I have sat across from a lot of young men over the years.
In schools, community settings, rooms that were not quite formal enough to be offices and not quite comfortable enough to be anything else. Young men who had been referred to someone like me because something had gone wrong, or because something was quietly about to. Usually the same look: guarded, slightly bored with the process, uncertain whether this conversation was going to be worth their time.
One conversation has stayed with me more than most.
He was 19. Smart, observant, the kind of bloke who looked capable of thriving under different conditions. He had dropped out of TAFE. Lost two jobs in six months. Spending most of his time online, most of it consuming content that had the people around him genuinely worried. His family did not know what to do. His support worker was running out of ideas.
(Identifying details have been changed).
When I asked him what he was actually getting from the content, he thought about it for a moment. Then he said something I was not expecting.
"It makes me feel like I'm not wasting my life. Like if I just sort this stuff out, I can actually be someone."
I have thought about that answer many times since.
The national conversation about young men and online influence often focuses heavily on the content.
What they are watching, who they are following, what values are being absorbed. Those questions are not irrelevant.
But they are the second question. The first question, the more important one, is almost always skipped.
What was already missing before they found it? This is where the genuine insight lives, and it is also where genuine intervention starts. Young men often do not gravitate toward these online figures because the content is uniquely insightful or particularly well-argued. They are drawn in because it appears to address something they have been quietly searching for.
Identity. Direction. Structure. A sense of capability. Belonging with clear entry conditions.
These are not unusual needs, nor are they unique to young men. They are foundational developmental needs that can become especially visible during late adolescence and early adulthood, including for young men trying to work out who they are, where they fit, and what kind of life they are building. And right now, many young men do not seem to be having these needs met by the environments closest to them, at least not in ways they can recognise, trust, or access.
The vacuum does not stay empty for long.
Steinberg's work on adolescent brain development helps explain part of what is happening. Adolescence, including the years extending into the early 20s, is a period when young people tend to be especially sensitive to social reward, peer evaluation, and questions of where they stand and whether they belong.
Robert Agnew's General Strain Theory offers another useful lens. Agnew argued that strain can arise when people fail to achieve positively valued goals, lose something they value, or are exposed to negative experiences. That strain can produce emotional pressure, especially when people feel blocked, rejected, humiliated, or treated unfairly. Applied carefully, this helps explain why a young man who feels stuck, directionless, or socially unrecognised may become more receptive to alternative sources of status, certainty, and belonging.
Baumeister and Leary's foundational research on belonging as a fundamental human motivation matters here too. Belonging is not a bonus feature of a good life. It is a fundamental human need. When belonging is absent, unstable, or highly conditional, people may become more vulnerable to structures that offer recognition, identity, and a place to stand.
Parts of the manosphere, for all of their problems, offer a form of belonging with very clear conditions. Adopt the framework, learn the language, accept the hierarchy, and you are given a place. For a young man who has been navigating ambiguity through adolescence without much guidance, that clarity can have genuine appeal.
This is not a defence of the content. It is an analysis of the mechanism. That distinction matters enormously if you actually want to do something about it.
One thing that rarely gets acknowledged in these conversations is that parts of the online manosphere operate like an identity marketplace.
It sells a specific product: the promise of becoming someone. Not self-improvement in the abstract, but transformation into a defined masculine archetype. The content provides a roadmap, a vocabulary, a community, and a set of visible signals that mark progress along that road.
For young men who have grown up without consistent mentorship, clear guidance, or structured pathways through the confusion of adolescence, this can be an extraordinarily compelling offer.
It says: here is who you could be. Here is the path. Here is a community of others on the same journey. You are not lost. You are just not there yet.
The tragedy is not that young men find this appealing. The tragedy is that we, the adults and systems closest to them, have too often failed to offer something better. Better, meaning equally clear, equally structured, equally committed to taking them seriously, but grounded in something that actually serves their long-term development and the wellbeing of the people around them.
Too much of what we offer instead is passive. Informational. Supportive in a way that does not ask much. Many disengaged young men are not primarily searching for support. They are searching for transformation.
That is a meaningful distinction.
Part of what makes this complicated is that many disengaged young men experience adult support as conditional, even when the adult does not intend it that way.
The subtle message becomes: I will invest in you once you demonstrate you are worth investing in. Show me you are engaged. Show me you are motivated. Show me you have already started doing the right thing.
This is understandable. Youth workers and educators operate in resource-limited environments with complex young people and limited time. But the dynamic it creates is almost the inverse of what these young men need.
What the research points toward, and what practice often confirms, is the power of genuine regard combined with high expectations. Not one or the other. Both simultaneously.
The mentor who says, in effect: I am going to take you seriously regardless of where you are right now, and I also believe you are capable of something harder than this. That combination is rare. In practice, when a young man encounters it, the effect can be disproportionate to the amount of time actually spent together.
At its best, this is what youth mentoring produces. Not the absence of challenge, but the presence of genuine investment alongside it. The sense that someone is demanding more from you precisely because they believe you can meet it.
The manosphere mimics this structure, clumsily and often destructively. But it mimics it because the combination of belonging, challenge, structure, and status is powerful. We should pay attention to that, rather than just being offended by the imitation.
It would be dishonest to write about this topic without acknowledging where it connects to more serious outcomes.
Research on pathways into antisocial behaviour, gang involvement, and youth violence repeatedly points to clusters of risk factors that overlap with parts of what we are describing here. Social isolation, weak connection to school or community, limited access to trusted adults and positive role models, lack of structured belonging, and blocked legitimate pathways to status or achievement often appear in the background of young people who become involved in serious antisocial behaviour or violence.
The manosphere, in its more extreme expressions, does not just fail to address these vulnerabilities. In some cases, it exploits them. It can channel legitimate frustration and unmet belonging needs into frameworks built on grievance, rigid masculinity, and us-versus-them identity structures that can increase social friction, normalise hostility, and undermine the protective factors that research tells us matter most.
This is why understanding the pull of this content is not an optional intellectual exercise for practitioners. It should be part of any serious prevention and intervention strategy involving young men.
You cannot compete with what you do not understand. And you cannot offer an alternative to something you have only ever looked at with contempt.
There is no single answer here. But there are patterns in what tends to work, drawn from both research and practice.
Structured challenge with genuine stakes. Young men, particularly those who are disengaged, often respond well to environments that ask something real of them. Not passive support. Not conversations that ask nothing of them. Challenge that is calibrated to their actual capacity and that escalates as they develop. Sport, trades, outdoor and adventure-based programs, mentoring structures with clear progression, creative and vocational pathways. The specific format matters, but the deeper pattern is the same: genuine challenge, clear progression, and genuine recognition when they meet it.
Positive male mentorship that is both demanding and human. For some young men, positive male mentors can be especially powerful. The mentors who tend to have the strongest impact are not simply kind. They are the ones who hold high expectations while also making the young man feel genuinely seen and capable. They push without abandoning. This combination is harder to build into a service than it sounds, but it can be identified, selected for, trained, supervised, and protected.
Belonging without an ideological price tag. One reason online communities are so effective at capturing young men is that they provide a clear sense of in-group belonging with accessible entry conditions. Effective real-world programs can create healthier versions of similar dynamics: clear identity, clear community, clear standards, genuine warmth, and room to question without being pushed out. When done transparently and ethically, this is not manipulation. It is developmental psychology applied with intention.
Starting with curiosity, not correction. When a young man is consuming problematic content, the instinct to correct is understandable. It is also often counterproductive as the first move. The more effective entry point is genuine curiosity. What is he getting from this? What is he searching for? What would have to be true in his life for this to feel less necessary?
These questions do not endorse the content. They open a door that correction tends to close.
The young men who are most drawn to these online environments are not broken. They are searching.
For many, the search is not irrational. It is a predictable response to unmet developmental needs in a culture that often seems uncertain about how to raise young men well. There is real uncertainty out there, among parents, educators, and institutions, about what healthy male development looks like, what young men actually need, and whose job it is to provide it.
The manosphere fills that uncertainty with certainty. It is false certainty, often harmful certainty, but certainty nonetheless.
Our job as practitioners, parents, educators, and community members is not to shame the search. It is to understand it clearly enough that we can offer a better answer.
That requires honesty about the gaps. About where our systems, schools, families, and communities have sometimes failed to deliver what young men need in a clear, consistent, and practical way. Not because anyone set out to fail them, but because we have been operating without a clear enough picture of what that provision actually looks like in practice.
The young men keep searching.
The question is whether we are ready to be what they find.
Lyndon | NextGen Edge Youth development practitioner | NextGenEdge.com.au
Photo by Rafay Ansari on Unsplash