Is the manosphere a rabbit hole? In Harmony Labs’ analysis of YouTube channels, viewers of male grievance content also watched plenty of other things, from sports to news and comedy. That complicates the picture of young men being drawn into a single world of grievance content. However, it does not tell us what happens when someone leaves YouTube to join a creator’s paid community.
Two recent reports from our partners at Equimundo examine different parts of that story. The Grift Economy, produced with Reset Tech, maps how some creators turn young men’s aspirations and insecurities into revenue. Men’s Flourishing + Media, produced with Harmony Labs and LinkUp Lab, looks at what people watch and how different audiences respond to selected media. In this week’s conversation, Caroline Hayes and I explore what each report can tell us—and what we still need to learn. We discuss:
How some creators turn young men’s aspirations and insecurities into attention, paid memberships, and courses
Whether grievance about women is central to that business model, or whether typical self-improvement marketing does more of the selling
What Harmony Labs found when it looked for a “rabbit hole” in men’s YouTube viewing1
Why watching a provocative clip tells us little, on its own, about what a young man believes
How to learn from young men who already assess online content critically
How can we take exploitation and misogyny seriously without assuming that every young man who encounters this content is drawn in by it? Caroline and I don’t agree on every part of the answer, but we agree that the distinction matters for research, for parents and educators, and for anyone trying to offer young men something better.
You can listen to the audio above or watch the video below. As always, we appreciate your feedback in the comments or via a direct message. As we book upcoming guests, what else would you like to know about manosphere research?
Methodology clarification: I described the Harmony Labs study as a panel of 300,000 men whose home internet traffic was monitored. Harmony Labs instead reports analyzing opt-in media-consumption data from about 300,000 people in the U.S. across devices, alongside a separate survey and tests of video clips. Its YouTube finding concerns the selected channels it studied: their viewers also consumed a wide range of other content. The study does not provide a prevalence estimate for the entire manosphere.
