What the Manosphere Understands (and Exploits) About Male Loneliness and Therapy
Published · Last updated
Written by Rose Chahla, LPCC
I recently watched the 2025 Netflix miniseries Adolescence (spoilers ahead), a four-episode psychological drama following the criminal investigation of a 13-year-old boy, Jamie, accused of murdering his classmate. Through the perspectives of his family, peers, and fragments of his inner world, we are left grappling with what could happen to a child to so thoroughly lose touch with his innocence and take the life of another child.
It may go without saying, but this is not a feel-good watch. The audience, myself included, is left with a deeply unsettling sense of dread because although the story is fictional, we know an increasing number of young men are being pulled into the misogynistic online subculture known as the manosphere. What was also striking - and, as a woman, unsettling - is that we never really come to know the young girl who is murdered. I can understand criticisms of that choice. But I can also understand the steadfastness of the decision to instead sit almost entirely inside Jamie's world: his resentments, entitlement, anger, loneliness, emotional detachment, and the insecurities and vulnerabilities beneath all of it.
A couple months after watching Adolescence, I read bell hooks' The Will to Change (2004), an intensely insightful book that many people unfamiliar with her work may not expect to center men with such compassion. hooks writes that "the first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women," but rather that men "kill off the emotional parts of themselves." She is clear that men deserve compassion not in spite of the harm they can cause, but because systems of emotional disconnection and domination harm everyone, including themselves.
In 2026, it's safe to say that none of these are new concepts. So why does it feel like we're going backwards? It increasingly feels like we are talking around the question of what to actually make of patriarchy, and what to do with the people who intentionally and unintentionally uphold it. Particularly men who want connection, who want intimacy, who want to be seen as "good" and moral, but who find themselves without a roadmap.
What the Manosphere Is Actually Offering Men
I've worked with men throughout my career who feel the loss that comes when they lack that roadmap - they feel it in their relationships, friendships, and within themselves. Some find themselves unsure how to repair, how to be vulnerable, how to tolerate shame without collapsing into defensiveness or anger. As a therapist, I have to ask myself, what is being offered to men when they are experiencing this uncertainty? Self-described misogynists like Andrew Tate know this, exploit it, and say to men - why swim upstream? The manosphere offers community, certainty, belonging, relief from shame, and a sense of "good enoughness" to men who often feel deeply lost and uncertain how to make sense of the pain they're carrying. Yet, ironically, it communicates a profound lack of faith in men's capacity to stay with that pain, understand it, and transform it without projecting it outward.
Why Shame Doesn't Work
In my personal life, I've responded to conversations with men that left me feeling angry, frustrated, and deeply concerned. I've criticized, rolled my eyes, and named what I believed to be misogynistic beliefs and behaviors. I have felt and acted on my righteous anger - and I have tried to use that anger to move men. I have compassion for those attempts. They came from a genuine desire not to sit idly by and to make my values clear. But still, the difficult truth is that those appeals often drove those men further into the very values and behaviors I was trying to challenge. What do I do with that loop with no exit? Patriarchy, after all, is remarkably resilient and insidious. It would not have survived this long if it were not so effective at shielding itself from accountability while allowing men to feel justified in the process.
As a therapist, this informs my work and pushes me to be intentional about creating a different kind of space for men. Not one that is shallowly affirming on the basis of basic human decency alone, but also not one rooted in humiliation or contempt. I do not believe shame and shaming are what transform people in sustainable ways. Many American men are socialized to expect certain forms of power or status while simultaneously learning to suppress emotional vulnerability, a truly tragic combination; they are taught to disconnect from themselves for fear of ridicule, weakness, or rejection. Left unexamined, this wreaks havoc on their relationships, communities, and inner lives for years.
What Therapy Can Offer Instead
In my eyes, therapy for men cannot simply become an echo chamber of feelings and reflection detached from accountability. Validation without responsibility is not healing, and neither is shame masquerading as moral clarity. If we genuinely want to help men disentangle themselves from harmful constructions of masculinity, we have to work in collaboration and be intentional. We therapists have to listen closely for the ways masculinity organizes men's fears, defenses, longings, relationships to power, and capacity for intimacy.
The Capacity to Stay - Vulnerability, Accountability, and Repair
Part of the work, I believe, is helping men develop the ability to stay emotionally present without collapsing into defensiveness, entitlement, self-loathing, or withdrawal. To tolerate painful emotions - including shame - without immediately converting them into defensiveness, anger, or withdrawal, but rather staying with them long enough to understand how they operate and what they cost. To understand vulnerability not as humiliation, but as a prerequisite for connection, accountability, and repair. Many men have never been taught how to do this without experiencing vulnerability as a threat to their masculinity, belonging, or worth. The manosphere, and the patriarchal values it upholds, offers men a sense of certainty, superiority, and permission to externalize pain. But true healing requires the opposite: uncertainty, grief, accountability, humility, tenderness, and the difficult work of remaining in relationship with other people while tolerating imperfection in themselves.
That, to me, is part of the work of our collective liberation. And perhaps part of the way out of the manosphere.
Written by Rose Chahla, LPCC | Published May 2026 | Last updated June 2026
Rose Chahla is a licensed therapist specializing in men's mental health, couples therapy, and individual therapy for adults throughout California. If you're navigating relationship challenges, emotional disconnection, or questions of identity and purpose, I invite you to reach out to learn more about working together.