2
Alienated Young Men

Marriage is dead. Divorce means you're screwed for life. Women have given up on monogamy, which makes them uninteresting to us for any serious relationship or raising a family. That's just the way it is. Even if we take the risk, chances are the kids won't be ours. In France, we even have to pay for the kids a wife has through adulterous affairs.

In school, boys are screwed over time and again. Schools are engineered for women. In the US, they force-feed boys Ritalin like Skittles to shut them up. And while girls are favoured to fulfil quotas, men are slipping into distant second place.

Nobody in my generation believes they're going to get a meaningful retirement. We have a third or a quarter of the wealth previous generations had, and everyone's fleeing to higher education to stave off unemployment and poverty because there are no jobs.

All that wouldn't be so bad if we could at least dull the pain with girls. But we're treated like paedophiles and potential rapists just for showing interest.

These are the words of Rupert, a young German video game enthusiast, whom right-wing provocateur, and now peddler of cheap religious items online, Milo Yiannopoulos claimed to have gotten to know when he wrote an extraordinarily popular article on Manosphere ideas for Breitbart news (Yiannopoulos, 2014). While expressed over a decade ago, Rupert's words could easily be repeated by most Manosphere men today. Rupert encapsulates a series of complaints that dominate the community, ranging from issues with girls, to treatment at school and a sense of futility about his future.

You picked up this book called The Male Complaint, so the first question I have to ask is, what do men actually have to complain about? Should we take these complaints seriously, or are they the rantings of a privileged few who are angry that they've lost power they once had?

I'm not the first person to ask this question - in fact, in his book Angry White Men, sociologist Michael Kimmel asks the same question in this mocking way - 'Middle- and upper-middle-class, white, middle-aged men - what could they possibly have to complain about?' (Kimmel, 2017: 137). Kimmel is being dismissive of the complaints of men in the West. He argues these complaints can be attributed to what he calls 'aggrieved entitlement', i.e., that men are aggrieved because the wealth and power they are entitled to are being taken away from them. There is some truth to this argument, as we'll see. However, the complaints of these men have much deeper roots that this simple explanation.

So, let's take a proper look at the complaints of men in the Manosphere. What are these men complaining about, where do these complaints stem from, and why do they end up being directed at women and feminism? I strongly believe that we should take these complaints seriously, even if we don't agree with all of them, nor who men blame for their problems or the often-violent direction they can take them in.

Are things really that bad for men?

What do men have to complain about? When asked this question, many Manosphere men will point to a range of areas where men are now starting to fall behind, either compared to their previous status, or in comparison to women. Even some high-profile feminists are starting to notice these statistics. Caitlin Moran, for example, asks this question in her book, What About Men? She quotes a middle-class boy who surprised her with a range of issues men are facing. 'I've got some stats for you', the boy apparently said, then going on to say:

Boys underachieve at school, compared with girls. Boys are more likely to be excluded from school. Boys are less likely to go into further education. Boys are more likely to be prescribed medication for ADHD/disruptive behaviour. Boys are more likely to become addicted: to drugs, alcohol, pornography. Men make up the majority of gang members. Men are the majority of the homeless. Men make up the majority of suicides. Men make up the majority of people who are murdered. Men make up the majority of the prison population. Men are the majority of the unemployed. Men are the majority of those who die at work. Men are the majority of those who die in wars. Men are the majority of those who lose custody of their children in divorce cases. (Moran, 2023)

While you may not trust the rantings of a teenage boy in most Western countries, these stats are correct. Boys, for example, are certainly doing worse at school than girls, across all indicators. They have lower test scores, are less likely to graduate from high school, are less likely to go on to university, are disciplined more heavily and are more likely to be diagnosed with learning disabilities (Abrams, 2023). Men are also far more likely to commit suicide. Data from England and Wales in 2019 found that suicide rates amongst men had hit their highest point since the year 2000, with 16.9 men killing themselves by suicide per 100,000 population (Butler, 2020). This was well above the rate for women, which was at 5.3 per 100,000 people. Such high stats are similar in other Western countries. Men are also massively over-represented in our prison population. In the United States in 2022, for example, there were 1,142, 359 men in prison, compared to 87,784 women (Statista, 2022). Of course, this is largely because men commit more crime than women. Yet, given the significant negative impact prison has on people's lives, mass incarceration like this is certainly something we should be worried about.

Manosphere men, alongside many other thinkers, point to these stats as evidence of what they call a 'crisis of masculinity'. People have been discussing this crisis since the 1980s, arguing that men and boys are facing specific challenges resulting in poor social and economic outcomes (Edley, 2017). Manosphere men blame this 'crisis' on attacks on men, while others point to the impacts that a strict adherence to masculinity has on men's ability to live and thrive in the modern world. There is reason to believe that such a crisis exists, and that it is right for men to be complaining about these issues. Why should men continue to die in wars, and face increasingly complex mental health problems, including suicide? If boys are failing at school, surely we need to address it. It is also clear we should continue to be tackling deaths at work, no matter the gender of who is dying. In this way, Manosphere men are right: there are issues that really need to be dealt with.

If only it was this simple, we could stop here, leaving you to some lighter reading. However, these statistics, and the concept of a crisis in masculinity, cannot really explain what is going on with men, and in turn the rise of the Manosphere. To start off with, these statistics only look at one side of the ledger, and certainly can't be used to claim that men are now the oppressed gender. While boys are struggling at school, for example, they often still leave school and end up taking most leadership positions in society, including in politics, business, science and more. Men earn more as well, with the wage gap refusing to budge. As I've already highlighted, men make up the largest proportion of the prison population because they commit a lot of crimes, in particular violence, often targeted at women (and at men as well). While things have changed, men still hold significant power in our society.

In addition, many of these statistics are not new, and in different circumstances Manosphere men often push for society to keep the structures that make these statistics happen. Men have always been the ones who have gone to war, and if anything, that is changing now as women have been allowed to participate in combat. Despite complaining about dying at war, Manosphere men also rail against these changes. Many Manosphere men point to the honour of going to war as part of what it means to be a man and are now complaining about women joining the forces. It also makes sense that men have historically been the majority of people who have died at work, primarily because men have dominated workspaces, and continue to dominate high-risk workplaces where deaths are more likely to occur. Once again, while complaining about dying at work, Manosphere men are also likely to complain about women entering these workplaces (and not complain about the bosses who put them in such dangerous positions). So, even though these statistics make for good complaint, it is not possible to link these stats to the growth of the Manosphere. While men have faced these issues for decades, the Manosphere and growing complaints about men's 'oppression' are only recent. Something else must be going on.

Possibly most importantly, none of these statistics explain why the Manosphere turns their anger towards feminism. Many feminists are also raising alarm at these statistics and have done so for many years. Feminists have rightly pointed out that these statistics are driven, at least in part, by strict codes of masculinity and femininity - our sexist society hurts men as well as women. This was also the claim of the early men's liberation movement, who aligned with feminists, before a famous split in the 1990s and 2000s (Coston and Kimmel, 2013). Many men also direct such complaints into other movements - joining unions to fight against unsafe workplaces, mental health support groups to tackle suicide rates, and the peace movement to resist war. The way...