Sex after Patriarchy #2 - Can the manosphere be seduced into a matriarchy?

finding common ground in a system that fails us all

Welcome to Sex After Patriarchy! SAP is my new weekly column exploring womanhood after male approval stops being the organizing principle of our lives. It’s part field report, part cultural analysis, part personal confession. Behind it all is the belief that one day we’ll wake up and have insanely good sex — after patriarchy. Toni Cade Bambara once said that the role of the artist is to make the revolution irresistible, so this column is my attempt to make a truly egalitarian society so sexy that even the most conservative person on this planet might secretly want a taste of a progressive future.

Like many of you, I spent a good 1.5 hours voluntarily getting rage-baited in front of my TV this week. And for everyone who isn’t as chronically online as I am: Louis Theroux, a British documentarian, went into the depths of the manosphere to understand what in the actual fuck is going on in the world of, allow me to quote, '“extreme online influencers who are actively redefining modern masculinity”.

You can say what you want about the documentary, whether it should have focused more on the impact on women, children, or the broader societal consequences, but the point is this: it arrives at an incredibly important moment in history. Most people have heard the term “manosphere,” but very few understand just how downright deadly this corner of the internet really is. After watching it, it essentially becomes impossible to dismiss. While yes, the documentary doesn’t capture every dimension of the issue (which work of art ever did?), Theroux succeeds in making this reality visible and accessible to a wider public, while maintaining a kind of deliberate neutrality that allows their worldview to speak for themselves.

Now, we can all agree that the manosphere is problematic in a myriad of ways, but if you know me, you know I might be a raging bitch, but I love humanity way too much not to channel that rage into a more productive conversation. I stand against everything these men stand for, and I wanted to punch the TV several times just to make it stop. At one point, I even caught myself thinking, “wow, I wish I could unsee this.” Ignorance is bliss, after all. Yet, despite all the violence against women and the extremely dark, deeply disturbing opinions in this corner of the internet, I decided to watch this documentary with the intention of finding common ground.

What surprised me most wasn’t the misogynistic slurs, the violence, or the hate and not even the nagging sense that all of it feels like an exaggerated attempt to come out of the closet, but the fact that these men actually had a point. A distorted one, lacking nuance and education, but a point nonetheless. If you really listen to what they’re saying, it becomes clear that they’re pointing to real problems in modern society, ranging from a deep deprivation of community to feeling trapped in a 9–5 workweek, frustrated that this form of capitalist enslavement doesn’t even reward them with any real sense of ownership. Even the ones who have collected more capitalist accomplishments and therefore see themselves higher up in the patriarchal ladder, feel deeply frustrated by the realization that no matter how much effort they put into climbing higher, the final step remains inaccessible.

Where they take a wrong turn, of course, is in identifying the cause. Contrary to their belief, women unfortunately aren’t remotely responsible for any of the problems they’re pointing to. If anything, I’d argue that most men who label themselves as anti-feminist are, in reality, reacting to class inequality —they’ve simply been taught to misidentify it. Men complaining about getting drafted into the army, because of feminism. Men complaining about having it harder in the workforce, because of feminism. Men complaining about not being able to afford a family, a house, a life that feels stable, because of feminism. Honey, you’re not being sent to war because of women who want equal rights, you’re being sent by other men. More precisely, men who are richer and more powerful than you are. You’re not having a harder time finding your place in the workforce, because of feminism, but because wealth is concentrating at the top. Oh, and because we’re living in a world where a single man called Elon Musk is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire. And lastly, you can’t afford a family, a house, or anything that feels stable—not because women gained rights, but because the same men who send you to war would rather tax the shit out of you than people like Elon Musk and his squad of billionaire tech bros.

Feminism isn’t any sort of root cause, but merely an easy scapegoat for their frustration with the fact that the version of masculinity they were promised (provider, protector, head of the household, alpha bro) was always contingent on access to resources that are now increasingly out of reach. Instead of putting one and one together and questioning the system that made those promises in the first place, it’s certainly easier to blame feminism for “taking something away” than to confront the possibility that what they were offered was never guaranteed to begin with. The ladder they’ve been encouraged to climb to dizzying heights was already broken before they even set foot on it. So yes, it sure as hell fells easier to direct the anger sideways instead of upwards, but as long as that’s where it goes, the solutions will remain just as misdirected.

So what role do women and children actually play in all of this?

Women and children play an essential role in the architecture of the manosphere. Of course not as participants with agency (I mean, come on, that would be asking for too much) but as symbols that give the entire system meaning. Women function as both reward and threat, something to be either obtained, or blamed. Vagina present = man’s status validated. Vagina absent = man’s victimhood validated. Either way, Vagina = validation. Case closed.

Children, on the other hand, operate as justification. They are invoked to moralize decisions that would otherwise be indefensible. The promise of “doing it for my future family” becomes a way to rationalize exploitation, misogyny, racism, homophobia, physical violence and an ongoing list of other atrocities. A common sentiment is: yeah, I know what I’m doing is fucked up, but at least MY children will never have to be OnlyFans models. Now this is convenient because it surely helps reframe pure self-interest as some sort of virtuous responsibility. Look at me!!! I may be radicalizing and ripping off an entire generation of young men by selling them crypto shit and promoting hatred toward half the world’s population, but I’m doing it for my unborn children!!! Thank God we still have men thinking about the future with such depth.

It’s probably unethical of me to even admit this, but I even found an inch of inspiration in their sheer self absorption, because I started to wonder what the world would look like if women were to walk around life with even a scratch of their audacity. It’s lowkey a shame the closest equivalent to the manosphere we have is women in aprons tending to their chicken. Anyways, apart from their obsession with giving their (yet to be born) children a good life, there is one more essential driving force and that is, of fucking course: IMPRESSING OTHER MEN. Male friends, male strangers, male neighbors, male followers, and a tale as old as time, their own fathers whose absence is somewhat of the core driver behind all of their shenanigans.

People think the irony is that they crave women while promoting violence against them, but that’s not even the peak contradiction. In this world, women are barely even a pit stop. They’re a cute little accessory, a bag charm, picked up along the way in a much longer marathon for male approval. The manosphere has to be the only place on earth where “straight” men perform straight-sex in order to impress “straight” men. May I suggest just… fucking each other? Maybe the entire manosphere will evaporate into air the day these men realize there’s an app called Grindr they can simply download in order to get validated by other men without radicalizing an entire generation of boys into hating the very gender that would be the first to welcome them with open arms into the LGBTQIA+ community.

My first instinct was to see the women who excelled at playing the exemplary bag charm as traitors to all women, because this entire ecosystem of male violence would be much harder to sustain without women playing along. However, I found equal parts solace and rage in the realization that most of these women feel systematically forced into this role as a way to survive in this capitalist hellscape. It may look like choice-feminism on the surface, but it’s glaring that it’s mostly strategy. In the first five minutes of the documentary, when Louis Theroux asks the woman hanging out with HSTikkyTokky what she likes about him, she bluntly answers: “his money.” I mean, it’s kind of hard to find anything else to like, or even tolerate, about these men, so I guess… get that bag, girl?

By now, we can sum up that the manosphere is essentially a self-sustaining ecosystem in which men monetize male frustration by rage-baiting other men into buying products, in order to receive validation within the same male hierarchy. Funnnn.

Now, how do we turn these men into allies in the fight for a matriarchal future?

The common ground is already there: these men hate the current system, or to eloquently put it in their words “the matrix.” I think I’ve made my point very clear by now that I’m morally standing against all of their views, but at some point, we’re going to have to swallow our pride on both sides and start fighting with each other instead of against each other. Like already mentioned, they’re not entirely wrong about everything that is wrong with the world we’re living in, they’re mostly wrong about who to blame. I hate to admit it, but their frustration and sense of betrayal is real. They were promised a version of life that doesn’t fucking exist, and instead of being given the tools to process that loss, they were handed an ideology that redirects their anger toward women.