The Wellness Pipeline to the Manosphere:

Reflections on Netflix’s “Inside the Manosphere”

An unexpected interlude: As I was finishing the final posts in this series, Netflix released Inside the Manosphere. It isn’t about wellness influencers exactly, but it felt too relevant to ignore, so consider this a quick detour into the neighboring rabbit hole before we return to the Wellness Strongman.

The Wellness Strongman:
What authority looks like in modern wellness

The Wellness Strongman: The Playbook
Authority, authoritarianism, and why we buy it

This post: The Wellness Pipeline to the Manosphere:
Reflections on Netflix’s Inside the Manosphere

Redefining Wellness
Sustaining Ourselves, Sustaining Each Other, Sustaining the Planet

Strength Training for the Resistance
Showing up, serving, and building real agency

In the middle of my “Wellness Strongmen” series, Netflix popped up with Inside the Manosphere as a textbook example of the promises of strength, discipline, and dominance that I’ve been articulating. It shows how fitness and wellness are both a throughline and a pipeline for these young, very ripped, and ostentatious influencers. Let’s take a look at this shift and grift from body optimization into political grievance.

Every bit of their self-branding and laser-focused content speaks to young male disenfranchisement. They speak to:

• A yearning for muscular, virile embodiment. For a generation raised on screens, there’s a deep longing for robust physicality and fitness.

• Financial freedom, opportunity, and status. Money is power, and you don’t want to answer to anyone else to get it.

• Belonging and leadership. Even if it’s just a subscription to a private Discord or Telegram channel, there’s a desperation to be on a team and have someone rooting for you.

• The need to express libido and actually feel their feelings. Don’t know how to express your desires? Project it onto women. Act all dominant.

Above all this documentary speaks to young men’s desire to improve their situations and carve out a path to mastery. Sounds completely fair to me. But why are we leaving it up to the manosphere to so tightly define the version of masculine success to emulate?

As our economy mortgages the futures of young people, saddling them with student loans, impossible housing costs, a mental health crisis, and AI already coming for entry-level jobs. With plenty of adolescent irreverence the manosphere responds with an escape from the “Matrix” of wage earning. Its offer ups anti-establishment ideology without ever acknowledging capitalism or the kinds of policies that create the current economic circumstances. The manosphere boosts an every-man-for-himself ethos, full of bravado. These influencers promise dominance, outsmarting the system, and the ultimate: control. Control your body, control your woman (or women), and control your life, even in an economy with fewer and fewer real opportunities.

It’s valuable to peek into the rabbit holes of the internet to understand how ideas permeate the broader culture, shaping how we talk about wellness and our politics. Many pundits and pollsters contend that manosphere support swung the 2024 election, as MAGA learned to harness this testosterone turmoil. Even if Joe Rogan is now questioning the Iran war and ICE raids, figures like Erika Kirk are saying the quiet part out loud: “Don’t let anyone disenfranchise you because you’re a young man… especially a young white male man.” A sentence like that would be laughable if it were not politically manipulating so much young male angst.

Meanwhile the administration forgives student loans while recruiting ICE agents to dress up in camo and play appalling real-life video games. That is the investment we are making. Those same resources could fund something closer to a modern Civilian Conservation Corps or AmeriCorps. We don’t need ICE in Vermont or Minnesota. We need massive public investment in infrastructure and to prevent and respond to natural disasters. What is we offered young people work with dignity, skill building, and a real career path? We could be funding opportunities to develop very needed skills, to feel capable, and to serve communities beyond all the bro-y parasocial fantasies.

Now we hope they don’t get too radicalized as they remained parked in front of screens, buying crypto and creatine while spiraling through Reddit threads of incel victimhood. Let’s give these guys some boots, some tools, a living wage, and a chance to be a damn hero.