The Lonely Hearts of the Digital Manosphere: Rejected, Radicalized, and Ready to Blame Women

Thursday, March 6, 2025.

There is a new breed of men stalking the internet—slick, pugnacious, and deeply convinced that women have gotten too much, taken too far, and left them stranded in the dust.

They call themselves men, warriors, seekers of lost honor.

But the data says something different.

They are, more often than not, young, spurned, and utterly enthralled by the gospel of "manfluencers"—those digital preachers of the manosphere, the loudspeakers of a movement that whispers to the wounded male ego and tells it precisely what it wants to hear: It’s not your fault, kid. It’s them.

The latest study out of Sweden, where gender equality is something of a national virtue but misogyny still festers in the corners of the internet like mold on an old socialist banner, suggests that young men who immerse themselves in this brand of online masculinity tend to come out the other side more bitter, more suspicious of women, and, in some cases, outright dehumanizing them.

This phenomenon is strongest among men who have felt the cold sting of romantic rejection.

The ones left on read, ghosted, turned down at the bar.

The ones who thought they were playing by the rules and still lost the game.

And so, in the hothouse of the digital sphere, they find new rules—rules dictated by a cabal of self-proclaimed truth-tellers who spin a narrative as old as time: Men were kings, once. Women are usurpers. The enemy sits across the gender divide, drinking matcha and racking up their Instagram followers.

This isn’t just online chatter, says The Manfluencer Study (Renström & Bäck, 2025). It’s measurable, quantifiable, and, most alarmingly, it’s contagious.

The Manfluencer Gospel: A New Priesthood for the Lost Boys

Manfluencers, for the uninitiated, are a breed of internet orators who package gender grievances into bite-sized, algorithm-friendly content.

They live on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter—anywhere a desperate young man can doom-scroll his way into a radical awakening.

Some position themselves as self-help gurus, offering tips on how to "win" in relationships, make money, get fit.

Others abandon the pretense entirely, waging an open war against feminism, modern dating norms, and the perceived emasculation of the 21st-century man.

Their audience? Mostly young men, mostly frustrated, and—according to the Swedish researchers—mostly susceptible to a worldview that positions women as not just unattainable but actively hostile.

Renström and Bäck (2025) ran three studies to crack this phenomenon open.

The first was a survey of 2,857 Swedish men, a sample wide enough to capture the breadth of digital masculinity.

The findings were stark: the more manfluencers a young man followed, the more likely he was to express views that saw women not as individuals but as instruments—commodities to be used, exchanged, discarded.

The second and third studies were experiments, direct shots of manfluencer propaganda injected into the test groups.

The results were eerily predictable.

Show a manfluencer clip that frames women as threats—maybe a post about the rising dominance of women in leadership, maybe a rant about false sexual assault allegations—and watch as the audience’s mistrust of women spikes.

The belief that women lie, that feminism is a coordinated attack on male autonomy, that men are under siege—it all solidifies in real-time.

But here’s where the study veers from mere observation into something more unsettling.

Because the most radicalized? The most receptive to these messages?

They weren’t just any young men. They were the ones who had been rejected.

Revenge of the Rejected

It turns out rejection isn’t just a bruise to the ego—it’s a gateway drug to misogyny.

The young men most likely to adopt hostile attitudes toward women weren’t the ones thriving in relationships.

They weren’t even the ones neutral on the subject. They were the ones who had tried, failed, and decided that the system must be rigged against them.

In the third experiment, researchers zeroed in on young Swedish men aged 18 to 25.

This time, the manfluencer content was even more explicit: feminism isn’t just bad for men, it’s actively dangerous. Women are being trained to deceive, to manipulate, to accuse men of things they didn’t do.

And the rejected men? They soaked it up like gasoline on an open flame.

What emerges from this research isn’t just a picture of radicalization, but a blueprint for how it happens.

A boy gets rejected. He goes looking for answers. And in the labyrinthine corridors of YouTube and Twitter, he finds an answer that fits. Not the truth—never the truth—but something close enough to be comforting.

And so the cycle begins.

He starts following more of these influencers. He builds an identity around their teachings. He nods along when they say feminism is to blame. He watches another video. He finds a forum. He starts posting himself. And before long, he is not just listening to the message—he is part of the chorus.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Renström, the lead researcher, has the kind of weary pragmatism that comes from watching history repeat itself in increasingly online ways.

“In some ways, this is not surprising,” she says. “But it is depressing.”

The manosphere is not new. The backlash to feminism is not new. What is new is the speed, the efficiency, the sheer scale of it all. The ability to take a thousand lonely men and give them a single, unifying rage.

The study comes with its caveats, of course.

Correlation is not causation. Maybe misogynistic men are simply more likely to follow misogynistic influencers. Maybe the online world distorts things in ways even researchers don’t fully understand.

But what the study makes clear is this: young men, angry and alone, are being molded into something dangerous. And if we want to stop it, we have to understand why they’re listening in the first place.

What the Swedish researchers have uncovered is not just a trend—it’s an ecosystem. A self-sustaining world where rejection breeds resentment, resentment fuels radicalization, and radicalization feeds back into more rejection.

It is a cycle. And cycles, if left unchecked, have a way of accelerating.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

RESEARCH:

Renström, E. A., & Bäck, H. (2025). Manfluencers and young men’s misogynistic attitudes: The role of perceived threats to men’s status. Journal of Political Psychology.