Mapping Indian the Manosphere
Rather than confront complex ideas about women and feminism, a number of young men are being drawn to an aggressive kind of masculinity, advocated by ‘alpha’ influencers. Can conversations bridge this new gender divide?
One of the most popular videos uploaded by Dev Tyagi, a 23-year-old social media content creator and music producer with 85,000 followers on Instagram, is about how he doesn’t allow his girlfriends to
have male friends. “Agar meri bandi hai, woh dost nahi rakh sakti… uske zindagi mein sirf ek ladka hoga, woh hunga main (If I have a girlfriend, she can’t have male friends. There should be only one guy in her life and that’s
me),” says Tyagi, in the slickly produced, sepia-toned short video set to a low-fi beat, which has over 500,000 likes on Instagram and has been shared close to 200,000 times.
A 17-year-old student from Mumbai sent me the video in response to a call-out, shared among friends and family, to speak to teenage boys and young adult men in India about their idea of masculinity. For some time now, academics, psychologists, feminists and those working in the gender and social justice space in India have been aware of a rise in conservative, misogynistic opinion on the Indian internet. From X threads about the right “body count” for girls to shaming women for their looks, clothes and behaviour, to glorifying an extremely traditional idea of womanhood linked to purity and sacrifice, these opinions are most visible on X and Instagram. In parallel, there has been a rise in conversations around male supremacy, reclaiming a patriarchal idea of masculinity, and the mainstreaming of sexist opinions.
“If a guy is being nice to a girl, his friends tease him saying he’s being a ‘beta’ and tell him to be an ‘alpha’ man,” says 16-year-old Veda (who did not want to reveal her surname), a student of an international school in Bengaluru, referring to a popular taxonomy of manhood prevalent in the manosphere. In this view of the world, beta men are kind and gentle, alphas are fearless and dominant, while sigmas are rebellious leaders, and it is pretty clear which are the desirable categories.
It’s a global phenomenon—a January 2024 Financial
Times article spoke about a new “global gender divide”, citing combined data sets from various studies conducted in South Korea, the US, the UK and Germany, which showed that young men are becoming more regressive and conservative in their views even as young women are becoming more progressive and liberal . Historically, ideological divides have been stark across generations; within the same generation, men and women have largely held similar positions on liberal vs conservative ideas. Today, in country after country, data shows that while young women are taking more forward-looking, leftleaning positions—on topics ranging from feminism to immigration—men have become more conservative and reactionary.
A manifestation of this phenomenon has been the rise of the “manosphere”—an online ecosystem of videos, blogs, Reddit and 4Chan forums, talk shows and podcasts that push ideas of male dominance and female subservience. It is not a monolith populated entirely by young men and boys—there are, increasingly, women who believe in it too, from the American “trad wives” to Indian women who call themselves “equal rights activists”. Ideas within the manosphere are a spectrum, ranging from fitness and self-improvement advice, albeit geared towards becoming a “high value” or “alpha” man, to overt misogyny and even calls for violence against women.
Its prominent spokespersons have been global influencers like Andrew Tate, who openly describes himself as a misogynist and has had an outsize impact on the manosphere since he rose to prominence around 2019—spawning hundreds of vlogs and social media accounts that parrot his views on how men can and need to become stronger, bolder, more assertive and dominant and how women need to be controlled and dominated.
Though currently facing trial for serious charges like human trafficking, rape and organised crime, Tate’s ideology, before he was thrown out by many of the social media platforms that contributed to his rise, had reached every corner of the globe where young people were online, including Indian classrooms.
Going by online and offline conversations, it is alarmingly common to find young Indian boys mouthing his views. Over a dozen 14-to-17-year-old girls I spoke to in Bengaluru for this story said that their male classmates were plugging into the “manosphere” and were fans of Andrew Tate and his ilk, including Indian content creators like Elvish Yadav and Beer Biceps, who have repeatedly shared problematic, sexist content. While Yadav has trolled and body-shamed women like influencer Kusha Kapila, actor Swara Bhaskar and his female co-contestants on Bigg Boss OTT 2 to wide applause from a largely male audience, Ranveer Allahabadia or “Beer Biceps” has shared alpha male advice, such as, “Nobody is coming to rescue you. Take responsibility for your life like a grown man does. Or remain the same boy you were.”
When influential parts of the internet double down on gender stereotypes and binaries, they trickle down to ordinary young men and women as well. “When we were younger, boys and girls used to play separately, but slowly we started becoming friends. These days there are hardly any mixed groups,” says A.D., a 16-year-old male student of an alternative school in Bengaluru. “Many of the boys say horrible things about girls they are dating or want to date, or they talk about how they don’t want to date girls who are not ‘feminine’.”
The young man who shared Dev Tyagi’s video had similar concerns about his classmates. Though he did not wish to be quoted, he made it very clear he himself did not subscribe to the ideas expressed in the video and found it “stupid”.
GETTING MEN “BACK ON TRACK”
Intrigued by the 23-year-old who is seemingly so popular among boys and men only slightly younger than himself as a kind of truth-telling uber-mensch, I reached out to Tyagi on Instagram. His grandiloquent videos are replete with cuss words and a performative harshness. One-onone, though, he speaks politely and intelligently in English interspersed with Hindi. “This is my professional voice. This is not how I would talk with my guy friends or in my videos. I have to be authentic or my listeners won’t identify with me,” he says. Are his views about women and dating performative too? He denies it. “It’s the truth. Indian men lack clarity. No one gives them constructive advice on love, women, career….” Most of his advice for men focuses on dating, and he believes women have “more power” and “the upper hand” in a relationship. “There is more desire for women than men, and that’s why there are more women than men in the dating game. A few years ago, I had a breakup and was extremely depressed. I felt that the girl had a lot of power. I felt even I wanted that power,” Tyagi explains.
His ideas of what women want from men veer towards the conservative and traditional. “I see girls from a biological perspective. They have many expectations from men. They want to be able to rely on them. They want someone who has potential, who is more successful than them. But guys are failing to attract them because they are taking inspiration from Bollywood and from reels telling them that you need to focus only on your girlfriend. This is the wrong way to go about it,” he says. According to Tyagi, he is teaching men to focus on themselves—their careers, their bodies, and on boosting their own self-esteem.
He does let some vulnerability through when he says that “men have this urge to prove themselves from childhood, because that’s what their families and society have always forced them to do.” But he doesn’t seem willing to delve deeper into whether this patriarchal dynamic itself should be questioned. His response to a cruel world is to make himself stronger; to create a shield of hypermasculinity and invulnerability around himself.
Content creator and men’s personality coach Sarthak Goel, 25, frequently refers to “his men” going off-track
We need to make peace with the idea that of course men are going to lose power. What we need to ask is why is that power even necessary?
NIKHIL TANEJA
CO-FOUNDER, YUVAA