Break Up With the Manosphere

We’ve seen what the bros have built. We can do much better. 

BY SHANNON WATTS 

It feels like months since Donald Trump took office, but it was just 12 days ago. In that short time, we’ve experienced the whiplash of executive orders, confirmations, and quiet erasures of government workers. Dangerous cabinet members have been confirmed. Diversity and equity gains were gutted with the stroke of a pen. The federal government’s reproductive rights webpage disappeared overnight as if it had never existed (but here’s the archived version). The chaos is all-consuming—each move expected, yet somehow still landing like a fresh gut punch.

Trump is operating from the playbook he promised voters, but watching men whose own family members have accused them of predatory behavior march into positions of power while women are marginalized feels like a full-throated “fuck you” to feminism. It’s as if the men who are now in power are hellbent on rolling back all of the progress women have made since the 70s and they’re reveling in their revenge. 

To be clear, Trump’s victory wasn’t just an election loss for the majority of American women who voted against him; it was a cultural rejection of female power facilitated in large part by the manosphere—a toxic, hyper-masculine echo chamber of podcasters, influencers, and bloggers who have spent years weaponizing misogyny. Their movement laid the groundwork for this moment, and right now, it feels like they’ve won.

A little history

The manosphere gained early visibility during flashpoints like GamerGate in 2014, where online harassment campaigns targeted women in gaming and tech, and the horrifying 2014 Isla Vista shootings by Elliot Rodger, who left behind a manifesto filled with misogynistic grievances. These events reflected a growing backlash to the rise of feminist blogs like Jezebel, the increasing mainstreaming of feminism, and women’s voices being amplified in previously male-dominated spaces. This toxic ecosystem grew to include communities like incels (involuntary celibates), Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), and Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), which have long framed feminism as a threat to their identity and power. 

But as I sit with the weight of it all, one thing has become clear: if we are going to successfully combat this backlash, we have to build something stronger than outrage alone. Online activism has played a critical role in mobilization and awareness for progressive causes—just as it has for the manosphere—but it’s not enough on its own to win. We need spaces for women in every arena: online, in real life, in activism, in community, and in joy.

We need a womansphere. Because the antidote to the manosphere isn’t just resistance—it’s connection.

The manosphere certainly creates connections but around the worst things. Modern-day manosphere leaders like “alpha” strongman Elliott Hulse, who preaches male dominance and rails against feminism, and far-right provocateur Nick Fuentes, the “your body, my choice” jackass who never met a nazi salute he didn’t like, exploit this resentment toward women, promoting hyper-masculinity as a cure-all for a world they claim is dominated by “woke” ideologies. Their messaging finds fertile ground in online forums like 4chan and Reddit, where misogyny and grievance politics are celebrated. Figures like Andrew Tate openly normalize violence against women, while he currently awaits trial on human trafficking and rape charges. 

The manosphere now actively recruits vulnerable young men through everything from bodybuilding forums to gaming livestreams, and thrives on creating enemies: women, feminism, and anyone challenging the status quo. Fear, blame, and division remain the cheap fuel that powers this system, pulling in disillusioned men and weaponizing their grievances against progress.

After the election, it felt as if the manosphere was unstoppable. But then I received an invitation to attend a meeting in San Jose with a group called the Gigis, a community created for “midlife women to gather, grow, and give back.” This regular gathering of nearly 60 women wanted me to lead them in a discussion about what they could do in the aftermath of the election. During our two-hour meeting, some of the women said they were exploring a run for office. Others were starting nonprofit organizations to serve their neighbors. And others were going back to school to hone their activism skills. But all of the Gigis were committed to coming together to encourage each other to keep going. 

Like the manosphere, this is a community, and the point of communities—of all types—is to help us find our purpose, test and hone our values, and be a part of something greater than ourselves. I’ve seen firsthand through Moms Demand Action that communities are where the real change happens—in ourselves and in the world. Not only is Moms Demand Action one of the largest grassroots organizations in the nation, but it’s also the largest real-life laboratory for helping women find their people and, in turn, their power. And that’s where we need to focus our energy: on creating in-person spaces that inspire connection and collective action. Unlike the manosphere, which thrives online by feeding on anger and fear, what I’m advocating for is grounded in real, face-to-face relationships, that foster compassion and collaboration. That’s the crucial difference between their network and what I’m calling the womansphere—we don’t just build ideas, we build bonds.

The manosphere understands that people crave belonging, even if their version rallies around a fear of inadequacy. But a healthy community—even if it’s just a handful of people—can help us feel connected to others and feel like we're part of something larger than ourselves. The manosphere thrives on reinforcing outdated power structures. The womansphere reimagines them entirely, creating a space for equity, inclusivity, and growth. Online and offline, where women can connect without fear.

Sitting with the Gigis—knowing that women everywhere, of all different walks, are meeting in their own groups—I realized that the most effective resistance to the Trump administration won’t be en masse, but underground—and it will start in small communities. We need a womansphere where we can come together in person from all walks of life to feel empowered, supported, and seen. We need in-person communities where women can have conversations, despite their levels of education or political views. We need more media and platforms to lift up women’s stories, leadership, and solutions. We need to celebrate and center diverse leadership and lived experiences. And we need to create a womansphere that is as loud and visible as the manosphere, but infinitely more constructive.

To be clear, I’m not talking about the existing “tradwife” communities, where women advocate for a return to regressive, hyper-traditional gender roles and use “feminine wiles” as power. Our womansphere is about real progress, inclusivity, and collaboration—not performative or nostalgic ideas of femininity. The womansphere isn’t just a rejection of toxicity; it’s a blueprint for a better, inclusive future.

The manosphere won’t go down without a weird, gross fight. Right now, they’re gloating, emboldened by political wins and all those inaugural ball invitations. But that’s all the more reason to double down on creating an alternative. In this moment, women, as always, face the harder job. Instead of tearing things down, we’re tasked with building something meaningful, something that endures. We need to work towards something, not against it. And while feminist spaces have historically had their own moments of conflict and division, this new womansphere can learn from the past and make constructive collaboration its guiding principle.

Build your community. Find your people. Start the conversation. This isn’t about perfection; it’s about progress. The womansphere starts now, and it starts with us. 

And seriously, our content is way better anyway. Here are a few ways to enter the womansphere:

Podcasts

• America, Who Hurt You?
• Pulling the Thread 
• The Amendment
• News Not Noise
• My So-Called Midlife with Reshma Saujani
• Not Gonna Lie with Kylie Kelce
• UNDISTRACTED, with Brittany Packnett Cunningham

Mission Driven Groups

• National Women's Defense League, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to preventing sexual harassment and protecting survivors.
• TOGETHXR, a media and commerce group founded by some of the world’s greatest athletes. 
• Women in AI (WAI), a nonprofit do-tank working towards inclusive AI that benefits global society.
• Project Dandelion, a women-led global campaign for climate justice.
• GenderLib, an emergent and innovative grassroots and volunteer-run national collective that builds direct action, media, and policy interventions centering bodily autonomy
• Moms First, grassroots community of moms and supporters taking action in their homes, workplaces, and communities. 

Inclusive Journalism:

• The Persistent, a digital journalism platform committed to amplifying women's voices, stories, ideas, and perspectives.
• The 19th News, an independent, nonprofit newsroom reporting on gender, politics and policy.
• them, the award-winning authority on what it means to be LGBTQ+ today — and tomorrow. 
• The Gist, a women-led, inclusive, and empowering sports community made for everyone.
• The Meteor, a multimedia company centering the lives of women, girls and nonbinary people. (Hi, that’s us!)

Social Media Darlings:

Emily Amick (@emilyinyourphone)

Jotaka Eaddy (@jotakaeaddy)

Your Virtual Anti-Disinformation Bestie (@the.wellness.therapist)

Becca Rea-Tucker (@thesweetfeminist) 

Shannon Watts is an author, organizer, and speaker. She founded Moms Demand Action and recently organized one of the largest Zoom gatherings in history, mobilizing women voters for the 2024 Kamala Harris campaign. Her new book Fired Up is coming in 2025.

by The Meteor

HER LIFE WAS AT RISK. ALABAMA DIDN’T CARE.

by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

WHAT IS A PARTIAL MOLAR PREGNANCY?

by The Meteor

How Shirley Chisholm Paved the Way for Kamala Harris

In a new oral history of the women’s movement, journalist Clara Bingham illuminates that and more

BY CINDI LEIVE

If, four weeks from now, Kamala Harris strides across a Chicago stage to become the Democratic nominee for president, it will be the first time a Black or South Asian woman has become a major party’s chosen candidate. But it will not be the first time a Black woman earned presidential delegates at the convention. That distinction belongs to former Congresswoman and 1972 presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm, who is one of the major players in Clara Bingham’s excellent and ridiculously well-timed new oral history, The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America, 1963-1973, out next week.

The Movement shatters the usual image of the Second Wave as being led solely by Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan, and—through Bingham’s interviews with 100 veterans of the movement, along with archival material—introduces the reader to trailblazers like Martha Griffiths, who got Title IX passed, and Rita Mae Brown and the swashbuckling lesbians of the Lavender Menace, who stood up to Betty Friedan’s anti-gay stance by swarming the stage at a NOW convention. (If it all feels like a movie, it’s worth noting that one of Bingham’s previous books, Class Action, was made into the movie North Country, with Charlize Theron.)

In other words, there’s a lot in the book. But given the news of the week, we had to start with Shirley.

Cindi Leive: This book is landing in the middle of a wonderful burst of energy around Kamala Harris. How do you see this, having been immersed in all things early '70s, but specifically the candidacy of Shirley Chisholm?

Clara Bingham: When Kamala Harris gave her acceptance speech back in 2020—when she and Joe Biden won the presidential election—she very specifically harkened back to women like Shirley Chisholm, who, she said, “fought and sacrificed so much for equality and liberty and justice for all…including the Black women who are often too often overlooked…but so often are the backbone of our democracy. I stand on their shoulders.” Those were the activists and intellectuals and organizers and leaders  who paved the way for where we are today. And one of the most audacious of them was Shirley Chisholm.

Shirley Chisholm ran for Congress in 1968 from a newly created majority-Black district in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn. And she defied the Democratic Party machine: The Black men who she'd worked with in the NAACP and different organizations in Brooklyn were upset with her for running and taking a seat from what would have been an African-American man. But because she rallied so many women voters and spoke fluent Spanish and basically knocked on every door in the district, she won. And she became the first Black woman member of Congress in January of 1969.

It's hard to imagine now the level of extreme misogyny and racism that Shirley Chisholm faced when she walked the halls of Congress in the first few months of her tenure. It was so horrific. In one incident, she was having lunch in the members’ dining room during her first days there. And she sat at an empty table. A Southern Congressman came up to her and said “You're sitting at the Georgia delegation table.” And he pointed to the New York delegation table across the room. She said, “I’m so sorry—I'll just finish here. You're welcome to join me.” But he refused, and she sat alone for the entire meal.

Another congressman from South Carolina, a pro-segregationist, would say “42,5,” every time she passed—meaning you're earning $42,500, the same amount that he was earning. It was an insult to this man that she was allowed to receive a paycheck that was the same number as his.

And there was another Southern congressman who would spit into his handkerchief every time she passed him. And so this is a classic Shirley Chisholm reaction: She brought a handkerchief, and when she passed him and he spat into his handkerchief, she turned to him and said, ‘Oh, you might need another one!’ And handed it to him. 

She had this ability to face down the misogyny and the racism that she put up with. And I think that is a lesson for Kamala Harris because she's already the target of a barrage of misogynistic and racist attacks. We’re in a different place two generations later… except for one thing, we just lost our constitutional right to an abortion. And so that puts Kamala Harris right into the bullseye of what women need going forward. 

Can you tell us a bit about Shirley Chisholm’s presidential run and the delegate votes that she received?

So Shirley Chisholm gets elected to Congress in 1968 and just four years later decides that she's going to run for president. She doesn't ask anybody for permission. She doesn’t ask anyone in the Democratic Party. She doesn't ask the Black Congressional Caucus. She doesn't ask the National Women's Political Caucus [which] she helped found.

She and everyone else knew that she had no chance of winning. But it wasn't just a symbolic race—it was a motivational and inspirational race. She realized that the white male Democrats were not speaking to a huge swath of potential American voters. They were not speaking to the youth vote—and at the time, in 1972, 46,200 U.S. soldiers had died in Vietnam. We were at the height of the Vietnam antiwar movement. We were at the height of the Black Power movement. We were at the height of the hippie counterculture. And also at the early but heady euphoric moment of the women's liberation movement, which came out of all three of those other movements for social change. So she says, in her iconic speech at the Brooklyn Concord Baptist Church in January of 1972, these famous lines: “I am not the candidate of Black America, although I am Black and proud. I am not the candidate of the women's movement of this country, although I am a woman and I'm equally proud of that. I am not the candidate of any political parties or fat cats or special interests. I stand here now without endorsements from many big name politicians or celebrities or any other kind of prop….and my presence before you now symbolizes a new era in American political history." And it did, because she engaged with people who had felt alienated from the mainstream political process. She held huge rallies all over the country, although she was only on the ballot in eight states. 

In the end, at the convention in Miami, she got 152 delegates—which is not many, but it's some—and she became the first woman in the Democratic Party to have her name placed in nomination. That was such an important historical landmark. And when she then walked into the convention, she realized that even though she’d lost, she'd made a difference. She wrote, “I had felt that someday a Black person or a female person should run for the presidency of the United States, and now I was a catalyst of change.” That's what she was…and that's what Kamala Harris is now. In our new world.

You mentioned the other movements happening at the time—I'm not sure if it's fully appreciated how much the civil-rights movement helped the birth of the quote-unquote women's movement. 

So many of the women—almost every single woman I interviewed—had been involved in the civil rights movement. And Black women who were on the forefront of the civil rights movement—women like Eleanor Holmes Norton, Pauli Murray, Florynce Kennedy, Frances Beal, the list goes on—were the legal architects and the moral architects of the second wave feminist movement. And that is something that I think people don't understand. The leaders of this movement were women who came right out of the civil rights movement, and they were women who understood racism and the connection between racism and sexism. It took a lot of white women longer to get it.

One example I love is that the white women who were at Newsweek were beginning to realize that the system at that organization was completely discriminatory of all women. When they started to realize that maybe it was illegal for the masthead at Newsweek to have all men at the top and women at the bottom, they went to the ACLU and met Eleanor Holmes Norton. She was fresh from Mississippi—she’d gone down to help get Fannie Lou Hamer out of jail. She had to teach the women at Newsweek what discrimination was! Because so many of them had gone to Seven Sister colleges and were privileged and educated, they thought discrimination was just a race issue. Eleanor realized their case was classic discrimination—she had to have seminars with so many of the white women who were working in Newsweek to explain to them, this is discrimination, and this is how it works.

You talked about the opposition that Shirley Chisholm was going up against, and it makes me think about what Kamala Harris is going up against in Trump, and his exaggerated white masculinity—the way he has embraced the Hulk Hogan of it all. Does the opposition now feel even fiercer than it did then?

Shirley Chisholm and a lot of the early feminists had to face a Neanderthal-like sexism that even today, in Trump MAGA world, is hard to imagine. …Now we have Trump, who has this toxic masculinity and is a strongman—and is such a throwback. But these guys were so afraid of change. When it came to the fight over the ERA in 1972, there was a North Carolina Senator, Sam Ervin, a Democrat, who was born in 1896. He was born before suffrage! He was 24 when women first got the vote! And in 1972, he gave this crazy speech, where he said, “I am also constrained to offer this amendment because of my realization that my life has been made happy by a wife who has stood beside me for many years and has faithfully performed all of the obligations devolving upon her as a wife and mother.” He quotes from Genesis. And he [and his peers] were the first men in the world who had to contend with women forcing them to give them their rights. They had to relinquish those rights: The ERA passed with flying colors in both the House and the Senate—it was a bipartisan victory, which is really hard to imagine today. 

But it didn’t pass. That’s one of the heartbreaks of your book.

I stopped the book in 1973, which really was one of the high points of the movement. Roe v. Wade had happened. The National Black Feminist Organization had launched. Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes. Title IX had been passed, the ERA passed. After '73, Phyllis Schlafly came on to the scene. And of course we all know that in the end, in her demonic and brilliant way, she managed to stop the ERA from being ratified by the states. If the ERA [were] the law of the land…I think we would be able to use it legally to argue for abortion rights.…And we can't make that argument now, because we lost the ERA. It's devastating. 

You’ve spent years immersed in this history. Are you encouraged or discouraged by it? 

Oh, I’m so encouraged!…This movement changed so many really ingrained, deep-seated customs that for thousands of years had placed women in a position of being second-class citizens. And so if you think of it, these men like Sam Ervin who were having to witness this change—it was completely rocking their world. 

Trump is a modern iteration of the same thing. But you can't put the genie back in the bottle. You know, he wants to—so do Brett Kavanaugh and JD Vance. They want to put women back, but that's just never going to happen. It's impossible.

by Cindi Leive

Believe Children.

What we should really be saying about Alice Munro

By Julianne Escobedo Shepherd

Last weekend, Canadian writer Andrea Robin Skinner wrote an intensely personal op-ed about her sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather—and about how her mother had protected the abuser. Though the violence began when Skinner was 9, she found the courage to tell her mother when she was in her twenties. But her mother “reacted exactly as I had feared she would," Skinner writes, "as if she had learned of an infidelity.” Skinner went on to report her stepfather to the police (he got two years' probation) but never reconciled with her mother before her death. It's a horrible story of sexual abuse and betrayal—but the thing that got the most attention was the name of Skinner's mother: Alice Munro, the celebrated novelist and 2013 winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.

The media response thus far has been primarily about Munro's legacy, with a procession of op-eds about what to do with her books and whether her writing indicated that she was the kind of person who would ignore her daughter's pleas. We've been having these types of conversations for years—the "can we separate art from artist?" conundrum—about cultural icons from Woody Allen to R. Kelly to Picasso. And yes, that’s a mildly interesting question…which also distracts from the most important issue here: Why on god's green earth are adults still dismissing children when they tell them, with an unimaginable amount of courage, about being sexually abused? 

Skinner's story is important not because of who her mother is, but because it illuminates disturbing truths about how child sexual assault is dealt with—or not—particularly when family ties seem to complicate the simple act of protecting children. "It seemed as if no one believed the truth should ever be told, that it never would be told, certainly not on a scale that matched the lie," Skinner wrote. 

Skinner’s experience is devastatingly common: RAINN estimates that one in every nine girls and one in every 20 boys experiences some form of child sexual abuse before they're 18, though some studies say the statistics are even higher. The ripple effects are lifelong: Once a child experiences sexual abuse, they're much more likely to experience PTSD, depression, or develop symptoms of drug abuse, per RAINN. And ninety-three percent of these children know their abuser, whether a family member, teacher, or some other person in authority—a violation of trust which makes it that much more difficult for them to report the abuse, particularly if their abuser has made threats against other loved ones, a common grooming tactic. 

When the abuser is a family member, in particular, the dynamics get even more complicated, even though they hypothetically shouldn't. The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry emphasizes that when a child reports their own abuse, it's important for the adult to remain calm and refrain from making judgmental comments, and to assure them they are not to blame—two crucial kindnesses Skinner writes that she wasn't afforded. And though there aren't hard statistics available about the percentage of children who report abuse but aren't believed, judging by the amount of first-person testimonies on the internet, it's unfortunately common. Even Ellen Degeneres experienced this—she was abused by her stepfather and her mom disbelieved her. (Degeneres's mother believes her now, thankfully; in 2019, she released a statement that read, in part, "If someone in your life has the courage to speak out, please believe them.")

We know what some people say: that not every claim is true. And many remember so-called "false memory syndrome"—although that’s not a term or concept officially recognized by reputable psychiatric sources such as the DSM-IV—and the "Satanic day care" panic of the 1980s and '90s, in which children did in fact accuse daycare teachers of mass abuse. (Most saw their convictions overturned.) But the fact is that these instances were and are extremely rare; in fact, like rape, childhood sexual abuse is grossly underreported, with one study identifying that half of childhood abuse survivors never tell anyone, even after they are adults. 

That makes what happens when young survivors do tell someone so crucial. “Don’t let your natural and understandable feelings of confusion and doubt override the fact that the perpetrator is always at fault,” writes the National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN), in its very helpful guide. “If, in the heat of your own pain and distress, you accuse your adolescent of betrayal instead of acknowledging that your child was the victim, he or she may begin to experience dangerous—and potentially damaging—self-doubt.” Reading the NCTSN’s materials, you also understand that given the frequency and prevalence of childhood sexual abuse, it's possible that the person being told has their own traumatic history with abuse, which can complicate their reaction. 

Skinner wrote her piece after years of experiencing the ripple effects of being both abused and disbelieved; she began slipping in school and struggled with bulimia. But while her trauma followed her well into adulthood, as it does with many survivors, she eventually got professional help. It's never too late to do that, and there are lots of specific resources for adult survivors, including organizations, like Hidden Water, which follow a restorative justice approach to healing. 

What else might help? Erin Merryn, a survivor and children's advocate, has some answers. After being abused as a child—first by a neighbor, then by a family member—she has since spent the last 15 years lobbying legislators around the country to implement Erin's Law, which requires public schools to teach prevention courses to children in school through 12th grade. (It has been adopted in 38 states, with more on the way.) Reporting abuse might be fraught, but signaling to a child that they're being protected from further harm is more important. Most crucially, the child must be believed and treated with gentle care, particularly if they're expected to develop a healthy adult life. And that matters more than any one writer's legacy.  

If you or someone you know needs help, contact RAINN here or at 1-800-656-4673. 

Julianne Escobedo Shepherd is a writer, culture critic, and editor in NYC. Her first book, Vaquera, about growing up in Wyoming and the myth of the American West, is forthcoming for Penguin.

by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd