This Guardian article on the manosphere and its adherents/victims is a train-crash - horrifying and fascinating
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By the summer of 2022, London was getting Nick down. He’d recently attended yet another pick-up bootcamp. The instructor had got the students to do “social pressure drills” in and around Leicester Square. First, he made them pair up and stand on opposite sides of the street in Piccadilly and yell at each other. Then he had them tap a stranger on the shoulder and attempt to start a conversation using gibberish – for example, “Orange peels. I like orange peels.” The exercises were meant to desensitise the students to rejection so that, later on, when they were in the thick of the action in the nightclub, things would seem easy by comparison.
It was the final drill that did it for Nick. The instructor told the men to attach themselves to lamp-posts in one of the city’s busiest thoroughfares. They were then to simulate having sex with it. Nick did what he was told because he was “trusting the process” (another self-help dictum). As was often the case on these programmes, clients would spend a lot of money and then rationalise it by following orders. Nick located a suitable piece of street furniture and took up the position. He began with a gentle motion of the hips. The instructor was bearing down on the students, ensuring they were pushing through the fear. “Let’s see some enthusiasm, guys,” he bellowed. “Imagine you’ve just pulled a hottie back to yours from the club. Visualise it.” Nick tried closing his eyes to shut out the passing crowds. He started pummelling away until he reached a steady rhythm. He felt himself letting go as the crowds began to dissolve; maybe it didn’t matter what people thought of him.
It was at that moment that a tingling sensation began to radiate upwards from his loins. He snapped back to reality and looked down: his phone was vibrating inside his trouser pocket. The instructor was berating another student who had detached himself from a lamp to swat away some tracksuited teenagers. Nick slipped his phone out surreptitiously and saw the word “Mum” flash on the screen. He had spoken with her already that day but he took the call anyway; he assumed it must be important. She sounded choked up when he answered. It was his grandad. He hadn’t been answering the phone all morning, so one of Nick’s cousins had gone round. He’d had to go in through an upstairs window because their grandad wasn’t answering the door either. Then he found him still lying in bed, propped up by a couple of pillows. He’d died during the night. “It was a lot to take in,” Nick told me.
The instructor wasn’t letting up, though. “Fight the fear,” he bellowed as Nick nestled the phone between his shoulder and ear, and listlessly gyrated his hips. “People in the street had completely faded out by that point,” he said. “I wasn’t feeling fear because I wasn’t feeling anything.” His mum was still on the line, fussing about her dad’s affairs that would need sorting. Had his grandad wanted to be buried or cremated? How should he know? He was still half-heartedly going at the lamp-post when the first salty tear ran down his cheek and into his mouth. At that point, “ it was like: what the fuck am I doing with my life?” Nick finally gave up when a drunken woman kicked him between the legs from behind with a bulky heel. The pain took a moment to reach his stomach but when it did, it brought welcome clarity. Nick said goodbye to his mum, wiped his eyes on his sleeve and tottered to the nearest underground station, hunching over to dull the pain.
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https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/25/nick-wanted-to-drop-bodyfat-and-build-his-own-micro-harem-of-women-how-my-friend-fell-for-the-red-pill-hucksters-of-the-manosphere
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