Going Down the 'Manosphere' Rabbit Hole

Sherdil Singh is quite annoyed these days. The 18-year-old라이브 바카라 best friend has started dating a woman and he feels like a third wheel around the couple. “What could be worse?” rues the teenager, who is about to graduate from a school in his city Delhi and has never been in a romantic relationship. Influenced by the woman, Sherdil believes, his friend seems to be turning into something like a “feminist”. Why else would his friend overreact now to the kind of jokes they didn’t mind cracking earlier or appear to be extra-sensitive about the sort of comments they would have easily passed otherwise, Sherdil wonders. What라이브 바카라 more, he even lectures him sometimes about how to behave with the opposite gender.

As his father is too busy with work and he doesn’t speak of “these kinds of things” with his mother, Sherdil turns to the Internet for advice. He has seen male content creators on his YouTube and Instagram feed talking about dating, grooming, body building and even how to start a successful business. He has browsed some of the content in boredom but never paid attention. They may not be completely right, but they aren’t entirely wrong either, he thinks. There is all this focus on Beti Bachao and women라이브 바카라 rights, after all, while no one is talking about how hard it is to be a young man in this world. Isn’t there a lot of pressure on men to provide and to be strong, he wonders. Coming from a middle-class family with strict parents and little attention from the opposite gender, Sherdil hates it when the girls in his school talk about male privilege. He doesn’t feel privileged.

He starts following some of these creators, watches their reels and videos, and even engages with a few comments underneath this content. “Feminism is all well and good in theory, but women forget it when it라이브 바카라 time to do the dirty jobs,” he writes on one such forum. The comment gets 100 likes in less than a minute with other men agreeing empathically and sending him follow requests. This is more attention than he has ever got online.

Sherdil expected no more than to watch these reels and perhaps take on one of the courses they sell—perhaps the one on how to change your face to increase your sexual market value, or that other one on how to dress to attract more girls. But he gets much more in the process—he finds a community of men and boys who are going through the same issues as him. They want to engage with him, speak about his problems, offer advice and acceptance.

I know how Sherdil feels because I made him up. Under this assumed identity, I browsed what is called the “manosphere” for a week—on Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and Discord—and spoke with several of its digital denizens, including content creators. There are thousands of real boys like Sherdil online. In an August 2024 report, the Equimundo Centre for Masculinities and Social Justice defines the manosphere as “a broad collection of websites, forums and other online spaces characterised by their misogynistic and anti-feminist content”.

According to the report, boys often go online with “common search terms and topic areas” such as “dating advice, financial guidance and fitness content”, but many “end up funnelled” into the manosphere, “which swoops in with clear messages to help men make sense of a changing world, particularly around gender and gender roles”. “Many of these spaces exist on platforms like YouTube, Reddit, notably aboveground—increasingly permeating mainstream media,” the report notes.

Within the manosphere, there are groups such as incels (involuntary celibates), Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) and Pick-up Artists (PUAs). There are also men라이브 바카라 grooming ‘experts’ and dating gurus. While not every aspect of this network is overtly toxic or misogynist, most of it aligns more or less with The Red Pill (TRP)—a neoconservative perspective based on essentialist notions of gender and sexuality that selectively deploys evolutionary psychology as proof of male dominance being part of the natural order of things allegedly disrupted by feminist narratives. The term comes from the movie The Matrix (1999), whose protagonist must choose between taking the Blue Pill to stay in a reassuring world of illusions and swallowing the Red Pill that will make him realise his enslaved reality. The main online community of ‘red-pillers’ was created in 2012 on Reddit.

Mohan Dhawan, a 20-year-old who works in the media, came across TRP content when he was in his teens. “I don’t follow it now, but back then it was attractive because some of what they say is true. For instance, men are indeed under a lot of pressure. If a man doesn’t earn for his family, then he will not be respected even in his own house,” he says. Red pillers essentially ignore that criticism of such gender-constrained roles is implicit in the critique of patriarchy. Yet Dhawan immediately follows up his statement on how the system puts men in a tight spot with a dig at feminism—“sometimes it is fake, right?”—and faithfully regurgitates the same widely shared TRP trope Sherdil had deployed to find others like ‘him’: “Women forget feminism when it라이브 바카라 time to clean the gutters, for example.”

Most popular creators in the Indian manosphere include dating coaches such as Sarthak Goel and Kshitij Sehrawat, who have over 300,000 and 700,000 followers, respectively, on YouTube and over 200,000 each on Instagram. A lot of anti-women sentiment is easily couched under the guise of “teaching men how to talk to women”. In one video, Goel explains to his followers how to not pay attention to a girl if she says no when he asks her out. She is only “testing” the man라이브 바카라 feelings, he tells them. In another, he claims “women cheat on nice guys”. Requests for an interview with Goel and Sehrawat went unanswered.

The comments show the range of men who follow such content. “I’m 40 bro, but what you say resonates with me too,” says one. When a boy talks about how he라이브 바카라 “16, so lonely and no girl will ever look at me”, men ask him to share his picture so they can “see for themselves”. Only some of the comments after the photograph was presumably shared are supportive.

Many boys and men seem desperate to change their looks—“looksmaxxing” in incel lingo—in order to be more attractive to women. While many unleash their frustration with comments on the “dark side” of women, some go as far as saying “women who tease men deserve to be raped”.

In one Instagram video, Kshitij, who goes by the username IronManLifestyle, sits on a low couch, hand placed firmly on the thighs of a woman in a micro-dress sitting next to him. In such videos he imparts “dating advice”, including how to make a woman comfortable enough so she shares her number with you after refusing. “You have to make her realise how important and unique you are; make her realise the fear of value loss,” he teaches.

The crux of such videos of the PUA category is that men should attract women by being “classically masculine”—big, strong providers—and seeing themselves as products whose “demand” will go up if they don’t “chase” women. A steady stream of proto-masculine content encourages followers to not just objectify women but also themselves. “Everyone is a product,” says Mayank Bhattacharya, 33, who runs a popular men라이브 바카라 looksmaxxing channel on YouTube and Instagram. “As any marketplace, like these dating apps, is a commercialised process, a man who wants a chance to break the algorithm and stand out will work on himself.” His followers are largely boys “in the 12th standard or just going into college”. He got into making content after watching TRP creators on YouTube and says “incel culture has gotten worse” in the past decade. His own content has become “more positive” over the past four years, he claims, adding dismally that it has “affected” his views and his income, which used to be around Rs 3 lakh per month just from YouTube. While his old videos on Andrew Tate라이브 바카라 “marketing secrets” got 100K views, his recent ones on clothes and style to attract women get only 3-4K. The “violent misogyny promoted” by Tate had been blamed by the prosecution for inciting Kyle Clifford, 26, to rape a woman and murder three—Carol, Louise and Hannah Hunt—at their home in Bushey, Hertfordshire, in July 2024.

Ayush Sharma (ChadTag) runs a facial reformer programme for their YouTube audience, teaching boys how to change their looks and attitude to attract more women. “I am the least toxic one out there. Other creators call me gay,” he says. “That라이브 바카라 the ultimate insult, next only to Cuck (for Cuckold), a man whose chick cheats on him.”

In fact, masculinity in its most rigid form is a strong predictor of intimate partner violence (IPV), suggests a 2014 UNFPA study on ‘Masculinity, Son Preference and Intimate Partner Violence in India’, which found men who demonstrated such masculinity to be 1.35 times more likely to be perpetrators than others more equitable in their attitudes and behaviour. Moreover, 44 per cent of men who had regularly witnessed or experienced discrimination and violence in their childhood admitted to violence against their partners, compared to only 14 per cent among the other men.

In 2020, Delhi police busted an Instagram group called BoisLockerRoom that shared images of underage girls and hosted chats with abusive comments about them. In 2019, a teenager in Panvel was arrested for raping his sister after watching “lewd content”, according to the FIR. More recently, after a 17-year-old in Gujarat raped and blackmailed a minor girl, he told the police that he got the idea from YouTube and WhatsApp channels.

On Discord and Reddit forums such as the Chad University, there are instructions for boys about the “Inner Game”: how to get over their self-doubt and get the “target (the girl)”, to never leave her alone, and to never forget they are “the buyer”, not the “seller”. Like much of manosphere culture, this phrase is borrowed from elsewhere—sports terminology, in this case. As Sherdil, I ‘attended’ this university for a few days and befriended a 17-year-old boy. Aadish* (name changed on request) had also found this side of the Internet while searching for dating advice. He spoke to me several times and we exchanged our troubles.

“Bhai, whenever a girl comes into the picture, there is kalesh (trouble),” he comforted Sherdil when I said my best friend had distanced himself after falling for a “feminist-type chick”. But he also encouraged me to talk to the girl I was interested in, telling me her “no” was “where the fun began”. Aadish has two sisters and “many girlfriends”, he told me. Will he let his sisters date someone on the forum? “No!” Aadish says and sounds quite sure.

Avantika Mehta is a senior associate editor based in New Delhi

This article is part of 바카라라이브 바카라 April 21, 2025 issue 'Adolescence' which looks at the forces shaping teenage boys today—online misogyny, incel forums, bullying, and the chaos of the manosphere. It appeared in print as 'The Rabbit Hole.'