We Pathologized Masculinity and Created a Monster
The rise of incel culture and online misogyny is the predictable consequence of men receiving the message that their longing for connection is itself a form of harm
Something has gone badly wrong in the formation of young men. Across the English-speaking world and well beyond it, a generation of males has retreated into online communities defined not by aspiration or brotherhood, but by resentment, grievance, and a profound sense of relational exile. Scholars call this ecosystem the manosphere. Sociologists catalog its subcultures — incels, Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), pick-up artists, men’s rights activists — and document their alarming overlaps with radicalization and violence. What receives far less attention is the question: What kind of wound produces this kind of infection?
The answer, I want to argue, is an attachment wound — and understanding it clearly requires us to take seriously both the legitimate relational disorientation many young men experience and the cultural conditions, including certain strands of feminist discourse, that helped produce it. Neither side of that sentence can be abandoned without losing the truth.
The manosphere is more than a gender backlash
The standard account of the manosphere frames it as reactionary: men who cannot tolerate women’s equality striking back at gains they did not want to concede. There is something to this. Misogyny is real, entitlement is real, and the violence that has erupted from incel communities — from the 2014 Isla Vista killings to subsequent attacks claimed in the name of incel ideology — cannot be minimized or explained away.
But the backlash framing, taken alone, is insufficient. It cannot explain why the manosphere has grown most rapidly precisely among younger men — men who did not grow up under the old patriarchal order, who did not personally lose power or status, and who in many cases are the most economically and socially marginal members of their generation. These are not men defending privilege. It appears that these men never felt they had any.
What they share is not entitlement but isolation. And isolation, in the language of attachment science, is the start of a relational crisis.
Protest, Despair, Detachment: Reading the Manosphere Through Attachment Theory
Attachment theory, developed across decades of careful empirical work, tells us that human beings are wired for connection. When the relational environment fails to provide secure belonging — when attachment figures are unavailable, rejecting, or hostile — the attachment system mounts a predictable response. John Bowlby described this sequence as protest, despair, and detachment.
Framework
The Protest–Despair–Detachment Sequence in Manosphere Formation
Protest. Loud and rageful rejection of the relational environment perceived as hostile. Manifests as incel forums, misogynist content, grievance communities. The attachment system is still activated — still reaching, even if violently.
Despair. The collapse of hope that belonging is possible. “Blackpill” ideology — the belief that one is genetically and permanently unlovable — is protest giving way to despair. The system begins to shut down.
Detachment. Withdrawal from the relational field entirely. MGTOW — Men Going Their Own Way — represents detachment: the decision to abandon the quest for connection altogether and build an identity around self-sufficiency and contempt for intimacy.
The manosphere, read through this lens, is not a coherent ideology. It is a spectrum of attachment distress responses, each corresponding to a different stage of relational breakdown. Incels are in protest. “Blackpilled” incels are in despair. MGTOW adherents have reached detachment. The rage, the nihilism, and the withdrawal are not signs of strength. They are signs of a wounded attachment system doing exactly what wounded attachment systems do.
What triggered the protest?
Attachment protest is triggered by the perception of rejection — specifically, rejection from the relational environment one depends upon. For young men navigating identity formation, that relational environment can also be within a context of culture. Is not merely personal. It can include but not limited to the ambient messages that a society sends about who belongs, who is valued, and whose longing for connection is legitimate.
I am careful in my analysis here because what follows is easily misread. I am not claiming that feminism or the #MeToo movement are responsible for the manosphere. The claim is that a specific drift in cultural messaging — a drift that occurred within a particular strand of feminist discourse during the 2010s — contributed, to a large extent, to a relational environment that many young men experienced as hostile to their very existence.
“The rhetorical slide from ‘this structure is harmful’ to ‘men as such are the problem’ produced genuine relational injury in a generation of young men who had done nothing to deserve that ambient hostility.”
Feminist critique of patriarchal structures — of dominance-based masculinity, of systems that subordinate women and constrain men alike — is a legitimate and necessary intellectual project. The problem arose when the critique of structures migrated into a critique of persons: when “toxic masculinity” ceased to name a set of distorted social scripts and became, in popular usage, something closer to a description of maleness itself. When young men absorbed, from cultural media, from educational environments, and from online discourse, the message that their desire for connection was suspect, that their masculinity was a pathology to be managed, and that their relational needs were a form of entitlement they had not earned.
The attachment system reads this as rejection and not as a call to grow or reform. As rejection. And rejected attachment systems protest.
We got what we deserved
There is a third element in this story that is rarely named in secular analyses but is essential to a full account: the collapse of alternative belonging structures that might have intercepted young men before they reached the manosphere.
For centuries, the church provided men with a framework for masculine identity that was neither domineering nor dissolute — an account of strength as self-giving, of dignity as derivative of image-bearing rather than performance, of belonging as a gift received rather than a status earned. It offered what the manosphere now desperately mimics: brotherhood, initiation, meaning, and a narrative that made suffering intelligible.
As that formation infrastructure eroded — as churches became less effective at discipling men, as the secular state cancelled the church, as the theological resources for a constructive account of masculine identity were either abandoned or never developed — the vacuum did not remain empty. The manosphere filled it. Online communities of resentment offered what the church had stopped providing: identity, in-group belonging, a story about why one’s suffering is not random, and a sense of mission, however dark.
For reflection
The manosphere offers men the four things belonging requires: identity, community, narrative, and mission. Its power lies in the absence of better alternatives and not in what it offers. The pastoral and therapeutic question is not how to refute the manosphere but how to rebuild the institutions capable of offering something better. The church has done this for centuries and still can fill that void.
What would it mean for the church to become the kind of community where a young man who feels permanently unlovable could find not agreement with that verdict but a credible alternative to it?
The priests they deserve
There is a detail in this story that deserves its own reckoning, one that carries an uncomfortable irony for those who spent the last two decades dismissing pastoral authority as irrelevant, patriarchal, or dangerous. The same cultural moment that delegitimized the pastor, the priest, the rabbi, and the imam did not produce autonomous, self-determining men liberated from the need for guidance. It produced men who were starving for exactly the kind of formation that religious leaders had always offered — and who found it, eventually, in the worst possible places.
Consider what Andrew Tate, the most visible figure of contemporary manosphere culture, actually provides to his followers. He offers moral framing: a story about why their suffering is not random, why they are struggling, and who is to blame. He offers behavioral prescription: a code of conduct, a regimen, a set of rules for how to live. He offers community identity: a sense of in-group belonging, a shared language, a brotherhood of the initiated. He offers an account of the enemy: the forces arrayed against them, the ideology they must resist. These are, in structure, liturgical functions. Tate is not a social media personality who stumbled into influence. He is, functionally, a ‘leader’ — performing, in corrupted form, every office that religious formation has always performed.
“The manosphere is not a new phenomenon thankfully. It is a dark liturgy that is performing, in corrupted form, every office that religious formation has always performed, for men who were told they no longer needed priests.”
The irony is pointed. A culture that scorned religious authority as unnecessary, that caricatured pastors as power-hungry and faith communities as instruments of control, has watched its young men develop something indistinguishable from religious devotion — directed at figures whose actual contempt for those men’s flourishing is barely concealed. They traded the shepherd for the wolf and called it liberation.
This is not karma in the punitive sense but in the structural sense. Human beings require formation. They require figures or role models who embody ideals and narratives that make suffering meaningful. When institutions capable of providing these things are dismantled or discredited without replacement, the need does not disappear but finds another outlet. The question was never whether young men would have ideological leaders, but always what kind.
The Irony
A generation was told it did not need pastors, priests, or the formation structures of religious community. That generation did not become self-sufficient. It became credulous — susceptible to any figure who offered identity, mission, belonging, and an enemy. The manosphere did not create the hunger. It merely arrived with what it needed to thrive.
The most urgent question for faith communities is not how to compete with the manosphere’s platforms. I think the greatest concern would be how to recover the depth of formation that made religious communities worth choosing in the first place.
A constructive response
None of this is an apology for misogyny. The violence, the dehumanization, the rage directed at women that saturates incel communities is genuinely dangerous, and naming its psychological roots does not diminish its moral seriousness. Protest behavior that harms others remains harmful, whatever the wound that produced it.
But understanding the wound is a prerequisite for treating it. Condemning the manosphere without attending to the attachment conditions that generate it is like treating a fever without asking what infection drives it. The fever is still there and the infection matters a lot more.
Three responses follow from this analysis. First, the church needs a constructive theology of masculine identity — one grounded not in dominance or passivity but in the image-bearing dignity of persons called to self-giving strength. Second, therapeutic and pastoral communities need to become skilled at meeting men in protest rather than waiting for them to arrive composed. Attachment protest is loud and often ugly; effective helpers must not be frightened away from it. Third, the broader culture needs to distinguish, far more carefully than it has, between the critique of harmful masculine scripts and the ambient message that men themselves are the problem. That distinction is very important and not merely an academic exercise. For many young men, it is the difference between receiving an invitation to grow and receiving a verdict of condemnation.
The manosphere is, at its core, a community of men who believed the verdict. The work of flourishing — for them, and for the women and communities their rage touches — begins with offering something better to believe.
Rage as distress signal
What looks, from the outside, like hatred is often, at its root, a distress signal from an attachment system that has given up hope. The manosphere did not emerge from nowhere. It grew out of real relational dislocation —- dislocation shaped partly by economic marginalization, partly by the collapse of male belonging institutions, and partly by cultural messaging that, at its least careful, communicated to young men that their longing for connection was a form of harm.
Recognizing this does not require us to be naive about the dangers the manosphere poses. It requires us to be serious about the conditions that produce it, and serious, in turn, about building the relational environments, the ecclesial communities, and the therapeutic cultures capable of intercepting that distress before it becomes rage.
Flourishing, for men as for all people, begins not with the suppression of the need for belonging but with the provision of conditions in which that need can be met. The task before the clinic, church or the culture is not to explain away young men’s pain. It is to become communities capable of receiving it and offering, in return, the one thing that actually heals an attachment wound: secure and unconditional belonging.