I grew up in the manosphere before it had a name

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I was 5 years old the first time I understood what a woman was supposed to tolerate. My father moved his mistress into our house before he moved us out of it. I didn’t have a word for that yet. I just knew my mother had no job or money, and yet was responsible for my brother and me, with no house of her own. 

She moved us into her parents’ house in 1990 because she had no other option. 

She had no job of her own, no bank account with only her name on it, nothing that would have let her walk out the door and still feed her children. That’s not a metaphor. 

That’s a spreadsheet. 

And it is, I’ve come to believe, the real ledger underneath most conversations about feminism, whether we admit it or not.

I cofounded the Santa Cruz Feminist Society at the end of 2024, days after Donald Trump won a second term. We wanted to do something with our dread besides carry it around, so we started writing. This is our sixth piece.

Our most recent meeting was about the manosphere: the sprawling online world of influencers who teach boys and young men that women exist to be managed, won or discarded. We’d watched Louis Theroux’s documentary on it, and by the time we finished talking, I’d landed on the conclusion I keep landing on. 

Feminism, underneath everything else, is a conversation about class.

Here is what I mean. The manosphere gets discussed as though it invented something. It didn’t. My father held every one of its core beliefs before there was an app to deliver them or a subscription to sell. He believed his wants outranked other people’s boundaries. He believed love and control were the same transaction. None of that required Wi-Fi. What the manosphere actually invented is a business model: a way to find the most vulnerable people on the internet and charge them for the privilege of being exploited.

A recent New Yorker investigation into Andrew Tate’s rise laid out that business model in granular detail. His targets weren’t chosen at random. Reporting found that the women Tate and his brother recruited often came from troubled homes or poverty — already broke, already short on support, already hungry for someone to tell them they mattered. He sold their bodies, sometimes literally, as the price of being loved. Meanwhile, the young men paying $50 a month for his courses were being sold something, too: a promise of wealth and dominance that, for most, stayed just out of reach. 

Different currency. Same transaction. Vulnerability, monetized.

I was exactly the kind of young woman that transaction is built for. I grew up not understanding what a boundary was, because mine had been erased before I knew I had any. I confused being loved with being abused, because that was the only version of love I’d ever been shown. It took me years, a law degree and a great deal of unlearning to understand that those are not the same thing.

At our meeting, the room split along a familiar line. Some of us wanted to talk about the young men being radicalized — genuinely lonely, genuinely lost, an easy audience for anyone offering them a tribe. Others wanted to talk about the women and girls standing in the blast radius. 

Both conversations matter. But I know which one is mine to have, and it’s the second.

Here’s what I think we get wrong when we talk about protecting those women and girls. We talk about financial literacy, and we should. We talk about shelters and hotlines, and we should. But underneath that practical scaffolding, there’s a psychological one we mostly skip: teaching girls, early and relentlessly, that they are worth loving on their own, before anyone else shows up to confirm it. Teaching them to trust themselves radically, completely, without a witness. It took me years of hard work to learn that. 

It’s the only thing that keeps the manosphere from ever getting past your front door.

I don’t mean this as a slogan for a tote bag. I mean it as infrastructure, the same way we treat literacy or math. A girl who has been taught, in her bones, that her worth isn’t up for negotiation cannot be sold a story that requires her to negotiate it away. That is the actual vaccine. Everything else is triage.

There’s a parallel curriculum boys need, too — one that teaches them masculinity doesn’t require a smaller woman standing next to it to prove itself. That curriculum doesn’t exist yet. 

We should be the ones who build it.

The essay I have standing to write is this: My father didn’t need an algorithm to convince my mother she was his only option. The manosphere just figured out how to sell that same lie, at scale, to millions of daughters who never met him.

Angela Lipanovich is a clean energy attorney in Santa Cruz and co-founder of the Santa Cruz Feminist Society, a discussion group that has published five op-eds on gender and politics since forming in late 2024. She writes about the long reach of family violence, and about what it actually takes to interrupt it before it becomes someone else’s inheritance.