Why the Manosphere is doomed

Even if they're 2/3 right on the merits

First off, I think we can all agree that there's clearly some very rotten dynamics going on with gender relations in dating, and they've been getting worse. Not just that, but societally there are also pretty clear gender divides, and men are losing out in some important areas.

I’m not going to rehash all the areas, but greater female educational attainment, women not wanting to date “down,” higher male dropout rates, video games and porn, higher male successful suicide rates, higher male virginity, higher unfulfilled male desire for relationships, and so on. I’m pointing to that vague cluster of things.

I actually agree with at least ~2/3 of Manosphere points or positions as being pretty much true - I just suspect that there aren’t good actionable solutions.

Remember these books? The Berenstain Bears are fun because they’re one of the most common examples of the Mandela Effect

Just so anyone can castigate me fairly, I’ll outline some of them.

1. Divorce law and family courts are strongly stacked against men

   1. Sure. Women initiate 70% of divorces, and custody is awarded to mom 80% of the time. And? That’s probably how it should be. Moms are typically inherently more invested in the kids and are usually better parents, and even though she’s primary, the great majority of those are joint custody arrangements.

2. There are biological differences between men and women

   1. This shouldn’t be controversial at all. For one thing, we know that men are inherently more competitive and aggressive than women, and basically nobody disputes this - it’s why prisons have 8-10x as many men. Moms being more invested in kids is biological, also. There’s almost certainly other biological differences, too. But what can you do about this?

3. Modern feminism is driving a lot of bad outcomes, and is biased against men

   1. I mean “advocacy” is always biased towards the side it’s advocating for, right?

   2. Giving people more choice doesn’t mean they’re going to use that choice in the ways you want, and this extends to the societal and cultural level; considering just the biggest likely bad outcome - if we all die out because smart women don’t want to have kids, them’s the breaks, you shouldn’t be able to force them. Society needs to figure out carrots, not sticks, because people by and large won’t stand for sticks, and societal-level sticks are largely immoral.

4. Hypergamy - women want to date and marry higher status men

   1. Duh? Don’t men want to date “younger-and-more attractive-than-them” women? Why is only one of these called hypergamy, when they’re both true?

5. Dating sucks for low status men

   1. Yup, 100%. It’s no treat for low status women, either. Or mid or high status women, OR most other men, for that matter. “Dating” sucks fully generally, for everyone - it’s the only “actually important” thing we’ve ALL got to do with a 90%+ failure rate, and it’s not like women are happy with the current dating dynamics and mores - dating apps are 70/30 men / women, meaning it’s so bad that women are opting out at twice the rate of men.

6. Women are treated as though they have intrinsic value just by existing, but men have to earn any value / respect they get

   1. Yup - biology again. Biologically, women do the expensive / hard thing (have eggs, grow babies, create the next generation), and that thing is so important to the future survival and flourishing of any given species that women really are inherently valuable in a way that men aren’t, and this gets reflected in our mores and norms. It’s hard to overcome a fact and dynamic that’s been baked in over ~2B years of reproductive evolution.

7. There are male problems that society doesn’t really seem to care about or do much about

   1. Higher successful suicide rates, higher dropout rates, lower educational attainment, more dangerous careers, higher crime rates, etc.

   2. Yes, and this is a real problem. But what do you expect society to do here? Ban guns? Men will use ropes or jump off bridges. Men are just more focused on getting what they want overall, and less patient with dumb institutional stuff, so they’ll probably always have higher suicide and dropping out and crime, and will always adopt more dangerous careers and hobbies, it’s part of those biological differences.

I feel like yes, the problems definitely exist, but overall, there’s nothing you can DO! There's no changes that you can make at the societal level that will substantively close the gaps if the problems are either biological, or if the problem - as in dating - is that things overall are more competitive, and more people are losing out in that more competitive domain.

The ten thousand Phd’s

I return now to a theme I touch on frequently here (because me and my friends used to run teams of these Phd’s, and saw the data science revolution spread out and change the world across nearly all finance and FAANG and F100 companies).

You know how Netflix says their main competition is “sleep” and “every other way you can spend free time?” That’s how competitive stuff is now! And they’re winning. And it’s not just Netflix, this is the basic philosophy behind every app now, from Tik Tok to Youtube.

Dating happens in “free time,” too. So men are competing for female attention along with all the FAANGS and apps and the Golden Age of Television. The bar has been raised, and there’s ten thousand Ivy-caliber Phd’s competing for that attention now, too. Good luck.

The dynamics are bigger than any individual, and a good chunk of them are biological / evo psyche and so immutable, so you're just pointing to ground truths that kinda suck for most men AND women with no real solutions.

Everything worthwhile is a competition

I think the real complaint here is that things are more competitive, and men are losing out more than they were historically. The competition is harder, and the bar has been raised.

When the bar is raised, you’ve got to put more effort in for the same results, and people hate that.

This has correlates everywhere, and it’s not just for men - in getting good jobs, competition is higher. Getting into a good school? Competition is higher. Buying a house? Competition is so much higher in any city worth living, house prices are ~double what they were 10-20 years ago.

So yeah, the bar has been going up more or less everywhere as society has expanded to encompass more people and economies have grown, and attention-snaffling capabilities have grown at the FAANGs and similar companies.

It’s trickled down into the areas the Manosphere complains about, as well as several other areas that affect both genders, and I don’t think you can get around that.

Competitions have losers

This is just a fact. Usually, it’s fine, it’s how progress is made. Employees compete for jobs, and when the competition is more fierce, employers get better employees.

Companies compete for market share, and when the competition is tougher, more capable companies survive. You should WANT this - incompetent companies and employees suck. You’re telling me you’ve never had to deal with a super slow business that isn’t really motivated? That’s genuinely bad at their job? Competition is the cure for that! Those businesses go out of business a lot more readily than ones that are fast and good at their jobs.

In other words, competition is GOOD. It’s how we get good stuff!

If you can’t offer a more compelling experience than women watching Netflix or scrolling on their phone alone, maybe nobody SHOULD date you. You need to offer a better experience overall - that’s what the bar being raised cashes out to.

The fact that men need to compete for mates is nothing new, because it’s been true for many millions of years, much longer than we’ve been human - and we know the “competitive bar” is high if there’s more than twice as many men on apps as there are women!

And you don’t think women compete for mates?? Isn’t that fact basically what the entire cosmetics ($500 - $600B globally) and fashion industries ($2 - $3T) are built on?

The competition is arguably much worse for women! If they’re hypergamous, the vast majority of them are competing for the same top decile or quintile men - and somehow the Manosphere complains about THAT, too! But the actual effect of that is that the competition is much fiercer for *women* and they have to give up more to “win!” If you think about it, this fact might be reflected in the 70% women-initiated divorce rates - if you sign up for a bad deal and it only gets worse over time, can you blame them?

Women have to compete against all the same FAANG apps, too, you know. PLUS porn and video games! Those are two giant memetic hazards that don’t even exist for most men to compete against in the attention-sphere, because they largely appeal to men alone. So arguably, women have it worse in this competition in two different ways!

But what about societal / technological progress?

One of the recurring themes in the Manosphere seems to be that “technological and societal progress is completely dependent on monogamy!” If “mid” men don’t get wives, they say, society will collapse, nobody will engineer or invent things, and our entire economy will come to a standstill.

Oh, also sometimes they take this to the extreme of not just failing to contribute economically, but that “this will not stand, sirrah!” If average men can’t get mates, men will RISE UP! They’ll revolt in the streets, and howling and brandishing blades and guns aloft, systematically dismantle our business and social institutions!!

To which I say, LOL.

Nope. That frog is ~2/3 boiled already and we’re doing fine.

It’s been boiled to completion in several societies already, and it hasn’t mattered.

So I’ve done business in several Asian countries over more than a decade. I keep hearing Western men saying stuff like this, but then if you look at Asia, it completely gives the lie to the idea.

Korea has the lowest fertility rate on earth, and the marriage rate is half what it was 20 years ago; do they have wide unrest due to men not marrying or breeding? Nope, they have much lower homicide and crime rates than the US.

China has a massively imbalanced gender ratio due to the One Child Policy- I've lived and done business there for years, and it outright sucks to be a Chinese dude, average women won't even date you unless you own your own house and car, and that's like needing to own NYC or SF real estate as a barista in terms of multiples of average incomes.

Any widespread unrest? Nope, it's one of the safest countries in the world. And the Chinese economy grew so much in the last 30 years it pulled 800M people up from $5 a day poverty to $12.5k GDP per capita ($20k with purchasing price parity).

Likewise Japan on the fertility and marriage fronts - do they have unrest? No, they have hikikomori and "herbivore men." Essentially zero unrest or crime, you can pass out drunk in the middle of the street at 3am with your wallet and phone next to you, and wake up and it will all still be there, and you'll be unharmed.

It's also extremely common, literally the majority norm, in all these countries for successful guys to have multiple partners, via wives plus mistresses, or plus KTV excursions, or whatever. High status polygamy in this sense is real and common, which means hypergamy is real and common.

Empirically, even in countries already much worse off than the US on this front, it just hasn't been a problem anywhere.

Objections I’ve heard:

1. “That’s cherry picking! The West won’t stand for high status polygamy, look how violent and disordered the Middle East is! They have it, and look where they are!”

East Asia and SE Asia, in which all these dynamics have been true for a while, covers 2.3 billion people, more than a quarter of the entire world's population.

The entire middle east covers roughly 350M, or 15% of 2.3B. Which one of us is cherry picking here?

The Islamic world is likely terrible for other reasons besides high status polygamy - endogamy-oriented family structures that prioritize nepotism and weaken state capacity and rule of law, and borders being defined largely by Britain and France without regard to existing tribal and religious geographical distributions are both notable contributing factors.

2. Asian countries are too different, culturally! The West is nothing like them, it’s more like the Middle East!

Asian culture honestly seems closer to Western culture than the Middle East does to me.

Religion: Most people in both Asia and the West are largely secular, or religious-in-name-only, ME is Islamic and serious about it.

Economics: Asia and the West are both capitalist, with money made by creating businesses that sell products and services the majority of people recognize as valuable, ME is petrostates, which makes money by pumping oil and giving handouts to their citizens.

Cultures of achievement: Asia and the West value education and hard work as the primary routes to achievement, ME values piety and / or being born rich, with family and "who you know" seen as the primary route to achievement.

Large companies with worldwide recognition: Asia gives us Toyota, Honda, Sony, Huawei, Lenovo, BYD, Alibaba, LG, Samsung, and more. The West has Apple, Tesla, Amazon, and basically every other company you recognize. The ME has...??? Nobody I can think of.

War, riots, and violence: Asia and the West both have long traditions of stability and growth and high attainment. The ME is essentially always at war and has high levels of unrest and violence, and has been characterized by that since the pre-national "desert tribes" days.

On basically every important dimension I can think of, Asia is closer to the West than the Middle East is.

3. “But Western countries are different! Asians are conformist and low testosterone! REAL men, Western men, won’t stand for that, sirrah!”

I disagree, I don't think it matters at all. Sure, everyone talks a big game - "oh, you'll get unrest! You just wait!"

I'm not worried. People always talk a big game. "Oh, if the government was spying on us, we'd riiiise up, don't you worry!" Less than 1 year later it comes out that the NSA spies on literally everyone all the time, forever, in every possible channel, and saves all the data for all time to be mined in perpetuity in the future. All the "rise up" people? Not a peep!

Oh, but if regular dudes couldn't get dates, then we'd rise up!

Nah - we’re 2/3 boiled in America already

Because online dating came out long ago, and first only ~20% of men could get responses:

Then as the dynamics increased and apps took over, only 5% of men could get responses:

And sure, online dating started as a minority channel, but now it's by far the dominant way anyone meets:

How are those dating dynamics shaking out in actual results? Male virginity is at an all time high, sex in male Zennials at an all time low:

Way more males 18-29 want a relationship and aren’t in one than women in the West ALREADY:

So overall, Westerners are a mostly-boiled frog already, and there's been nary a peep. Do you see any “rising up?”

I think Westerners think they're a lot tougher and prone to "rising up" than they really are. Empirically it basically never happens, certainly not on a scale to actually cause any society-wide changes, and even more certainly not in a direction that’s going to put women back into kitchens and being stuck with dudes they don’t like.

So what would you need to actually move the needle back to “1950’s” here? You’d need to undo all of: no-fault divorce, women being able to get degrees, women being able to have careers, women being able to have bank accounts, women being able to get birth control, and given they’re not going to go quietly into that good night, probably women being able to vote (better do that one first)? Good luck.

Oh, and on testosterone - Asians (China, Japan, S. Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, even India) actually have higher testosterone than Americans!

But it’s still a more generous competitive environment than historically

In the Baby Boom years, something like ~80-85% of men fathered at least one child (and ~92% of women of childbearing age). 92/85% is literally the highest it has ever been, for both genders.

Today, the number is around 80/60%. More competitive, right? I’m sure effective birth control, various memetic hazards making alternatives more appealing, and careers and deciding to marry and have children later have driven a lot of that gap, but all those dynamics are part of the definition of being more competitive on this front, too.

But compared to the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptiveness, it’s an “easy mode” golden age! Harking back to the 80/40% point above - more recent data suggests that even THIS is optimistic.

From an excellent Lyman Stone post aggregating info from two recent papers:

Humans Are Genetic Monogamists

Source: Lyman Stone’s post here aggregating data from Karmin et al (2025) and Birkenfeld et al (2022)

This shows that the long-term average (yellow line) is probably 3-4 women reproducing for every man, which would actually be closer to 80/27%, or even 80/20% vs 80/40% - a significant delta, and looking pretty competitive for men historically.¹

So sure, 80/60% is worse and more competitive than what men had 75 years ago! But it’s 2-3 times better than what men faced historically!

I really think the answer is just…stepping up

The landscape isn’t going to change. Men have to step up and provide a better dating and relationship experience, or get outcompeted.

And complaining about competition when it’s tougher than ever, and tougher for women too, isn’t going to win you any prizes. Nobody likes a sore loser, and nobody likes a complainer.

Alternatively, you’ll probably have more success trying to limit the FAANGS and other apps than trying to shove women back into the 50’s. Limiting apps might be doable, with a ton of work and coordination, and because it affects both genders you would potentially have more than 20% of the country on board, but the 50’s thing definitely isn’t doable.

Because if it comes down to a gendered choice, the Manosphere types are going to lose out anyways.

Women have always been more precious than men, for ~2B years. This is because of basic biological scarcity - women produce eggs, which are expensive and rare, and men produce sperm, which are produced in the hundreds of millions per day, just in a single man. A society of a thousand women per man has hope, a society of a thousand men per women is going to be extinct very soon, unless they use those men to overrun another society and perpetrate “Y chromosome replacement” to balance it out.

Then on top of that, there’s another reason the women will win.

Who’s going to do more for our societies?

If there are winners and losers on the “gender” front in our more competitive world, there’s certainly a conceptual horse you should back within that divide - the higher human capital people.

In the EEA, 80% of women had descendants and only 40% of men, and that's probably true.² Let’s just assume that in the limits, we’re going to end up back there as things unfold.

If we DO revert back to a similar dynamic when women have equal power and optionality, there's no solution that doesn't screw either women or men. You either keep optionality for women, or try to revert back to the 50’s.

Taking away female power and optionality again is the wrong choice. People sometimes point to the much higher teacher, nurse, and secretary quality in the 50’s. This was because smart and talented women were stuck with those jobs, culturally, when they had the innate potential to be doctors, executives, or scientists.

Given that there's a big "human capital" difference between whichever side is going to be screwed, I'm happily on the side of screwing lower capital men versus those high capital women in that battle.

Because who is going to do more for all of us, in the aggregate? The higher human capital people. Those women who can now be scientists, doctors, and executives. That’s who you should side with if there needs to be a choice, and that’s who we need more of in our future.

All the Manosphere complaints and dynamics point to society essentially agreeing with that position, too - so if you’re losing on the merits AND losing the popularity contest, I think that spells out “doomed” pretty clearly.

1. Lyman is careful to note that this isn’t too much higher than modern times - it doesn’t *necessarily* indicate a high-degree of polygyny, but does at a minimum indicate a high degree of deaths in childbirth and serial monogamy, with a small proportion of men were MUCH more likely to marry / father children from multiple women. I think he’s a little optimistic about it not indicating a decent amount of polygyny, to be honest.

Historically, the rate of childbirth death in the EEA ranged up to 20-33% for women at age 45 and was probably 5-15% up to age 30. Another factor is deaths by infection, which generally took out ~40% of the population of adults of both genders by age 50 (separate from child mortality, which was generally ~50%). This means that childbirth deaths and subsequent remarriage was probably only affecting ~15-20% of the female population, and we know ~80% of adult women reproduced, and I think there had to be a pretty big differential between high and low status men breeding to drive the rest of that gap.

2. The original factoid is most commonly cited from Baumeister’s 2007 APA address, and he was likely referring to results from:

Seielstad, M., Minch, E. & Cavalli-Sforza, L. Genetic evidence for a higher female migration rate in humans. Nat Genet 20, 278–280 (1998). https://doi.org/10.1038/3088, which has this line in the abstract pointing to reproductive skews:

"The fraction of variation within human populations for Y chromosome single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) is 35.5%, versus 80–85% for the autosomes and mtDNA"

The “1 man reproduced for every 17 women” claim is obvious nonsense as an aggregate long-term dynamic (although we have hit this peak during historical times when Yamnaya-style pastoralists / steppe nomads ran rampant for hundreds of years, per Lyman’s ~16 women for every men peak, which endured over too short a time to be reflected in the graph above).