From extreme and dangerous trends like ‘looksmaxxing’ to dangerous social platforms like ‘Omoggle’, growing corners of the internet are sounding the alarm for the wellbeing of young men across the globe.
‘What We're Missing About the Rise of Masculinity Influencers’; ‘What teen boys are watching online should alarm every parent’; ‘The manosphere doesn't just exploit boys' insecurities. It manufactures them.’
Headlines of this nature have become increasingly pervasive as the online ‘manosphere’ continues to expand.
Young men frequently turn to highly exposed, influential online figures for life guidance, but what they can find instead is an ecosystem that exploits their vulnerabilities and fosters insidious, often dangerous, mindsets and behaviours.
Last year, the British television drama Adolescence had the public talking about the dark realities of these online subcultures. This year, the conversation has been reignited by Louis Theroux's recent manosphere docuseries, drawing fresh attention to just how far these toxic networks reach into the mainstream.
These highly insular, algorithmically targeted online subcultures are driving a rapid evolution of language, risks and behaviours. To effectively safeguard boys and young men, psychologists, educators, parents and policymakers must urgently keep pace, developing a deeper literacy of these digital echo chambers to mitigate the potential physical and psychological harms they can inflict.
“These platforms target insecurities that have been common in young men forever – their bodies, their attractiveness, their place in society," says Dr James Brown FAPS, clinical and consulting psychologist, and lecturer in clinical psychology at the University of New England.
"What makes them so effective is the messaging of certainty: 'Follow this plan, and you will be more attractive, more popular, more successful.' Those confident, unwavering voices are incredibly alluring to a young man who's still figuring himself out, and that's where the real danger begins."
The slippery slope of online content
A group of researchers from the University of Melbourne and American University recently analysed the TikTok histories of 142 young men in Australia, America and the United Kingdom, relaying their insights in an article for The Conversation. They found that 44 per cent of all the content they analysed featured "masculine-related themes".
They put this content into three different categories:
- Cultural touch points: sports, fitness, fashion and dating tips. This accounted for 38 per cent of content viewed.
- Masculine status: Content that, on the surface, looks like self-improvement, motivational content that centres around themes such as having discipline and "levelling up as a man".
Under the surface of this content, themes of "emotional suppression, financial abundance and 'high-value' male archetypes" emerged, the researchers found. They wrote: "Women are framed as rewards to be earned. The content is ideologically hardened, but also easy to miss."
This accounted for six per cent of the videos analysed.
- Degrading health content: This made up only one per cent of content analysed and focused on using peptide hormones and testosterone boosters, and content that "demands, endangers or advocates" self-harm.
The researchers also found this content was likely to promote violence against women and general misogynistic behaviours.
The 'cultural touch point' content often acts as the top of the funnel for young boys. They are drawn in by the promotion of health, wealth and becoming more 'desirable', which the researchers say "lay the foundations that make messages of misogyny, risk-taking, violence and hate not just palatable, but reasonable".
What is looksmaxxing?
When alarming articles emerge of young men engaging in degrading health content or using extreme physical regimes, it's easy for clinicians and parents to fear a widespread epidemic.
This is amplified when we see 'looksmaxxing trends" take over social media feeds.
Looksmaxxing is the practice of obsessively optimising one's physical appearance. It ranges from relatively benign habits like skincare and grooming ("softmaxxing") to extreme measures such as bone-smashing, where people are encouraged to use tools like hammers to alter their facial structure ("hardmaxxing").
However, Dr Brown points out that, currently, the more pervasive danger lies in mainstream digital environments that subtly erode wellbeing over time.
"There's a spectrum here,” he says. “Looksmaxxing and platforms like Omoggle [see below] sit at the extreme, alarming end, but they represent only about one per cent of the content young men are actually consuming.
“What concerns me more is the vast middle ground – content promoting online betting, gaming culture and subtle misinformation about health, wellbeing and what it means to be a man. That's what the majority of young men are being exposed to, day after day, and it deserves far more of our attention.”
Instead of creating entirely new diagnostic categories, these digital echo chambers act as a modern fuel source for traditional psychological distress, amplifying standard presentations.
"The core presentations we see are still anxiety and depression and these harmful online spaces tend to amplify those, rather than create entirely new conditions. We haven't yet seen the most extreme content filtering into the clinical room in large numbers, thank goodness.
“That said, there has been a steady increase over the past 20 years in young men presenting with eating disorders and body dysmorphic disorder, though we're still talking about a relatively small percentage of overall presentations."
However, he notes that this does not mean psychologists, parents and the government can afford to be complacent about the extreme fringes.
"If we aren't proactive about addressing the extreme content, there's a real risk it becomes normalised and filters further into mainstream culture. The broader manosphere, this ecosystem of influencers and the messaging they promote, is already a significant concern."
Supporting boys and young men
When working with teenagers caught in these echo chambers, the immediate clinical temptation might be to confront the harmful misinformation directly. However, Dr Brown advises against a heavy-handed, parental approach, which risks fracturing therapeutic rapport.
"The basics still matter; building trust and rapport, and helping the young person feel that you are genuinely interested in their experience. The last thing you want is to take a fear-based approach to what they're involved with. Young men are intelligent and have the capacity to figure this out, if we support them to do so.
“Our job is to keep them engaged with us, not drive them back toward unvetted, untested information from unreliable sources.
Psychologists, especially those working in school environments, would benefit from researching and understanding the language and environments that exist online, he says, and posits that the profession will start seeing helpful professional development options in this space.
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"The negative impacts of this online world on young men often surfaces in the schoolyard before we hear of it anywhere else. We could intervene earlier by funding more school psychologists, and certainly by supporting their role as an influence in this space – educating parents, kids and so on."
Some of the terminology worth understanding includes:
- Looksmaxxing: the practice of obsessively optimising one's physical appearance through extreme measures, ranging from skincare and grooming to surgical procedures or extreme practices (such as using a hammer to reshape facial bones) in pursuit of an idealised male aesthetic.
- Mogging/being mogged: being visibly outcompeted or overshadowed by another man's appearance or status, often used to humiliate others in online spaces.
- Omoggle: a website where users are randomly matched with others via live video for an appearance-rating game, using AI technology to determine which of the pair has the most 'optimal' facial structure.
- Beta/subhuman: labels applied to men deemed physically or socially inferior, used to rank males in a rigid dominance hierarchy and shame those who don't conform to an idealised masculine standard.
- The 80/20 rule — the belief that 80 per cent of women are only attracted to the top 20 per cent of men, used to justify misogyny and promote the idea that most men are romantically unlucky.
- Incel: short for 'involuntary celibate,' referring to men who blame women and society for their inability to form romantic relationships, often expressing deep misogyny and resentment.
- Red/bluepill: borrowed from The Matrix, "redpilled" signals awakening to manosphere ideology, while "bluepilled" dismissively describes men who reject it as naive or conditioned.
Once trust is established and the context/language is understood, cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) remains highly effective for dismantling pseudo-scientific internet rhetoric, says Dr Brown.
"Cognitive behaviour therapy gives us some helpful tools here. We teach people to test the evidence behind their beliefs, to hold thoughts lightly rather than accepting everything at face value, and to build genuine critical thinking skills.
“Through a Socratic dialogue, we can help a person of any age learn to sift through what they're hearing, test the evidence and become more discerning."
A particularly powerful reframe involves exposing the commercial agenda of charismatic online figures who exploit male vulnerabilities for financial gain, he adds.
"One of the things we as psychologists are having to educate clients on is helping them understand that the nature of these platforms isn't about the delivery of information. It's about capturing your attention.
"One of the most important things we can help young people understand is that these platforms aren't designed to deliver information. They're designed to capture attention. We can help young men consider, 'Do you know what's actually being sold here? It's you. Your eyes on the screen – you are the product.' Once they grasp that, they can become far more aware of their online world."
Educators, parents and psychologists can also leverage the manosphere's obsession with 'self-optimisation' by reframing what it truly means to be a healthy, functioning man, he adds.
"Rather than challenging the self-optimisation idea head-on, you can reframe it. If a young man is passionate about the gym and bodybuilding, you work with that and help him see that being a healthy young man also means a good stretching routine, keeping your heart healthy with cardio, eating well, spending time with mates and looking after your mental health. You're broadening his definition of what it means to be his best self."
Crucially, this reframe should introduce the concept of psychological flexibility and resilience, he says, which are usually neglected or actively discouraged in manosphere-related content.
"It's particularly important that we help young men understand that being their best self includes recovering from setbacks. The self-optimisation content they consume almost never talks about failure, and yet any meaningful goal will involve it.
“Our language needs to include that: 'When you struggle to keep up with your gym program, how can you be kind to yourself? How do you restore, recover and come back stronger?' We're helping them develop a much healthier and more realistic range of beliefs and behaviours."
A shared problem to solve
While individual therapy and parental guidance are critical, Dr Brown emphasises that the mental health sector and families shouldn't bear the entire systemic burden of policing a multi-billion-dollar tech industry.
"Parents and health professionals should not be the last line of defense here. There are clear steps that could be taken at a government level such as better regulation and stronger platform accountability. It shouldn't fall to a parent to have these conversations as the only stopgap before their child ends up in a psychologist's office because they're already deeply affected."
Dr Brown concludes with an encouraging reflection on the modern state of male help-seeking behaviours in Australia.
"We're concerned that in the online space young men are being encouraged not to seek help, but on the other hand, there's plenty of good evidence to show us otherwise. Young men are actually presenting for help more than they ever used to. Years gone by, they would have been told to tape it up and get on with it. Now they're being encouraged to seek help, and the research says that they are."
The key for psychologists, parents and educators is to remain open-minded, adaptable and genuinely interested in the unique ways young men communicate their struggles, he adds.
"I've had plenty of experiences where it's been the young man who initiated the help-seeking – and that's been really encouraging.
"I've had plenty of clinical experiences where it's been the young man himself who initiated seeking help and that's genuinely encouraging. This is the point the media often misses: we hear the alarming stories, but there are many more showing that young men are actively asking for help. Be curious about them, meet them where they are, and you'll often find they have some great ideas about what kind of support they're looking for."