Long Read: The Gentlemen
The men the internet rarely shows you
In an Inktippedjourneys clip that went a little viral a few months ago, I joked that there are so many songs by African men about losing women to wealthier men that one could build a playlist of them.
Mine would run through K. Frimpong’s horn-laden highlife classic, Kyenkyen Bi Adi M’awu and Ruff-N-Smooth’s Azingele all the way through to Kuami Eugene’s Take Away, which features a chorus of men literally singing, “If you no get money, anything you say be funny. They are taking your babes away…“
In the clip, I incorrectly included Magic System’s 1999 Premier Gaou but a Francophone friend explained to me that the scenario there involves a lover who left the singer when he was broke, and is trying to get back with him now that he isn’t. Not quite the same, but similar enough.
It all boils down to money.
From highlife to hiplife to afrobeats, our lyrics really make you feel what Marx meant when he said that all of history is the history of class struggle.
The first time I remember mentioning the idea of this playlist was when being interviewed by my old friend Rodney Quarcoo for Dad’s Dey: his podcast on African fatherhood.
More men with microphones: I know, I know… but the episode just dropped and watching it, I am surprised by all the ground we covered. Sure: money wahala came up, but so did infidelity, disownment, vasectomies, and a lot more.
Dad’s Dey fits into a growing number of podcasts, recently given a (cheesy but clever) nickname: The Gentlemanosphere. To understand what that is, let’s first look at what it isn’t.
Introducing… the Manosphere
Research for my memoir has taken me to some interesting corners of the internet. What gets collectively called the Manosphere is actually a loose collection of distinct online communities that includes
Incels, who believe they are owed sex and denied it
Red Pill adherents, who are convinced they know the real truth about female nature
Pickup artists, who treat seduction as a manipulative science (think Will Smith’s character in the movie, Hitch)
Men Going Their Own Way, who have largely withdrawn from women (and sometimes from society) altogether
There are more, and they all differ wildly but to my mind, they tend to share a diagnosis that the world is rigged against men, that feminist culture is responsible for this rigging, and that the appropriate response is either dominance. Or – at times – withdrawal.
Earlier this year, Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere traced the business model underneath the ideology. Before that Adolescence - the award-winning drama about a thirteen-year-old who kills a classmate after being radicalised online - became one of the most-watched shows in Netflix history, sparking national conversations, and even resulting in the enacting of new laws in a few countries.
Where some of the ideas popularized in the Manosphere lead is not a matter of speculation. The Dominique Pelicot case in France - in which a man invited dozens of strangers to repeatedly rape his wife over the course of a decade while she was drugged and unconscious - shocked everyone when it went to trial in 2024.
More recently, there was the widely reported case of an online “rape academy” in which 62 million men were alleged to have flocked to learn how to assault women. That figure has since been shown to be grossly inaccurate, but the problem is that such a website existed in the first place, and that there was enough of an audience to make it worth someone’s while to build it.
And then, right here in Ghana, an online celebrity was recently arrested after an investigation from INTERPOL, following complaints from Australian women who had attended Detty December. Police say they found evidence he had been drugging women at clubs with Xanax, assaulting them while unconscious, filming it, and running a paid Telegram channel to distribute what he filmed.
Suffice to say, this is not The Good Place.
The Gentlemanosphere
Coined in an article by Ari David Blaff, the Gentlemanosphere describes a loose network of podcasters with a different message for boys and men. Things like getting off screens and into the real world. Asking for help when you need it. Expressing what you’re feeling. Looking after yourself. And that the work of becoming a better man is a practice - lifelong and imperfect - done in relation to other people.
Its podcasters understand that silence is something boys learn in order to survive. They also understand that the tool used to teach them is something the manosphere thrives on:
Shame.
From very early on, boys are taught who not to be through ridicule and subtle-but-relentless social instruction to not be soft. They are taught that this is for their own good, that soft men are barely men at all, and that any strong emotions they feel should be channeled inwards. Silence brings acceptance and belonging. Being articulate or expressive about your emotions?
Not so much.
This training is why we sometimes struggle to share our struggles. Worse though, this culture of silence protects dangerous behavior by other men, keeping harmful environments intact even among men who aren’t directly causing harm. The system is self-reinforcing and self-destructive, producing outward harm and inward isolation.
The cost of breaking free is discomfort or shame, but it is only possible if men stop needing other men’s approval to feel like a man in the first place.
This idea is one the Gentlemanosphere circles, sometimes explicitly, sometimes not: the difference between a masculinity rooted in external things versus one rooted from within.
What I call the old masculinity runs on external validation: what you drive, who you sleep with, how other men rate you, how few tears you’ve been seen to cry. It can be subjected to shame, because it depends on an audience.
A masculinity rooted from within - a sense of being a man because you just are, without needing performance to confirm it - is much harder to shame into silence, and harder to weaponize.
There are statistics that the manosphere brings up about men, on the rare occasions when they feel the need to ground their rhetoric in researched facts. Male suicide rates are three to four times higher than female rates. Boys are more likely to be suspended, held back, or dropped out of school. Men represent less than 40% of university graduates in many Western countries. The manosphere didn’t produce these findings: they are grounded in real research.
But what the manosphere does is arrive with an explanation for what they mean and who is to blame. The Gentlemanosphere offers different explanations.
Richard Reeves, who founded the American Institute for Boys and Men, has spent years building the policy case for structural reform in how societies support boys. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose book The Anxious Generation is required reading for any parent right now, has documented how smartphones and social media have done particular damage to boys. Scott Galloway and Chris Williamson - whose Modern Wisdom reached Spotify’s global top shows alongside Joe Rogan - carry these arguments to mainstream audiences. Writer Rob Henderson connects male drift specifically to the matter of class: progressive ideas that cost the educated class nothing but extract a steep price from everyone else.
These men disagree on many things but seem to share the conviction that the work of becoming a good man is worth doing, and that men are capable of it.
Something that often comes up is the value of therapy: an institution whose benefits I have personally benefitted from. If men cannot teach boys what we ourselves were never taught, then something has to bridge that generational gap. Therapy is a space where silence can be safely broken, and where the work of building an internal rather than external sense of self can begin in earnest, with someone trained to guide it.
The Gentlemanosphere’s figures talk about therapy in ways their fathers probably never did, and the effect on a young male listener - hearing a man he respects speak without shame about being in therapy - cannot be underestimated.
Not everyone can afford therapy, but podcasts do allow some of its wisdoms to be dispensed. In places like my beloved Ghana, religion often offers belonging and a language for personal struggle. In churches, for example, pastoral care can serve as informal counselling. This has some merit, but besides the fact that few church counsellors are trained therapists, the price of admission sometimes includes ideas about women, gender, queerness, and about what threatens the family that the Gentlemanosphere is, in its better moments, actively working against.
An African Gentlemanosphere
Dad’s Dey fits into both a global and a specifically African conversation about what it means to be a better man. Here are a few more such podcasts:
Mantalk.ke in Kenya was founded on three explicit pillars: social development, moral courage, and emotional vulnerability. It has hundreds of episodes and almost 200,000 subscribers. The first sub-Saharan African podcast to produce a full season with Spotify Studios in London, it has featured voices from Kenya, Nigeria, and Ghana and has the stated ambition “to have a safe space for men to have a voice, and to listen to other thought leaders.”
Menisms in Nigeria brings the intelligence of Lagos pop culture into conversation with how men feel and why. Rapper M.I. Abaga has sat with them to discuss the pressures of African masculinity and therapy for a huge African audience.
Manned Up Conversations in Johannesburg is built around challenging outdated notions of masculinity and creating space where men can process their struggles without having those struggles weaponised against them.
What makes these different from the Western Gentlemanosphere is not just geography. The Western movement primarily diagnoses a modern crisis: social media, the collapse of in-person childhood, boys underperforming educationally. All real and recent.
Sure.
The African conversation adds something older: the fallout from colonial powers that disrupted African gender norms, stripped traditional livelihoods, and imposed their own patriarchal structures on top of existing ones. Precolonial African societies were broadly patriarchal too: men controlled land and largely led political structures, and women’s autonomy was frequently constrained. Colonialism made things worse in specific, documentable ways.
Kopano Ratele - Professor of Psychology at Stellenbosch University and author of Liberating Masculinities (2016) and Why Men Hurt Women (2022) - has spent his career making one argument with exceptional rigour: that pro-feminist work with men and boys is pro-African. His scholarship provides an intellectual foundation for the house these podcasters are trying to build.
African women were fighting for their rights long before the term feminism arrived here; before what they were doing came to be called African Feminism. The latter tradition has argued for decades that a framework built for one context with different cultural assumptions will not necessarily fit elsewhere. The African Gentlemanosphere applies this to the Western male-wellness conversation. It too draws from the communal ethic that runs through African traditional life; the idea that a person is constituted through their relationships rather than despite them.
If you are a young man reading this, these podcasts are speaking about you and to you, built by people who live in your world. They are harder to find than an Andrew Tate clip (or that of his Kenyan counterpart, Andrew Kibe).
I wonder why.
The View from West Africa
My African feminist friends roll their eyes at the so-called male loneliness epidemic. I get it. There is real frustration that male loneliness gets treated as an urgent crisis while women’s physical safety has long been dismissed.
I cannot speak for what’s going on in the West, where all the data is – of course – coming from. What I can see is that the seeds of this thing are growing right here in our own soil, and I can see why ideas from the manosphere are starting to take root. I wrote about such things in The Guardian, as far back as eleven years ago.
Every African generation has had its own version of the same anxiety: the fear of being left behind by a world changing faster than you can keep up. One generation had to survive the shock of colonialism violently swallowing their traditional world whole. The next had to navigate the postcolonial world, where they suffered the same indignities, except now from their own people.
Running through all of this is the colonial-style education that replaced whatever coming-of-age norms and ceremonies we had, and which got really good at using discipline and the threat of shame to entrench the idea that silence in the face of suffering is strength. Such disruptions reshaped many things, including the structure of intimate life itself.
No Romance Without Finance
For most of human history - in Africa and elsewhere - partnerships between older men and younger women were the norm rather than the exception. The reasons were not romantic: younger women had less power, while older men were the ones who had accumulated the resources, social standing, and economic infrastructure that made household formation possible.
These arrangements were largely unquestioned until recent centuries when industrialization created stable wages for younger women and men too, making the latter more viable choices for the former. Women’s education and growing economic independence reduced the need to marry for resources, making preference a real possibility. For a few decades, such conditions made same-age partnership so dominant that we now consider it the norm. But that norm is starting to unravel in this stage of capitalism.
A few years ago, I came across the term “diet patriarchy” online. It has other meanings, but back then it was being used to mock young Ghanaian meninists who wanted the privileges their fathers enjoyed under patriarchy, without providing the financial muscle that had made those arrangements possible.
Millions of young men are discovering that no matter how hard they hustle and grind, the things that once defined manhood for their fathers and grandfathers are harder - sometimes impossible - to reach. The solution isn’t to hustle harder because the problem is bigger than individual effort:
It’s structural.
Unfortunately, that gap between what manhood is still expected to look like and what it is increasingly impossible to build is precisely where the manosphere glides in with the smoothness of a Michael Jackson moonwalk. Its wealth-as-manhood message resonates with particular force where having money is both survival and status. It tells confused young men you are not the problem: feminism is.
It’s a simplistic, destructive answer, but the pain it colonizes - though misguided - is palpable.
Not Everything That Glitters is Gold
In November 2025, Jessica Winter published an essay in The New Yorker titled What Did Men Do to Deserve This? that had some pointed criticisms of figures in the Gentlemanosphere.
Her sharpest observation was about data selectivity. Research shows a correlation between social media use and mental health disorders in boys and men, for example. But the way that it is at times presented neglects that these effects affect both genders (or may be even worse for girls), describing things as harming “young men” when “young people“ would be more accurate.
Winter described this as a feature of what she calls the “centrist manosphere”: figures who praise women’s advancement while insisting that men’s anxieties are somehow more urgent.
I think Winter is right. But I also suspect that some of what she is criticizing is what happens when you have a specific audience and you have to frame information in a particular way to make your audience care enough to bother trying to understand. I could be wrong.
I think one of the effects of the Manosphere that people don’t talk about is how wary it has made some boys (and men) of feminist language as a whole. A wall goes up the moment you use certain words, and good luck trying to communicate your way past it. It doesn’t mean you have to police your language per se, but it does mean that you must give thought to who you are addressing, the same way anyone does in the field of communication.
Being a teacher means I have to think with deep and constant intention about how to help people engage with ideas they may disagree with. I cannot simply build community with likeminded people (as important as that also is) and leave everyone else to go hang.
Male suicide rates being higher than women’s is not a narrative choice and neither are the statistics on violence against women: regularly some of the most consistently underreported and structurally ignored numbers in public life.
I think part of the problem is that we live in a world where funding is treated as finite (funny how that same world somehow creates trillionaires…) as a result of which one crisis is made to justify itself against another rather than alongside it.
Also: while Winter’s argument is a specific one, it fits into a broader category of criticism that I think bell hooks encountered after she published one of my favourite books of all time, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love back in 2004.
Quite controversially at the time, one of her arguments was that patriarchy is not just something men enforce on women but also something women participate in enforcing on boys too because everyone is socialized into it. “To indoctrinate boys into the rules of patriarchy,” she wrote, “we force them to feel pain and to deny their feelings.”
That “we” was deliberate and uncomfortable: the damage feminism was trying to address was also being perpetuated by those closest to boys in their earliest years.
Parts of the feminist movement accused her of centering male feelings at women’s expense, but what she was actually doing was describing the system clearly enough that everyone inside it could see their own position. That is harder and more useful than treating it all as binary and taking sides.
Richard Reeves - whose Of Boys and Men is the most rigorous recent structural account I have read of what I see going on - was explicit about his hesitation to write his book at all because of this. But his conclusion was that if responsible people don’t at least try to address these very real problems in straightforward ways, irresponsible people will.
Which is the argument for the Gentlemanosphere’s existence in a sentence, really.
I personally think there is a male crisis, but I also think the response to it will be imperfect, and may sometimes slip male primacy into progressive clothing, intentionally or not. Both of those things are true at once.
The responsibility of men in this space is to stay honest about the second while refusing to abandon the first to the people who will exploit it. Leaving that field to the manosphere is a choice, but one with consequences.
A Son to a Father. A Father to a Son
He’s too young for these conversations right now, but one day I hope to point my son towards more podcasts like Dad’s Dey.
I built the version of manhood I needed from pieces I found, using them to fill the gaps in the version I had inherited from my father.
I want my son to have better materials with which to build himself. Not into a better man, but into a better person. I also want him to realize - much earlier than I did - that building is the point.
Maybe I should make that playlist while I’m at it.
Resources
Dad’s Dey on YouTube
Mantalk.ke on YouTube
Menisms on YouTube
African Men Speak at africanmenspeak.com
Sonke Gender Justice at genderjustice.org.za
Jonathan Haidt’s resources for parents at anxiousgeneration.com
Read
bell hooks, The Will to Change
Richard Reeves, Of Boys and Men
Kopano Ratele, Liberating Masculinities and Why Men Hurt Women
Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read
Warren Farrell (skip John Gray’s sections), The Boy Crisis
Nana Darkoa Sekyiamah, Seeking Sexual Freedom and The Sex Lives of African Women