The Manosphere as Symptom: Feminism and the Crisis of Care

By Chantelle Gray

The term “manosphere” entered popular vocabulary in 2009, originally referring to a loose collection of fringe anti-feminist blogs. Recently, the concept resurged on social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram and Rumble, thoroughly transformed into a mainstream and lucrative commercial enterprise driven by “manfluencers.” These male personalities focus on fitness, self-improvement, wealth and men’s rights and frequently embed in their messages a conservative ideology grounded in extreme misogyny. Raging against a world filled by fever-driven emasculating feminazis, they advocate for tradwives – subservient, child-rearing housewives with little interest in anything other than pleasing their husbands.

The manosphere and its pathologies of desire

While it is tempting to dismiss these men as incels or victims of filter bubbles, I imagine that Deleuze and Guattari would try to bypass either moral judgement or panic. Instead, they would diagnose the pathologies of desire giving rise to these symptomatic expressions. The tragedy of the symptom is, of course, that it is a misidentification of the true vectors of oppression. Although it might contain a grain of truth, the content is largely distorted by and trapped in conditions of ressentiment. Andrew Tate and Costin Vlad Alamariu – better known as Bronze Age Pervert – are paradigmatic in this regard. Ironically, the latter professes to be deeply influenced by Nietzsche, though this may simply be a far-Right tactic to construct a pseudo-academic veneer for reactionary politics, as Andrew Marzoni points out.

I admit, producing a symptomatology of these women haters is hard. Really hard. It’s just so easy to hate them back – and feel morally superior in doing so! More than that, it seems wholly justified when, for example, Alamariu makes a case for eugenics, again using poor Nietzsche to bolster his mythology of a natural aristocracy and the suppression of the broader masses to attain this. Instead of working towards freedom for all, the manosphere wants freedom for some at the expense of others. This kind of contradiction seems deeply tied to the problem of desire and interest.

Scrambling the codes of desire and interest

Deleuze and Guattari tell us that desire cannot be deceived while interests can be. This is especially evident on manospheric social media. A feminist symptomatology would therefore have to grapple with how a genuine desire for more life can become distorted by algorithmically driven interests. An example of this is when interests become weaponised and experienced as internalised oppression, often leading to externalised expressions of domination. The manosphere, which operates as a set of algorithmically determined microfascisms, exploits the gap between desire and interest through its quasi-intellectual, testosterone-driven aesthetic. I would argue that Deleuze and Guattari’s observation in Anti-Oedipus that capitalism is deeply illiterate helps us understand this.

What they mean is that language, like the State apparatus, has an overcoding power by which dominant linguistic structures impose relatively rigid meanings and social norms onto the messy, unpredictable flows of human life. When language becomes mobilised for capitalist or statist ends, it functions as order-words. This is seen when anxieties around masculinity are deterritorialised by capitalism only to be reterritorialised politically as neo-fascism. Or, to put it differently, the revolutionary desire for freedombecomes recuperated and expressed as nostalgic interest for imagined, hyper-hierarchical and patriarchal pasts, as is the case nowadays on many Bronze Age-obsessed internet forums.

The positive task of care

Symptomatology is, of course, only the first part of schizoanalysis. The positive project is the second and more important step. This requires not only recognising the fascisms out there but the little fascists inside ourselves – the voices that want to hate back and feel good doing it. This is precisely what opens a gap between desire and interest. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not advocating for feminists to accept the tripe flowing from the mouths of manfluencers. Rather, I’m asking us all to reconsider what a Deleuze-Guattarian influenced feminist response might look like. How do we recognise the means by which individual fantasies become plugged into the group fantasies defining a social field? What strategies do we need for building alternative, non-hierarchical and healthy visions of masculinity – and femininity – that do not overcorrect the distorted visions of the manosphere?

In many ways, the problem is one of individuation, and more specifically of transindividuation – or the processes by which we become, and the conditions from which we enter processes of becoming. This requires theoretical perspectives and practices capable of imagining masculinity and femininity outside of either false binaries or no real distinctions. Confronting patriarchy may mean confronting distorted views of masculinity and femininity, but it also requires doing so without further alienating ourselves from each other. So, while we might not agree with the views of manfluencers, there remains the need for an orientation towards care to counter the deep deficiency thereof in the world at large.

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About the author

Chantelle Gray’s work focuses on the intersections between politics, aesthetics, science and technology. Her work develops theoretical and artistic frameworks for taking care of humans, technologies and ecologies in the digital age. Her books include Deleuze and Anarchism, co-edited with Aragorn Eloff (2019, Edinburgh University Press) and Anarchism after Deleuze and Guattari: Fabulating Futures (2022, Bloomsbury). She is the Editor-in-Chief of the South African Journal of Philosophy and is also a member of SENSA (Sonic Exploration Network of Southern Africa), and releases music here: https://chantellegray.bandcamp.com/. 

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