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What started with a YouTube search for relationship advice after rejection quickly took Jefferson Nguyen to a destination he did not intend to visit.
He was seeking answers about what young women want young men to be, and how to talk to them. What he discovered turned him into a young man even his loving sister found disturbing.
“When you start getting these feelings as a young man of romance and attraction, and then being rejected, it kind of leads you to a viewpoint of you are not good enough,” says Nguyen, now in his mid-20s. “It becomes an issue of your self-worth.”
His benign Googling proved a one-way trip into the world of so-called manosphere influencers who insisted “what girls want is for you to be aggressive; invalidate their boundaries”.
Nguyen began hitting the gym and started spouting the philosophy at home.
“My sister overheard me. She pulled me aside as I said all the [influencer] talking points, and showed a lot of tough love. She told me, ‘You are a pretty big idiot – no girl will actually talk to you if you talk like that to her,’” he says.
“She knew a lot of it was social: I was worried about what other people would think about me if I didn’t do this stuff. She pulled the card on me of, ‘What will people think about you if you do this stuff?’”
As parents with Netflix subscriptions reel at Inside the Manosphere, a new documentary from British journalist Louis Theroux revealing what the latest generation of manosphere content creators are telling young male followers, Nguyen describes what can happen as a form of radicalisation.
He was able to “de-radicalise” after realising content he was seeing left him feeling worse. “It just drags you deeper into it; you get more depressed by following their teachings, and you get more sad,” he says. “Then you seek more help from them and get more depressed: it’s a cycle.”
At the time, Nguyen was a few years older than the 13-year-old main character from Netflix global hit Adolescence, which dramatised the downfall of a teen boy so heavily influenced by misogynistic internet culture that when a classmate rejects him, he commits life-changing violence without remorse.
Nguyen thinks himself lucky he became disillusioned before he went into the early manosphere’s darkest territory. A turning point was encountering an incel – short for involuntarily celibate – influencer baiting men of Asian ancestry.
“I saw a little bit of his manifesto … like white girls see Asian men as subhuman and things like that, and people were praising him,” he says. “It gave me a jolt of, ‘Oh, I am not interested in these guys’, and then my sister came along.”
New research by the Australian Institute of Criminology into how young men disengage from incel communities finds they are most likely to join when aged 15 to 17 and stay for about 4½ years.
Respondents to the institute’s survey reported joining the communities “when struggling with isolation, rejection, or declining mental health” and seeking forums offering support.
But such involvement frequently deepened a sense of hopelessness and loneliness, says report co-author and institute senior research analyst Laura Doherty. Reasons men left forums included “growing dissatisfaction with the violence and nihilism perpetuated in these cultures”, Doherty said.
“What motivated men to disengage also centred on the language used about women, and a growing disconnect with the world those communities portrayed and the world they were experiencing in their day-to-day lives.”
The most critical trigger was that the forums were not delivering what they were promising, she said.
Forming healthy social connections through friendships, education, hobbies, work or relationships with women helped men choose to disengage with forums, at which point many developed more positive attitudes to women.
“Others showed limited attitudinal change, underscoring the need for targeted support,” the researchers found.
Speaking at the No to Violence national conference last week, Monash University researcher Dr Stephanie Wescott said legitimate content about fitness for young men was mixed with highly harmful content by manosphere creators, and attitudes that could lead to violence – such as that women need to be compliant and serve men – were prevalent.
Wescott and Australia’s National Research Organisation for Women’s Safety launched a manosphere practical guide for schools, to help teachers and communities understand risks and create responses.
“What we know from teachers is that they’re hearing things from boys that they’ve never heard to this extent before, they’re seeing [boys’ attitudes] change dramatically over a few years,” said Wescott, a former teacher.
She warned that displays of overt misogyny are “red flags for other types of extremist violence”, and that misogynist hand signals created by alleged rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate were being reported by teachers seeing them in classrooms.
Ben Vasiliou, of the preventive mental health organisation the Man Cave, said it can be difficult for boys to realise that the space they are entering online will lead them into dangerous territory for their wellbeing.
“It often starts with naive searches about how to get fit and ask a girl out,” he said. “The algorithm attracts particular boys and men in.”
In the past three months, schools had been asking for help to educate boys in increasingly younger years, and calls were coming in about worrying attitudes among students as young as year 5 and 6. Vasiliou said the social media ban had not prevented this content reaching young children.
Jefferson Nguyen, who is sharing his experience to try to educate others about the risks of ultra-masculinity rabbit holes online, said good relationships with a diverse group of people in the real world have helped him feel much more mentally equipped for life than he did when he slipped into one when younger.
He still loves fitness and gym work, but “my life has turned around”.
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Wendy Tuohy is a senior writer focusing on social issues and those impacting women and girls.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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