The Manosphere’s Best Customer Is the Boy Who Never Picks Up a Book

There is, I’ve learned this week, a YouTube genre dedicated to the proposition that Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker, the one in full clown makeup and dancing on the stairs, had the right mindset for getting ahead in a competitive world. The journalist Jason Diamond has described its presenters as dudes with muscles on muscles, and its most popular video has somewhere north of four million views.

Not to be all alarmist about things, but I worry that’s what my son is going to end up watching if I don’t get him into novels.

Because it’s clear that this sort of stuff is what is filling the gap when boys stop reading. There’s a whole content economy out there, one that’s worth several billion dollars, which is run by men who have correctly identified that an audience of young males who feel afraid, lonely, and inadequate is the most monetisable audience the internet has ever produced. Andrew Tate alone is reported to have grossed over $25 million from Hustler’s University, his online course on getting rich and obtaining a Bugatti. And Jordan Peterson sells supplements which cost $40 a tub.

The conviction that reading novels is for losers is free, because it’s also the product.

Forty years ago, the sociologist Raewyn Connell coined the term hegemonic masculinity. By this, she meant the version of being a man that gets coded as default, against which other versions get marked as failed. So, hegemonic masculinity in the 1980s required a job, a wife, a mortgage, and the ability to fix the boiler.

Forty years on, the job, the wife, the mortgage, and the boiler are all variously in trouble but the masculine-coding work continues. The contemporary version has a name. It is called protest masculinity, which is Connell’s term for the kind of masculinity that defines itself by aggressive rejection of everything coded as feminine.

Sadly, reading, in the protest-masculinity worldview, is feminised, and reading novels is double-feminised. Reading novels by women is so feminised that, as the Sally Rooney Instagram-meme genre likes to suggest, no man would ever do it for any reason other than getting laid.

A 2021 study by María Espinoza Catalán made the cost of this clear. She ran an experimental study of Chilean adolescents and found that boys who endorse reading-gender stereotypes show measurable devaluation of their own reading. Liking reading actively reduces perceived masculinity, on a sliding scale where the kid who loves books pays the highest cultural price.

A mirror experiment has also been run. Marta Vilasís-Pamos and Inês Pires interviewed Spanish teenagers in 2022 and were able to identify the category of the ashamed gamer: girls who played extensively but refused to claim the label because the label carried masculine connotations. The shape of all that shame is identical, showing that the gender schema operates in both directions. Only the direction differs.

So far, so very familiar. Masculinity codes reading as feminine, boys absorb the coding and read less. We’ve been here before.

But the worrying bit is what is filling the space reading used to occupy.

This is where the manosphere does its actual work, and it does it in the language of self-improvement. We’re talking about Tate, Peterson and Rogan here. The kind of YouTube channel where the host wears a leather jacket indoors. All of them sell betterment. The betterment is to be achieved through goal-setting, supplementation, working out, status-acquisition, and the relentless internal monologue of someone who’s read no book published after 1950 except 12 Rules for Life.

I think it’s worth a brief detour for a moment here, because the male-coded literary tradition gets this exactly right, and most of us reading this already know it. Robert E Howard’s Conan reads, learns languages, recites poetry, and ends up a king. Edgar Rice Burroughs’ John Carter speaks the tongue of every Martian culture he encounters. Heinlein’s Lazarus Long has a private library so large it takes a starship to transport. And Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings while a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. The heroes of male-coded popular fiction have, for nearly a century, been men of action and men of letters, simultaneously. The boy who actually picks up a Conan novel discovers, fairly quickly, that the most competent, well-travelled, dangerous man in the room typically also reads. Andrew Tate is, by this standard, an embarrassment. The manosphere does not extend the male literary tradition. It betrays it. It sells boys an imitation of manliness that contains no literacy, because the revenue model depends on its audience never noticing the gap.

But here’s the wrinkle, courtesy of forty years of self-determination theory. Human motivation comes in two broad flavours.

On the one hand, autonomous motivation, which is wanting to do something because it interests you, satisfies you, or connects you to other people. And on the other, controlled motivation, which is wanting to do something because of a reward, a status, a punishment, or the avoidance of shame. Autonomous motivation produces flourishing and long-term performance, whereas controlled motivation produces compliance, anxiety, and burnout.

We’ve known this for decades, which I mention because the manosphere’s revenue model depends quite specifically on our boys not knowing it.

In 2025, Stenberg, Sundgren and Bostedt published a longitudinal study finding that boys aged nine to fourteen are already running their educational lives on a motivation profile dominated by controlled motivation. They report being more optimistic about school than girls, despite achieving worse outcomes. The reason their optimism doesn’t translate into achievement is that controlled motivation, the kind powered by rewards and the avoidance of shame, doesn’t actually produce learning.

All it does is produces the appearance of trying very hard.

And the manosphere’s content model is the apotheosis of any sort of controlled motivation. Everything about it is extrinsic. You need to get the body, get the girl, get the money, get the respect and get up at four in the morning to take an ice bath and write your goals on a whiteboard. It makes every available identity a status-pursuit and every form of contentment that doesn’t require visible upward motion is treated as entirely suspect.

And, against this backdrop, reading novels, which produces no external markers and gives you no goal to post on Instagram is, in this framework, literally a waste of your time.

So, to combat this, we really need to understand that pouring yet more controlled motivation into a population already underperforming because it has too much of it is wholly the wrong intervention.

Crucially, though, novels do the opposite work. They supply autonomous motivation in the most concentrated form humans have ever invented. Because you choose what you read, at your own pace and you inhabit lives that bear no relation to your own. You get to acquire competence that you can’t monetise and you get to learn how other people feel, including people you would otherwise never have sat next to on a bus.

This is, more or less, the entire developmental nutrient profile boys are missing. And they’re missing it HARD. The American Time Use Survey shows daily reading for pleasure has fallen from 28 percent of adults in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. And in the same survey, we see that men spend an average of 43 minutes per day on what the BLS politely calls games and computer leisure. I’m sad to say, this is mostly not Civilization VI...

And what has replaced reading? The Adin Ross streams. The Theo Von podcast appearances. The Paul brothers. The Nelk Boys, and most consequentially Joe Rogan. And this is because the damned algorithm has discovered that shame retains engagement far better than enthusiasm ever does. Thus, shame is what gets fed back to our boys on a never-ending loop.

We combat all of this by, at first, making sure our boys recognise that the voice in their head telling them reading is feminised is being sold to them by men with identifiable revenue models and all of whom would prefer their discretionary income went on their courses rather than a battered copy of A Princess of Mars. And once kids understand that someone is profiting from their feelings, those feeling becomes slightly more inspectable.

And, secondly, we need to celebrate that the men in real life who read tend to be those who are partnered, employed, and broadly well-regarded. And that the men in the algorithm who tell our kids that reading is for losers tend to be selling them something. We need people to notice which men have which lives.

And dads absolutely need to be visible reading. Forty years of expectancy-value research from Jacquelynne Eccles tells us that the single largest impact on a child’s sense of what reading is for is the behaviour of his parents. That’s bigger than schools, peers and the curriculum. If a boy’s father reads, the boy is, statistically, far more likely to read as well. If the father is scrolling through whatever the algorithm has decided he is going to want today, then the boy is going to do that too.

The man your son sees reading is the most expensive marketing budget Andrew Tate will ever fail to outbid.