With missiles and bombs raining down, Pentagon accounts began using strange turns of phrase to describe the AI-guided violence unleashed against child and soldier alike. The destruction was described as “lethalitymaxxing”. Its perpetrators were said to be “locked in” with “low cortisol”.
This lingo finds much of its origins in the manosphere: a set of defined online communities centred on male grievance and empowerment.
The fact the highest political institutions are now using the language and concepts of the manosphere suggests this community and beliefs have become far more extensive than many like to think.
An online phenomenon?
Mainstream awareness of the manosphere emerged following its rapid expansion during the COVID pandemic through influencers such as Andrew Tate.
A common understanding emerged during this time of the manosphere as a digital subculture that leads vulnerable young boys and men astray. Popular media such as 2025’s Adolescence and Louis Theroux’s latest documentary have only reinforced this perception.
In Australia, its impacts have been felt especially acutely in the classroom. There’s been a noticeable growth of gendered harassment and disorderly behaviour among male students that is directed at female classmates and teachers.
The manosphere has also acted as an incubator for a stark form of self-help for young men, known as self-optimisation. It relies on arbitrarily quantified metrics around looks, status, personality and wealth.
To succeed, one is driven to compete with others by “maxxing” these metrics of self-value and lauding them against one’s competitors.
Outdated conceptions
But today this delineation of us and them – of mainstream and counterculture – is no longer accurate. As the US government posts show us, the manosphere today isn’t limited to a handful of online communities. It’s more like a collection of ideas floating around the culture.
Although some analysts have defined this as the “neo-manosphere”, this continues to suggest it’s an unusual phenomenon restricted to the internet.
Having broken containment, manosphere ideas and logic are now becoming deeply ingrained, reproduced and transformed in significant parts of the mainstream zeitgeist.
When manosphere ideas are picked up outside their original contexts, the ideas take on a life of their own. The growing normalisation of “maxxing” as a concept within an ever-expanding array of activities (from eating enough fibre to warmaking) is one way this happens.
Similarly, there’s the concept of hypergamy, or “dating up”. It’s the idea women only date in ruthlessly strategic and socially Darwinian terms to ascend the social and material hierarchy. It’s increasinglyentered normal understandings of modern romance.
As commentators point out, when the Joe Rogan Experience, ranked the number-one podcast globally for years, regularly espouses such concepts to tens of millions of loyal followers, you are no longer talking about subculture.
Normalising the manosphere
The rapid rise and popularity of the online influencer Braden Peters illustrates how pervasive manosphere ideas have become.
Known by his online moniker Clavicular, Peters is a streamer who became famous for popularising “looksmaxxing”.
Looksmaxxing is a relentless and extreme optimisation of one’s physical appearance. It’s measured by pseudoscientific metrics of attractiveness and often achieved through invasive and dangerouspractices.
Peters has repeatedly and angrily denied any connection to the manosphere community. Instead, he claims his approach to life is simply the most optimal way one can live.
Despite this, he channels a range of manosphere ideas in his content. His streams provide constant advice to their young audience on self-optimisation, whether for looksmaxxing, financemaxxing or statusmaxxing.
Peters suggests the key purpose in life for men of his generation is to relentlessly raise these numbers to “mog” (outperform) one’s competitors.
Because this status is only ever ephemeral, maxxing becomes an endless pursuit and a goal in itself.
Central to Peters’ content is performative visuals. Maxxing only rewards what can be conveyed through images: sixpack abs and a chiselled jawline, a Bugatti draped in bikini models, or even a grinning soldier, unbothered by the missiles and drones overhead on his way to rain hell on his enemies.
The maxxers don’t exist in a vacuum. All of us are encouraged to treat our world as if it is defined by interpersonal competition. We are constantly encouraged to optimise and quantify ourselves across myriad digital profiles in which we build our “personal brands” – our LinkedIns, our Tinders and our Google Scholars.
Researchers have found images can feel more real than reality. When that happens, we stop viewing other people through our shared humanity and starting thinking of them merely as quantifiable entities to compete against and dominate. This is the dehumanising worldview that now reaches into the highest offices of US political life.
The deeper roots
Thinking about the manosphere as an external threat to be contained fails to understand the bigger picture.
All this is occurring amid diminishing intergenerational economic opportunities, continual global crises and chaos, decaying social connections, and a growing disparity between rich and poor not seen since the gilded age.
For many young men who lack social connection and emotional intelligence, this intense competition over unstable future prospects is felt acutely. When influencers such as Peters or Tate offer simple, “quantifiable” solutions, vulnerable young men listen.
Initiatives around respect, building empathy, setting behavioural expectations and punishing transgressions can have a role in stemming the worst of the manosphere’s negative impacts for now. But they will ultimately fail unless the broader belief system and its structural economic and political causes are addressed.
The balm against manosphere ideas – as with many other extreme and radical beliefs – requires holistic solutions. These solutions look less like education and “respectful discourse” and more like rekindling a social contract that provides tangible material outcomes. This means meaningful, secure and achievable work, accessible housing, and ending extreme wealth disparity.
Ben Rich, Director of the Curtin Extremism Research Network (CERN), Curtin University and Paul Sutherland, PhD Candidate, Humanities, Curtin University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.