What exactly is the “manosphere”?
We all know the stock answer: it’s “a loosely connected web of blogs dealing with men’s issues”… but that failed to satisfy me, so in an effort to find a more scientific answer to this question, I just spent something like 4 hours plowing through some 200 or more blogs – starting with the blogs I (at least occasionally) read, then looking at everyone those blogs link to, then everyone those blogs link to…
I bottomed out about two and a half hours into it, seemingly free-falling into an ever-expanding ocean of blogs, but then… somehow, the threads I was following started coming together again. You’d expect that if there is such a thing as “the manosphere” then going through the blogs you’d eventually find most of the ever-increasing number of links pointing back to each other in a somewhat circular fashion – and that is indeed what happened. The final quarter hour of my adventure on the open seas of blog was the strangest part – I would run across a new blog I’d never seen or even heard of before, and every link in its sidebar (save one or two of the blogger’s personal picks) would already show the purple “previously visited link” color. And this happened a lot, even with blogrolls several tens of blogs long.
So there you go, the active “manosphere” is, according to my calculations, comprised of around 120-140 blogs, with several tens of old, abandoned blogs still lying around as well. It’s somewhat divided into smaller and quite heavily overlapping spheres (centered around Game, marriage issues, legal issues and MRA, antifeminism, whining, MGTOW, cultural commentary, self-improvement, etc.) and bleeds rather profusely into a distinct alt-right blogosphere through both spheres’ shared interest in the ongoing cultural decay of the Western world and how to live with that.
It basically looks a lot like one of these:
A realization I had in the process that, although not really logically surprising, still felt counter-intuitive was that a lot of the uncharted blogs I usually never ventured anywhere close to were not bad at all. I suppose we all imagine that we’ve personally picked the good ones to follow, but the truth seems much more likely to be that we simply picked those which seemed the closest, judging by whatever virtual social connections brought us into the “manosphere” in the first place. It’s the “friend of a friend” phenomenon transferring from real life onto our blog reading habits. Depending on which blogs they’ve found first, bloggers and readers both cluster into smaller groups even within one manospheric subgroup – I found at least two, or depending on how you count, possibly three distinct “Game” subgroups of blogs, all writing about the exact same stuff, but mostly separately from each other, not linking to or discussing posts from the other groups. Probably not even reading them. Maybe not even knowing they exist.
Fascinating stuff… so what do I intend to do with this information? The only thing a man possessed of his natural male instincts and drives can do in a situation like this: build the biggest auto-updating manosphere blogroll ever.
… now it’s two weeks later and I’ve done it. It was no easy task in either the labor or the technical sense, and I crashed the server at least twice, but I finally found a way to make it work: I am now linking to updates from over 140 blogs in real time.
I’m fairly confident that all the “major” manosphere blogs are covered, but that said, if some obscure blog isn’t on the list that doesn’t mean I decided not to include it. The more likely explanation is that I’ve never heard of it and didn’t find it even when I went three layers of links deep from the blogs that I usually read. That’s exactly what inspired the point of this whole exercise – to gather together the currently pretty loose web of the “manosphere” and let readers find all those good writers they don’t even know are out there, and let those writers find new readers. This is what needs to happen if the manosphere is to grow and flourish.
I’m donating the most valuable piece of internet real-estate I have – the home page of my blog – to this cause, and that’s where you can now find between 50-100 new links to freshly pressed blog posts every day. I’m betting quite a few of those will be stuff you’ll want to read, especially since many of the writers contributing to this very site write their own blogs as well, and a lot of those are featured.
Having been a bit out of the loop lately, I’m going to be using it myself to better stay on top of what’s going on in the ‘sphere, and to discover the valuable offerings of blogs that I haven’t much been exposed to before. I hope you have a great time doing the same.
Happy reading!
