What The Manosphere Doesn’t Say
Violence has nowhere to go. And that’s a problem.
Grüezi!
In the early 1990s, I was sent to film young men acting up on a northern council estate. Politicians blamed it on single mothers.
The women told a different story. The petty crime of their sons was a small price to pay for the relief of living without angry, violent partners.
They were making a rational trade-off in conditions they hadn’t chosen: less fear in the home, less order outside it. And it wasn’t just a local anomaly.
It pointed to a larger pattern I only understood later: remove one brutal form of male disorder, and another appears in its place — unless something more civilised is built to replace it.
1. Ragworth
Ragworth, in Stockton-on-Tees, a nondescript collection of council houses. A year or so earlier, there’d been a week of rioting — petrol bombs and stones thrown at police, cars torched, builders pulled off renovation work because the vandalism wouldn’t stop.
Male unemployment was 55 per cent. But then there were no men. The crime rate was six times the area average. In Parliament, the local MP called it ‘riots among drug gangs.’
By the time I arrived with a camera crew, the riots were old news but the estate hadn’t settled. There was still car theft — ‘twocking’, some low-level vandalism, still kids drifting with nothing to do and nowhere to go.
The women watched all of this with resignation. From their windows, life was small but it was theirs, and they didn’t dwell on things.
Many had been mothers at sixteen. They’d been abandoned by boyfriends who’d moved on to better estates, better cars, better families.
Even the drug-dealing on the estate was small-time.
And outside, their sons were hanging around, testing whatever forms of status and control were available to them. What they were doing wasn’t random dysfunction. It was status-seeking in the only currency the estate could still mint.
The cameras captured the boys. They couldn’t capture the contradictions.
2. The Ratchet
A form of male violence becomes intolerable and is suppressed — by law, policing, or moral sanction. Often that suppression is justified. But punishment is not the same thing as replacement.
If the institutions that once gave men status, discipline, solidarity, and a place in the world have already decayed, prohibition alone does not produce peace. It leaves the underlying drives to reappear in more private, degraded, or self-destructive forms.
In the century or so between the middle of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries, the British state systematically dismantled the communal violence that had been embedded in everyday life for centuries.
Bear-baiting, bull-baiting, cockfighting — all criminalised, though fox hunting survived untouched. Enclosures eliminated the physical spaces where village recreation happened.
The historian E.P. Thompson documented what followed with the Industrial Revolution — manufacturing communities that had ‘lost their animation, their vivacity, their field games and their village sports.’
The aggression didn’t vanish. Without communal outlets or institutional structure, it turned inward — into the home. Anna Clark’s research on the period found a ‘sexual crisis’ — journeymen whose authority was undermined by economic upheaval retaliated by beating their wives.
First turn of the ratchet: public violence suppressed, aggression driven behind closed doors.
It took a long time for law and policing to follow it there. In Britain, Erin Pizzey opened the world’s first women’s refuge in 1971. In the US the Domestic Violence Act passed in 1976, the Violence Against Women Act in 1994.
The criminalisation of domestic violence was necessary and overdue — but it was focused on punishment rather than cause. As legal scholar Leigh Goodmark observed, ‘a criminal justice response absolves the state from having to confront the underpinning structural situations which generate the abuse.’
Second turn: domestic violence criminalised, structural causes untouched. In the absence of rebuilding, the damage was increasingly turned inward.
For thirty years the state has been willing to punish violent men, but not willing to build the institutions that might produce better ones.
3. Deindustrialisation and despair
The ratchet only becomes mass and permanent when the economic foundations collapse underneath it.
The boys on Ragworth were part of a structural male redundancy you can measure.
In the US, male labour force participation for those aged 25 to 54 peaked at 98 per cent in 1954. It has fallen almost every year since, and more than a tenth of men that age are not working or not looking for work.
Nicholas Eberstadt showed that by 2015 the work rate for that group was lower than in 1940, at the end of the Great Depression. Alan Krueger linked part of it to rising opioid use; in counties with the highest deaths of despair, over a quarter of prime-age men weren’t working.
In Britain, an Oxford University study found that 1970s industrial shocks fell ‘largely on male employment’ and proved ‘remarkably persistent’ — each percentage point change in a local authority’s male employment rate between 1971 and 1981 showed up as a 0.9 percentage point change in 2011, four decades later.
Deindustrialisation didn’t create temporary male unemployment. It created permanent structural redundancy in specific places.
In 2015, Anne Case and Angus Deaton identified something unprecedented in a wealthy country — mortality among middle-aged white Americans without a college degree had been rising since 1998, reversing decades of decline.
Case and Deaton called these ‘deaths of despair’: suicides, overdoses, alcoholic liver disease. America’s opioid crisis was just a symptom, not a cause.
‘Jobs are not just the source of money,’ they wrote. ‘They are the basis for the rituals, customs, and routines of working-class life.’
A Welsh university study this year found that ‘deaths of despair’ in England and Wales are 53 per cent higher in areas with a coal mining past, even in places where mining ended over half a century ago. The effects persist even after controlling for deprivation. Poverty alone can’t explain them.
Today, Stockton-on-Tees, the borough that contains Ragworth, has the widest gap in male life expectancy in England. Men in the centre of town can expect to live to 64. Four miles down the road in Billingham West, it’s 85. Twenty-one years.
In 2024, the UK male suicide rate hit 17.6 per 100,000 — the highest since 1999. The peak is among men aged 50 to 54: the generation that entered the workforce just as industry began to collapse.
4. hooks vs. crooks
The intellectual resources for understanding this don’t come from Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate.
They come from a strand of feminism that refuses to separate gender from class, and so gets easily ignored.
As the late bell hooks put it in The Will to Change:
“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation...”
Men, in hooks’ account, are the brutalised props of a system of male oppression. Those at the bottom end of society pay the self-brutalising price without the economic compensations that cushion its costs for more privileged men.
What has been lost in today’s culture wars is that gender and class can’t be separated.
The insight buried in the forgotten fringe of class-aware feminism was not that men also suffer, but that the ugliest, most violent, most depressing masculinity is also shaped by material conditions. That is what connects hooks to Ragworth.
There is also a market solution to this crisis. Even the lowest rung of society has attention to monetise. Social media has proved a perfect platform for the exploitation of young male resentment.
Jordan Peterson’s bizarrely-packaged self-improvement. Andrew Tate gives it an angrier narcissistic twist to commodify resentment.
Tate’s content was viewed 11.6 billion times on TikTok before his 2022 ban. A poll found that 79 per cent of British boys aged 16–17 had seen his stuff — more than had heard of the Prime Minister.
This is what we allow to fill the void.
5. Why Prohibition Fails
Jack Katz’s Seductions of Crime asked what people are actually trying to do when they commit crimes. He found armed robbers who kept going despite puny profits and the near certainty of jail — because of the experiential reward. The act itself offered status, intensity, and meaning.
Elijah Anderson’s Code of the Street, based on years of field work in Philadelphia, documented how ’respect’ based on the threat of violence becomes the primary currency when there are no other routes to identity and social rank.
It’s not an American phenomenon. Respect-based violence, toughness, willingness to fight have been found in cross-cultural research in Germany, Pakistan, and South Africa.
In laboratories, male mice will repeatedly work for the opportunity to fight, and trigger the same dopamine release that lights up for drugs, food, and sex.
What testosterone appears to mediate is not aggression directly but status competition: the urge to win, dominate, and hold rank.
Suppression alone is rarely enough.
You can criminalise violent acts; you can’t legislate away the search for reputation, intensity, and respect. If legitimate institutions don’t absorb those drives, illegitimate ones will.
6. Channelling
The evidence for what works is boringly consistent.
It’s not simple physical exertion, or cathartic ‘Fight Club’ confrontations, or parade ground discipline and ritual hazing.
What changes outcomes are mentored relationships, ethical frameworks, a place in a hierarchy that is earned, physical challenges that aren’t impossible, and a sense of belonging.
Military-style boot camps consistently fail. Self discipline is an emergent property, not an imposition, and it comes from activities that provide meaning, identity, and connection.
In the mid-80s, Michael Trulson studied thirty-four ‘juvenile delinquents’ in three groups — one set did traditional Tae Kwon Do with a philosophical and ethical emphasis, a second did ‘modern’ martial arts using just fighting techniques, and a third just physical activity.
They all had the same instructor and the same schedule. The young men in the ‘traditional’ group experienced less aggressiveness and less anxiety. The ‘modern’ martial arts group showed an increased tendency towards delinquency. It wasn’t combat that mattered, it was the context.
A 2020 Swedish study found that practicing Brazilian jiu-jitsu (BJJ) led to a decline in aggression, whereas Mixed Martial Arts led to an increase. It isn’t the fighting. Those different outcomes come from the culture and the institutional structures that surround the mat or the ring.
In the UAE eighty-eight boys were assigned BJJ or traditional physical education for twelve weeks. There were significant decreases in hyperactivity and problem behaviours in the BJJ group.
French sociologist Loïc Wacquant spent three years studying a Chicago boxing gym. The gym functioned as ‘an island of order and virtue,’ built around mutual respect, self-discipline and controlled contest, in contrast to the social chaos and disorder that surrounded it.
A British study found that three-quarters of English boxing clubs are in the most deprived parts of the country, with a quarter in the most deprived ten per cent of neighbourhoods.
In those places, gym coaches serve as mentors and community anchors when other institutions have retreated.
Luta pela Paz – ‘Fight for Peace’ – in a Rio favela has supported over 15,000 young people through boxing, education, employability, and leadership training.
Shared risk, earned rank, mutual reliance, an older hand showing a younger one how it's done. These aren’t modern therapeutic inventions, they’re awkward primordial patterns, ill-fitting but unignorable.
Those institutions do not simply exist to give violence an outlet. They convert aggression into self-respect, rank, and belonging.
7. Back to Ragworth
Ragworth was largely demolished after I filmed there. It was rebuilt with £12 million in regeneration funding.
The women back then were right to want their violent partners gone. The politicians who demonised them for their sons’ behaviour were wrong.
The question is what came next – after the factories and pubs and weekly wages that hid violence in tiny houses, or dished out beatings to those unwise or unruly enough to step out of line.
A 2006 LSE and Joseph Rowntree Foundation report found housing and jobs had improved. The health of residents remained poorer than the national average and the proportion of people neither working nor looking for work had increased. A local care home was supposed to provide a solution.
When Ragworth does make the news today, it is still for gangs, fighting, drug use and the occasional burning car.
The boys I filmed back then would be in their late forties now, of an age and demographic where the male suicide rate begins to peak.
In America in the 2010s, Case and Deaton wrote that deaths of despair are driven by ‘the loss of meaning, of dignity, of pride, and of self-respect that comes with the loss of marriage and of community.’
The crisis for the generations of men that have aged out of anger isn’t riots any more. It’s dying before retirement age. It’s self-neglect. That’s the legacy for boys who grew up amid male absence and social emptiness.
We think it’s health or housing or jobs because we can write those things off. We aren’t prepared to admit that it is more profound, in case that might oblige us to adjust our view of the world, or at least take some responsibility for it.
What persists among us is not some mystical male need for violence. It is the Paleolithic hunting party. The dull, dangerous truth that young men will seek out status, intensity, rank, and comradeship — for good or ill.
A serious society would not paper over that. It would build the institutions necessary to civilise it.
The women of Ragworth deserved their freedom. Their sons – and grandsons – deserved institutions capable of turning aggression into discipline, pride, and belonging.
The women’s freedom came through accident and neglect. It’s unlikely that will work for the men.
Thanks for reading,
Best,
Adrian