Sadiq Khan stood up in London this week and called the manosphere what it is: snake oil salesmen peddling pound shop misogyny to a lost generation of young men. He’s right, and the part everyone keeps tiptoeing around is that it’s a business. Tate, the HSTikkyTokky crowd, the whole grindset content farm — they’re not selling masculinity. They’re selling a course to a 19-year-old who can’t find a job, can’t afford rent, and has been told his whole life that if he just hustled hard enough the door would open. The door’s been bricked up for years. These guys figured out you can charge admission to stand in front of it.
Here’s what makes it work, and it’s the same thing this blog keeps coming back to. The despair is real. A generation of young men got handed an economy that posts record profits while it fires people, a housing market built to keep them out, a “jobless boom” that’s booming for everyone but them. That anger has to go somewhere. So the grifters show up and aim it at women — at feminism, at your ex, at the girl who didn’t text back — because hating the boardroom doesn’t sell merch and hating women does. It’s the oldest move going. Take a man who just got robbed and convince him the thief was whoever was standing next to him in line.
So no, the fix isn’t to lecture these kids about being better men while the machine that radicalized them keeps running. Khan’s program and his under-16 social media ban at least name the algorithm doing the recruiting, which is more than most politicians manage to say out loud. But the manosphere doesn’t die because you moderate it. It dies when a 19-year-old can get a job that covers rent and a future that feels like his, because that emptiness is what the grift is renting out. Give a man something real and the snake oil stops moving. Leave him with nothing and there will always be somebody there to sell him the rage.