex, money, belonging, and what it means to be a man. It also figured out that many of them will listen to someone who takes those questions seriously. We may have left a fair amount of that territory open. Other people moved in, and some discovered there was a fortune to be made convincing young men they would never quite be enough.