The Heresies of the Manosphere, Part 1

Into the Manosphere

A quick heads up to all you wonderful subscribers: For the next few weeks, I’ll be doing something a bit different with the newsletter. Instead of sending out one long essay for full subscribers, I’m going to be sending out three shorter essays on the same topic: the theological errors of the Christian Manosphere. It’s an important topic, which requires more words and thoughts than I can fit into one reasonably sized essay. I want to make sure I explore it with the care and nuance it deserves, so I’ll spread out my writing on it over the next few weeks. These essays will be only for full subscribers, but I’ll include a decent-sized preview with each one, so you can decide if this series is worth a cup of coffee to you. If you do upgrade your subscription at any point, you’ll have full access to all the archives, as well as the opportunity to weigh in on the discussion. Thank you!

When I was nineteen-years-old, I didn’t know what it meant to be a woman. I knew I was one. People tended not to be as confused on that point thirty years ago as they are now. But beyond having two X chromosomes, I wasn’t sure what defined a woman or made her a good one. Was it long hair and curves? Was it an interest in small children and homemaking? Was it a quiet voice and a pleasing personality? What, besides hormones and the ability to bear a baby, made me different from a man?

This collegiate existential crisis was brought on, as most existential crises are at that age, by a boy. I liked one who didn’t like me back. And he wasn’t the first. Plenty of boys I’d liked had not liked me back. The reason for this, I decided, was that something was wrong with me. I felt like I had missed the class on how to be the sort of woman who could catch a man’s eye.

Accordingly, for weeks I stomped around campus confused. I was torn between feeling angry at all the adults who had encouraged me to focus on academics at the expense of makeup tutorials and also feeling like being a woman had to mean more than looking winsome and willowy. I wondered if I could still be feminine with a sharp mind and strong opinions. Was I less of a woman for being more smart than sexy? Did the size of my pants matter in some ontological way?

Eventually, I split the difference and developed an eating disorder. I decided that if I was tiny and delicate enough, I would appear so feminine that no one would notice my opinions. It didn’t work. People still noticed the opinions. But all these years later, I find myself strangely grateful for my confused descent into such foolishness. It has given me a kind of empathy for young men today, whose confusion over what it means to be a man is leading them deeper and deeper into the Manosphere.

What is the Manosphere?

For those of you wondering, “What the heck is Emily talking about?”, the Manosphere is a corner of the Internet where men are encouraged to be men. Or, more accurately, where men are encouraged to be a certain kind of man—the kind of man who is large and in charge, strong, virile, and the king of his castle.

In the secular Manosphere, that means being jacked, wealthy, and sexually promiscuous. In the Christian Manosphere, it seems to mean practicing jiu jitsu, smoking cigars, and being the sole breadwinner and decision maker in the home (or in pursuit of a wife who will let you do all those things without complaint). For Manosphere Christians, headship in the family is not understood so much as a dance with the heart, as it is a dance lesson given to the heart … and everyone else in the family. In the Manosphere, father always knows best. Accordingly, submission is never mutual, with husband and wife deferring to one another in love, but rather a one-way street, where submission is a duty owed exclusively by the wife to the husband.

Both in the secular Manosphere and Christian Manosphere, men frequently speak of being “red pilled”—a phrase drawn from the movie “The Matrix,” that basically means they have woken up from a culture-induced stupor. They see how the culture and feminism have conspired against them, and they’re no longer going along with it. (For a great podcast on this phenomenon, check out Two Become Family’s episode on the Manosphere and Red-Pilling)

Over the past few years, thanks to the loud voices of podcasters and YouTubers in the Manosphere, the number of Christian and non-Christian young men who claim to have swallowed a red pill has exploded. It’s no longer just gamers in their mother’s basements bitterly bashing women online. It’s now also nice Catholic boys on the campuses of good Catholic universities informing young women that it would be a mortal sin for them to work outside the home should they marry. It’s men in the offices of well-known Catholic apostolates protesting hiring women writers to do what a man could do. It’s newly married Catholic husbands telling their wives they’ll need permission to leave the home, even for simple errands like going to the grocery store. Whole swaths of Gen Z Catholics (and younger Millennials) have started subscribing, in whole or in part, to the retrograde, misogynic, and deeply unCatholic ideas about manhood found in the Christian Manosphere.

And I kind of get it.

I don’t like it. I don’t agree with it. But I do get it. As Richard Reeves details in his book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, the world is not a friendly one for young boys or young men who don’t want to sit in desks as children or work at them as men. Our educational system is more oriented towards girls than boys. Our economy is more oriented towards intellectual labor than manual labor. And good paying working-class jobs that allow a man to support a family are increasingly few and far between. For men who don’t want to pursue white collar work or who aren’t cut out for white collar work, career pickings are slim.

Life is not just rough for working class men, though. All young men today have grown up watching media which routinely denigrates dads and seeing the culture at large downplay a father’s importance. Pornography is the sea in which most young men spend their adolescence swimming. Both video game addiction and smart phone addiction keep young boys inside, on their screens, and not outside breaking legs and learning to take risks in a healthy way. And both competitive sports and competitive academics have boys (and girls) jumping through hyper-controlling, anxiety-inducing hoops from the time they can read. To top it all off, a quarter of all boys in the U.S. are currently growing up without a father in the home, giving them no healthy, present male role model for what it means to be a man.

Given all that, of course young men are frustrated. Of course they’re confused. Of course they’re feeling more than a little bit lost and looking for solid guidance about masculinity. In many ways, these guys are not unlike my 19-year-old self, who saw two ideals of womanhood presented to her—the feminist boss girl ideal and the sexy but dumb co-ed ideal—and found both wanting. In my confusion and frustration, I chose anorexia. In their confusion and frustration, they’re choosing Andrew Tate (or Timothy Gordon). They’re looking for clarity, purpose, and a way out of the mess in which our culture currently finds itself.

The Manosphere, Christian or otherwise, seems to offer them this. It tells men they are good—that their strength, their energy, and their desire to explore, build, and conquer are gifts, meant to be used. It recognizes their dignity, their worth, and the value of masculinity. It encourages young men to take responsibility for their life and pursue excellence. All of which is good. All of which young men need to hear.

But the good ends there.

In the secular Manosphere, vice is presented as virtue. Greed, lust, and the abuse of power are all glorified, held up as ideals to pursue not sins to avoid. Its failings are not subtle. In the Christian Manosphere, influencers quote Scripture or passages from Church teaching and the writings of the saints. But those passages—on marital submission, male headship, women teaching in the Church, and more—are often taken out of context, twisted, or presented as the unchanging teachings of the Church when they most definitely are not. What emerges from that distortion is not a vision of healthy Christian masculinity, but a caricature of masculinity, one which fundamentally misunderstands who God made man to be and what God made man to do.

The Both/And of Male and Female

Recently, on the podcast, Chris, Kate, Casey, and I spoke with our good friend Dr. Matt Breuninger about the masculine genius. It was a fantastic conversation, but not one which produced a lot of answers. The masculine genius, like the feminine genius, can be hard to pin down. This is because each and every one of us is a unique human being. Sex is not determinative of every aspect of who we are. Statistically, men and women tend to exhibit certain preferences, struggles, and strengths—for example, women tend to use more words in a day. But those preferences, struggles, and strengths are always generalities. They don’t apply to every man or woman. We all fall somewhere on the bell curve, and a man who talks more than most men or a woman who talks less than most women are not any less of a man or a woman for being outliers on that curve. They’re just themselves.

Sexual difference also doesn’t mean sexual polarity. The fact that more women tend to be nurturing, doesn’t mean men aren’t nurturing. Likewise, the fact that more men tend to have strong spatial awareness skills, doesn’t mean women don’t have spatial awareness skills. Men and women are not complete opposites, with the differences between us starkly black and white. We are all human beings, made in the image of God, in possession of the same human nature. Even though men and women are not the same, we are more alike than we are different.

The Catholic Church recognizes this. Its anthropology, its understanding of the human person, acknowledges both our commonality and our uniqueness. This is one reason why it can recognize that sex is fixed. Although the Church is routinely accused for being “anti-science,” (whatever that means), her view of sexuality corresponds to scientific reality. It’s the totality of our body—our chromosomes, hormones, DNA, reproductive organs, muscle and fat composition, bone density, etc.—which determines whether we are a man or a woman. It’s not our feelings, strengths, likes and dislikes. Being sensitive, preferring to play with dolls, excelling at math—none of that has anything to do with what sex you are. It’s just you: a unique individual made in the image of God.

This is not to say that sex doesn’t matter. It absolutely does. As Christians, we believe God made us—intentionally, thoughtfully, deliberately. From all eternity, He knew each of us would exist. Before we existed as a child in our mothers’ womb, we existed as a thought in the mind of God. And even as a thought, we existed as male or female. God saw all of us always, including our sex. That part of who we are is not incidental to who we are. It’s integral. As the Catechism states, “Sexuality affects all aspects of the human person in the unity of his body and soul,” (CCC 2332). In other words, God willfully created me as a woman, and it’s as a woman that He wants me to image Him in this world. My womanhood, my femininity, is bound up with the work He has for me in this life. The same is true of my husband. His maleness is not an accident. God made Chris a man. And Chris cannot be who God made him to be or do the work God made him to do apart from his manhood.

The Church is able to hold these truths in tension with one another. Sex is not determinative, and sex is important. We are all individuals and we are all created, in body and soul, as men or women. Christ has a unique call and plan for each of us and that unique call and plan is not separate from our maleness and femaleness.

The one thing transgender activists and the Christian Manosphere have in common is their inability (or refusal) to do the same. For them, it can’t be both/and. It must be either/or. So, the transgender movement rightly acknowledges that sex is not determinative of who we are, that we are all unique individuals, and that each of us has a unique path in life. But it denies that sex is fundamentally important, that sex is an ontological reality, and that our path to God is inseparable from our sex. The Christian Manosphere movement mirrors the transgender movement, recognizing the importance and reality of sex, as well as its connection to vocation. But it does that while also insisting that sex is determinative of the whole of who we are, denying the particularity of individuals, and denying the uniqueness of God’s plan for each individual.

The Manosphere’s failure, I think, is its confusion of signs and the reality to which those signs point. They don’t understand the sacramental nature of the world, and they don’t understand what it means to be a human person, made in the image of God. Their anthropology is flawed.

And that’s what we’ll talk about next week.

More By Me Related To This Topic:

Visitation Sessions: In Search of the Masculine Genius (Podcast)

Welcoming the Wholeness of Women: The Catholic Vision of Feminine Dignity (Substack Essay)

Tending the Garden, Part 1: Understanding God’s Vision for Marriage and Family (Substack Essay)

Tending the Garden, Part 2: Redeeming the Family (Substack Essay)

The Marital Debt, Mary, and the Feminine Genius (Substack Q&A)

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