I took the manosphere’s ‘red pill,’ so other parents don’t have to

By Katie Hurley, CNN

(CNN) — My 17-year-old son isn’t much of a TikTok enthusiast. There was a time when he watched basketball content and followed some musicians he likes, but a few weeks ago, he deleted the app. Stating he just didn’t use it anymore, it was almost as if he had ghosted it.

But I wondered why after he mentioned something to me in late January, after TikTok changed its ownership structure for US users: “Good news on TikTok: less porn. Bad news: lots of red pill content.”

If you’re not familiar with the term “red pill,” it’s a nod to the “Matrix” movies — referring to men waking up to the “harsh truth” that men are oppressed by a feminist society. In a nutshell, it’s fringe content that positions men as victims of a society that favors women.

I’m lucky that my son was never one to lose time scrolling.
He’s always preferred to shoot hoops or hang with his friends, and he deleted the app on at least one other occasion because he found the repetitive content annoying. (If you identify as a male adolescent, good luck “curating” your algorithm. People often give that advice, but he found that it’s completely unrealistic in teen boy world. You get what they give you.)

It’s hard to escape the red pill-promoting manosphere these days because it doesn’t live on TikTok alone. Boys and men can stumble into this content on YouTube, other social media apps and gaming, and even in the real world when peers bring the content right into the classroom or friend group. It also sneaks up on them. I don’t imagine many teen boys are heading to their favorite app and searching “how to be a misogynist.” When I talk to teen boys, they typically tell me they see red pill content after they search for fitness, skin care or hair care videos.

I took a deep dive into the manosphere for my new book, “Breaking the Boy Code: The New Playbook for Raising Resilient Boys” because I couldn’t find practical solutions for parents and educators dealing with this “boy crisis.” We need more than scary headlines and alarming statistics.

The “red pill” content I explored becomes more intense over time, including racist and misogynistic themes, but it can take a while. In the beginning, the lines between self-help and radical thought are blurry at best.

Netflix recently called attention to this growing problem in “Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere,” a documentary focused on some of the biggest influencers in this space. That attention helps make parents aware of the threats to boys online. But I wanted to know more about the impact on our boys.

I learned that 73% of adolescent boys regularly encounter masculinity-related content and nearly 1 in 4 experience high levels of exposure, according to a 2025 Common Sense Media survey of over 1,000 US male adolescents between the ages of 11 and 17. Fourteen percent of boys with high digital masculinity exposure experience low self-esteem, and 39% of that group report feeling “useless at times” and 34% think they’re “no good.”

Though this data makes a connection between high exposure to manosphere content and poor mental health, a lot of attention tends to focus on the actions boys are influenced to take, such as chiseling their jaws with actual hammers and injecting peptides into their skin. Those suggestions sound awful — but what about the impact on their mental health?

About six months ago, out of curiosity, I did my best to take the red pill on TikTok.

Diving into the manosphere as a middle-aged woman

I didn’t hide my identity or create a fake account to launch myself headlong into the manosphere. I simply searched terms and hashtags that might lead me toward masculinity influencers. I saw a lot of videos encouraging boys to buy a specific hair care brand, use a small hammer or other hard object to tap along the jawline for a more chiseled look, and how to use tape on their eyelids to develop the “hunter eyes” look. Some of them were alarming. But it was the unspoken effects of this content that stayed with me.

What I noticed was disturbing and saddened me. Here’s what I saw.

Low self-esteem and insecurity oozed out of boys. Both in videos they create and comments they post on other threads, boys, and middle school boys in particular, asked questions about their appearance, claiming to seek honest feedback. Though crying is discouraged by masculinity influencers as weak, many boys fought back tears as they tapped away at their jawlines while talking about what they need to change about both their appearance and personality.

Seeking validation by asking commenters to rate their perceived improvements and sharing photos in comment sections to gain feedback from another creator’s followers show the intense insecurity some boys face during this period of development.

The manosphere has a playbook that results in monetization for the chosen few. The reason it’s important to understand the mechanisms behind the manosphere at the top (think Clavicular and Andrew Tate) is because their content and ideology trickles down but the money trickles up.

Watch enough of this content and you’ll learn that the keys to becoming a “man” include hyper independence, strong leadership, financial stability, assertiveness skills and an ability to provide what they refer to as “containment.” Masculine men will contain women by “unemploying” them and handling all problems so they can relax at home, free from worldly stressors.

They present this information as if it’s well-studied, and there’s always a solution for boys and young men who are only just learning this version of masculinity. Course packs, coupon codes for herbal supplements, jaw trainers, and creatine and entrance codes into sports betting and day-trading apps abound in the manosphere.

It’s packaged as self-help but targets the lonely and disenfranchised, and the cost of improvement is high — financially and emotionally.

Belonging, purpose and mattering drive boys toward this content. After reading through scores of comments on videos that ranged from benign (shower twice a day) to downright dangerous (bone smashing), I noticed a common thread: These boys are looking for belonging, purpose and mattering. They want to feel understood. Although anger is a common emotion in these spaces, channeling that anger toward a common enemy (girls and women) builds connection. In these negatively charged spaces, some boys feel like they belong and they matter.

The fear of rejection is pervasive. Boys who engage with this content regularly are told to be stoic, tough and aggressive, to take control. But it’s easy to see that this message only lands at surface level. Frustrated when the masculinity advice doesn’t work, boys rant about rejection using misogynistic language with violent undertones. Fear turns to rage quickly, especially when other boys cheer them on.

Many boys and men aren’t buying it. After months of scrolling through masculinity content, it took a lot of puppy videos to get my “for you” page back to something that didn’t raise my blood pressure. In the process of flooding my feed with positive content, I noticed something: There are quite a few teens and young men sharing solid life advice and critiquing masculinity influencers. The attention economy favors the outrageous, so the so-called “soft masculinity” creators (like Ben Hurst and Jordan Stephens) don’t have the same reach just yet. But they’re out there, trying to add some balance to conversations about masculinity, and that’s a step in the right direction.

What should parents do?

Redefining role models in a time when digital influence is magnetic is difficult but not impossible. I often tell parents that it’s a series of seemingly small changes that makes a big difference. Try these tips:

• Promote in-person helping: Volunteering together is underrated. When families do good together, they find all kinds of connections, role models and friends whom they wouldn’t have otherwise met.
• Teach critical thinking skills: Teach boys to question the authenticity and validity of content. Does the post mention #ad or #spon? What does that mean? If a post claims scientific evidence, is the evidence linked, and did he read it and determine that it qualifies as scientific (peer-reviewed, reputable scholarly journal)?
• Foster the gut check: Empower boys to unfollow accounts that make them feel bad about themselves, helpless or hopeless. Boys need to learn to trust the emotional and physical cues that tell them how content affects them. Take time to understand each platform.

Many platforms say they are working hard to offer safe and supervised experiences for younger social media users. I reached out to both TikTok and YouTube to get a better sense of the steps they’re taking to help teens enjoy a safer experience in their apps.

Both platforms created helpful guides for caregivers. TikTok created a Guardian’s Guide to help caregivers understand the user experience and the available safety features. YouTube teamed up with the American Psychological Association to create A Guide to Healthy Screen Habits for Teens.

Spokespersons for both platforms also urge caregivers to use the latest tools provided by the apps to help kids learn to use digital platforms in a healthy way.

YouTube shared that they now have three distinct experiences to match developmental stage: YouTube Kids (0-12), kid accounts (this is a managed onramp supervised by parents), and teen accounts (13-17; autoplay is automatically set to “off”).

A TikTok spokesperson stated that teen accounts have more than 50 safety, privacy and security settings automatically enabled, including no access to direct messages for users 13 to 15 and no livestreaming for those under the age of 18. They also have a family pairing program to help parents scaffold digital safety skills by managing content, safety and well-being settings.

One piece of advice for parents

In total, I spent just about six months popping in and out of these spaces to try to understand how boys end up there and why they stay. If there’s one piece of advice I can offer to parents of boys, it’s this: In the absence of connection, belonging and feeling understood in their lives, boys will look elsewhere to meet these needs.

If you want your sons to come to you, you need to create brave spaces inside your family where they can be honest and you can listen without problem-solving and validate what they’re going through. None of this is easy, and all of them need a soft landing, no matter how tough they might seem.

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