I once spent three and a half years and forty-nine interviews focused on how men experience women’s power in dating. Back in 2013, I sat down with ordinary dating men and pickup artists, with the trainers who teach pickup artistry, with academics working on masculinities, and with sex workers who hear truths about men that the rest of us never get to hear. It became my PhD and then my book, Rethinking Misogyny, and I was reading the manosphere closely throughout. I asked the men about a range of subjects including their friendships with other men; their own body image; women’s emotions; female beauty; female power, in dating and in society at large; women’s fertility and contraception; female violence; monogamy; and power between the genders.

The way the manosphere has grown since then does not surprise me in the slightest. What does still surprise me is that nobody will name the elephant in the room, which is the power women have and how frightened of it men are. That fear is why the manosphere offers men constructed certitude, and it is why the pickup artist industry offers it too. Thirteen years on from the fieldwork, we still cannot talk about men’s fear of women.

Two stories broke within a week of each other and belong side by side, although I have not seen anyone put them there. On 25 August the Guardian reported that lawyers for Andrew and Tristan Tate had told a Miami court that almost nothing about their clients’ online lives was true: the supercars were rented, the superyacht belonged to somebody else, a passport in a supervillain’s name was a Halloween prop, and the posts about limitless money were hyperbole. The brothers, their own legal team explained, are “playing a role”. They were arrested in July and are fighting extradition to the United Kingdom, where they face 59 charges relating to alleged offences between 2010 and 2017, every one of which they deny.

On the 2nd of September The Times published Julia Llewellyn Smith’s interview with Simon Leviev, born Shimon Hayut, who posed as the heir to a diamond fortune and took an estimated £7 million from women he met on Tinder, leaving one of them bankrupt. He has convictions in Finland and in Israel, he has served time in three countries, and he is now free of any court case for the first time in fifteen years. He sells personalised video messages at £165 each, has a Hollywood manager, is developing a perfume and a dating app, and the piece notes that in the manosphere he is a hero.

Read the two articles against each other and the thing that jumps out is not the similarity, which is obvious enough, but the difference in what each man is currently required to claim. The Tates’ lawyers have had to stand in front of an American judge and dismantle their clients’ entire online persona in order to argue against extradition, because a man who says he has seven passports and unlimited money is a man who looks like a flight risk. Leviev, sitting on Zoom in a Patek Philippe, is under no such pressure and is therefore still insisting he was worth close to a hundred million dollars, that his life was jets and bodyguards and supercars, and that a couple of hundred thousand pounds taken from a woman would not have covered one of his weekends. Two men making the identical claim about themselves, one legally obliged to abandon it and one commercially obliged to maintain it, which tells you that the wealth was never the thing being defended in either case; the claim itself was the product, and it could be dropped or doubled depending on who was listening.

Ulrich Beck gave us the term for what is being sold here back in 1997. Constructed Certitude describes the tendency to cherry-pick historic and scientific data in order to assemble a workable, reassuring account of how the world is; it manufactures certainty where the conditions do not supply any. The comfort of standing on ground that feels solid is the whole of its appeal, and it is no small thing to offer a frightened man. When I was doing my fieldwork the pickup artist industry ran almost entirely on it. Trainers taught a highly selective evolutionary psychology alongside neuro-linguistic programming, ‘peacocking’, scripted routines and a taxonomy of women presented as biology rather than as sales technique. The claims could not be tested, and that was their function; naturalness of behaviour and authenticity of masculinity are not things that can be proven, and an industry which relies on constructed certitude drawn from cherry-picked scientific ‘facts’ will always end up promising more than its own framework can underwrite. The manosphere was running alongside all of this rather than waiting to inherit it. The forums, the blogs and the early red-pill writing were already in place while men were still handing over fifteen hundred pounds for a weekend boot camp in London, and they were offering the same certitude free at the point of use. What has shifted since is the balance between the two. Paying a trainer has gone out of fashion; the platforms that pay per view have not, and the mechanism running through both of them has never altered in any respect that matters.

None of this began with the internet, and the pickup artists were not the first to sell it either. Ross Jeffries was teaching men neuro-linguistic programming as a seduction technique in the late 1980s, a decade in which gender positions were still comparatively legible and in which a theory like hegemonic masculinity still had real explanatory purchase; Neil Strauss and Mystery developed that material through the 1990s. The lads’ magazines arrived in the middle of it and reached a readership no boot camp could have dreamed of. One of the trainers I interviewed still reached for them two decades later when he wanted to describe what mainstream men want, talking about a Loaded girl and an FHM girl as a recognised type that needed no explanation; the magazines had supplied a vocabulary that long outlasted them.

What those magazines did, and Rogers analysed it precisely in 2005, was split men’s intimate lives in two. Sex was presented as straightforward, reliably available and thoroughly solvable; relationships were where the uncertainty was permitted to live, along with a female sexuality treated as difficult to decipher and a female opinion capable of damaging a man who let it near him. Sex therefore had to be mastered, and the magazines offered three routes to mastery. The first borrowed the language of workplace management, so that sexual goals could be pursued with an eye to efficiency. The second put sex on a production line, an activity demanding constant improvement, broken into components small enough to be learnt one at a time. The third called in science, which supplied foolproof advice carrying the authority of objective knowledge and leaned on biology because biology sounds apolitical. Rogers makes one observation about that third route which I have never stopped thinking about: invoking science meant men did not have to consult each other directly, since asking another man for help might look like weakness. Science was doing duty as a conduit for men’s anxieties.

Every one of those three is running today at a scale the magazines could not have imagined. The management language survives in the manosphere as optimisation and the daily routine. The production line survives as content, endless and modular and improvable and free at the point of delivery. The science survives as the selective evolutionary psychology that the Tate operation and a hundred smaller ones dispense as though it were settled fact, and it performs precisely the same service it performed in 1995, which is to let a man take instruction about his deepest insecurity without ever having to admit to another man that he has one. I found the same architecture in the pickup artist community, where dating success was cut into manageable modules that kept the attention fixed on the man’s own skill. The trap is identical in all three. Certitude of this kind manufactures the very anxiety it advertises itself as curing, because if success really is a matter of acquiring a skill set, then a man who has acquired it and is still alone has nowhere left to put the failure except onto himself.

One line in the Times interview tells you how directly the two worlds connect. Explaining why he could not possibly have been interested in Fjellhoy, Leviev grades her out of ten and observes that on a bad day a four can look like a six. That numerical scale is pickup artist doctrine, more or less verbatim, and it was already old when I encountered it in 2012. Its purpose has never been description. It converts a person who has the power to refuse you into a figure on a chart, and a man who has been rated by a woman and found wanting can retaliate by rating her back, in a currency he controls and she never agreed to use. Men do not reach for that scale because they think women are unimportant. They reach for it because a woman’s judgement lands somewhere that has no armour on it.

What my interviewees actually told me was not what I had gone looking for. The 30 men in the main sample, twenty regular dating men and ten pickup artists, did not express a coherent male identity or agree amongst themselves about what a successful man is at this point in history; they contradicted themselves constantly, often inside a single answer. Their masculinities sat on a spectrum from ‘hard’ to ‘soft’ regardless of whether they were inside the PUA world or outside it, and the dating men turned out to be considerably less reliant on essentialist ideas about gender than I had expected them to be. Some of the men who were harshest about women were the same men who spoke most fluently about egalitarian ideals, which told me that knowing about structural inequality does not necessarily restructure a man’s understanding of his own privilege.

Ask men one at a time and even the settled cultural assumptions come apart in your hands. When I put to them the prevalent idea that women are more emotionally intelligent than men, sixteen answered the question directly and they split almost down the middle: eight thought it was true, seven thought it was not, and one was unsure. Several of those who agreed reached for instinct or a female sixth sense to account for it, which is the cherry-picked biology arriving from an entirely ordinary direction rather than from a trainer. One man, a thirty-three-year-old from Manchester, told me he was certain that women had the greater emotional intelligence while being perfectly conscious that he spent much of his own time acting as an agony aunt for the people around him; he settled that by treating himself as an exception rather than by revising the belief, and I watched men perform that manoeuvre over and over again. Underneath most of it, once the performance thinned out, sat an anxiety about women for which the men had almost no vocabulary at all.

I described men’s homosocial performance as a curtain of arrogance because that is what it does. It enables men to boast about far more masculine support than they actually receive. Traditional theories of homosociality read male bonding as men preferring the company of men and discounting women, but I do not think that reading survives contact with what the men actually said. Take ‘bros before hos’, which it would be far too easy to file under ordinary sexism; the more useful question is why the declaration needs to be made at all. It has to be stated out loud precisely because women matter so much to men that homosocial bonds are vulnerable to them. The slogan is not evidence of women’s irrelevance. It is evidence of the reverse, and it has to be chanted rather than merely stated, in the way a mantra gets recited over and over precisely so that the man reciting it never has to hear what is going on underneath.

This brings me to the distinction I keep returning to, and the one nobody in the current debate wants to make, because from a distance it sounds like a defence of men who have not earned one. Behaviour that looks from outside like the assertion of power is frequently a defence against power felt to be held by someone else. Offensive and defensive motivations generate identical behaviour, they require completely different responses, and there is no way of separating them except by going back to what men say when they are given anonymity and enough time. Women’s power here is not institutional; men still hold most of the capital, most of the boards and most of the parliaments, and I am not confused on that point. Within the specific arena of dating and intimacy, though, women hold something a great many men find close to unbearable, which is the power to choose, to refuse, to assess and to leave. The distance between a man’s structural advantage and his felt powerlessness in front of one woman who is not interested is exactly the gap the manosphere sells into, and it sells certainty because certainty is what fear buys.

Something has changed since 2014. When I was interviewing trainers, exposure was the industry’s main occupational hazard; a PUA who was publicly identified lost his students, and the business depended on staying hidden in plain sight, visible enough to be found by the men who were looking for it and obscure enough not to be found by anybody else. Exposure is now the product. The Tates’ lawyers have written it into a court document, arguing that the more outlandish the post the more views and therefore the more income it generates. Leviev told the Times that the documentary which named him as a swindler in front of tens of millions of people was the best thing that ever happened to him, and that he is laughing all the way to the bank. He also remarked that Fjellhoy and Sjoholm, who now work as motivational speakers, are cashing out just as he is, which is a sentence worth sitting with; it treats the man who took the money and the women who lost it as fellow entrepreneurs working the same seam. Sjoholm’s response was that fraud carries a real human cost which disappears the moment these stories are framed as intrigue rather than as crime, and she is right, and the framing is not accidental. Intrigue is monetisable in a way that harm is not.

None of this helps the men who are buying it, which is the part I most want to be clear about. The framework fails them on its own terms. A man who has been assured that women can be reliably decoded, and who then discovers that they cannot, will conclude that he failed the method rather than that the method was false, and the people who sold it to him have every commercial reason to encourage that conclusion. On his lawyers’ own written account, the followers who paid Andrew and Tristan Tate to learn how to become wealthy men were watching rented cars and a borrowed yacht. The fear those men brought with them was real, the loneliness was real, and the wish for a rule that reliably works is entirely comprehensible. What is not comprehensible to me is that the only people who have shown any interest in offering them an account of themselves are the ones with something to sell.

We have spent thirteen years getting better at naming what the manosphere does to women, and we have made almost no progress at all on the question of what these men are so frightened of, or on constructing anywhere that a man can say it out loud without being taken for a men’s rights activist. Nobody needs to persuade me that the logic of a men’s rights activist troll is full of holes, and I am perfectly happy to take it apart. I would also argue that we desperately need the average man to become involved in debating gender roles from a man’s own perspective, so that we can set it beside women’s perspective and arrive at a fuller understanding of gender relations. If we do not make room for men to talk about these things, and to develop a language of their own in which to do it, then we are manufacturing a vacuum. We should not be in the least bit surprised when the manosphere takes up residence in it, because it can and it will.

Rethinking Misogyny: Men’s Perceptions of Female Power in Dating Relationships is published by Routledge. It is available on Amazon UK and Amazon US.

Photo by Austin Curtis on Unsplash.