Your Sons Are Being Sold Fake Masculinity for $99 a Month

I’ve got four kids. Two of them are boys. And I’m here to tell you that if you think the manosphere is just some political movement that happened organically, like boys just woke up one day and decided to be angry, you haven’t been paying attention. A new 153-page report from Reset Tech and Equimundo just laid the whole thing bare, and every mother in this country should be reading it.

It’s called “The Grift Economy,” and here’s what it found: your sons are being algorithmically routed into paid communities, unregulated supplements, crypto schemes, and high-ticket “coaching” programs. That’s the word the researchers used. Routed. Like cattle. These boys look up dating advice or fitness tips, and the algorithm funnels them straight into a pipeline that converts their genuine loneliness and economic anxiety into resentment, and then converts that resentment into a credit card charge.

Andrew Tate, the guy who was arrested in Florida last month fighting extradition to the UK on rape and sex trafficking charges, pulls an estimated $184 million a year from his “Real World” education platform. A hundred and eighty-four million. Ninety-nine dollars a month, per kid, for what the researchers call “fraud at scale.” Recycled content. Affiliate pyramids. Deliberate cancellation barriers. Deceptive testimonials. Does that sound like a movement to you, or does that sound like a pyramid scheme with better branding?

James English (CC BY 3.0) via Wikimedia Commons

Top streamers like Adin Ross make between $30,000 and $50,000 per hour. Joe Rogan gets over $200,000 for a speaking gig. The top creators in this space pull $1 million to $10 million a year across platform payouts, sponsorships, courses, memberships, and speaking fees. And the platforms, Meta, TikTok, X, YouTube, Kick, they take their cut. They reward the outrage. They push the extreme content because it generates clicks, and clicks generate money. The report tracked 216 influencers pushing “looksmaxxing” content across TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. Combined reach: 14.6 billion views. The researchers said it plainly: “The reach is not organic. It is a product of recommendation architecture.”

Translation for those of us who speak plain English: the algorithm is doing this on purpose.

Here’s what kills me. The Trump campaign in 2024 leaned hard into what Wired called “meathead machismo” to win the male youth vote. And it worked. But now? Support among Gen Z men is plummeting. These boys got played politically and they got played financially, and the anger they came in with hasn’t gone anywhere. Nobody addressed it. Nobody fixed anything. They just got sold a subscription.

Remember when the beauty industry destroyed women’s self-esteem to sell them products, and everybody eventually said “enough”? The report draws that exact parallel. Platforms were pressured to crack down on pro-eating-disorder content. But the same stuff aimed at boys, the body image obsession, the gray-market pills, the “looksmaxxing academies” charging up to $3,000 for private coaching? Crickets. YouTube terminated Tate’s channels back in 2022, and he’s still making $184 million a year. Kick says their moderation is “reactive,” which is corporate-speak for “we’ll do something after the damage is done.”

RDNE Stock project / Pexels

Gary Barker, who runs Equimundo, said the quiet part out loud: “They’re being duped.” He said the 18-to-29-year-olds, the biggest demographic in these spaces, have nobody in their corner. Society expects them to just figure it out. Be skeptical media consumers. Handle it themselves. These are the same kids the algorithm is feeding into a meat grinder, and we’re telling them to be smart about it?

I’ve got questions. Where are the regulators? Where is the FTC on “fraud at scale”? Where are the platforms that are supposedly so concerned about safety? And where are the politicians who rode these boys’ votes to power and then left them holding a $99 monthly subscription and a bag of unregulated supplements?

They think we’re too dumb to notice. They think moms aren’t reading 153-page reports. They think we’re too busy carpooling to figure out that our sons are being herded into a multibillion-dollar pyramid scheme dressed up as self-improvement. Well, I noticed. And I’ve got the group chat fired up.

The manosphere isn’t a movement. It’s a toll booth on your son’s future, and the people collecting the money are the same ones telling him he’s a victim. That’s not masculinity. That’s a con. And every one of us with a boy at home better start acting like it.