The Guardian Reports on the African "Manosphere"

As readers of this blog are likely to be well aware I have long been skeptical of the claims made for the popularity of the "manosphere" and its cultural influence among young males--the extreme media attention to it less a reflection of the manosphere's actual part in their lives (as yet little studied, still less understood, and perhaps actually rather small) than a matter of that media's own reactionary sensibility, susceptibility to getting sucked into and fueling moral panic, and as always, its desire to talk about identity, gender, the "personal," rather than the large issues confronting all of us, let alone doing so in an intelligent way precisely because proper attention to that is the last thing those in charge of it want. (Consider, for instance, how much more congenial it is for the Democratic Party and its supporters to go on flogging the stupid lie that the manosphere brought the young male vote over to them than to admit that the voters once again refused to "hold their nose and vote" for them as they rejected their umpteenth neoliberal-neoconservative-centrist Democratic presidential contender carrying forward the unhappy Clinton-Obama-Biden tradition--">even after the polling data that gave this a semblance of plausibility was debunked by validated voter information.) It was thus no surprise that a major purveyor of the "panicked" view of the matter, the Guardian, was on about it again, and only slightly less surprising that it found a way to take this seemingly covered-to-death subject and "make it new" by talking about how sub-Saharan Africa now, apparently, has its own online ecosystem of the manosphere type, with Zimbabwe having its own Andrew Tate in Mr. Shadaya Knight.

As I have argued over and over and over again, not just in regard to this issue but every other, the hacks of the media don't "do" context, or background, or real analysis, instead bombarding us with disconnected factoids and offering as the only aid to making sense of it "opinion," most of the time simply the Establishment position on a topic, and that not even in the manner of the notorious "both sidesism," but the "one sideism" of which we hear too little. It seems to me fair to say that they are par for the course in this article, starting with how the article neglects to mention that as of 2025 only 36 percent--roughly 1 in 3--people in Sub-Saharan Africa even has Internet access, with the figures actually lower in several of the countries from which the personalities they focus on hail, namely Kenya (35 percent), Somalia (28 percent) and Ethiopia (22 percent, just 1 in 5 Ethiopians online). This seems to me not just a reminder that the digital divide remains with us decades after it seemed "everyone is online" to many in "the First World" (and this, a reminder of the miserable failure of economic development everywhere on the planet in the past half century on the whole, save in orthodoxy-flouting China), but properly a significant piece of the background to any news story presumably telling us about the use of the Internet in the developing world, and the influence that it is having on its people. But if, as I have remarked many a time in the past, the Guardian affords more space to discussion of such matters as the failures of neoliberalism than, say, any major newspaper in the United States (especially in the era in which the New York Times brought Bret Stephens onto its staff in the name of ideological "diversity"), it remains a centrist organ that, while reliably fire-breathing on identity politics, is also far, far less interested in matters like poverty, economic inequality and neoliberal failure, with which the impulse of those running that publication to give us yet another moral panic-feeding tale of the manosphere and its vicious idiocies is all too consistent. So, too, is the fact that overlooking the detail would be cause for doubt as to the actual reach of figures like Mr. Knight--for if it is very possible that the young men of the far better Internet connection-supplied First World "barely know what the manosphere is," let alone look to it for guidance, one may plausibly imagine it matters that much less in countries where Internet connections are relatively few--and time online a comparative luxury.