How algorithms, alpha males and tradwives are winning the war for kids’ minds (19th News)

Toxic masculinity and idealized motherhood content are flooding social media feeds — forcing educators, students and parents to navigate the manosphere.

By Nadra Nittle, June 30, 2025

Aarush Santoshi struggled for words when a preteen boy approached him on a New Jersey street, shoved a phone in his face and asked: “What are your thoughts on Andrew Tate?”

The kid’s smirk and the fact he was recording rattled Santoshi, a high school junior at the time. Santoshi worried that the tween viewed Tate — an influencer accused of sexual assault and trafficking — as a joke to spring on strangers.

“This kid was engaging with content that promotes blatant misogyny, and he didn’t even realize how harmful it was,” said Santoshi, now 18 and the national political director of Feminist Generation, a youth-led organization that opposes authoritarianism. The encounter was a chilling sign of how deeply the “manosphere” — a network of online influencers promoting male supremacy and far-right ideologies — had infiltrated popular culture. 

The manosphere and parallel trends like the tradwife (traditional wife) movement — led by influencers who idealize marriage, motherhood and domesticity — are impacting even socially conscious students who say it’s hard to avoid this content brimming with toxic messages about gender. Over a half-dozen students told The 19th that after the 2024 election, which saw the manosphere blamed for young men’s rightward shift, they noticed changes in their classmates’ behavior — an uptick in sexist remarks, a sense of entitlement to girls’ attention and schadenfreude that yet another woman lost the presidency. 

Now, educators, parents and advocates are racing to counter the manosphere’s influence by addressing online gender dynamics with students — while youth themselves are pushing back through activism, their studies and debates with their peers. 

Read the full article on The 19th News.