‘Dad,’ my son said in early 2022. ‘You can’t write a book about boys and men without mentioning Andrew Tate.’ I responded with the question millions of parents have probably asked: ‘Who is Andrew Tate?’ Then I looked him up. He struck me as a brash masculinist with a medium-sized following. I decided he didn’t merit a mention in the book. But my son was right. Tate would soon become a global phenomenon, the poster boy of the militant wing of the ‘manosphere’, an eclectic mix of online influencers, podcasters and streamers. 

In Lost Boys, James Bloodworth records that by 2023, 84 per cent of British boys aged between thirteen and fifteen had heard of Tate and that nearly a quarter of that age group claimed to have a positive view of him. Among boys aged sixteen to twenty-four, Tate’s approval rate was 45 per cent. More boys had engaged with Tate’s content than knew who the prime minister was. 

Tate has now entered the consciousness of parents and mainstream institutions. In the wildly successful Netflix series Adolescence, the thirteen-year-old protagonist who kills a female classmate has been radicalised into misogyny through online material – specifically, as one of the investigating detectives puts it, ‘that Andrew Tate shite’. Tate is facing criminal charges for human trafficking and rape in Romania but has been given leave to return to the United States pending trial. His arrival on American soil has generated lots of attention.

Lost Boys is, then, perfectly timed. It takes us on a journey through the manosphere and its population of pick-up artists (PUAs), incels, con men and men’s rights activists. It is largely an online phenomenon, but also exists IRL, since that is where content is created. 

Bloodworth is a journalist who clearly relishes getting out from behind his desk, and his research for the book has taken him far and wide. He attended a ‘Make Men Great Again’ conference in Orlando, Florida. Here, he endured numerous speeches, including one from Ivan Throne (real name: Robert Haggerty Teesdale), who railed against modernity in most of its forms, including the ‘globohomo’ (a wicked combination of globalist and homosexual). He spent evenings in nightclubs with PUAs and their clients, and confesses that as a young man he was one of those clients himself.

He even did some freelance work in Las Vegas for Michael Sartain, a veteran who runs workshops with men promising to elevate their social media presence so that their circle expands to include ‘heart-­stopping women and elite men’. (Disclosure: I recorded a podcast with Sartain, after which he gave me a ride to my next engagement. I liked him. My online presence probably remains a disappointment to him, however.) The patriarch of this section of the manosphere is Dan Bilzerian. Bloodworth describes how in one Instagram post he appears ‘surrounded by five cinnamon-coloured women – not so much in swimwear as accompanied by it’.

Bloodworth’s efforts pay off in some vivid reporting. His descriptions of being coached and cajoled into making ‘cold approaches’ to women in Leicester Square nightclubs in 2006 are painfully honest. It is hard not to feel sympathy for men who are so starved of female attention and so aware of their own shortcomings that they are willing to pay for ‘professional’ help. 

When he returned to this world a decade on, Bloodworth found it expanded, transformed and fractured. A growing group of men, disenchanted with the PUA scene, had broken away, describing themselves as involuntary celibates, or incels. In fact, the first incel online forum was called PUAHate.com. One of the strengths of Lost Boys is the care with which Bloodworth distinguishes between the different elements of the manosphere. Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist, had by this point attracted a massive global following, in part because of his stance against overreaching laws about the use of pronouns in his home country, in part because of his recognition of the challenges facing many men. As Bloodworth correctly observes of this ‘folksy, tweed-wearing professor’, young men ‘took him seriously because he seemed to take them seriously’. 

As more men felt lost, the market for guides and gurus grew. As Bloodworth acknowledges, Peterson and others tapped into a reservoir of genuine male need, one that was being neglected in mainstream culture. Especially in more progressive institutions, the idea that men might have problems was much less popular than the idea that men were the problem. This created a vacuum. And as the theologian Richard Rohr observed, it is into a vacuum that ‘demons pour’. 

Perhaps Bloodworth’s most valuable achievement is to describe and refute some of the pernicious myths that pervade the manosphere. Myth one is that many women are ready, like a coiled spring, falsely to accuse a man of rape or sexual assault. This is an especially damaging idea because it can lead men to retreat to the relative safety of pornography rather than risk a misunderstanding turning into a life-wrecking criminal charge. Yes, false claims are made. But these are very rare. In fact, men in the UK are more likely to be raped by another man than falsely accused by a woman; in the United States men are more likely to be falsely accused of murder than of rape.

Myth two is that a minority of men are getting all the women. This claim, like most of its kind, has some factual basis. But it is a historical one. Most human societies have been places where men partner with more than one woman. But during the last few centuries, monogamy has become the norm. Some bad studies of dating apps and overapplied evolutionary psychology have led to the belief that today’s dating scene is something akin to Genghis Khan’s Mongolia. As Bloodworth points out, manosphere types tend to ‘ram every square peg through an evo-­­psych-shaped hole’. 

Myth three is that some men are being tricked into raising another man’s child. This is what Bloodworth calls ‘the red pill trope’. Its adherents believe that women are ‘biologically programmed to seek out “alpha sperm” behind the backs of … “beta provider” husband[s]’. According to the red pill brigade, up to 30 per cent of kids are being raised by a clueless man who is not their father. This is not true. In fact, the rate of what social scientists call ‘extra-pair paternity’ is around 1 per cent. 

Bloodworth diligently tries to hunt down the source of the mythical 30 per cent figure. The number turns out to be a factual error introduced into the transcript of the proceedings of ‘a small symposium on the ethics of artificial insemination that was carried out in a town in south-east England in 1972’. He skilfully shows how such ‘zombie facts’ live on in the fetid circles of aggrieved men, lending a patina of scientific credibility to misogynistic world views. 

Many of the online figures featured here offer a vision of a life unbounded by convention, commitments and relationships. Shortly after his release, Tate boasted that even in a Romanian prison he was freer than most men, who are tied down by marriages, mortgages and kids. Tate was channelling one of the most popular characters in the manosphere: Tyler Durden, the alter ego of Edward Norton’s Narrator in Fight Club. ‘All the ways you wish you could be, that’s me,’ Durden tells the Narrator. ‘I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I am smart, capable, and most importantly, I am free in all the ways that you are not.’ 

In one or two places, Bloodworth goes astray. He is unfair to Peterson, for one thing. I have my own disagreements with Peterson, but to suggest that he has flirted with anti-Semitism, on the grounds that he disagrees with the views of the Frankfurt School, is outrageous. Peterson has in fact been a consistent critic of anti-­Semitism. Bloodworth cites rates of violent crime committed by men, including against women. But he omits to mention that these have been trending downwards, even as the manosphere has expanded. As concerns about the online world rise, the fact that boys and men are becoming less violent is an important one to keep in mind, even if it complicates the story.

In order to signal distance from his subjects, and perhaps from his younger self, Bloodworth resorts on occasion to condescension. He refers to Bilzerian’s fan base as being ‘made up of adolescent males of all ages’. Although meant as an insult, this statement contains a deeper truth. The manosphere itself is trapped in adolescence, the period of separation from the birth family. Young men of course need to separate themselves from their own families. But following this separation, they should mature into adult relationships, ones which make demands of them. To be a mature man is to give more than you get. It is not about freedom; it is about service. 

‘Every known human society rests firmly on the learned nurturing behaviour of men,’ wrote the anthropologist Margaret Mead. But she also warned: ‘This behaviour, being learned, is fragile, and can disappear rather easily under social conditions that no longer teach it effectively.’ Boys become men when they have learned to nurture, to provide, to generate a surplus. Men like Tate are not leading men out of the wilderness; they are taking them into it.