Fighting the manosphere
The growth of the manosphere is often described as an internet problem: angry men, misogynistic influencers, online harassment, conspiracy theories and organised attacks on feminism.
All of this is real. But the manosphere is not simply the product of social media algorithms. It is the digital expression of a much older political system — patriarchy — combined with the insecurities, inequalities and social breakdown produced by capitalism.
Millions of young men are living with unemployment, precarious work, unaffordable housing, collapsing public services and a profound sense that they have no control over their future. The far right takes this legitimate anger and redirects it away from those who control wealth and power.
Instead of blaming corporations, landlords, authoritarian governments or an economic system based on exploitation, the manosphere tells men to blame women.
It tells them that feminism has taken away their jobs, their authority, their families and their status. It converts economic frustration into misogyny and personal insecurity into political reaction.
Women’s liberation movements therefore face a double challenge. We must confront misogyny directly, but we must also confront the economic and political conditions through which misogyny is reproduced.
In Pakistan, patriarchy is embedded in the family, the workplace, religious and social institutions, state structures and the organisation of the economy.
Women perform enormous amounts of unpaid domestic and care work. Millions of women work in agriculture, home-based production, domestic labour, brick kilns, garments and other informal sectors. Yet much of their work is either invisible or deliberately classified as non-work.
A woman may spend twelve hours stitching garments at home for an international supply chain, but she may not be recognised as a worker. A woman working alongside her family at a brick kiln may receive no individual wage. She may have no written contract, no social security, no maternity protection and no independent control over her income.
Women are expected to contribute to production, reproduce the labour force, care for children and elderly family members, and absorb the emotional consequences of poverty. But they are denied economic independence, mobility and decision-making power.
This is why socialist feminism remains so important. It helps us understand that women’s oppression cannot be separated from class exploitation.
Capitalism benefits from patriarchy. Women’s unpaid care work lowers the cost of reproducing labour. Their insecure position allows employers to treat them as a cheap and flexible workforce. Their exclusion from unions makes them easier to exploit, while harassment and violence are used to discipline them at work and at home.
The manosphere does not challenge this system. It protects it.
It tells working-class men that their dignity depends on exercising power over women. It teaches them to confuse domination with freedom and masculinity with control. Meanwhile, those who actually control the economy remain untouched.
This politics is particularly dangerous because it reaches young people through humour, lifestyle advice, fitness culture and promises of personal success. Misogyny is packaged as self-improvement. Reactionary politics is presented as rebellion.
Young men are told that they can solve structural problems through individual dominance: become richer, stronger and more powerful than everyone around you. But liberation cannot be built through competition and domination. It can only be built collectively.
We should also recognise that the manosphere is not culturally neutral. Its messages travel internationally, but they adapt themselves to local systems of caste, class, race, religion, colonialism and nationalism.
In South Asia, misogyny may be expressed through the language of family honour, religious conservatism or cultural authenticity. Feminism is often portrayed as a foreign or Western conspiracy, even though women in our region have resisted oppression for generations.
Women participated in anti-colonial movements, peasant struggles, trade unions, democratic movements and campaigns against military dictatorships. Working-class women have always fought — even when official histories erased their contributions.
In Pakistan today, women organise despite serious restrictions. Women garment workers challenge harassment and wage discrimination. Home-based workers struggle for legal recognition. Brick-kiln workers confront debt bondage. Nurses, teachers and health workers mobilise against privatisation and insecure employment. Women students challenge harassment and restrictions on campuses.
The Aurat March has also created an important public space in which women, transgender people, workers, students and progressive movements can challenge patriarchal power. Predictably, it has faced intense online abuse, disinformation, threats and accusations of being anti-family or anti-culture.
But the problem is not that feminism is destroying families. The problem is that exploitation, unemployment, poverty, violence and unequal care responsibilities are destroying people’s ability to live with dignity.
Our response to the manosphere cannot simply be to tell young men that they are wrong or morally defective. Nor can we abandon digital spaces to reactionary forces.
We need a political response.
First, we must organise women where they work and live — not only in NGOs or online platforms, but in factories, farms, universities, neighbourhoods and informal workplaces.
A woman who becomes part of a union or workers’ organisation does more than learn about her legal rights. She develops collective confidence. She discovers that what she experienced as an individual problem is shared by others and is rooted in a system.
Second, women’s liberation must become central to trade-union and working-class politics. It cannot be treated as a secondary issue to be addressed after the so-called main class struggle. There can be no united working class if women workers are silenced, harassed or excluded from leadership.
Third, men must be part of dismantling patriarchy — but not as leaders of women’s struggles. They must challenge misogyny among other men, share domestic and care work, support women’s leadership and reject the idea that equality represents a personal loss.
Fourth, we need political education capable of competing with the simple but dangerous explanations offered by the far right. Young people need spaces where they can understand how capitalism, patriarchy, imperialism and climate injustice shape their lives.
We must offer more than criticism. We must offer belonging, solidarity and a credible vision of another society.
Finally, the feminist movement must remain internationalist. The same corporations that exploit women garment workers in Pakistan and Bangladesh sell their products in the United States, Australia and Europe. The same digital platforms that profit from misogyny operate across borders. The same far-right networks exchange strategies internationally.
Our resistance must therefore be international as well.
The alternative to the manosphere is not a society in which women dominate men. It is a society in which nobody’s dignity depends upon dominating another person.
Women’s liberation means economic independence, freedom from violence, bodily autonomy, public services, social protection, decent work, collective organisation and democratic control over the decisions that shape our lives.
It means transforming not only attitudes but also the material structures of society.
The manosphere asks men to recover a fictional past in which they supposedly possessed certainty and authority. Socialist feminism invites all of us to build a different future — a future based on equality, care, cooperation, freedom and collective power.
That future will not emerge automatically. It must be organised.
And it will be built by women workers, feminist movements, trade unions, young people and all those who understand that none of us can be free until all of us are free.
Ayesha Ahmad is a Pakistani socialist-feminist activist, researcher, educator, and labour rights practitioner with the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party. A founding member of the Women Democratic Front (WDF), Ayesha has been deeply engaged in organizing working-class women and advancing campaigns around labour rights, environmental justice, and equitable development. Her political and organizing work is grounded in lived experience and a long-standing commitment to socialist and feminist struggles.