The Manosphere Isn’t the Problem. The Empty Center Is.
What a conversation with Dr. Nathalie Martinek clarified about why young men keep wearing identities like loaner cars.
I sat down with Dr. Nathalie Martinek to talk about the Netflix Manosphere documentary. We discussed gender relations and algorithms, eventually reaching the topic of postmodern absence of identity.
Nathalie said something that sticks:
“There’s a lot of people walking around who have no actual center. They wear these different identities and absorb the belief systems associated with them. Now I’m a feminist. Now I’m an incel. Now I’m a this. They’re largely invisible to themselves.”
That is an entire essay in one paragraph. The Manosphere functions as a vacancy filler, and its mirror image on the other side does the same job. Both keep working because the people downloading them have no stable internal structure to push back against the install.
The Vacancy Came First
Costello et al. (2022) profiled 151 self-identified incels and found 75 percent screened for moderate or severe depression and 67 percent for moderate or severe anxiety, with elevated loneliness and suicidal ideation. Fowler et al. (2022) reported that males accounted for nearly 80 percent of U.S. suicide deaths in 2019, with most male decedents carrying no known mental health diagnosis on record. The Manosphere is scavenging a demographic that has already been abandoned.
Nathalie put it plainly: “There used to be an ecosystem around young men. Family, village, uncles, grandparents, religion. Secularization scattered it. Opportunists fill the void.”
The Resentment Industrial Complex
She has a phrase for what the opportunists sell: the resentment industrial complex. The cousin concept is Rob Henderson’s luxury beliefs, though resentment runs lower on the income ladder and hits its consumers harder. A creator notices what gets engagement, drifts toward it, and sells a worldview he may not personally believe to an audience whose entire life will be organized around it.
I have written about this as digital dissociation and audience capture. Natalie sharpened the point: consumers “buy in, embed it into their identity, and just breed more resentment.” Frustration → algorithmic discovery of resentment-coded content → parasocial attachment → identity adoption → behavioral imitation → renewed frustration → re-engagement with the same source. The loop pays the creator and impoverishes the follower.
The Fairytale Industrial Complex
Halfway through, Nathalie cited a phrase from a writer named Francesca: the fairytale industrial complex. Men get sold the Beast-and-Aladdin arc where confidence plus grand gesture wins the girl. Women get sold the princess waiting to be seen and selected. Both scripts collapse on contact with adult life, and the participants cannot name what went wrong because the script was never visible to them as a script.
This is what I call orphaned instincts. The evolved drives are intact. Men still want to provide and protect; women still want to assess and select. Legitimate channels have closed. The substitute channels (dating apps, parasocial influencers, sports betting, OnlyFans subscriptions) absorb the drive without satisfying it with human contact. Sympathetic nervous system debt does not get repaid by swiping.
What Therapy Got Wrong
Nathalie and I diagnosed the therapist class as the new clergy: pastoral authority paired with credentialing, often without the lived material to back either. The field has positioned itself adjacent to a demographic it has not bothered to learn how to reach. A profession that treats male ambition as suspect and male bluntness as aggression will not be the place where a struggling 22-year-old goes for help. He goes where someone tells him he is allowed to want things and offers him something to do about it.
The Manosphere figured this out. Therapy mostly did not.
What Replaces the Vacancy
Communities are a need, not a luxury. Young men require ongoing relationships with trusted male elders who can correct them without performing it for an audience. Women need the same from women. Both need real friction with the other sex in person rather than the curated frictionlessness of an app.
The Friction Thesis applies. The young man who builds skill, takes rejection in person, and gets corrected by an older man who actually likes him is doing the developmental work the Manosphere monetizes the absence of.
Develop a center. Then the identities stop sticking.
Dr. Nathalie Martinek writes at drnataliemartinek.substack.com. Her work on gurupreneurs and the resentment industrial complex shaped most of what is good in this piece.
References
Costello, W., Rolon, V., Thomas, A. G., & Schmitt, D. (2022). Levels of well-being among men who are incel (involuntarily celibate). Evolutionary Psychological Science, 8(4), 375–390.
Fowler, K. A., Kaplan, M. S., Stone, D. M., Zhou, H., Stevens, M. R., & Simon, T. R. (2022). Suicide among males across the lifespan. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 63(3), 419–422.
