MAKE MEN GREAT AGAIN: A dispatch from the ‘Woodstock’ of the manosphere
A free excerpt from my book Lost Boys
I’ve been away on a short holiday in Lisbon so haven’t written anything new this week. Instead, I thought I’d give you a free extract from my book Lost Boys. Apologies to those who’ve already read the book - I’ll be back with something new next week. For those who haven’t, enjoy!
Orlando, Florida, October 2022
A man with a closely cropped Mohawk hands me a rectangular box and gives me a bone-crushing handshake that bends my fingers until they nearly break. It’s an assertion of dominance. I’ve just arrived and somebody is already trying to win a cock fight. The box emits a pungent aroma. Soap – three bars of it – are inside, each named after an iconic masculine cultural figure, in this case Bond, Durden and Maverick.
The soap comes infused with a potent pheromone kick that promises to ‘enhance alpha status, masculinity, charisma, mischief and attractiveness’. I want to test this claim out but when I look around all I see are burly white dudes with Ned Kelly beards, tight-fitting T-shirts and scrunched up facial expressions. I make a mental note to splash myself with Bond before I head downtown to the bars tonight.
I am at the Avanti Palms Resort and Conference Center on International Drive, a popular vacation spot a short distance down the freeway from the famous Walt Disney World. It’s October but the weather is hot and muggy. Outside the front of the hotel, rods of sunlight slip between the tall and slender palm trees and land on the dew-glazed verges. Meanwhile, in the hotel lobby sunburned tourists melt into faux leather armchairs and crane their necks at iPhones, their white flab turned a shade of tandoori red by the blazing October sun. Conference attendees arrive in a steady stream, heavyset men in T-shirts emblazoned with uncompromising slogans – ‘Barbarian’, ‘Freedom not Fear’, ‘Give Violence a Chance’ – who zigzag through the scattered fortress of suitcases and human flesh.
In the conference suite itself a selection of merchandise is spread out on a trestle table. Vendibles include quasi-MAGA (Make America Great Again) trucker caps. Priced at $37, they come in red, white, blue and black – plus a pink one for the women back at home (preferably in the kitchen). The caps feature slogans that are variations on the same theme. ‘Make Women Great Again’, ‘Make Women Sexy Again’, ‘Make Men Alpha Again’ and ‘The Future is Patriarchy’. There is something for the kids too: a brown and white teddy bear wearing a vest that says ‘FEMINISM IS CANCER’.
This is the 21 Convention, the self-proclaimed Woodstock of the manosphere now in its sixteenth year. For four days every October the alpha males of the internet come together to rail against the feminist conspiracy which they believe runs the world. The long-time organiser of the gathering, Anthony ‘Dream’ Johnson, describes the four-day event as ‘TED Talks for men’ – albeit with a misogynist twist. A diminutive man with a closely cropped beard and a MWGA (Make Women Great Again) trucker cap that sits permanently on his head, Johnson is the self-proclaimed president of the manosphere. He started the 21 Convention in 2006 and claims to have ‘helped over 100 million men’. He calls himself ‘beachmuscles’ on social media and takes beta males and turns them into ‘apex red-pilled alpha males’. Prices for one-to-one consulting begin at $500 an hour.
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The consensus in Orlando is that society is waging a ‘war’ on all things masculine; that courts and institutions are working in concert for the benefit of women; that false rape accusations and paternity fraud are rife; and that modern women are out of control. The turnout is relatively small compared to some of the other workshops I have attended during my research: I count forty men in total. This probably has something to do with the $2,000 ticket price. Only diehards come to live events; most choose to engage with the recordings at home: Johnson’s 21 Studios YouTube channel has over half a million subscribers.
In between sessions, men float around the conference rooms flaring their latissimus dorsi muscles and tensing their arms. Derogatory terms – ‘faggot’, ‘soy boy’, ‘beta cuck’ – are regularly affixed to those deemed to be lacking in the approved masculine qualities. Anthony Johnson’s go-to insults all draw on the theme of homosexuality. Things he doesn’t like are either ‘gay’, ‘totally gay’ or ‘totally fucking gay’.
In a world where masculinity is bound up with the sexual conquest of women – not to mention an exhausting, round-the-clock assertion of dominance – homosexuality is seen as undermining male hegemony. In contrast to other red pill teachings, it is treated as a cultural choice rather than a biological inevitability. Speakers in Orlando blame the ‘rainbow community’ for women’s sexual liberation as well as everything else defective about the modern world. Indeed, the ubiquity of anti-gay rhetoric at the conference is such that I will feel short-changed if none of the speakers ever shows up in the news under a heap of male prostitutes.
‘Stop being gay, that’s bad for you,’ declares Jeff Younger, a thrice married man who says he likes women ‘chaste and obedient’. Younger, fifty-six, was once discharged from the United States military following an ‘admission of homosexuality’. Yet he’s put all that behind him and these days purports to follow traditional Christian teachings on sexuality. ‘We live in a profoundly decadent age,’ he tells the audience. In 2022 Younger ran as a Republican candidate for the Texas House of Representatives on a ticket campaigning against gender-affirming treatments for children (he lost in the primary runoff). Younger has also been involved in a custody battle with the mother of his biological son over whether the child should be allowed to change gender. It isn’t just gender transition he opposes but gender non-conformity: the men in his family are forbidden even from growing their hair out.
‘The gay community has brought a lot of these things in and women have piggybacked on it,’ says Greg Adams, a YouTube influencer who coaches men in what he calls the ‘free agent lifestyle’. Predictably enough, the free and easy life is off limits for women. ‘You can’t turn a hoe into a housewife,’ says Adams, who evinces an implausible concern that ‘women will end up single and old’. At least four of the speakers at the 21 Summit are former pickup artists. But in recent times the teachings of Genesis have supplanted those found in The Game. Red pill spaces today overflow with former hard-partying womanisers who are all about conservative values. Johnson, a self-confessed former playboy, used his own keynote to bemoan a ‘complete decline in female modesty’.
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One of the most influential red pill gurus (and a previous 21 Convention speaker until he fell out with Johnson) is Rollo Tomassi (real name George Miller). Tomassi styles himself as the ‘Godfather’ of the red pill: a sceptical observer of the human condition who coolly doles out his unvarnished wisdom to an audience of men bamboozled by the ‘gynocentric social order’ (i.e. a society ruled for the benefit of women).
Reading his 2013 book The Rational Male, it’s easy to grasp why Tomassi’s audience features a preponderance of men who have been chastened by acrimonious divorces and failed relationships. A hostile and antagonistic tone emanates from every page like steam billowing off hot tarmac. Together with a long list of gripes about modern women, the book also provides the ‘newly unplugged’ male reader with advice on how to ‘flip the script’ on women. Men are encouraged to escape the ‘feminine matrix’ by applying a mixture of boilerplate self-improvement advice and alpha male cosplaying. Those who want to learn from Tomassi himself can pay $1,000 an hour for one-to-one mentoring on ‘sussing women out’.
The Godfather of the red pill’s main qualification for claiming a monopoly of insight in this area is the monogamous marriage he has been in since 1996. And the fact he adopts former racing greyhounds at his home in Reno, Nevada. ‘Everything I ever needed to learn about life I learned from my greyhounds,’ he has said. In case this CV fails to reassure, Tomassi endows his work with a scientific patina, routinely falling back on obscure graphs and charts and quoting (selectively) from evolutionary psychology and behaviourism (the idea that behaviours are acquired through conditioning). At other times he tries to sound like an anthropologist by making references to ‘hunter-gatherers’, ‘lizard brains’ and ‘tribalist beginnings’.
Along with other red pill ideologues, Tomassi maintains that ‘men’s and women’s brains are wired differently’. Men, it turns out, are ‘hard-wired’ to do the things they have always wanted to do: play the field, chase women half their age, and lord it over the wife back at home. Women on the other hand are programmed by their ‘evolved mental firmware’ to smile and put up with it.
Tomassi also offers the angsty men who tune in each week to his YouTube channel (224,000 subscribers) a comeuppance fantasy. The women who turned them down, left them on read and slept with other men are destined for a fall. She mistakenly thought she could have it all. Instead, she’s likely to end up depressed and alone as a ‘growing undercurrent of mid-life women…regret their past decisions to remain single into spinsterhood’.
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In the early days of the manosphere, men might stumble across pickup artist forums while looking for tips on what cologne to wear or how to ask a woman out. Two decades later, masculinity influencers were warning that even men in ostensibly loving relationships were at risk of being betrayed. ‘Women pick a monogamous marriage and they cheat with high-status guys,’ Jordan Peterson told the Joe Rogan Experience in 2018. Justin Waller, a business partner of Andrew Tate and popular masculinity influencer in his own right (and a sometime guest at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort), told his 1.1 million followers that a woman would only love them until she found a better option. ‘You think she won’t leave you for that guy who makes a little bit more money? Promise you she will.’
Men are around twice as likely to cheat on a partner as women. Yet rhetoric like this helped to fuel a preoccupation in the manosphere with paternity fraud – i.e. when a man is told (falsely) that a child is biologically his by the child’s mother. There was a widespread perception that huge numbers of men were unwittingly raising children that were not their own. Multiple speakers at the 21 Convention claimed that married men were seen as potential ‘targets’ of paternity fraud by duplicitous women. Meanwhile on social media, Tomassi was calling for the ‘Federally mandated DNA paternity testing of all births’.
A heightened sense of paranoia about the paternity of one’s children was downstream from the red pill trope that women were biologically programmed to seek out ‘alpha sperm’ behind the back of her ‘beta provider’ husband. In 2018, Jordan Peterson claimed that paternity fraud was ‘more common than anybody suspected’. It was not unusual in the manosphere to hear the claim that between 10 and 30 per cent of children were being raised by men who were unaware they were not the biological father. Yet despite the ubiquity of such eye-catching figures, cases of misattributed paternity are exceedingly rare. A 1999 study found the extent of paternity discrepancy in the UK to be just 1.6 per cent.15 Meanwhile the most reliable study for North America has put the non-paternity rate at between 1 and 3 per cent.
The 30 per cent figure appears to have originated from a transcript of a small symposium on the ethics of artificial insemination that was carried out in a town in south-east England in 1972. The results from the study were never published so the method of testing and population sample were not independently verified, though one participant in the symposium is reported to have described the sample as ‘highly biased’. Moreover, DNA techniques in the early 1970s were unsophisticated compared to DNA profiling as we know it today, which wasn’t developed until the 1980s.
A 2016 review of the scientific literature found a much lower incidence of misattributed paternity than the figures commonly cited in the manosphere. The authors of the review were dismissive of the idea that women cheat to secure the best genes for their offspring. ‘The observed low EPP [extra-pair paternity] rates challenge the idea that women routinely “shop around” for good genes by engaging in extra-pair copulations... Human EPP rates have stayed near constant at around 1 per cent across several human societies over the past several hundred years.’
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At the red pill summit in Orlando the sexual double standard is treated as a given. Men are encouraged to ‘spin plates’ – which is to say, to date multiple women at the same time – whereas women who do the same are diminished as ‘sluts’ and ‘whores’ who are ‘run through’ and ‘ruined’. The importance of a woman’s ‘body count’ was emphasised ad nauseam in Orlando. Within a heterosexual context, men can do more or less as they please. However, according to red pill ‘science’, women who want a piece of the action risk losing their ability to ‘pair bond’ – i.e. to form a romantic emotional attachment.
It is ironic that being a red-blooded alpha male should co-exist with a gnawing sense of performance anxiety. But then, the notion that she might have had better is unnerving to those prone to think of themselves as dominant alphas – a rank that demands a certain thrust and potency. From this tension emerges an uptight machismo that feels mortally threatened by party girls, rainbow flags and Andrea Dworkin.
During my week in Orlando, sitting at the back of the air-conditioned conference suite listening to this stuff, I was often tempted to laugh. It’s an emotion that is hard to avoid when confronted with such a taut and inflexible aesthetic. There was something comic about the brutal handshakes, the flexing of muscles and the regular conflations of strength with brute force – not to mention the arrant humourlessness of it all. Whether turning people like this into figures of fun diminishes them or not is another matter. In any case, the jovial mood soon gives way to something darker.
This is an abridged and edited extract from Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere. You can buy my book here. Alternatively, you might consider becoming a paid subscriber to my newsletter. It costs £4.95 a month and as a freelance writer, every paid subscription means I can dedicate more time to writing this newsletter.
