The FT says: “Confronting the misogyny and get-rich-quick schemes of influencers means talking openly to young men about success.”
The writer Simon van Teutem resists the lazy framing that treats manosphere appeal as pure ideology, and his market-failure argument cuts closer to the truth than most commentary on the subject. The Davey Verbeek opening works well precisely because it complicates the promised villain. A boy grieving his father and wanting to provide for his children is not a fascist; he is a human being who got there by a comprehensible path.
The strongest passage is Richard Reeves’s summary: society has given young men a long list of don’ts and almost no do’s, then blamed them for looking elsewhere. That is accurate and underappreciated.
Instead of saying young men are simply becoming more right wing, the article argues that the manosphere wins because it offers a map of agency, success, and direction in a setting where respectable institutions mostly offer warnings, shame, and abstraction. That core claim is the live one.
The best line of argument is the simple one that “a crude map beats no map.” That gets at something real. Boys and young men are being told constantly what not to be, while the manosphere speaks directly, concretely, and relentlessly to ambition, competition, money, dating, and self-making. Even when the advice is garbage, it is still advice. That matters.
The article is also smart when it says the manosphere is not mainly ideological in the usual left-right sense, but a struggle over who gets to define success for boys. That is much sharper than the standard “online extremism” frame. It sees that the draw is not just misogyny. It is status, competence, agency, and a script for becoming someone.
The article skirts the hardest part of the problem. Van Teutem cites data showing young men value income as a romantic credential at a rate two and a half times higher than women with equivalent credentials. He then quotes Cordelia Fine to say these preferences are socially constructed. Fine is probably right in some sense, but as he himself acknowledges, explaining the physics of a wall does not help you walk through it. The social constructionist move functions here as a way of acknowledging the pressure without having to take it seriously. Young men live inside those preferences right now including the use of misogyny as a cheap way to feel high status.
It also leaves some status logic underdeveloped. The manosphere does not just sell a path to success. It sells rank ordering. It tells boys who is above them, who is below them, who humiliated them, and how to reverse the humiliation. That is why the appeal is so emotional. It is not merely “here is how to improve your life.” It is “here is why you have been denied your proper place.” The article gets close to this with the language of insecurity, competition, and rejection, but it could go further.
That gets to the hardest point. The article asks, “where is the competition?” That is exactly right. But real competition would require more than better arguments. It would require institutions, mentors, male exemplars, repeated practices, and a language that does not sound like a lecture from someone embarrassed by ambition.
The article has a significant tension it never resolves. Van Teutem argues the manosphere succeeds because it shows up with a map when polite society refuses to draw one, and he is right. But then his own alternative map turns out to be: get a degree from a top university, build a company that creates value for others, find meaning in contribution. This is the vision of a 28-year-old Oxford PhD candidate who writes for De Correspondent. It is not obviously more accessible to Davey than what Andrew Tate offers, and it carries the same structural problem he diagnoses in polite society, namely that it assumes a world where merit and virtue reliably converge.
The piece would be stronger if it grappled with Pinsof-style coalition logic. The manosphere is not just filling an informational vacuum. It is offering young men a coalition with a moral vocabulary, a clear friend-enemy distinction, shared symbols, and an account of why their struggles are not their fault. That is a much harder thing to compete with than bad financial advice. Van Teutem’s alternative vision, that your flourishing and someone else’s should point in the same direction, is better ethics, but it offers no coalition, no clear in-group, and no satisfying villain. It is the vision of an autonomous liberal individual, which is precisely what many of these young men feel they cannot afford to be.
Society talks about success constantly, but almost always in one of two registers that avoid the hard questions.
The first register is therapeutic. Success means finding your authentic self, doing what you love, prioritizing mental health, and not measuring your worth by external achievement. This is well-intentioned and contains real wisdom, but it sidesteps the material reality that young men face. You cannot pay rent with authenticity, and the dating market does not reward emotional availability the way it rewards income.
The second register is structural critique. Success as conventionally defined is a product of privilege, luck, and inherited advantage. The meritocracy is largely a myth. This is also partly true and also largely useless as practical guidance. It explains why the race is rigged without telling you how to run it.
What society avoids is the practical, morally serious middle ground: yes, external achievement matters and here is how to pursue it; yes, status hierarchies are real and here is how to navigate them without losing your soul; yes, women on average respond to male success in ways that create real pressure, and here is how to think about that without becoming bitter or predatory.
The people who do speak in this register tend to come from either religious traditions or from figures like Jordan Peterson, who got enormously rich precisely because he occupied that vacuum before anyone else noticed it was there. Peterson’s advice, make your bed, take responsibility, defer gratification, is banal. The audience was not there for original ideas. They were there because someone was finally speaking directly to young men about how to live without either moralizing at them or pretending the pressures they feel do not exist.
Van Teutem is right that this is a market failure. But it is a market failure with ideological roots. The professional-managerial class that dominates elite media and academia has discomfort with success talk because it sits uneasily alongside commitments to equality and structural critique. That discomfort is not hypocritical exactly, but it is a luxury. The people who can afford not to talk about success are precisely the people who have already achieved it.
The most important practical difference between young men and women is that time pressure runs on different schedules. A man’s attractiveness to potential partners rises through his twenties and into his thirties as his status, income, and confidence increase. A woman’s romantic market position peaks earlier and is more tied to youth and appearance, at least in the short run. This is uncomfortable to say. It is also empirically robust across cultures, however much social construction shapes the margins. A 28-year-old man who is broke but building something real still has time. A 28-year-old woman who has spent her twenties climbing a career ladder may find the romantic landscape has shifted in ways she did not anticipate.
For young men, the practical advice is to get serious about income earlier than feels necessary. Not because money is the point, but because financial instability at 25 closes options, narrows relationships, and compounds anxiety in ways that are hard to recover from. Learn a skill the market pays for. Build a network before you need one. Understand that status in male peer groups often runs on different currency than status in the broader world, and that optimizing for the former can actively harm the latter.
For young women, the practical advice runs in a somewhat different direction. The credentialing instinct, the accumulation of degrees and titles, serves women well in institutional environments but can become a substitute for building leverage, which means clients, capital, or skills that transfer outside a single employer. Many high-achieving women in their late twenties are more dependent on institutional approval than they realize. The smart move is to develop something portable.
Both sexes underestimate how much of success is relational rather than meritocratic. The person who hires you, funds you, or promotes you almost always does so partly because they know you, trust you, or feel some loyalty to you. Young men often treat networking as vaguely corrupt and avoid it. Young women often network well within institutions but less well across them, particularly with older men who might serve as mentors or sponsors, partly because those relationships carry social awkwardness that did not exist a generation ago when they were more common.
Young men tend to suffer most from a lack of direction, from not knowing what game they are playing or whether they are allowed to compete seriously. Young women tend to suffer most from conflicting demands, from being told they can have everything while absorbing the implicit message that wanting too much of any one thing, too much ambition, too much domesticity, too much sexuality, too much reserve, is somehow wrong. The manosphere offers young men a direction, however crude. No equivalent cultural product offers young women a coherent way to navigate their specific contradictions. That is its own kind of market failure.
Talk show host Dennis Prager is 77 years old and paralyzed below the neck. Last month, he filed a lawsuit against three hospitals for medical malpractice. How might Prager’s situation illuminate this discussion?
The obvious connection is the hero system. Prager built his entire public identity around a coherent account of how to live: gratitude, faith, personal responsibility, the rejection of victimhood. The lawsuit complicates this because it is structurally a victimhood claim. Three institutions failed him and he wants them to pay. He can hold both positions, and legally they are perfectly compatible, but the tension reveals something important. Even a man who has spent forty years teaching that attitude determines outcomes, that suffering is a test of your philosophy rather than evidence of injustice, reaches for institutional accountability when the harm is severe enough. The manosphere teaches young men a version of the same stoic self-reliance framework, that the system is rigged but you can transcend it through discipline and will. Prager’s lawsuit suggests that this framework, however valuable as a daily operating posture, has limits that even its most committed practitioners acknowledge under pressure.
The less obvious connection is about what happens when a moral authority’s coalition needs are in tension with his stated beliefs. Prager cannot perform the standard redemptive pivot, cannot say that paralysis taught him his priorities were wrong, because his entire audience came to him precisely because he told them their priorities were already correct. His stress test narrative, suffering confirmed my wisdom rather than revised it, serves his coalition’s needs more than it serves honest self-examination. The manosphere operates the same logic at a cruder level. Influencers cannot tell their audiences that the dating market is complex and that women’s choices are reasonable responses to their own incentives, because that would dissolve the coalition. The audience needs a villain.
What this suggests is that moral frameworks aimed at young men tend to calcify around whatever coalition the framework initially attracts, and then serve that coalition’s emotional needs rather than the truth. Prager started with some insight and ended defending positions he cannot revise without losing his audience and reputation. The manosphere starts with the cruder version and never had the insight to begin with. The young man looking for guidance deserves a framework honest enough to say: here is what we know, here is what remains uncertain, and here is what the evidence suggests even when it is uncomfortable for both of us.
How much wisdom is there in viewing your own suffering as a stress test of your philosophy? It feels grandiose.
The stress test framing does contain a kernel of real wisdom. Stoic philosophy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and most serious religious traditions all argue that your response to suffering reveals your character more than your response to ease does. There is nothing false about that. Viktor Frankl built something on a related insight. The question is what you do with the gap between how you thought you would respond and how you do.
What makes the framing grandiose is that it converts suffering into a performance of prior correctness rather than an encounter with something new. Real suffering tends to produce revision, not confirmation. It finds the places where your map did not match the territory. The people who come through serious catastrophe with something worth saying usually say: I thought I understood this and I did not, or I valued the wrong things, or I was wrong about how much control I had. Prager’s framing produces none of that. It produces a man who already knew everything the suffering had to teach.
There is also something theologically suspicious about it, even on Prager’s own terms. The Jewish tradition he draws on is full of men who argued with God, who found their frameworks shattered by what happened to them, who did not emerge from catastrophe confirmed but broken and then rebuilt differently. Job is the obvious example. Job’s friends are the ones who insist the existing framework explains everything. God rebukes the friends, not Job.
The deeper problem is that the stress test framing is most available to people whose identity is most invested in the framework being tested. A man whose entire public life rests on the correctness of his philosophy cannot afford to have the philosophy fail the test. So the test gets graded accordingly. This is not necessarily conscious dishonesty. It is what happens when the need to maintain a coherent self runs up against evidence that might threaten it. Robert Trivers would call it self-deception in the service of social presentation. You believe the test was passed because the alternative is too costly to contemplate.
For a young man or woman under thirty, this is useful negative instruction. The philosophies worth holding are the ones you are willing to let suffering revise. If you find yourself in a hard season and your main interpretive move is to confirm that you were right all along, that is a sign the philosophy is serving you rather than the other way around.
