“No one wants to have sex with you.”
— James Bloodworth, Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere
That line (barked by a pick-up artist to his paying clients in a Leicester Square Starbucks) hits with more violence than the supposed seduction tips that follow. It’s not advice. It’s the whole deal in miniature. Degradation packaged as self-improvement. Humiliation made productive. That’s the trade the manosphere offers: turn your alienation into a business model.
This week, French anti-terror police arrested an 18-year-old man in Saint-Étienne suspected of planning a knife attack on women. He was part of incel forums, reportedly obsessed with Elliot Rodger, and had researched how to carry out a mass stabbing. What looks like lone-wolf nihilism is anything but. It’s ideological. James Bloodworth’s Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere offers the clearest portrait yet of the culture that breeds it. Not just fringe misogyny, but a whole parallel society of men raised on performance, shamed by failure, and trained to hate.
Bloodworth embeds himself in that world, not with detachment, but with honesty. He speaks to the young men attending seduction bootcamps, trawling Discord for advice on “looksmaxxing,” falling into Black Pill despair, or signing up for Andrew Tate’s “Hustlers University.” These men aren’t monsters. Many are broke, insecure, invisible. But in a system that cannot offer belonging, they settle for hierarchy. If they can’t be loved, they want to be feared. After all there’s always someone online ready to show them how.
Alienation with a Smile: The Logic of Enjoyment
The system may be brutal, but it’s all there is, and worse, it demands your enjoyment. This is the hedonic injunction of late capitalism: not just to suffer, but to smile through it, to act as though desire is being fulfilled even as it’s endlessly deferred. These men feel that contradiction in their bones. They don’t imagine a different society. They imagine ranking higher in the one they’ve been handed. In Lost Boys, this libidinal economy plays out through dating apps, chatrooms, affiliate links — digital arenas where jouissance becomes transactional and failure is personalised. The loneliness is real. The proposed solutions are poison. Bloodworth never lets you forget how banal it all is. The most insidious ideologies don’t declare themselves. They arrive as psychic compromise: This is just how things are. You just need to try harder.
Žižek gets this. Drawing on Lacan, he shows how ideology no longer represses desire but mobilises it. Telling us to enjoy, to chase the object of desire, even when we know it won’t satisfy. These men are not resisting power; they’re caught in its unconscious logic. They seek the recognition of the big Other, not a literal person, but the imagined gaze of society, the one that promises validation, sexual success, status. But the big Other doesn’t exist. The system itself is incoherent, contradictory, absent at its core. That absence, what Lacan called lack, is misrecognised as personal failure. The problem isn’t the system — it’s you. You didn’t hustle hard enough. You didn’t “man up.” You didn’t optimise your profile or say the right thing.
In Lost Boys, Bloodworth traces how this libidinal economy becomes unbearable. The men he meets aren’t just lonely, they are chasing a fantasy structured by absence, trying to convert systemic contradiction into personal redemption. When it fails, again and again, the pain has to go somewhere. It gets rerouted: into resentment, hatred, conspiracy. The most dangerous ideologies don’t promise revolution. They offer meaning. They say: you are not lacking (you were robbed).
Michael Kimmel would call this “aggrieved entitlement” the rage of men who were promised rewards that never came. The language varies (alpha, beta, cuck, simp), but the structure is always the same. You were told masculinity made you strong. Now you’re broke, single, ashamed. The manosphere doesn’t challenge those conditions. It sells you a mirror, then asks for a subscription fee. If it works, you’re cured. If it doesn’t, well, now you know who to blame.
It’s easy to laugh at men chasing alpha status or dissecting their jawlines online, but the economic backdrop isn’t funny. Masculinity, for decades, was tethered to material function: breadwinner, homeowner, worker, husband. Capitalism has obliterated all of that. Try providing when your warehouse job is on a zero-hours contract and the rent’s half your pay. Try dating from your childhood bedroom, trapped with your parents into your thirties. Try feeling like a man when the system has decided you’re unnecessary. The labour market doesn’t just exclude, it humiliates. The more the economy fragments, the more young men look for something (anything) to anchor their identity. The right hands them a chance. The left has too often handed them nothing.
Fantasy, Rage, and the Crisis Rebranded
There’s a line in Jessa Crispin’s What Is Wrong with Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything that helps sharpen this. She describes the Michael Douglas archetype (He of Falling Down, Wall Street, Fatal Attraction) as the cinematic embodiment of wounded masculine grievance. A man who’s followed all the rules but finds the world no longer cares. He snaps. He takes revenge. It’s not a fantasy of liberation. It’s a fantasy of punishment. Andrew Tate updates the same figure for a TikTok economy: slick, angry, contemptuous. He acts out the power these men think they are owed. Žižek writes that ideology isn’t something we believe, it’s something we enjoy. This is that enjoyment, distilled: fury as identity, resentment as community.
I remember going to see Basic Instinct twice at the cinema. I was a Verhoeven fan boy, and it felt like an event. There was the shock and titillation, of course, especially that infamous leg-crossing scene. But what stuck with me was the sex scene between Douglas and Jeanne Tripplehorn, who plays his therapist. It was violent, or at least rough enough to feel troubling, and framed as catharsis for him. A man in collapse trying to reassert control. Crispin gets this: Basic Instinct doesn’t just offer a femme fatale in Sharon Stone. It offers a world in which the professional woman, the knowing woman, becomes a threat. Douglas’s character lashes out sexually at the one person who sees through him. As Crispin puts it, the masculine psyche is already unravelling. It just doesn’t know what else to do but dominate.
When Collapse Became Cinematic
This wasn’t niche. The 1990s were saturated with films about male breakdown: Fight Club, American Beauty, The Game, Eyes Wide Shut. These weren’t just stories about men suffering. Instead they were about men violently asserting themselves when the world no longer gave them the play. Masculinity was portrayed as both wounded and righteous, castrated by modernity and deserving of revenge. Verhoeven knew this and satirised it. Fincher romanticised it. Mendes dressed it in suburban ennui. The culture pretended to diagnose a crisis, but too often what it really did was aestheticise the wound. White-collar alienation became erotically charged. Rage became stylised. Rebellion was flattened into aesthetic pose. Just look at the gym-body fascism in Fight Club, consumer-spurning narcissism in American Beauty, or apocalyptic libertarianism in The Matrix. What passed for critique was often just another performance.
This is what Debord called the spectacle: a society where real social relations are mediated by images, and where even dissent is reabsorbed as a commodity. These films didn’t disrupt the logic of capital and patriarchy — they dramatised it, sold it, and in doing so, helped stabilise it. The spectacle doesn’t demand belief. It only demands that we keep watching, and watching, and watching.
The Reactionary Sublime
The politics of the manosphere today (that yearning for control, for status, for a clear enemy) were already there in the ’90s. We just called it entertainment. These films gave affective shape to the idea that men had lost something. A place in the world, a role, a purpose. But they never quite said what it was, because the answer was too uncomfortable. What was lost was not manhood in some timeless sense. It was patriarchal authority, economic power, and the illusion of being at the centre of history. The cultural response was not to challenge that loss but to mythologise it, mourn it, and quietly prepare the ground for its return. If today’s YouTubers and affiliate grifters sell masculinity as a crisis of agency, these films laid the groundwork by treating masculine collapse as mythic and somehow noble. The story was always: the world went wrong, and he was the casualty. But he wasn’t. He was the protagonist.
What the manosphere really sells is a look. Cigars, Bugattis, six-packs, sunglasses indoors. It’s fascist aesthetics on a TikTok budget, less Leni Riefenstahl, more GymTok filtered through crypto. Tate isn’t charismatic because he’s coherent. He’s charismatic because he’s a spectacle. The cigars, the fast car, the silent semi naked woman or two in the background. It’s all theatre. Žižek reminds us that ideology doesn’t need to convince you. It just needs to seduce. Seduction is everywhere: on Instagram, on Rumble, in the DMs of a kid who’s just failed his GCSEs and thinks masculinity means someone else should be afraid of him. This isn’t ideology vs aesthetics. This is ideology as aesthetics. The reactionary sublime.
The Wrong Moral Panic
It’s telling, too, where the public conversation chooses to look. We have spent years watching columnists, politicians, and self-declared feminists like JK Rowling manufacture a moral panic over trans women’s use of toilets and women-only spaces, as if their presence is the greatest threat to society. Meanwhile, boys are being radicalised on Discord, groomed by traffickers in Tate’s orbit, or fantasising about stabbing women in shopping centres. The so-called defenders of womanhood are silent about this. Or worse, they are too busy sharing memes about pronouns to notice what’s happening under their noses. Lost Boys doesn’t flinch from this contradiction. It asks why masculinity is in crisis, not how to scapegoat someone else for it.
Of course we have been here before. The late Thatcher era was soaked in masculine grievance, we had the soldier, the copper, the football yob. The state vilified working-class men when they organised, then sanctified them when they enforced order. Today’s incel or Top G bro is the bastard child of that contradiction. A man abandoned by the economy but still convinced it’s women, queers, and immigrants who’ve stolen his power. Powellism had its own gender script: women and children as justification for reaction, white masculinity as its enforcer. What’s changed is the delivery system. Now it’s constantly livestreamed and tweeted to a captive audience.
By the time Bloodworth gets to Lyndon McLeod. The manosphere novelist who carried out the very killings he had once written. The point is made painfully clear. The boundary between fantasy and real-world violence isn’t just porous. It’s monetised. The manosphere has learned to turn alienation into aesthetics. As we all know, the internet runs on aesthetics.
Bloodworth doesn’t excuse the hatred. But he does insist on context. These men aren’t angry for no reason. They are surplus to the economy and surplus to traditional masculinity. They have been told to perform, but the audience has stopped clapping. Lea Ypi’s account of liberalism in Free is instructive here. A freedom premised on choices that are barely choices at all. Swipe, hustle, lift, obey. Fail? That’s on you.
Patriarchy doesn’t just break people. It promises them that breaking others will make them whole.
That’s why the right’s embrace of patriarchal order is so dangerous. It’s not just rhetorical. This is a 17th century programme for the 21st. It strips women of autonomy, turns reproductive rights into battlegrounds, and reframes male violence as natural hierarchy. When Trumpists speak of “law and order,” when Farage bangs on about “real men” and “traditional values,” they are not describing policy, they are broadcasting dominance. Patriarchy becomes the glue in a wider authoritarian project, stitching together the incel loner, the self-styled strongman, the evangelical judge. When the left fumbles its response, when it vacates the space of gender politics out of fear or confusion, it leaves women (especially poor women) to deal with the consequences alone.
Spectacle and Knives
The Saint-Étienne suspect didn’t need a manifesto. He had memes. He had Rodger’s YouTube videos. He had a structure. Crispin was right — these are not men resisting power. They are its casualties, desperate to be reinstated as its enforcers.
What’s so powerful about Lost Boys is how restrained it is. Bloodworth doesn’t preach. He watches. He listens. He sees what happens when men are told vulnerability is weakness and intimacy is leverage. These men aren’t looking for connection. They are looking for order. For a life script. For ways to matter, even briefly. The longer we ignore them, the more likely they are to find meaning in violence.
The left must not mistake this for a fringe issue. This is class, gender, and ideology wrapped up together. Tate may be the punchline, but the structure that made him is no joke. If we don’t offer solidarity (material, cultural, and political) the far right will offer spectacle and knives while wearing better clothes and driving nicer cars.
“He was a decent person. He just wanted to be seen.”
— James Bloodworth, Lost Boys
