Paul Alker, Craig Kelly, Max Hart, Cade Darby, and Emma Armstrong
Throughout this blog series we aim to show how violence against women and girls (VAWG) must be understood through multiple layers. While macro level structures shape the broader social, economic, political, and cultural conditions that enable VAWG, as we argued in the last post, the focus of this post is to consider the meso level – the institutions and social environments where these dynamics play out more tangibly. Schools, workplaces, communities, and digital spaces all serve as key sites where gendered violence can be reinforced, resisted, or normalised (Ellis and Thiara, 2014). Despite formal progress in gender equality, many of these spaces continue to reproduce patterns of inequality and misogyny, as will be discussed within this post.
One of the most significant achievements from feminism has been the increased integration of women into the workplace. However, this progress has arguably brought about unintended consequences. While women have entered the labour market in large numbers, they remain disproportionately concentrated in part-time, casual employment which does not provide the economic security required for true emancipation from patriarchal control (Maestripieri, 2023). At the same time, the workplace itself continues to be a major site of VAWG, via harassment and discrimination (Begeny et al., 2023). On paper, formal progress does not equate to lived experiences of sex equality, despite promises of anti-misogyny and ‘inclusion’ as an initiative at an organisational level. This disjuncture is particularly acute in male-dominated institutions such as the military and the police, where hierarchical structures and institutional cultures of silence often normalise and conceal misogynistic behaviours, including sexual and domestic violence (Hendrikx et al., 2023; Riley, 2025). In these settings, the superficial attempts at equality fail to address the causes of this violence.
While the workplace has been a key battleground for gender equality, neoliberal feminism has often reduced progress to these corporate diversity initiatives and symbolic gestures (Fraser, 2020). Beyond work, and in response to the demands of the neoliberal market, activism – particularly feminist activism – has become a highly commodified practice, (Mcintyre, 2021). Liberal feminism’s cultural turn and adoption of postmodernist perspectives has fallen into the same trap as much contemporary anti-racism. Despite good intentions, they often neglect the structural conditions that give rise to modern forms of racism and misogyny. This is even truer in an era of hyper visibility, in which narcissistic performances of self on platforms such as social media distract from the structural drivers of inequality (Yardley, 2017). By centring representation and performative activism, these movements engage in what Kotzé (2020) terms ‘micro-resistance’ – small-scale, surface-level acts of defiance that create the illusion of progress while leaving the underlying system fundamentally unchallenged. The potential of collectivism and the awareness of common oppressors has been clouded by individualistic identity politics, promising autonomy and uniqueness through consumerism (Winlow and Hall, 2017) and increasingly platformed as short soundbites competing for attention on social media which necessitates a degree of narcissism at its core. Against this backdrop, misogyny thrives (Yardley and Richards, 2023).
The symbolic violence of the present post-political context has left many feeling that they lack any real political representation. Whilst the culture war rages on, and both sides of the political spectrum remain true to neoliberal orthodoxy and fail to address issues on an economic level, a sense of apathy within the voting population prevails, which has led to a loss of faith in politics and overall disengagement from the mainstream political sphere (Winlow and Hall, 2022). In the absence of meaningful solutions, this has of course resulted in some gravitating towards political figures on the fringes who appeal to their grievances and feelings of dissatisfaction. Therefore, online spaces occupied by manosphere figures provide not only ideological narratives but also affective rewards – recognition, belonging and a sense of purpose – which compensate for the feelings of lack and dislocation generated by contemporary social life.
In March 2025, Netflix released the series Adolescence, a provocative drama exploring the radicalisation of young men online, whichsparked widespread discussion about how the digital space acts as a vehicle for normalising misogyny and gendered violence, particularly around incel communities (O’Rourke and Haslop, 2023). Ging (2019) discusses the ‘manosphere’, characterised by an adherence to Red Pill ‘philosophy’, which purports to liberate men from a life of feminist delusion. Within this context, genuine political thought is absent in exchange for a perpetual pursuit of profit – whether in the form of monetary or social capital – and a pseudo-populism. Andrew Tate is a prime example of this dynamic, serving as a leading beacon of the manosphere for disaffected young men across the globe, a position further cemented by the extensive hatred directed towards him (Haslop et al., 2024). He has garnered a cult like following based upon the objectification, subjugation and degradation of women that is thinly veiled through incoherent aspects of a personal marketed identity. His persona is a myriad of incoherent alignments that aims to capture as wide a following of disaffected young men as possible. He oscillates between disparate and often contradictory identities: claims of religious devotion while engaging in the sex industry; glorifying elite physical conditioning while indulging in the overt use of harmful substances that align with signifiers of wealth, such as Cuban cigars; and launching vague political aspirations (the BRUV party) that are underpinned by notions of anti-immigration, despite ongoing legal proceedings in a country where he is a foreign national.
This month, Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere premiered on Netflix, offering a close-up view of some of the key figures operating in the online manosphere. What emerges is a world built on hustle culture, where participants promote courses, mentorship schemes, and pathways to wealth that often resemble pyramid-scheme style models, promising success to many while structurally delivering it to very few (Ilan, 2026). Alongside this sits a striking contradiction: while espousing overtly misogynistic views in their content, several figures are shown to be markedly deferential in their personal relationships with women. Our overall impression is less one of anger and more one of sadness. The documentary confirms the hostility embedded within these spaces, but also the fragility and insecurity that underpin them. Perhaps most telling is the repeated invocation of the ‘matrix’, a metaphor used to suggest that mainstream society deceives and supresses men, positioning the manosphere as a form of awakening or resistance. Yet, what is offered in its place is a system that mirrors the very dynamics it claims to oppose: a competitive, exclusionary model of success in which only a small minority can realistically thrive. This very much echoes Kotzé’s (2020) concept of micro-resistance. These observations point to a deeper question: how do these spaces attract individuals and sustain their engagement over time?
At its fundamental level, the manosphere serves as an isolating social vessel that separates individuals from familial ties to ensure ideological change can take place. This process reflects dynamics observed in other institutional contexts where shifts in the symbolic order are produced through forms of social detachment, including cult formulation (Curtis and Curtis, 1993) and military recruitment strategies (Armstrong, 2025). While the manosphere operates primary online, making physical isolation less central, forms of social and relational isolation remain key to its functioning. Entry into these spaces if often framed through promises of success, wealth, and sexual access (Sugiura, 2021), particularly targeting working-class men who exist within a sense of hopelessness and feel ‘left behind’ from the economically successful populace (Telford, 2025). The promise of wealth can be seen as the driving force that convinces many men to join the movement, but this promise is an illusionary truth behind a much larger symbolic order which these men later assimilate.
This process of ideological change becomes apparent when looking upon the use of the ‘matrix’ to describe the world, shielding the populace from wealth and power, with those involved in the manosphere as the protagonists for change and enlightenment (Vallerga and Zurbriggen, 2022). This language surrounding existing social ties can isolate the individual, as they are told that the general population are ‘sheep’ and therefore not worth engaging with if one seeks success. The application of isolation within this group works to detach individuals from familial and social ties, drawing them into a community that appears to offer what they feel has been missing from their lives. This makes toxic elements of the red pill, such as the discussions of female inferiority (Vallerga and Zurbriggen, 2022) and normalisation of sexual dominance (Hoebanx, 2025), easier to assimilate, as this is the content individuals are exposed to daily. In this way, individuals are offered little in the way of counterarguments, leaving them effectively enclosed within a narrow ideological environment.
Ilan (2026) argues that contemporary Western societies increasingly resemble what he terms a “hustle society”, in which the core tenets of neoliberalism, relentless entrepreneurialism, speculative risk-taking and exploitative opportunity-seeking, are normalised cultural expectations. Within such a context, individuals like Andrew Tate are not aberrations but archetypal figures who serve as exaggerated expressions of dominant cultural values. The hustler identity, combining wealth accumulation, conspicuous consumption and the exploitation of others, maps closely onto the hyper-competitive and individualised subjectivities produced by neoliberal capitalism. Seen in this light, the misogynistic ideology circulating within the manosphere does not simply represent a fringe deviance but an intensified articulation of the same competitive, transactional and extractive logics that increasingly shape mainstream economic and social life. Thus, the manosphere provides misogynistic ideology, but also offers participation in the aspirational logics of the hustle society.
Therefore, such dynamics do not emerge in a vacuum but are shaped by broader structural conditions. The absence of a genuine political alternative beyond the dominant neoliberal order continues to marginalise ever-growing swathes of the population and has left a vacuum that figures like Tate and others featured in Theroux’s documentary exploit. This has accelerated the rise in disaffected young males, as young as aged ten, who subscribe to his misogynistic overtures and are actively groomed into these online spaces through patterns of consumption, both material and ideological.
For some working-class men particularly, the erosion of traditional pathways to masculine identity – such as stable employment and the breadwinner role – leaves them seeking alternative ways to assert their masculinity (Ellis, 2015). Many turn to physical pursuits such as the gym (Gibbs et al., 2022) or the military (Armstrong, 2025), as sites where strength, discipline, and control can be visibly demonstrated. However, before these routes become viable options, young boys are exploited in the digital space, where figures like Tate capitalise on their insecurity, frustration, and lack of direction. Here, we see how overtly the Meso level interacts with both the Macro and Micro levels. Even if we wilfully ignore the ongoing accusations of violence against women perpetrated by Tate himself; evidence of his influence within the context of the parameters set out by the Macro have a clear impact on the Micro. Research in the Australian school system offers a stark demonstration of the normalisation of VAWG in young men due to the influence of Tate and the wider manosphere (Wescott et al., 2023).
As we have already stated, individuals like Tate are most certainly a contributing factor to rising hate and violence toward women and girls, a fact that would be dangerous to ignore. However, it is perhaps problematic also to ignore the fact that Tate, and indeed Donald Trump and other manosphere and far-right figures, are the extreme embodiment of everything the prevailing political economy stands for, rather than being the antithesis of contemporary neoliberal values. Although positioned as non-conformist, they are in fact hyper-conformist (Kotźe, 2020). It is our contention that a purely moral critique of the action of Tate, which account for an overwhelming amount of the overall discourse, not only fails to acknowledge the role of neoliberal ideology in the formation of such harmful subjectivities but also creates the very conditions in which young men are indeed vulnerable to the influence of such rhetoric. Beyond providing endless moral critique of individuals like Tate, who should of course be held accountable for their crimes, focus must also be directed towards critiquing the system that gave rise to him – figures like Tate do not emerge in a vacuum and neither do the young men who follow him. Therefore, it is our contention that focusing solely on individual consumers or online influencers risks obscuring the institutional and structural conditions that make such figures influential in the first place.
Beyond focusing on the influence of Tate and many facets of the so-called incel ideology, Adolescence shines a light on the contemporary experience of teenagers, both male and female, in the senior school environment and highlights the various challenges they both face on a day-to-day basis, inside and outside this environment. In somewhat stark terms, episode two depicts the modern school as a space in which students effectively run the show, lacking any level of discipline, whilst the teachers in many cases overzealously attempt to ‘police the horde’. Despite the fact that a fellow student has been brutally murdered, very few seem to care. To some, this depiction may verge on the hyperbolic, yet for us, it certainly touches upon aspects of our own secondary school experience and that outlined in academic research.
As Billingham and Irwin-Rogers (2022) highlight, children and young people’s time spent in school is one of the most significant elements of their childhood and adolescent years. They note that, at its best, it can help children to make sense of the world they inhabit and determine their place within it, whilst simultaneously providing the foundations for them to live happy and healthy lives. Importantly they acknowledge that, of all the institutions that children and young people come into contact with, school is arguably the most consequential, given that it is the only institution in society that every child under the age of 16 is legally obliged to attend and thus holds enormous practical, emotional and relational significance in young people’s lives. They note how schools have the potential to play a vital role in enabling children and young people to flourish by being places which support young people’s sense of mattering, furnishing them with deeply meaningful forms of recognition and respect, whilst helping them to see the difference that their existence makes to the world. Yet, they argue that a number of structural features of the education system are in fact generating harm and ultimately compromising many children and young people’s ability to flourish. As Ging (2025) notes, the school environment depicted within Adolescence constitutes a significant part of the puzzle as to why 13-year-old Jamie went on to kill his classmate Katie. The school setting depicted is far removed from the ideal Billingham and Irwin-Rogers outline above and certainly serves as a startling example of some of the features of the secondary education system currently harming the young people caught up within it. Yet, this is the reality of schooling following a decade and a half of austerity in which ill-equipped teacher battle with students who do not respect them.
Alongside the structural dynamics already outlined, secondary schools can function as key sites in which experiences of humiliation are produced and internalised. As young people begin to navigate attraction and intimacy, these interactions unfold under conditions of intense visibility from friends and peers. Rejection is rarely private and is often witnessed, shared, and in some cases amplified through social media platforms, transforming routine adolescent experiences into a humiliating spectacle of acute public embarrassment. This is not to suggest that rejection leads directly to violence, but rather that, under certain conditions, repeated experiences of exclusion and perceived inadequacy can sediment into deeper feelings of shame, resentment and anger. Where these affects are not processed or supported, they may be redirected inwards in the form of a variety of self-destructive behaviours or outward in the form of violence manifest in both symbolic and subjective forms. In this sense, violence is not condoned, but understood as symptomatic of something more deeply embedded.
Ultimately, schools operate as a microcosm of the wider social world, as ideological state apparatuses that aid in the reproduction of its very logic within the subject. It also functions as a space in which the same attributes that confer status outside the school gates, such as appearance, confidence, popularity and forms of social and cultural capital, structure hierarchies within it. In a neoliberal consumer culture, self-worth becomes increasingly tied to notions of desirability and what might be understood as ‘sexual market value’. For those excluded from these hierarchies, rejection can take on a more profound significance, experienced less as a singular event and more as a confirmation of one’s perceived lack of value. In this sense, the school environment not only reflects broader inequalities but reproduces them, creating conditions in which humiliation can become a formative experience, shaped by, and in turn reinforcing, the wider socio-symbolic order. As a result, young men increasingly seek meaning and belonging in digital spaces, opening them up to the influence of figure like Andrew Tate and other manosphere content creators.
References
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