Back in 2005, when he was 22, James Bloodworth typed something like “How to get a girlfriend” into Google and found a forum called, he thinks, “Alt Seduction Fast”. Before long he was attending nightclubs with a seduction expert called “Tux”, who taught young men how to approach women. He cringes to remember it.
“I was living in the countryside with my grandmother. I didn’t go out much. I saw a few close friends once or twice a week. They were socially awkward; shy, I suppose. And my social skill atrophied and I lost confidence, probably from staying in the house too much.”
The pickup-artist community, made famous in Neil Strauss’s bestselling book The Game, was an early stage of what we now call the manosphere. Bloodworth is now a seasoned journalist who has written for The New Statesman, The Guardian and The Wall Street Journal.
His last book, Hired, documented six months he spent working undercover in an Amazon warehouse. His newest book, Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere, is a fascinating and disturbing exploration of the nooks and crannies of online misogyny. Bloodworth is in Ireland this weekend to talk about it at International Festival of Literature Dublin.
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The book starts with a very honest account of his time in the world of pickup artists that helps put all those “lost boys” into empathetic perspective. That community “appealed to me because it was counterintuitive,” he says.
“It was, like, ‘Everything you’ve been doing up to now has been wrong.’ And I was quite receptive to that message, because everything I was doing wasn’t working, and the counterintuitive thing I found quite appealing, because I was already quite an oppositional person in terms of my politics.
“I was very leftwing at the time, and I still am to some extent. Questioning the mainstream and received wisdom appealed to that side of myself. And there were also these guru figures who claimed to have this roadmap and that if you just follow this step-by-step process, it will fix your problem. That was quite appealing, because I was so directionless.”
He hung out on the online forums. He learned the techniques. He went to the clubs. Even then he didn’t like the overly scripted “banter” or the more manipulative elements of that culture; in retrospect he believes it’s easy to see the roots of the manosphere inside it all. “There was always this othering of women in that subculture,” he says. “It was always very susceptible to that.”
[ What is the manosphere and why is everyone talking about it?Opens in new window ]
Bloodworth ultimately found a girlfriend, went to university and fell away from the pickup gurus. Occasionally he’d dip into the online forums to see what was happening in the community; he was alarmed at how extreme things had become. In the 2010s on YouTube, he says, the pickup artists began to evolve into something different.
“They’d make these videos where they would go out to nightclubs and start behaving obnoxiously and women would be the butt of the joke. It was entertainment at women’s expense ... When it gravitated to YouTube it became much more about generating a reaction among an audience of men than necessarily teaching men anything. It was about getting their money but also getting clicks and likes and generating outrage and shock.”
He outlines this evolution in Lost Boys. In the early 2010s the manosphere was still a fringe phenomenon. Figures such as Julien Blanc made headlines because his dating advice seemed to encourage sexual assault. The comedian Dapper Laughs lost a lucrative TV gig because of a rape joke.
[ From the archive: US ‘date coach’ Julien Blanc’s Australian visa cancelledOpens in new window ]
Later, Bloodworth says, he could see something new “emerge alongside Trumpism and 4Chan and Reddit and these anonymous communities where they’re saying, ‘There’s a war on men … There’s no option but to just wage war on feminism.’ And it just takes on this much darker, conspiratorial, political edge.”
In 2018 he saw this world edging towards the mainstream and decided to write a book on the subject. “Jordan Peterson had become super famous. I wanted to explore why so many men saw this guy as a surrogate father figure. Because, to me, a lot of the message was very basic self-help stuff that I’d heard in the 1990s from Tony Robbins – ‘Stand up straight, make your bed, build confidence’ – [but] it seemed to come with this harder edge of conservative gender roles.”
As Bloodworth explored it, that world became more extreme, with the emergence of figures such as Andrew Tate “making Peterson look moderate”. It was “male-supremacist, antifeminist, very socially Darwinist”.
There are two main trains of thought in the manosphere. There are the advocates of the “red pill” (named after the pill Neo takes to see the “real world” in the 1999 film The Matrix). They believe that by teaching men to act in a regressive way they can achieve a certain form of success in life and with women. And then there are more pessimist “black pill” communities, often called incels – short for involuntary celibates – who live in a sort of hopeless hate. Both are essentially misogynistic.
In the course of his research Bloodworth met many manosphere participants and attended “status-maxxing” seminars given in Las Vegas by the motivational speaker Michael Sartain.
“He takes testosterone-replacement therapy. He dresses like a 20-year-old ... And he would always be surrounded by women in their early 20s. He was 46 … We went on photo shoots with rented Lamborghinis and other supercars in the desert in Nevada, and people would pose for photos with these cars as if they were their own.”
With the pickup artists the belief was that it was all about personality and charisma. “With Michael Sartain it was all about women being only interested in status, and if you don’t have this high-status lifestyle you’re going to be one of the ‘surplus men’. That was the phrase they used …
“With the manosphere everything’s kind of shoved through the prism of the marketplace. They talk about the ‘sexual marketplace’. And then even self-improvement is about creating yourself as more of a desirable commodity.”
Bloodworth also visited “red pill” events that had a more explicitly political agenda and, increasingly, direct ties to the Maga movement. “They see figures like Donald Trump [and think] their problems are going to be fixed through politics.”
The black pill is toxic in a different way. “After The Game there was this explosion of pickup entrepreneurs charging lots of money promising to fix men’s dating shortcomings. A lot of men went through that, and then some came out the other side having spent all this money, having been scammed by some of these pickup charlatans, and they were no better off ...
A lot of the stuff now is about impressing other men – getting ridiculously jacked at the gym, the sports cars, the cigars
— James Bloodworth
“And they were angry about it. They turned their anger on the pickup instructors but also on women … They’re loners. They spend a lot of time at home in their bedrooms. They basically call for a form of sexual slavery.”
Many manosphere adherents believe in traditional gender roles and literally advocate removing the vote from women. They often believe in sleeping with as many women as possible while also judging those women for doing so. In extreme cases, young men who have identified as incels have committed mass shootings and murders.
Most young men are not extremists, but Bloodworth believes that the omnipresence of the material on social media is changing their attitudes nonetheless.
“You might start off watching this content as entertainment and be slowly radicalised in the process,” he says. “There was a poll done by Ipsos at the beginning of last year, and a slim majority of men aged between 14 and 21 believe that the 80/20 rule” – a pseudoscientific manosphere-perpetuated belief that 20 per cent of men attract 80 per cent of all women – “was real, that women were only interested in high-status men.
“You also see among younger generations of men a bit more hostility towards basic feminist tenets, compared to groups of older men. [A young man] may see Andrew Tate and think he’s a bombastic idiot, but sometimes [he’s] imbibing some of these messages without quite realising it.”
To address this, Bloodworth believes we need to understand the mechanisms at play. The business model of the manosphere “works by making young men feel insecure and then selling them the purported solution”, he says. “So they will berate young men, spread conspiracy theories about the 80/20 rule and that if men don’t take action they’re going to be part of this 80 per cent of ‘surplus men’ left behind.
“And then they seek to capitalise on it by saying, ‘If you buy my course, if you follow my teaching, if you watch my videos, if you sign up to my mentoring programme, I can help to fix you.’”
This is all fuelled by the way social-media algorithms work.
“There’s so much noise [online] that saying the more extreme thing is the way to become famous,” Bloodworth says. “Andrew Tate was someone who was trying to get famous for a long time, whether it was through kick-boxing or going into the Celebrity Big Brother house …
“He found that the way he actually got famous was by saying these really abrasive, obnoxious things online. People who maybe agreed with that, or thought it was funny, would then share that stuff, but also people who were just outraged by it would share it.”
The algorithms operate like a pipeline to this extremity. “When I discovered the pickup forum in 2005, and then realised this stuff wasn’t for me, I could just not visit the forum any more,” he says.
“But when I [started] the book, in 2018, I would watch some Jordan Peterson videos as research, and then my whole timeline on YouTube was quickly colonised by this material. [Before long] it recommends you a video of someone saying that the left and the LGBT movement will result in the downfall of western civilisation.”
This is further exacerbated, he says, by real-world social trends. Work has become less secure. There’s a housing crisis and a cost-of-living crisis.
“You’re much more likely to be an incel if you live at home with your parents, if you can’t find a stable job … It’s easier for these figures to come along and say, ‘Actually, the problem is because women and migrants are hoarding all the treasure ...’
“We live in a society in which ties to other people are looser. It’s then easier to see the world through this two-dimensional screen. Other humans become two dimensional. You can then impose these theories on to women. If you’re around women and around other people, it’s much harder to do that.”
Social media also pushes individualistic solutions over collective ones and ultimately fosters a depressing belief that men are essentially alone.
“That’s why you can end up down these rabbit holes of endless self-improvement,” Bloodworth says. “Some self-improvement I don’t have any problem with, but why can’t you pair that with collective solutions?” We should be asking bigger questions, he says. “Why doesn’t the workplace pay as much as it should? Why is there no way to wrestle the levers of power back from some of these oligarchic figures?”
He believes that young men need connection and community in the real world. What other solutions might help them? “Female friends are a huge one,” Bloodworth says. “You then humanise some of the rhetoric. [Your female friends] are just going to dismantle that rhetoric if you start to use it in front of them.
“The pickup artist was all about turning yourself into the object of female desire, but a lot of the stuff now is about impressing other men – getting ridiculously jacked at the gym, the sports cars, the cigars, the fake Instagram photos of going on private jets, the trophy girlfriends.
“Whereas, if you actually talk to women about what they want, it tends to not be those things. Having female friends is huge.”
Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere is published by Atlantic Books. James Bloodworth is in conversation with his fellow author Shane Hegarty at International Literature Festival Dublin at 2pm on Saturday, May 16th
