Andy is 22 and Australian. Asked what he makes of the “masculinity content” on his feed, he said this:
It’s pretty toxic but at the same time I can’t help but want the confidence that their methods seem to provide. Like I don’t want to be a part of it because it’s messed up, but just a little I want to be like that so I feel respected or at least deserving of it.[1]
He was one of 142 young men, aged 16 to 25, in Australia, the UK and the US, whom researchers from the University of Melbourne and elsewhere asked about the content on their phones. Their verdict, which I will paraphrase politely, was that some of it is rubbish and some of it is useful. Most of them raised the manosphere and Andrew Tate without being asked. The researchers say these young men described “being pulled in multiple directions”.[1]
That phrase stayed with me, because I think it is exactly right.
Look at what we ask of a young man today. Be emotionally available, but be strong. Earn well and get to the top of your career, but be at home. Lead, but don’t be controlling. Offer to help a woman, but know that offering may be taken as assuming she can’t manage. Make the first approach, but know that an approach is welcome only if she was already interested. Each demand is reasonable on its own. Together they cancel out. And over the top sits the internet’s favourite checklist, six foot, a six-pack and a six-figure income, held up, half as a joke and half not, as the bare minimum.
Young women face their own set of contradictions, and they are just as real. But this piece is about the young men, because someone is making money out of their confusion.
When every expectation comes with its opposite, a man selling one simple rule sounds like relief. That is the manosphere’s real product. It does not resolve the contradictions. It picks one side of each, money over home, control over leadership, hardness over feeling, and sneers at the other. The young men can see this. “Participants readily identified vulnerability in others,” the researchers note, “but none identified it in themselves.”[1] They know the content is preying on someone. They just don’t think it is them.
What they say they want is reasonable: “self-improvement advice, purpose and community, without the misogyny”.[1] Andy does not want to hurt anyone. He wants to be respected, and to feel he deserves it. He is being sold a cheap version.
The better version is old. Cicero said public responsibility required “character, proportion, and the ability to use words for a common purpose”.[2] Homer let the greatest of the Greek heroes weep in front of strangers and thought no less of him.[3] Neither offers a checklist. Both describe a man whose strength can hold more than one thing at once.
I did not learn that from a feed. I learnt some of it in a dojo, in my late forties, kneeling on knees that hurt, alongside my wife and our three children. The dojo has no room for the appearance of competence. You can do the technique or you can’t, and the class is watching. Public correction, it turns out, is survivable, and often useful.[4] Respect there was earned slowly, in front of witnesses, and nobody had to be put down for anyone else to rise.
My father was not an educated man. He was a factory worker at General Motors Holden, working for years in the heat, noise and dirt of a heavy industry, stamping out terminals for spark plugs. His limited English – really just a few words – meant he stayed in essentially the same role for decades. But on a labourer’s wage, augmented by my mother’s sewing, he established our family in the community: paid off a house, educated two children, was active in the Greek community and, when he finally passed away, the funeral service was attended by hundreds of people, some of whom we had not seen for many years. He mattered – his life touched many. He had none of the three sixes. Nobody at that funeral cared.
I am fortunate. My formative years, and my dating years, came before this shift. It was expected that a young man would make the first approach and pay on the date. Holding a door open for a lady was simply good manners, not misinterpreted as asserting that she needed a man to open a door. The rules were not fairer, but there were fewer of them, and they did not contradict each other every morning on a screen.
So I don’t think the answer is to lecture Andy. He already knows something is off. The answer is for men of my generation to show, rather than tell, what the better version looks like: strong enough to feel, capable enough to ask, secure enough not to need anyone beneath him.
[1]: Krista Fisher, Emily Lewis, Vivian Gerrand and Zac Seidler, “‘It’s pretty toxic… but just a little, I want to be like that’: what young men think of manosphere content”, The Conversation, 23 October 2026. Names in the study were changed to protect privacy.
[2]: “Less Human, Not More Manly”
[3]: “Odysseus Wept”