How Male Insecurity Became a Subscription Service!

Algorithmic Masculinity! Is the manosphere less a movement and more a business model built on recurring insecurity?

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On March 11, 2026, Netflix released Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, which hit number one. Louis Theroux, the mild-mannered British documentarian best known for his faux-naïve curiosity, traveled to Marbella, Miami, and New York to sit across from a collection of male influencers who refer to women as “dishwashers,” sell courses on dominance, and seem constitutionally incapable of having a conversation that isn’t content-free.

It’s a good documentary if you like spectacle, but it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. Watching rich men say horrible things about women isn't exactly investigative journalism.

And like most documentaries about touchy subjects, it captured the circus without cracking the machinery underneath it.

Even in critiquing it, I’m still adding to its visibility by writing about it.

Can any of this be fixed?

Meh! Not while the platforms themselves are built this way - optimized, engineered, and slowly enshittified to reward outrage and division.

Once you accept that, once you stop waiting for the platforms to regulate themselves or the gurus to grow a conscience, you start seeing the machinery more clearly. The algorithms are designed to keep men angry and women exhausted.

This is about who profits from the fight.

Now, let’s talk about what the manosphere actually is.

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What is the Manosphere?

The manosphere is not one thing. It’s a loosely connected online ecosystem. We’re talking forums, podcasts, YouTube channels, and private Discord servers, populated almost exclusively by men and built around a specific theory of masculinity.

That idea shows up in different forms depending on where you sit in the ecosystem. At its core, it argues that men are in crisis, feminism is to blame, traditional male dominance is the fix, and the men at the top are the ones worth listening to.

The umbrella stretches wide, covering men’s rights activists (MRAs), pickup artists (PUAs), “men going their own way” (MGTOW), and the incel community, along with self-improvement figures and outright misogynists, with plenty of overlap in between.

What ties them together, as Louis Theroux puts it, is a “swaggering machismo” that’s moved from the fringes of the internet into the mainstream, into schools, workplaces, and the bedrooms of teenage boys.

That’s the WHAT.

The WHY has very little to do with masculinity and almost everything to do with money. Because the manosphere, at its cold, beating heart, is not really a movement at all. It’s a business model. And business models don’t care about your feelings.

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Who’s Getting Paid!

Andrew Tate’s platform, Hustlers University, peaked at over 200,000 subscribers paying $49.99 a month. That’s $10 million a month. He wasn’t selling a product or a service. That was subscriptions only. A monthly fee to be told you’re not man enough yet.

At its proposed price hike to $147 a month, the platform stood to generate over $30 million annually even at reduced subscriber levels, while Tate was under house arrest in Romania, facing charges of human trafficking and rape.

The platform kept generating an estimated $5.65 million monthly in late 2024, legal proceedings be damned. Tate himself has claimed revenues of around $120 million annually across his various ventures. The affiliate marketing engine, that’s where members earn commissions by recruiting new subscribers, was structured less like an education platform and more like a multilevel marketing scheme wearing a leather jacket and driving a red Bugatti.

This is not incidental to the manosphere. This is the manosphere.

The courses, the private Discords, the “alpha coaching” packages, the supplements, the dating apps, the merch — none of it exists because a generation of men desperately needed guidance, and a few generous souls stepped up.

It exists because male insecurity, when packaged and pushed by algorithms, becomes one of the most dependable revenue streams on the internet. The coaching industry was valued at $6.25 billion globally in 2024 and is projected to reach $7.3 billion in 2025.

The manosphere didn’t invent that market. It just figured out how to own the most emotionally raw corner of it. The product itself was never masculinity. The product was the feeling that you were one course away from having it.

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Insecurity as Infrastructure

To understand why this works, you have to understand the architecture of the pitch. And the pitch is, at its heart, a work of manufactured scarcity.

You’re told that you could be at the top, and that right now, you’re falling short. That success with women, money, and status is within reach, but only if you keep showing up and paying in. It’s much like some of these courses and weird shit you see flying on Substack and LinkedIn.

The content is built to highlight the gap between who you are and who you could be, then present itself as the way across it. Close one gap, and another opens. Finish the course on “the cold approach”, and now you need the course on “the inner game.” Master inner game, and now you need the War Room membership at $8,000 a year to be around men who’ve really made it.

It’s the same mechanic as the diet industry that only profits when you’re still on a diet.

The customer cannot graduate because graduation ends the revenue.

If you think about it, it’s not a new trick. Patent medicine salesmen in the 1800s sold “male vitality tonics” by first convincing men their vitality was dangerously depleted. Marlboro built an empire on the void between who you were and who a cigarette could briefly make you feel like. The problem was always the targeting.

Back then, it wasn’t algorithms but billboards, magazines, TV ads, and cultural norms doing the work. Broad, blunt instruments influenced what people thought they lacked. The algorithm just finds the insecurity faster, personalizes it, and turns up the volume.

Whether these men actually believe what they're selling becomes irrelevant once the revenue model is in place. The machine runs on incentives alone.

Research published in 2025 (PDF below) describes a “manosphere light” operating on mainstream platforms: content that is “not as toxic as the more extreme forms, but perhaps more pernicious as it reaches a far larger audience.”

Alexander Dhoest Study

229KB ∙ PDF file

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TikTok’s recommendation engine, according to the study examining 345 videos, actively pushes users toward increasingly traditional and extreme gender content, creating what researchers called “epistemological filter bubbles.”

The algorithm doesn’t radicalize men in a single session. It does it the way water shapes rock — slowly and invisibly. By the time a young man is paying $49.99 a month to be told how to talk to women by a man currently fighting six separate legal investigations across three countries, the algorithm has already done two years of unpaid marketing work.

It is estimated that YouTube earned up to £2.4 million in advertising revenue from channels promoting Tate's content before banning them under media pressure. The platform was being compensated, too

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Who Left the Door Open?

The more interesting question is not “why do young men fall for this?” but rather “who decided this was a gap worth filling, and why did they get there first?”
The answer is that mainstream institutions largely abdicated.

By institutions, I mean the systems that used to help people become someone—schools, families, religious spaces, workplaces, and community life. These were the environments that offered mentorship, structure, and a sense of belonging. They’re still here, but too often they feel distant, fragmented, or out of touch with the lived reality of young men today.

There is a real and documented crisis in male belonging. Male suicide rates in the United States run roughly four times higher than female suicide rates. Young men are now less likely than young women to attend college, with the gender gap in enrollment widening year after year.

A 2021 survey found that 15% of men reported having no close friends — a fivefold increase from 3% in 1990. These are not small data points. They are a structural failure in building the kind of community and mentorship that men, like women, like all humans, require.

In Theroux's documentary, one of the men interviewed described feeling 'alone and unseen. A crisis of belonging.

The manosphere did not create this vacuum. It just had the foresight, or the opportunism, to monetize it. And it did so with a pitch that was direct and uncomplicated:

1. Here are men who have figured things out.

2. Here is what they did.

3. Here is how you pay to learn it.

That’s a clearer, more accessible pitch than anything institutional masculinity has offered young men lately.

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The Bernie-to-Tate Pipeline

In January 2020, Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign announced an endorsement from Joe Rogan. It was the most listened-to podcast host in the world. The backlash from the Democratic establishment was loud and completely missed the point.

GIF credit IMGFLIP

At the time, Rogan had called universal healthcare reasonable, praised Barack Obama as the best president of his lifetime. He was, by any reasonable accounting, a man of loosely progressive instincts who happened to also be willing to say things that made establishment liberals squirm.

By November 2024, he had endorsed Donald Trump. The endorsement is widely credited—by Democrats, at least—with moving the needle among young male voters.

So what changed?

Almost nothing, actually.

What changed is what was on offer. Sanders appealed to Rogan because he questioned power—who has it, how it’s used, and why it feels so out of reach. Trump echoed a similar sentiment, but in a more aggressive tone. Both, in their own way, point to the same idea: the system isn’t as fair as it claims to be, and the people running it aren’t always on your side.

That’s not a right-wing idea. That’s not a left-wing idea. That’s an anti-establishment idea, and it migrates toward whoever is currently most effectively performing that role.

People are drawn to perceived truth-tellers who challenge power, and that same psychological pull can lead them to very different ideological outcomes.

For the manosphere, that enemy is women’s advancement, feminism, and the “matrix” of cultural institutions that support both. The real forces putting men at risk, stagnant wages, automation, disappearing blue-collar jobs, and fractured communities, aren’t convenient enemies to fight

You can’t sell a course on how to defeat advanced capitalism. You can absolutely sell a course on how to “dominate” a date.

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The Subscription Always Renews

The manosphere is going to be fine. Probably better than fine.

As of mid-2025, several of its most prominent voices — Rogan, Andrew Schulz, and Theo Von — have begun expressing frustration with the Trump administration they helped elect. Rogan called the administration’s immigration enforcement “insane.” Schulz told his audience that Trump was “doing the exact opposite of everything I voted for.” Von criticized U.S. military action in Iran.

But watch what happens to the revenue.

Disillusionment with an administration isn’t disillusionment with the ecosystem—it’s new content. The machinery doesn’t require a specific political outcome. It requires a continuous state of aggrievement, and democratic politics reliably generates that regardless of who wins.

While men and women argue about who has it worse, while the left blames the right for radicalizing young men and the right blames the left for alienating them in the first place, the platforms are running the scoreboard, and neither team is on it.

Meta, X, YouTube, TikTok: these companies do not have a political preference. They have an engagement preference. Outrage performs. Tribal conflict performs. A gender war that never resolves performs indefinitely, because a war that ends stops generating clicks.

Every viral argument about whether men are oppressed or women are under attack is, from the platform’s perspective, a successful content delivery event. They get the ad revenue. You get the cortisol.

The upcoming cohort of sixteen-year-olds discovering the algorithm will not begin with Andrew Tate. Tate may be in court indefinitely. They’ll begin with something adjacent, something smoother, something that learned from his overreaches. The funnel will have better UX. The affiliate marketing will be more compliant.

The product will still be the same gap. The gap between who you are and who you deserve to be. The gap that only another month’s subscription can close.

That’s the thing about a business model built on recurring insecurity: the insecurity is the feature. You don’t fix it. You service it. You renew it. You charge for it again next month.

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I’m a brown-skinned woman who has worked in male-dominated industries my entire career. I’ve faced—and still face—enough bullshit to write a far angrier article. The grievances are real. I’m not here to gaslight women or tell men to toughen up.

Being an asshole isn’t new. What’s new is how profitable they’ve become, and how quickly the system turns that into reach, influence, and money.

Which brings me to this: should we be angry at each other, or at a system specifically designed to keep us angry at each other? Because those are two very different problems with two very different solutions, and we keep solving for the wrong one.

Tech billionaires are making policy. Algorithms are raising children. Leaders who benefit most from our division are currently laughing in a group chat we’re not in. And we’re down here fighting about who had it harder, feeding the machine that profits from us, never figuring that out together.

Underneath all the noise, there are actual boys struggling to figure out who they are supposed to be. There are women exhausted from fighting for basic dignity. None of them is the enemy.

The pointing goes left, then right, then left again.

Meanwhile, the subscription renews.

And somewhere, a kid who just needed someone to talk to clicked “Join.”

Thank you so much for reading!

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