Lost Boys review: ‘a useful guide to masculinity’

That there is presently a crisis of masculinity in the Western nations is something almost everyone appears to agree on – and the only aspect of the matter that anyone appears to agree on. The nature of this crisis, its causes, its effects, its possible solutions: all of these questions feed a hubbub of furious argument.
Which makes James Bloodworth’s Lost Boys a useful intervention. Bloodworth has taken the same investigative approach he did to his previous book, the revealing Hired, for which – following the documentary method pioneered by George Orwell in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) – he spent six months working in minimum-wage, zero-hours jobs. This time he has immersed himself in the so-called manosphere, that online-driven shadow world of reactionary maleness, centred upon conscious opposition to the supposed feminisation of society.

By his own account the author was very nearly drawn into this world as it was coalescing; a younger man, insecure and so desperate to find a girlfriend that in 2006 he paid £2,000 to attend “pickup artist” training. He eventually worked out for himself that treating women as fellow human beings rather than objects of conquest was the way forward. But this gives him some insight into the increasing ranks of those who have not.

The manosphere consists chiefly of such people, supporting a coterie of grifters, sharks and zealots who prey upon them, and upon the women these men so desperately, helplessly desire and despise. In this it adheres to the pattern of any other 21st-century ideologically driven cult – a kind of pyramid scheme in which the suckers below feed money and adulation to the exploiters above (the now notorious Andrew Tate is surely the best-known example), hoping to acquire some crumbs of their status.

Notorious: Andrew Tate[Missing Credit]

At its most extreme, the manosphere produces mass killers, such as Elliot Rodger, who ought to be recognised as terrorists on behalf of misogyny, and whose violence against women reflects a horrifying commonplace across society as a whole.