Review of James Bloodworth’s Lost Boys: My Personal Journey Through the Manosphere (Atlantic Books, 2025).
My YouTube algorithm is certain I am male, so it shows me male-tailored advertising. Yes, I watch Heretics. and TRIGGERnometry sometimes, but wouldn’t a dose of The Rest is Entertainment or The Nerve mess with the algorithm’s male bent? Apparently no. “What are you doing in that jacket? Wear a jacket for men, not for boys,” a typical YouTube ad tells me. “Only the real ones [who continue barbequing in rain] know which IPA to drink.” And “Men! This is where you fail when you try to flirt with women.” “Are there really people taking online courses on flirting with women?” I idly wonder before I click “skip.”
It turns out it’s a multi-million dollar industry that, as James Bloodworth argues in his new book Lost Boys, goes back to at least the mega-success of Neil Strauss’ 2005 book The Game. Around the same time in the early naughts, the author, a solitary young man, decided to take one of the courses on chatting up women and improving one’s “body count” offered by Real Social Dynamics (RSD). By 2014, RSD was the biggest pickup company in the world, partly thanks to its early adoption of YouTube and the ignominy of coaches like Julien Blanc. The course, we learn, took men “into the field,” that is, to the bars and other public spaces where, egged on by the coaches, they could practice approaching women and growing emotionally immune to rejection.
What the RSD had in common with every other guru and company in the fast growing and fast monetizing manosphere was the certainty that 1) women (all of them; it’s science) are hypergamous, ruled by emotions, dazzled by success and money, badly in need of masculine order as an antidote for their feminine chaos, and 2) what you fail at, these experts can fix, for a modest sum of multiple thousands of dollars (to start with).
Young James soon left the RSD when he realized that talking to women on a pickup script is the worst approach he could employ.
In 2018, when an editor asked him to write about the manosphere and the seduction industry, he found a scene that had grown multiple sizes and reached well into the mainstream of culture and politics in the U.S.
Who takes the red pill?
The internet has broken everyone’s brain, but the brokenness has been manifesting differently in men and women. If the very online women have spent the last decade attending Race to Dinner and Robin DiAngelo courses, decolonizing school curricula, introducing land acknowledgements and pronouns to their work places, and cancelling each other for problematic behaviour, what have the very online men been up to? Gaming, crypto trading, rationalist forums and Zizians, survivalism, and the manosphere, a vast internet land of associations, online forums, conventions, speakers and businesses explaining to men how women (and the “‘gynocratic order”) are to blame for everything, how their lives can be fixed for a fee, and where they can find other men who get it.
Hub AI
Bloodworth takes us to the Red Pill forums, which count hundreds of thousands of users on Reddit, and to 21 Convention: the Woodstock of the manosphere. The red pill versus blue pill mythology comes from the movie The Matrix, in which the protagonists are offered a red pill-boosted exit from a life of illusions. With the blue pill, you keep your life as is—a slave to the elaborate AI matrix. The Red Pill mano-movement has worked this into a philosophy that asks men to step away from the “feminine matrix” and “women’s mental firmware” and recreate the world where men are gods. One of the best-known Red Pill gurus is Rollo Tomassi (real name George W. Miller), who offered his ideas on how to fix relations between men and women and abandon the matrix in The Rational Male. The manosphere fizzled with excitement, writes Bloodworth, when Donald Trump announced his first run for the Republican nomination. This excitement, though, was not as organic as it may have initially seemed. In 2017, American journalist Trevor Martin discovered the considerable crossover between the Red Pill forums and Reddit thread r/The_Donald. It was later revealed that r/TheRedPill was founded and run by Robert Fisher, a Republican representative for New Hampshire. Over in Florida, at the 21 Convention, most speakers contend, as Bloodworth’s sums it up, “society is waging a war on all things masculine; that courts and institutions are working in concert for the benefit of women; that false rape accusations and paternity fraud are rife; and that modern women are out of control.” In an interview, the president of the Manosphere, Anthony Dream Johnson, tells Bloodworth that “women are highly destructive creatures when they’re not given instructions.” After an unlucky first marriage (with a woman who turned out to be an escort), Johnson is now happy in a strictly hierarchical marriage where “I’m the decision-maker, I’m the King, the Emperor, the God, the Alpha and the Omega. And I think that’s how women operate best.” Johnson is also known to have described Jordan Peterson as “too f***ing beta.” You too can be an alpha male if you register for his $500-an-hour coaching calls. All of this “uber-masc” rhetoric sounds mimetically exaggerated to the point of being comical, and the manosphere and the very online Right, as well as the dirtbag Left, have always maintained that “they’re only joking.” It’s all just online braggadocio, they say. They argue it is tongue-in-cheek; a vernacular that only those who know, know. It’s Hulk Hogan! It’s UFC! It’s all pretend! Until things take a turn for the unfunny. You may remember the 2021 Denver shooting and the manosphere’s Ivan Throne, also known as Lyndon McLeod. A self-help course instructor with business ties in the tattoo and cannabis industries, McLeod was a figure celebrated across the manosphere, especially after publishing Sanction, the three-volume novel set in a dystopian future, which calls for a sweep down of liberal democratic degeneracy or “weak men and tyrannical females.” The murders that he committed in Denver, he had described in Sanction, which contains many other threats to people known and less known. Jack Donovan, “best masculine philosopher in the world” (according to 21 Convention’s Anthony Johnson) had McLeod as a podcast guest. Influential Donovan (gay, unusually for this crowd, and self-described “androphile”) is a former member of the Wolves of Vinland. Chuck Palahniuk cites Donovan as an “influence” and was on Donovan’s podcast. The movie Fight Club, based on Palahniuk’s novel of the same name, now has a cult status in certain circles of the manosphere. When I watched it recently, it struck me as comparatively benign, very pre-internet and ideologically conflicted. It definitely anticipates some of Jordan Peterson’s early material geared towards the lost young men who grew up without a present and engaged father. After the Denver shooting, some parts of the manosphere denounced McLeod, but some celebrated him, especially the “militant accelerationist” Telegram channels. “Accelerationists” is another group of people to know about: the men who aim to accelerate societal collapse through acts of violence, sabotage, and terrorism. The sooner this world is put to rest, the faster the chosen can ascend to power and “restore tradition, patriarchy, and racial segregation.” The book lists multiple terrorist attacks of the last two decades whose perpetrators have expressed allegiance to the accelerationist cause, including the 2019 mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand; the 2022 shooting in Buffalo, New York; and the 2019 El Paso, Texas, attack. One of the most popular publications embraced by the more political corners of the manosphere is Bronze Age Mindset (BAM), written anonymously by someone named the Bronze Age Pervert, later revealed to be the Romanian-American writer Costin Vlad Alamariu. BAM celebrates a cult of “higher specimens” and anticipates a war in which “strong men will unleash violence on ‘bugmen.’” The liberation of women is, of course, the most ridiculous thing that has ever been attempted. The BAM was, Bloodworth writes, an underground sensation among young Trumpian right-wingers. After Trump’s former national security advisor, Michael Anton, wrote about BAM in the Claremont Review, younger men paid attention. A former staffer for Republican governor Ron DeSantis told the New York Times that “every junior staffer in the Trump administration” read BAM. Conservatives need to acknowledge, wrote Anton, that “in the spiritual war for the hearts and minds of the disaffected youth on the right, conservatism is losing. BAPism is winning.” There is an influential arm of the Right today that is more inspired by Julius Evola and pagan Nietzscheanism than any modern-era conservative thinker. Something to add to your list of topics for the 3 AM ruminations. Fix your Instagram, young man I couldn’t conclude this piece without mentioning the manosphere thinkers who sell courses on how to create the appearance of a “high status lifestyle,” with whom we also spend some time in the book. Michael Sartain, with the “Men of Action” (MoA) program—”Master the Art of Building a High-Status Social Circle in Just 25 Days”—teaches students how to create social media that manifests the life that they want to live. “Fix your f***ing Instagram. Every hot girl is on [there],” if you want to improve your dating chances. Dan Bilzerian, followed by 30 million on Instagram, is a role model for the wannabe statusmaxxers. Soon, students are told, all the women will be going for the 10 percent high-status men, while the rest of the male population will be “leftover men.” To avoid this fate, consider the $10,000 MoA program. Or Andrew Tate’s $8,000 members-only network of “elite” men pursuing financial success. You could also try his online Hustlers University. “Social media ruined the women,” says one of the interviewed manosphere dropouts who still agrees with the Tate Brothers on human relations. Today’s women only want the best men, not average men. “Polygyny is the nature’s equilibrium, and we’re going back [there] because it’s a better proposition for women than being with a beta.” The bleakest forums of the manosphere are left for the end: the “Black Pilled,” self-hatred-filled incel forums, including www.PUAHate.com, a mini-sphere of the pickup artist, or PUA, culture dropouts. They have rated themselves as unworthy and wallow in it, making a culture of it. “Are men of my height genetic trash?” Incels have a non-negligent history of terrorism (you will remember the Toronto van attack) and have, in every other way, withdrawn from women. For them, there is no hope of a bridge between the sexes; here in the manosphere, we are in the deep caverns of internet-induced isolation.
