How to combat the influence of the ‘manosphere’: professor

A loose network of men's groups online is promoting misogyny and anti-feminism. Professor, Neil Shyminsky talks about his fight against the manosphere.

According to the Mental Health Commission of Canada, the manosphere is a loose network of men’s groups online promoting misogyny and anti-feminism to wide audiences. Neil Shyminsky, a professor at Cambrian College in Ontario joined CTV Your Morning Edmonton’s Kent Morrison about his fight against the manosphere.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Kent Morrison: First of all, let’s talk about these videos online. Who are the people making these videos?

Neil Shyminsky: The people making these videos commonly refer to themselves as “manfluencers.” You can understand the origin of the term pretty clearly. They’re influencers who operate in the manosphere and they are incredibly varied in their approaches and their background. Some of them are fitness influencers, or nutritionists, all sorts of professions, but their common goal here is to promote misogyny and to make women feel unsafe in online and real life spaces.

Kent: Who are the people that are consuming these videos?

Neil: Their audiences are primarily men and also primarily young men. A lot of teenagers are in these audiences and even younger. When my oldest daughter graduated from elementary school, the person that most of these 13 and 14-year-old boys said they admired most was Andrew Tate, who is easily one of the worst man-influencers out there.

Kent: Why are they making these messages? Do we know why this community is growing and why these people are making these videos?

Neil: Their politics are very broadly anti-feminist and a lot of the time they make an appeal to tradition. In these videos, they like to talk about how the world was better before it was easier to be a man, when the roles that we had were very narrowly defined and prescribed and all you had to do was go to work and make money and come home and then you were taken care of.

They’re trying to restore some older version of the world that you know only existed for a very small number of us to begin with. But that is their ultimate goal, to enforce narrow gender roles and a very different version of the world from the one that we live in now.

Kent: How do we keep young boys and men from falling under this influence?

Neil: The short answer here is to promote curiosity. If your sons, your brothers, boyfriends, husbands, ask questions and if we can have conversations with them and push back when we hear them repeating some of the lines that come out of the manatee, or say things that sound anti-feminist or misogynist, that gentle coaxing can go a very long way.

Also with the young men and the boys in our lives, it means paying very close attention to what it is they’re watching and where they spend their time online because the manosphere has its tentacles in all sorts of spaces. Fitness and nutrition are two big ones, wellness, gaming spaces, those are all sort of being “mano-sphereized.” We have to be incredibly mindful of where they’re spending their time, because those could be gateways to much more diabolical manosphere content.