Sorry, I Missed This: Why the manosphere pulls in neurodivergent men (and how to help)

Why would a community that says you’ll never be loved feel like a safe place? Tim Squirrell holds a doctorate in online communities and has worked in counterterrorism, focused on online extremism. He joins host Cate Osborn to talk about the manosphere and why teens and young men with ADHD or autism may be more likely to get pulled in.

They discuss how these creators teach young men unhealthy ideas about relationships, why their pitch appeals to neurodivergent teens, and how the algorithm fuels the slippery slope from self-improvement content to red pill content.

Then they get practical: early warning signs, and how to stay connected to someone going down this path without pushing them further in. 

• Watch: When intense feels normal: ADHD and abusive relationships

• Watch: How online community is saving (and breaking) my ADHD brain

Episode transcript

Tim Squirrell: If you are in a manosphere space, you can blame women, you can blame feminism, you can blame genetics, you can blame all sorts of different things for whatever ails you.

So, a lot of these folks talk about autism or ADHD as being things which hold them back. What they find in these groups is acceptance of that — other people who are willing to also say, "No, no, mate, you are too autistic. No woman's ever going to love you." And that is in some way comforting, even if it is brutal.

Cate Osborn: That's Tim Squirrell, a researcher with a doctorate in online communities. And he's used this knowledge to work in counterterrorism with a focus on online extremism, hate, and disinformation.

Today we're sitting down to talk about why neurodivergent people, especially young men, may be more susceptible to predatory, self-help, manosphere, red-pill creators, and how the predatory practices of these influencers and these organizations specifically target neurodivergent kids.

Hi, everybody. Welcome back to "Sorry I Missed This," the show where we talk about all things ADHD and its impact on sex, relationships, intimacy, communication, and more. As always, it's me, your host, Cate Osborn.

You might be wondering, why manosphere influencers on "Sorry I Missed This"? And the fact of the matter is that when we look at red pill, incel culture, at its core, it is the antithesis of "Sorry I Missed This." It is about teaching unhealthy relationships.

Tim Squirrell is actively looking at how these people target teens, and especially teens who experience things like bullying and ostracism from their peers, and the way that they create a false sense of belonging in these really toxic, really unhealthy, really misogynistic communities.

When we look at neurodivergent kids, they do experience higher levels of bullying, and so there is a higher prevalence of neurodivergent kids in a lot of these communities.

When it comes to discussing these kind of things, it's really important to be aware of how insidious and how common a lot of this messaging is, and most importantly, know how to address it with the vulnerable populations that these people are targeting.

Tim, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the show!

Tim Squirrell: Thanks so much for having me.

Cate: We're going to talk a little bit about manosphere, a little bit about red pill, a little bit about incel stuff. But I figure we should start at the beginning, because there might be a lot of our dear listeners who don't necessarily know what those terms mean or how they fit kind of into that umbrella.

What are we talking about when we talk about these communities?

(02:45) An overview of the manosphere and its subcultures.

Tim: So, the manosphere is a very loose collection of different sets of people who are all unified basically by misogyny and the belief that the world is geared towards women and that it would be better if it were not.

Red-pill guys are your basic bread and butter: "I hate women. The red pill is the thing that tells me that everyone else sees the world in the wrong way. Women are actually on top; men are being downtrodden. Go to the gym, rise and grind, become the alpha male, and then you will be able to succeed."

It used to be quite a niche thing, but has now really burst out into the mainstream and has been absorbed into a broader kind of hustle culture, "sigma grindset" sort of thing, which means that it's become really commercialized.

And then you've got the incels. The incels reject a lot of what the rest of the manosphere does. They also are really hated by a lot of the rest of the manosphere because they say, "All the strategies that you've developed, none of those work for us because we are either A, too ugly, or B, too neurodivergent or mentally ill."

Instead of the red pill, they say they are taking the black pill, which is the idea that the world is fundamentally stacked against you, and the reason for that is basically down to your genetics. All women are always on the lookout for ways to screw you over, and there is no way you will ever be happy and ever be successful, regardless of how much you do in the gym, regardless of all the other stuff that you might want to do.

Now, there's a bit more nuance to it than that, but that's the typology.

Cate: One of the things that's really interesting about the sort of manosphere umbrella and all of these different niche communities underneath it is that they offer kind of answers and community in this identity politics thing. That's so powerful and that's so tasty for a lot of people, especially people who already feel othered.

Tim: Yeah, it's tantalizing. Having studied various kinds of radicalization for quite some time now, there are real commonalities across all of them. People are looking for community, looking for a shared identity, and looking for support, but quite often they're not able to say that that is what they're looking for.

Incels, for example, have found basically the world's worst support group, full of people who will say all sorts of really horrendous stuff, and that is nonetheless a form of community for those people.

What is crucial for a lot of the folks who get embroiled in these places is that they don't really feel like they have anywhere else to go. They are isolated, atomized in their everyday lives. And so what they find is often not just a sense of understanding, but also a sense of sympathy.

One of the things that a lot of these places do is they remove any locus of control from you. If you are in a manosphere space, you can blame women, you can blame feminism, you can blame genetics, you can blame all sorts of different things for whatever ails you.

In incel groups, they locate the things that are wrong in the world or wrong with them in the most difficult-to-alter stuff — things like the circumference of your wrist or your height, right? And these are things that are very, very difficult to change, and so they prevent you from ever really accessing the idea that change could come.

The same, I think, goes when it comes to neurotype. A lot of these folks talk about autism or ADHD as being things which hold them back from ever achieving romantic or sexual success. What they find in these groups is acceptance of that — other people who are willing to also say, "No, no, mate, you are too autistic. No woman's ever going to love you."

And that is in some way comforting, even if it is brutal, because it's seen as being honest, and because they believe that it is better for someone to be brutal and honest and horrible than it is for them to tell comforting lies.

All the advice that says you can change your circumstances if you just have a shower, dress different, go to the gym, eat well, pick up a hobby, become an interesting person — they believe all of that is a lie. And so they end up going towards something that says, "No, nothing's going to change. You can't get better. But that's okay. We accept you."

(07:31) Why neurodivergent youth are drawn to online extremist pipelines.

Cate: It's such a complicated place to be, because a lot of this content is kind of wrapped up in this self-improvement, hustle culture, even just simple rules, like simple checklists or "This is how the world works: It is XYZ thing."

I have been contacted by parents, especially of teenage boys, who are going down this slippery slope, and they're making these connections with people who are saying these things and sharing these ideologies around neurodivergence. And so the question is, what do we do? How do I pull my kid out?

Tim: I, too, have had a lot of these questions from folks whose loved ones have been consumed by various kinds of radicalization over the years. Because this stuff is also everywhere, right?

This is not just a challenge because these simple rules and communities which seem to support you are compelling in and of themselves. It's also because it's pushed down their throat by the algorithm. It's something you encounter constantly. It's seen also as a way of improving your circumstances.

As people's standards of living stagnate and they feel unable to ever get ahead in the world through a nine-to-five job and a standard life, they seek some escape from that. And quite often the manosphere these days offers that, because it says, "Not only will we allow you to be sexually, romantically appealing and successful, we'll also show you how to 'escape the Matrix' and make loads of money," usually by doing something which doesn't create any value at all, like dropshipping or managing someone else's OnlyFans or crypto, right?

And then they also, as you say, give you these really simple rules which, if you follow them, then you will be successful. And that is particularly appealing, I think, to young men who either are autistic — and that gives you a really strong sense of black and white, justice, injustice, and understanding of the world that can be quite rigid — or if you are someone who struggles with attention issues, then having something which says, "Here is a quantifiable set of things for you to do, and you can tick a box each time you've done one of them, and each time you do that you're going to get a little dopamine kick."

Cate: We've talked a little bit about algorithms. Can you talk a little bit about how someone might inadvertently end up in these spaces?

(10:11) How social media algorithms accelerate radicalization.

Tim: The difficulty in answering a question about algorithms is that the algorithms are always changing, and the preferred platforms are always changing. What I can do is tell you that at base, pretty much every social media platform these days is optimized for engagement. What that means is that if something gets people to interact with it in some way, then it gets shown to more people.

Crucially, that is sentiment-neutral. What I mean by that is whether you comment on it because you like it or you comment on it because you hate it, the effect is the same: It gets shown to more people.

Which is why someone like Andrew Tate will say what you actually want on your videos is a mix of 60 to 70% people who approve of what you're saying and about 30 to 40% haters, because that is what boosts you to a much larger audience. Which is also why you see more and more of the manosphere saying stuff that is controversial for the sake of it, because it gets them more clout, because that's how the algorithm is built.

The problem also is that if you are on the internet and you have been on the internet for more than five minutes, you have a profile built up about you. Based on that profile, or even just the predictions of your profile from Google or Facebook or whoever, they will serve you particular kinds of content.

That is a problem. There was a study we did where we looked at YouTube and YouTube Shorts, and we found that if you made accounts for a white male either 13 to 18 or 18-plus, no matter what you did, basically you'd end up getting manosphere content recommended towards you. We weren't even testing for that! We were looking for something completely different.

What we found in the process of training these accounts, no matter what we did, they'd get recommended manosphere stuff. And that's a problem, right? Because it means that no matter whether you are day one on the internet or someone who's been there for quite a while, you're probably going to see this stuff, and it is particularly geared towards you.

If you listen to a manosphere influencer, everything they say, it feels like they're 12. They're sort of sitting there going, "Well, I've got the fastest car, and I've got the rockingest bod." And those are the sorts of things that they're saying which appeal to you if you are a 12-year-old boy.

And so there's not just an algorithmic thing there; there's also a pure targeting thing, which is that these people know that their most impressionable audience is teenage boys who want to make something of their lives and who are looking for meaning.

And so there's a really horrible cocktail of algorithmic engagement and controversy and laser-focused marketing, which is going to draw people in.

Cate: It's one of the reasons why I get so frustrated, because so much of social media is just designed to be exactly counterintuitive to the ADHD brain. If you were going to set up just a "Saw" movie trap for a person with ADHD, it would be these algorithms — this constant dopamine cycling, this constant input, and there's new, and there's fresh moment to moment to moment. You can swipe forever and forever. There's no good time —

Tim: The infinite scroll is one of the most insidious inventions of all time. And as you say, that is an ADHD "Saw" trap.

Cate: And I'm a person who has made my career being a content creator, and there is still part of me where I carry an immense amount of guilt because I feel like I'm contributing to the problem.

That algorithmic constant scroll — you have to be so aware of that, I think. A lot of these neurodivergent populations are falling down these rabbit holes because of the ease of access and the way that we're just getting served this information accidentally.

Tim: Short-form video, infinite scroll, engagement algorithm is kind of the dark triad of social media. And you can see it through TikTok these days. None of the others have mastered it quite as much. You can say the same maybe for Reels or YouTube Shorts.

The fact that you can just be swiping, swiping, swiping — "Okay, I'll watch that one," swipe, swipe, swipe, "I'll watch that one," swipe — and you make these decisions in a split second about whether you're going to engage with something based around just vibes, and those vibes are things which have a huge amount of business acumen and money associated with them, right?

This stuff is optimized to be as addictive as it possibly can be, and our brains ain't built for that.

This is not me, for what it's worth, coming out as an anti-internet guy. I grew up on the internet; I was a real lonely teenager. The reason I'm doing the job I do today is because I spent so much time online that I cared about it so much that I decided that I would make a bit of a career out of it. I love the internet, but I hate what's been done to it.

Cate: For our dear listeners who might be concerned that someone in their life is maybe going down this slippery slope, is maybe consuming some of this, are there clues, right? How does this tend to start showing up when it starts seeping into real life?

Tim: Unfortunately, the answer is going to be it's kind of complicated.

You might catch references to particular influencers who they really like. You might see them watching videos from guys who aren't wearing a shirt and who are giving them lots of advice about finance, rather than guys who aren't wearing a shirt and are in the gym telling them how to do an exercise correctly, which is kind of fine.

If you start to hear them using some of the language which feels derogatory towards women, and start talking about things like a "high-value man" or a "low-value woman," those are the sorts of things that start to set off red flags, because they are the softer language.

(18:08) Strategies for having constructive conversations and deradicalizing loved ones.

Cate: How do we start talking to our partners or our kids who might be going down this pipeline in terms of sort of starting to pull them out of it?

Tim: It's an extremely difficult one, and there is no easy solution.

The thing to bear in mind is that, unfortunately, unless they are actively dangerous to you or they are frankly so unpleasant that you just want to cut them out of your life entirely, you need to stay in contact and around them, and act as a kind of anchor to the real world.

And that is really difficult to do, because having these arguments with people is exhausting and frustrating. But the only way that people get out is if they maintain some kind of tether to the world outside of the community they're finding themselves in, and those people are around at the right time to get them out.

In the same way that if you are trying to get someone out of a high-control cult, you can't get them out yourself. You can't get someone out of an abusive relationship yourself. You have to wait for them to be at the moment where they realize that that's what they need to do. What you ultimately need is for someone to reach a kind of a crisis moment where the status quo can't continue, and there is a possibility of change — there's a window. And then at that point, you can help to pull them out of it. But it requires a lot of continuous work over time.

Cate: In your research around radicalization and deradicalization, what works in terms of having these conversations effectively? Because, again, we talked a little bit about you can't really pull somebody out. But are there good places to start the conversation or open the conversation in a way that feels safe, that feels accessible?

Tim: What works is the million-dollar question in any kind of deradicalization effort, and to be honest, there is very little that is particularly well proven.

I will refer back to what I've said previously, which is that you essentially need to be open and not defensive with someone. It's fine to argue with them, and you can be completely robust, right? And you can challenge people on things, because you absolutely shouldn't accept as read the things that they are saying if they are misogynistic or racist or homophobic.

But you will want to avoid ever resorting to personal insults — the usual sorts of stuff that allows people to make it feel as though you are just against them, rather than trying to change their views on something.

You have to recognize that very few people will change their mind on the spot, and that often you'll have to have the same argument a number of times to get to the point where they will have changed their mind about something, and they might never admit it to you.

I think it's really crucial to think about how you argue and how you debate stuff, and that argumentation is an emotional process as much as it is a logical one. There is a lot invested in not changing your mind on the spot, because it means losing, and also because losing is something that is seen as really bad in these sorts of spaces.

If I can give a quick recommendation, there's quite a good book about this by a guy called Mick West, who basically made all his money — I think he made "Tony Hawk's Pro Skater" — and then he decided that he was just going to kind of bum around for the rest of his career and became a professional debunker of conspiracy theories.

It's super cool. It's called "Escaping the Rabbit Hole," and it has a step-by-step guide of how to engage with people who are engaged in conspiracy theories. The process of deradicalization, whether it's from conspiracy theories or from something like the manosphere, is very, very similar.

Sometimes it involves trying to find lots of evidence and trying to rebut particular claims, but a lot of the time it's about making someone feel heard and represented, and giving them some sense of community or alternative. Winning the argument is as much about changing someone's feelings as it is about changing their mind.

Often what you're trying to do actually is draw them away from one community and towards another. Helping someone pick up a sport, or a hobby, a film club, a book group — any of those things is a nice prophylactic against radicalization, because it gives you tethers to existing community. That community can both give you joy and meaning, and also keep you accountable when you start to go off the rails.

Cate: What strikes me the most about this conversation is that a lot of the people who are drawn to these communities, I think it'd be easy to just look at them and be like, "Oh, they're bad people." But they're not. They're people who are in pain. They're people who are looking for answers. In a lot of situations, we also see that they are sometimes undiagnosed neurodivergent people or people who got diagnosed later in life, and so they've been struggling for a while.

It feels like the worst thing that someone can do as a partner or a parent when you find that someone is engaging in these communities is to make them feel foolish or silly, because they're there looking for answers, and I have a lot of empathy towards that.

Tim: Yeah, I do as well. One of the things I would caveat is there are some people involved in these spaces who — this is just my view — are genuinely really bad people. And I've encountered a few of them in my time.

But you're right that the average person who is drawn into incel ideology or the manosphere or whatever is just someone looking for meaning and community and support, and who wants to be seen.

You can see that in the average fan of someone like Andrew Tate or someone like Myron Gaines, those sorts of folks, where those people project a huge amount of confidence and confidence that they have the right answers about life. And I think that can be quite seductive.

That's really tricky, because, unfortunately, most of the answers for things in life are really nuanced and hard and not simple. When you're pushing back on this stuff, you have to sort of say, "Well, that's not quite right." And often these people are spitting out 20 untruths a minute, and it's very, very hard to keep fact-checking that in real time, particularly when they're streaming for five hours a day or whatever, and you can't possibly keep up with that.

The longer someone's spending in those spaces, the harder it's going to be to pull them out, and the more work you're going to have to do towards that.

Cate: Tim, before we leave you, do you have any last thoughts, words of wisdom, pieces of advice for anyone who might be struggling in this realm, might be living with a partner or a kid who's dealing with this kind of stuff?

Tim: My advice for everyone is to go out and touch grass.

I think the ultimate message with a lot of this stuff is it usually gets better. Most people who get involved in manosphere stuff, incel stuff, etc., they often age out of it. They grow up, they mature, they realize that who they were when they were 17 was incredibly cringe-worthy — God knows I was.

I think that it's worth extending that grace to other people, but also recognizing that that doesn't mean you can take your eye off the ball, right? All the stuff still stands about being around for people and being a source of robust challenge, and making people feel able to be heard whilst also recognizing that there are lines. All of that still stands, but it probably will improve. And that's the best you can really hope for in this world.

Cate: Thank you for listening. Anything mentioned in the episode will be linked in the show notes with more resources. Have a question, comment, burning story you'd like to share? Email us at sorryimissedthis@understood.org.

This show is brought to you by Understood.org. Understood.org is a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering people navigating neurodivergence. If you want to help us continue this work, donate at understood.org/give.

"Sorry I Missed This" is produced by Jessamine Molli and edited by Jessie DiMartino. Video is produced by Calvin Knie. Our theme music was written by Justin D. Wright. Production support provided by Andrew Rector. Briana Berry is our production director. Neil Drumming is our editorial director.

From Understood.org, our executive directors are Laura Key, Scott Cocchiere, and Jordan Davidson. And I'm your host, Cate Osborn. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you again soon.

Tim: Do you need me to do the "'The Matrix' is a film from 1999 by the Wachowski sisters"?