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This international men’s day let’s talk about how the manosphere harms boys 

As Scotland’s experts on preventing men’s violence against women and girls, Zero Tolerance is highlighting the harm the manosphere is having on boys, and the solution. 

This International Men’s Day new research gives insight into young men’s understandings and interactions with extreme misogynistic online content. 

Theatre company Civic Digits led a participatory project with young people exploring their experiences of incel culture, the misogynistic online community of men who hate women for making them ‘involuntarily celibate’.  

During the project young people attended workshops to explore gender, gender-based violence, critique online content, and create characters vulnerable to radicalisation and grooming. This work ultimately informed the creation of an interactive play, ‘Many Good Men’ which was performed by professional actors. 

We commissioned research alongside this project which highlights the harm such content has on boys’ mental health and relationships.  

The findings echo other research which shows that online misogynistic content creators target young men, and reinforce harmful gender stereotypes that pressure them to conform to a restrictive definition of masculinity which emphasises money, muscles, and sexual attraction. 

Young men who are worried about rejection might innocently search online for advice about how to get a girlfriend. This quickly evolves into a stream of content that gets more and more extreme, morphing boys into young men with low self-esteem, poor relationships, and a hatred of women. 

We may feel a desire to directly contradict and criticise this misogynistic content, but the project found this to be ineffective. Instead, the solution lies in creating a non-judgemental environment for young men to discuss and reflect on masculinity, relationships, and sex. These topics then can be more effectively explored through creative activities.  

“Most of us agree that equality between boys and girls is a good thing and want all children to live freely and feel safe. But girls are experiencing violence in schools and boys’ attitudes are becoming more misogynistic as they’re targeted by manosphere content online. This content harms young men’s relationships and mental health, as well as encouraging them to engage in violence against women and girls.  

The Many Good Men project shows how important it is for boys to have a safe and supportive space to critically engage and challenge such content, as well as expectations of gender, romantic relationships, and masculinity. ” – Rachel Adamson, Zero Tolerance Co-director 

“We were delighted to work with Zero Tolerance on this report. It added a huge value to our Many Good Men project as it allowed us to reflect and share the many discoveries we made in this forum theatre approach to addressing the radicalisation of masculinity online. We hope that those important discoveries will now be shared widely and that this will impact the implementation of polices around violence against women and children. Many Good Men demonstrated how impactful a forum theatre approach is for addressing online misogynistic content, particularly as it creates a safe and brave space for communities to come together, to listen to and support young people who experience the consequences of violent and hate filled online content.” – Clare Duffy, Civic Digits Director

To curb the threat of online radical misogyny, we must tackle the root cause: gender inequality. Zero Tolerance is calling on the Scottish Government to: 

1.Make it compulsory and statutory to provide comprehensive, gender-equal, culturally sensitive informationin relationships, sexual health and parenthood education (RSHP), so that young people do not have to resort to searching for information online.  

2.Strengthen ties between the youth work and education sectors, so that every young person in Scotland has a youth worker they can talk to and ask for information. Youth workers’ skills in relationship building and creating safe, non-judgemental relationships are vital.  

3.Collaborate with UK and international partners to regulate online platforms, reducing the amount of harmful content and preventing algorithms from promoting it. 

To learn more about the impact of extreme misogyny on young people read the new Many Good Men report. Over the course of 16 Days of Activism to End Gender Based Violence we will be releasing a series of podcasts discussing the key implications of this research.  

You can learn more about the Many Good Men project on Civic Digits website and watch the short film (3 mins) for the Many Good Men play. 

Read the Many Good Men full report,

Just want the highlights? Read the summary,

Super short on time? Get the headlines from our briefing!