When his editor suggested he write a book about the manosphere, James Bloodworth replied, “Why would I want to do that?” You can see his point. Who would want to spend their days reading about and thinking about the toxic online subculture where men go to blame women for everything and plot their revenge? Who would choose to listen to endless Jordan Peterson podcasts or watch interminable Andrew Tate video clips? Well, the answer is quite a lot of men, even though the squeamish Bloodworth doesn’t really seem to know why.
His book begins with an excellent chapter in which he describes how, as a callow 23-year-old, he forked out a couple of grand to take part in a course in how to seduce women. This was the era of Neil Strauss’s bestselling book The Game (2005), which taught geeky men how to pull gullible women. A bundle of nerves, the author ended up chanting a mantra of “Right here, right now!” on a night out in the West End with fellow pick-up pupils. As he prepared to approach a “target”, his coach informed him encouragingly, “Your organ is a spear.”
Unfortunately, for a book subtitled “a personal journey through the manosphere”, this reminiscence from two decades ago is as personal as it gets. The author has interviewed some leading figures of the manosphere, including former pick-up artist Anthony “Dream” Johnson. He has gone to several manosphere conferences where participants wear baseball caps printed with the slogan “Make Women Great Again”. He has even worked as a coach on a course in how to design social media profiles to attract women. (The signature Instagram pic of the course creator, Michael Sartain, has him grinning at the heart of a human pyramid of hotties.) Yet we never again get the same level of detail. We’ve little idea how Bloodworth landed that job, or how he felt doing it. Was he nervous, for instance, that he might be unmasked as a left-leaning investigative reporter?
This leaves us with Bloodworth’s less personal material, which is certainly sobering. By the broadly chronological account of Lost Boys, the manosphere grew out of noughties pick-up artist culture. There were men who absorbed the lessons of Strauss’s book but still had no luck with the ladies, and they were angry about it. There were the successful pick-up artists who posted clips online of them chatting up women, then found that the most popular ones were when they insulted their targets. So they posted more clips like that. We learn about the Red Pill brigade, who believe that the world is secretly run by women and most men don’t stand a chance. And so on.
Strangely, there’s zero consideration here of the explosion of online pornography, which encourages a hyper-sexualised view of the world, while arguably making the surreptitious viewer feel self-conscious and embittered that they aren’t getting as much action as the priapic musclemen on the screen. I would have liked to have seen more, too, on the polarisation of thought created by the internet’s algorithms, and the acceleration effect of the digital revolution, as a result of which, as Bloodworth notes, a boy showing interest in the relatively cerebral musings of Jordan Peterson on Instagram will, within an hour, be exposed to the more extreme pontifications of the odious Andrew Tate.
At its best, Lost Boys itself acts as a kind of red pill, which reveals that the manosphere is really run by an assortment of more or less sleazy grifters. When I followed Michael Sartain on Instagram to learn more about the kind of course to which Bloodworth contributed, within minutes I received a DM from Sartain himself: “You here for the girls & lifestyle or the recent social circle vid I just did?” “Girls & lifestyle,” I replied after a pause, keen to see how far the grift would go. I’ve since had five more messages, steering me towards his 21 Day Social Circle programme, which costs about $7,000.
Tate and Peterson are on the make too, of course—as, in a different sense, is the Trump administration, which as Bloodworth points out towards the end of his book, has enthusiastically embraced the slang and stylings of the manosphere. The president himself dismisses his enemies as “beta”. Meanwhile, his deputy, J.D. Vance, describes himself as “red-pilled”. All of which leaves us with the worrying sense that the subculture of the manosphere is fast becoming a superculture.
