Anthony “Dream” Johnson, the self-described president of the manosphere, declared war on Rollo Tomassi in the summer of 2019. On Twitter, Johnson called Tomassi a “TRAITOR, fraud, and SELL OUT.” Virtual armies were gathered and battle lines were drawn between the two leading figures: Johnson, a thirty-something with a Trump-inspired red hat that reads, “MAKE WOMEN GREAT AGAIN,” and Tomassi, the fifty-something “godfather” of the internet of men. What seemed at first a petty fight over a personal falling out turned into a reckoning for the sprawling network of antifeminist online communities. In response to the fight, Jack Murphy, who runs an “exclusive men’s organization” focused on “positive masculinity,” declared on Twitter: “The ‘manosphere’ is dead.”
Reports of the manosphere’s death are greatly exaggerated. In fact, it’s thriving, as evidenced by bustling message boards, and hundreds of thousands of YouTube subscribers. It is, however, in the midst of an existential crisis.
Decades ago, the manosphere first began to emerge as a loose array of groups with variable approaches to challenging women’s liberation—from men’s rights activists (MRAs) who proclaimed themselves to be the real victims of sexism to pickup artists (PUAs) who designed strategies meant to manipulate women into bed. These groups were frequently hostile toward each other but shared the fundamental belief that cisgender men had been wronged by feminism and modern society. Over the years, that shared perspective has expanded into a subtly unifying ideology and the manosphere’s various subsets have proven to function less as distinct communities than stepping stones leading men toward newer, more radical factions. Research suggests these groups are only growing.
Alongside this movement toward radicalism, the manosphere’s ideas have successfully infiltrated the mainstream. The manosphere has never been more influential in popular culture, nor so extremist and politicized. All of this has fomented a rupture in the ‘sphere, one evidenced by the rift between Johnson and Tomassi. The latter’s supporters characterize it as a divide between rationalist, apolitical adherents of “the red pill”—which, within the manosphere, is essentially a conspiracy theory about feminism—and traditional conservatives, or “TradCons,” with retro, moralistic patriarchal fantasies. From their perspective, the integrity of the manosphere is in peril precisely because of its success. Its ideologies have spread so far and wide, its audience grown so big, that its core identity is in crisis.
These groups share fundamental beliefs while harboring divergent ideals, as reflected in Johnson’s 21 Convention, a “masculine self-improvement event” which recently took place at an undisclosed location in Orlando, Florida. According to the event’s website, Johnson’s convention featured a special “patriarch” session on “fatherhood, masculinity, fathers, aspiring fathers, marriage, family, relationships, and all the issues facing fathers today in Western Culture.” The speakers included George Bruno, a man who evangelizes about women’s modest dress (“Breasts are most beautiful... in the bedroom,” he tweeted) and popular fitness YouTuber Elliott Hulse, who rants about “degeneracy,” exalts marriage, and appears to question whether women should be allowed to vote. Another speaker’s Twitter bio identifies him as a “patriarch” and a member of the Mormon Church. Recent 21 Convention events featured the racist alt-right figure Stefan Molyneux, who promotes “race realism,” and the anti-feminist and Pizzagate conspiracy theory promoter Mike Cernovich.
While Johnson’s speakers reinforce patriarchal norms around everything from women’s modesty to the glorification of father-as-protector, Tomassi rejects much of that traditionalism. He got his start in the pickup artist community and calls modern marriage “a menagerie of horrors for today’s men” that he “cannot condone.” He associates with flashy dating coaches who are devoted to what he calls the “game,” including Troy Francis, who recently characterized the current manosphere divide as, “Dullards v decadents.” Within this framework, Tomassi is a decadent and Johnson is a dullard.
The “decadents” don’t just define themselves in opposition to the “dullards,” who have been buoyed by a Trump presidency. So-called decadents like Tomassi say the manosphere has seen an influx of imitators and opportunists who are motivated by politics, fame, money, or all of the above. There is a whole new crop of mainstream-leaning figures who fall outside the manosphere’s longstanding tribes, including woo-woo spiritual influencers and feel-good self-help gurus. This includes the wildly popular Jordan Peterson, a Canadian professor and author famed for defending human hierarchies on the basis of lobster biology, and whose work appears heavily influenced by the manosphere.
For some within it, the fracture threatens the manosphere’s existence: as a writer using the pseudonym Black Label Logic wrote in the wake of Johnson’s battle cry, “The truth is, this space is in trouble.” But there are high stakes too for those outside the realm of MRAs and PUAs. Silly as it may seem, the outcome of this dullards-decadents battle stands to influence the future of antifeminism—not just in pockets online but in mainstream culture and politics, where the manosphere already has a stronghold. It isn’t just a question of whether Johnson or Tomassi “wins,” or which personal brand and belief system triumphs. It’s possible these divisions only strengthen the manosphere’s most militant and dangerous facets, those lacking self-described “presidents” yet still have the power of influence.
Whatever the result of this clash of identities, the effects are likely to be felt for years to come, and far beyond the boundaries of the manosphere. The future of the far-right is being decided, quietly, online.
In truth, this reckoning is decades in the making. In the 1970s, William Farrell, a man now widely credited with popularizing some of the manosphere’s foundational arguments, joined the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women. He supported the Equal Rights Amendment, ran men’s consciousness groups, organized a task force on the “Masculine Mystique,” and wrote critically of the constraints of gendered expectation in his 1973 book The Liberated Man. Farrell became the subject of rapt media attention, including a People magazine photo-spread featuring him cooking breakfast for his wife, an IBM executive, as Mother Jones’ Mariah Blake reported. As the 1970s brought divorce and custody disputes to the cultural fore, though, Farrell became more concerned with men’s rights.
In 1993, shortly after Farrell and his wife divorced, he wrote The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex, a book that regards men as the truly aggrieved. It’s been called “something of a Bible to the Men’s Rights followers.” With the internet boom, those followers began to emerge online. The early inklings of what would become known much later as the manosphere was “littered not only with anti-feminist diatribes but also with racism, homophobia, and far-right conspiracy theories,” as Blake reported. “One early site, Fathers Manifesto, interspersed excerpts of Farrell’s writing with calls to exile blacks from America and claims that Catholic priests were sexually abusing children as part of a plot to spread AIDS,” she writes.
Pickup artist communities cropped up online around the same time, but just as with MRAs, PUAs had an offline history. In 1992, Ross Jeffries, the so-called “godfather” of pickup, published How to Get the Women You Desire into Bed. Jeffries held seminars on his “speed seduction” technique, which was inspired by neuro-linguistic programming, a pseudoscientific theory for influencing human behavior using hypnotic techniques. Hitting the daytime talk show circuit to promote his book, Jeffries portrayed himself as a fed-up man finally standing up to women, delivering such bromides as, “When you accommodate, you get what the commode gets. You get the crapola. You have to learn to say ‘no’ to a woman.”
By the end of the nineties, Jeffries had inspired Tom Cruise’s character in the film Magnolia, an over-the-top, headset-wearing self-help guru who shouted onstage about “respect[ting] the cock” and “[taming] the cunt.” In the 2000s, these online networks grew, as did their IRL counterparts: group meet-ups, called “seduction lairs,” and pricey in-person workshops run by ostentatious characters. Take Mystery, a PUA who adorned himself with eyeliner, a fuzzy top hat, and platform shoes. From these booming PUA communities emerged a dictionary’s worth of terminology like “negging,” a technique of subtly insulting a woman to generate sexual interest driven by insecurity, and “peacocking,” dressing flashily to attract attention and convey confidence.
Just as PUAs were gaining steam and a lexicon, MRAs began to splinter. The divide emerged over the “unwillingness of some to cooperate with female MRAs and a belief that MRAs should not work as a collective,” according to a report by the UK advocacy group Hope not Hate. This spawned a separate community of “men going their own way” (or MGTOW). In 2001, as Donna Zuckerberg reports, the blog No Ma’am published a “MGTOW Manifesto” with the stated aim of instilling “masculinity in men, femininity in women, and work[ing] toward limited government!” Its political message was ostensibly libertarian, but it was clearly gendered: women were meant to return to their “feminine qualities,” the manifesto explained. On the other hand, the post detailed a strategy for men of “living independent lives” and “fighting chivalry.”
It was PUAs, not MGTOWs, who would soon get mainstream validation. In 2005, journalist Neil Strauss published The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists, which was framed as expose but functioned as a how-to. Two years later, in 2007, Mystery got his own VH1 reality-TV show, guiding hapless men through the art of the pickup. He may have made for amusing television, what with his rocker-meets-magician aesthetic, but this was the same man quoted in The Game as advising how a man can persist through women’s “last-minute resistance” to sex (or “LMR”) by “just [taking] your cock out.” The following year, the notorious Roosh V launched his pickup blog and made explicit what was often implicit in PUA technique by writing things like, “No means no—until it means yes” and “Make rape legal if done on private property.”
It was following Roosh’s ratcheting of violent rhetoric in the manosphere that Paul Elam, a devoted fan of William Farrell, launched A Voice for Men (AVFM). It was, purportedly, a site organized around advocating for men’s rights, and yet often directed its ire at women. Within a year of launching, Elam had pronounced October “Bash-A-Violent-Bitch Month” in a post illustrated with a photo of a woman with a black eye and a caption reading, “Maybe she DID have it coming.” (Elam later called the post a satirical response to a blogon this site.) He once wrote in a post, which has since been removed, that some women “walk through life with the equivalent of a I’M A STUPID, CONNIVING BITCH—PLEASE RAPE ME neon sign glowing above their empty little narcissistic heads.” In 2011, AVFM created Register-Her, which named, shamed, and led to the doxing and harassment of women the site “deemed to have falsely accused men of rape or domestic violence,” or for “having protested men’s rights activist gatherings, or those Elam simply disagreed with,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.
