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.
