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I explore the challenges of bringing up boys in the world of the manosphere with Dr. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, author of the 2025 book Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism and the founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University. As a distinguished scholar and practitioner, Dr. Miller-Idriss offers recommendations for how to manage dangerous online misinformation.
What follows is an interview about preparing for and potentially resolving problems with the manosphere and gendered violence.
Robert Kraft: The manosphere presents itself as a friendly, self-help space for boys, building their confidence and dispensing advice, with substantial content promoting misogyny and rigid gender stereotypes. How can parents protect their sons from extremist influence in the manosphere?
Dr. Miller-Idriss: Most important is listening to what they are saying—over the dinner table or in the car pool with friends—and being alert for how they are potentially being influenced by these ideas. It can be hard not to react with judgment or shame to those comments, but the evidence shows that the best approach is to lead with openness and curiosity.
Our research has revealed great value in placing children in the position of being the experts in explaining their online lives. Here are three specific conversation starters for parents and grandparents that confer such expertise.
1. “Can you explain how a meme works? Is it like a cartoon? Who gets to edit and change it and how?” These questions then lead to a discussion of how often memes are mean-spirited or share harmful ideas about girls or boys.
2. “I have questions that I’m really curious about and trying to understand—but I don’t mean them in a judgmental way at all. How often do you see things online that are telling you the way you should be as a boy or a girl? How often are there comments about what your bodies should look like?”
3. If your children start using seemingly innocuous terms like “girlmath” in a jokey way, ask about the term. “What does girlmath mean? Have you seen it? If you follow accounts that make jokes like that, what do you like about these accounts?”
RK: What specific signs can parents look for if they suspect their sons are consuming misogynistic or extremist content from the manosphere?
Dr. M-I: Teens and young men might start saying things like “women have it easier” or “feminism has gone too far” or “it’s better if women stay at home” or “women shouldn’t vote.” Children and adolescents might also start wearing t-shirts or putting stickers on their laptop or icons in their online profiles that are antifeminist or anti-LGBTQ+. A shirt or meme that says, “I identify as an attack helicopter,” for example, is a classic dismissal and disparagement of trans or non-binary people’s identities. You might hear things like “feminism is cancer” or “there are no good women left,” or terms used in the manosphere like “alpha men” and “beta men” or slang words like “Chad” or “simp,” “sigma,” or the “red pill.”
Using these terms doesn’t necessarily mean that kids are fully down the rabbit hole, but it does indicate they are exposed to these ideas in ways that merit discussion.1
RK: Given that misogyny and hostile sexism are all around us, how do we address and combat gendered destructiveness in our everyday lives?
Dr. M-I: The fact that it exists everywhere means we can actually combat it everywhere. For example, we have to stop policing gendered norms—telling boys to “man up” or “don’t cry,” for starters, or expecting girls to be “nice” or “smile more” or be docile and not speak up.
We have to teach boys to speak up when they hear others degrading women. And we need to help others see the destructiveness of it for all of us—that we all suffer when we impose these rigid hierarchies.
Men can model, teach, and mentor boys and other men—on their sports teams, in their youth groups, in their classrooms, and in their households—toward a way of being a man that embraces a fuller set of emotional options and ways of caring for others. Men can model how to engage with girls, women, and the LGBTQ+ community differently, to commit to being an ally, and to know that harmful online content can shape their expectations about relationships, consent, and pleasure.
RK: In Man Up, “containment” is the first of five strategies that motivates gendered harm and mobilizes extremism. Could you elaborate on the influence of containment?
Dr. M-I: Containment is such a powerful metaphor for how everyday misogyny works—to keep women and LGBTQ+ people in their place. The goal is to keep women out of male-dominated spaces, to not only belittle or insult but also control and complain. If you’ve always been in a world where public figures or leaders look like you, the inclusion of others might feel like oppression.
The widespread online use of the phrase “your body, my choice” in the wake of the 2024 US presidential election showed that some men sought to reclaim power over women and their bodies. And this is just one example. This territorial policing is also true, of course, for the LGBTQ+ community, who were forced to stay in the closet for so long.
These strategies and tactics of containment are the most ordinary and everyday way of controlling women and LGBTQ+ people, and they create pathways to anger when the subjects of these epithets don’t adhere, don’t agree, or are not submissive or pleasing enough. And then that can open pathways to scapegoating women and feminists for taking men’s places or for going too far or for disadvantaging men—all narratives that circulate widely in the manosphere.
RK: When discussing misogyny, sexism, and gender-based bigotry, how does the book Man Up manage nonbinary issues with gender?
Dr. M-I: By defining misogyny not as hatred of women (which is how it’s understood in popular usage), but rather as the policing of patriarchal norms and expectations. Misogyny, then, is a kind of law enforcement arm of the patriarchy for policing all genders.
I hope that this more expansive definition of misogyny helps us understand how much we are all harmed—including men and boys, who are often confined to narrow views of masculinity that constrain them and limit their access to human capacities and expressions like caregiving, empathy, and emotional intimacy. Patriarchy uses containment to rigidly enforce narrow, supposedly “natural” binaries.
RK: Man Up offers this famous quotation of Bette Davis: “When a man gives his opinion, he’s a man. When a woman gives her opinion, she’s a bitch.” Bette Davis said that before many of your readers were born. Regarding gendered destructiveness, what is new and more dangerous in 2025 as compared to 1965?
Dr. M-I: The most obvious answer to this is the online worlds we live in. The percentage of Americans who say they have been harassed online because of gender or sexual orientation has drastically increased. Graphic rape and death threats, as I describe in Man Up, have been described as a standard discursive move for expressing disagreement or disapproval of women online.
Part of the problem is how easy it is to harass women and queer or gender-diverse people online—with direct messaging, live in-game voice chats, sharing of sexually-explicit photos and videos as revenge porn (including AI-generated ones), cyberstalking, doxing, harassment, sextortion, verbal abuse, gendered slurs, rape and death threats. Online worlds don’t make these behaviors happen, but they amplify them, increase their exposure, and spread them contagiously. Online hate and threats become supersized and easily morph into offline violence and threats.
