Can we just get a beer?

You’ve just arrived at the bar and you’re sliding into the booth. Your friend leans over and says, “Oh, this is my buddy, you’ll love him. ” You’ve learned that this can mean many things. In this case, it means you’ll soon be three beers deep into a conversation about how feminism has destroyed the West.

A couple years ago drinking a beer or two with your friends wasn’t a philosophical undertaking. Proving anything was seen as killing the mood and talking about politics was equivalent to a joke not landing. Somewhere between the pandemic, the algorithm, and the commodification of identity this idea was usurped. In the age of the podcast everyone has a take and with a little concentration you soon come to the realization that these ideas are just soundbites they heard in the latest Andrew Tate Tiktok.

More and more young men seem to be smitten by this movement of reclaiming masculinity. The dumbest guy in your high school class is now reposting videos of immigrants being deported, punctuated by three laughing crying emojis. Scroll a little further and you’ll find him liking a reel where some round-faced guy with a podcast mic is ‘debating’ ten OnlyFans models about their body counts. You click through to his short-lived fitness page, where he proudly documents his all-meat diet: steak, eggs, butter, raw honey and talks about carbs being a part of the global emasculation agenda. It’s absurd, and it would be funny, if it weren’t so common. All of it the anger, the performance, the repetition of borrowed rhetoric falls neatly under one bloated, algorithm-fed umbrella: the Manosphere.

The name “Manosphere” implies cohesion, as if there’s a shared code or brotherhood behind it all. Spend more than five minutes in it and you’ll find nothing but contradictions loosely glued together by self[-improvement courses. One guy tells you to cut seed oils out to retain your testosterone, another says abs are a psyop, and a third insists you’re not a real man unless you’re in a one sided polyamorous couple. The advice shifts week to week, but the pitch remains the same, listen to me and become a real man. It’s a grift in motion. A revolving carousel of slogans, anxieties, and half-baked confidence tricks wrapped in the language of masculinity. It screams that they’re being hunted, undermined, and erased. Most importantly, it reassures them that nothing is their fault. That women are wired to betray, that society is engineered to weaken them, and that fulfillment belongs only to the “high value.” If that sounds exhausting, that’s because it is. But it also sells. 

It doesn’t start with hate. It starts with a weird mix of loneliness, boredom, and a creeping sense that somewhere along the way, you missed a memo. You tried being nice, respectful, agreeable, but it didn’t seem to work. You went on dates where they didn’t laugh at your jokes. Applied to jobs you never heard back from. Then late one night, the algorithm sends you a man in a tight shirt yelling into a mic about how society is lying to you. At first, it’s ridiculous. But somehow, between the nonsense, there’s something oddly comforting. A bad guy you can blame. It’s modernity. It’s seed oils. The Manosphere offers answers where the world gives you seemingly nothing. 

My first brush with the Manosphere came in 2021, during my freshman year of college, sometime between a hangover and a half-smoked joint. My roommate and I were lying on the couch, when we stumbled onto a compilation video called something like Andrew Tate’s Funniest Moments. We watched as this bald guy in sunglasses screamed at the camera about how smoothies were gay and women were property. Here was this guy, shirtless, smoking cigars indoors, ranting about masculinity. It was a perfect bit. We couldn’t believe he was real.

For a while, we treated him like a novelty act. We’d find more clips, each one more ridiculous than the last, and play them for each other and our friends. Some people didn’t get the joke. Others laughed along. But to us, the unspoken rule was clear: this wasn’t real. We didn’t actually think women were genetically hardwired to be commanded. It was funny because someone out there thought this way and said it out loud with such confidence.

Then one day, the joke broke.

I queued up one of the Tate clips. Something about women being better off as objects. A throwaway line, ridiculous on its face. I played it expecting the usual reaction, a mix of disbelief and laughter. Instead, a guy I didn’t know turned to me and said, “He’s kinda got a point though.”

It was the first time I realized people weren’t just watching this stuff ironically. Some were letting it in. Whether out of insecurity, loneliness, or sheer repetition, that same absurdity that once made us laugh was now being quietly rationalized. What started as satire had become scripture. And once you notice it, you start seeing it everywhere. Every platform. Every niche. There’s now an Andrew Tate clone for every part of your life. Fitness? Eat like a caveman and reject all seasoning. Money? Start drop-shipping and call yourself a founder. Love? Women are broken, fix yourself instead. Spirituality? Ice baths and testosterone. All of it packaged as truth, sold like gospel, and delivered in the voice of someone who never questions himself.

Last week, I was in Philadelphia visiting a friend for his birthday. We went to a Phillies game, twenty guys deep, most of them strangers to me. Sometime around the sixth inning, I overheard one of them say, unprompted, “I love Dana White.” My friend casually replied, “Didn’t he hit his wife?” There was a pause. Then the other guy shrugged and said, “So what?”

It would be dramatic, and maybe a little dishonest, to claim this is how most young men think. But it’s not rare enough to ignore either. You hear it in passing, in comment sections, and at the bar. Something has shifted. The language has changed. The line between satire and sincerity between joking and believing has disappeared.

There’s a particular kind of guy this radicalization works best on who thinks nothing can touch him if he says “it’s just a joke.” The irony-coated defense mechanism has become a kind of armor, a way to say the most deranged thing imaginable and then slip away through the emergency exit of sarcasm. “It’s satire,” he’ll say, smiling. “You’re taking it too seriously.” But irony, especially when it becomes a full-time posture, doesn’t protect you from bad ideas. It marinates you in them. And by the time you’re explaining to a group of people at a bar why women are biologically programmed to obey or why hitting your wife is bad “but not that bad” you don’t sound ironic. You sound like exactly what you’ve become.

For young men, especially those who are lonely, anxious, and deeply online, irony becomes the perfect gateway drug. It’s just a funny bald man in Romania with a Bugatti. But the repetition matters. The language matters. And over time, those phrases start to harden into worldview. Maybe you disagree but you do find it funny, and strangely his answers are the only ones you’ve ever gotten. Algorithms love this. They only care that you’re watching. And if you watch one Tate clip ironically, you’ll get ten more. If you send your friend a ridiculous podcast segment “just to laugh at,” your feed begins to change shape. Slowly  it stops being about what you like and starts being about what you can’t look away from. When everyone’s joking, it becomes harder to tell who’s not.

Having a few beers used to be easy but it now carries the quiet tension of a political summit. You don’t know if this is going to be the friend who wants to talk about music or the one who got really into “primal masculinity” and is about to explain why therapy is a scam invented by feminists. 

That’s what the Manosphere really is. A kind of emotional fundamentalism. A collection of myths and half-truths that offer men a shortcut through confusion. A way to feel strong instead of vulnerable, righteous instead of self-aware. 

So now you’re at the bar. The beer is cold. The lighting is low. And your friend’s friend starts railing against “modern women” or telling you how society hates men, or quoting someone he insists is a “free thinker” who’s really just a glorified car salesman with a podcast. And suddenly, you’re not in on the bit anymore. You’re part of the audience. 

You stare into your drink and wonder how we got here. 

You finish your beer. You leave a tip. You go home wondering if anyone else noticed how weird that got.

Artwork: Rebecca Maude