The rise of the so-called ‘manosphere’ has provoked intense debate, with online influencers attracting large audiences of boys and young men through a message centred on masculinity, status and sexual success. Critics have been quick to condemn its excesses, while others have sought to understand its appeal. One factor in its rise remains underexplored: the role of fatherlessness in shaping the outlook of many of its leading figures and followers.
The current discourse often underplays the pervasive absence of fathers that haunts the lives of many within the manosphere. This, in turn, echoes a wider cultural shift away from the familial structures and model of masculinity once sustained by Christianity.
Some of the most prominent figures associated with the movement have spoken openly about unstable or fractured childhoods. Harrison Sullivan, known online as ‘HStikkytokky’, is a muscle-bound 24-year-old living in Marbella. He has admitted that his successful rugby player father abandoned him as a child. His mother tried to compensate for his absence by working six days a week to send Harrison to private school. For the record, she abhors her son’s views, but despite her efforts, this seems to have had little effect on mitigating them.
Similarly, the 40-year-old Floridian Justin Waller, a self-made multi-millionaire, has described a family upbringing marked by instability. He lives with his girlfriend Kristen, with whom he shares two children, but is not married. They are in a mutually agreed “one-way monogamous relationship”. He has claimed that his mother burned down two homes for insurance payouts and that his father was at one point banned from seeing the children.
Andrew Tate – arguably the ‘godfather of the movement’ – has also spoken publicly about being severely beaten by his father during childhood.
These personal histories are not incidental. It is not difficult to see how early family dysfunction might shape perceptions of relationships. It is a well-established observation that boys who lack father figures are more likely to experience unstable and unhealthy relationships later in life.
In the manosphere’s worldview, romance is reduced to a form of transaction, with men cast as natural aggressors who must ‘gain’ value through the accumulation of status and wealth. Women, meanwhile, are described as being ‘born with their value’ in the form of youth and beauty.
The movement frequently invokes evolutionary biology, claiming that men possess an innate urge to procreate with as many women as possible. Women’s desires are framed in terms of securing resources and protection, leading to the conclusion that they should accept arrangements in which men pursue multiple partners.
Yet beneath the success, women and riches displayed online, there are also signs of mistrust, aggression and defensiveness, often without clear provocation. The fragility of these relationships becomes apparent on closer inspection. The host of The Fresh and Fit Podcast, Myron Gaines, and his girlfriend separated before a recent documentary featuring him aired, as the practical implications of ‘one-sided polygamy’ became clear.
That documentary – Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere – offered a glimpse into these dynamics, including interactions between influencers and their female counterparts, often OnlyFans models. These exchanges frequently involved explicit content created for attention and profit. Yet when asked about their genuine views, many of the men expressed disdain for the same behaviour, insisting they would not want their daughters to follow such a path. This tension suggests that the model of relationships being promoted is internally unstable.
By contrast, Western civilisation, and the bedrock on which it was built, Christianity, have long held to the traditional structure of the family, based on the marriage covenant between one man and one woman. This tradition ascribed distinct parental roles to men and women and provided sons with a clear sense of ‘what it is to be a man’.
In Christianity, Jesus Christ offers the perfect model of masculinity. Unlike the dominance-driven masculinity promoted in the manosphere, Christ is the ‘New Adam’, the sinless version of man before the Fall, who never succumbed to temptation or asserted unjust tyranny over others. Popular culture often places the blame for the Fall solely on Eve, but Christianity recognises that Adam failed to live up to his masculine role by passively following and failing to stop her. Jesus, on the other hand, displayed complete obedience to the will of God, instructing humanity to do the same and redeeming us in the process.
Manosphere influencers regularly resort to name-calling in condemning the sexual sins of many modern women, but Jesus treated all sinners with divine love and compassion. In John 4:1–26, he approaches the Samaritan woman at the well and recounts her relational history as well as her current entanglement with a man who was not her husband. His knowledge of her private sins leaves her dumbfounded, but Jesus does not condemn her. Instead, he tells her that the water – that is, the pleasures and temptations offered by the world – will always leave her thirsty, while He offers ‘living water’ and that by putting her faith in God and His promise of salvation, she will never thirst again.
The Gospels also make it clear that Jesus was, to use modern terminology, no pushover. In John 2:13–17, upon finding that the Temple was being desecrated and used for the sale of livestock and money changing, Jesus fashions a whip and overturns the tables. This was not an example of failing to control unruly passions, but the expression of righteous anger aimed at protecting the sanctity of His Father’s house.
In terms of perfect fatherhood, Jesus’s stepfather, St Joseph, is chosen by God to be His earthly guardian. Joseph shows no inclination towards worldly power or personal honour; in fact, he remains completely silent throughout the scriptures. Rather, upon hearing that King Herod had ordered the slaughter of all firstborn sons to hunt down Jesus, whom he believed posed a threat to his authority, Joseph dutifully acts as the protector of the Holy Family and shepherds them away to the safety of Egypt (Matthew 2:13–18).
Extending beyond fatherhood, Christianity sets out the role of men specifically in relation to women. Writing in 1960, CS Lewis argued in The Four Loves that there is a built-in power imbalance in sexual intimacy, ‘inviting the man to an extreme, although short-lived, masterfulness, to the dominance of a conqueror or a captor, and the woman to a correspondingly extreme abjection and surrender.’ Does this support the manosphere’s theory of the sexes?
Absolutely not. Man is punished for this ‘paper crown’, as Lewis calls it, because in the permanence of marriage, Christian law inflicts ‘a certain headship on him’. In other words, he is called to obey the command in Ephesians 5:25, to love his wife as ‘Christ loved the Church and gave himself up for her’. Christ’s love was shown through this willingness to die for the Church; the obligation of man is therefore one of sacrificial leadership and selflessness, rather than, much to the confusion of the manosphere, one of worldly dominance or ego.
Incidentally, it is a shame the documentary was made by a self-described atheist because, as shown by Tate and Sneako’s (another prominent influencer) recent conversion to Islam, there exists within some of these young men a real yearning for truth and an objective moral framework. Unfortunately, this belief system does not place self-sacrificial masculinity at the centre, which is precisely what so many disaffected men need to fill the void left by fatherlessness and guard against the empty promises of online misogyny.
