The Internet Has Been Worse for Men
I think the internet has been worse for men than we want to admit.
Which is a sentence that can get you yelled at by roughly six different groups before you've finished saying it. So let me be specific. I don't mean women have been fine online. If you're a woman, you may be reading this while your message requests contain a photo of a stranger's anatomy that you did not order. I also don't think there's a scientific scoreboard where one side gets declared the official loser of the internet.
What I mean is that some of the internet's most effective traps fit neatly into the ways a lot of men already struggle: spending less time with friends, not asking for help, retreating into a screen when things get weird, and finding an entire industry ready to tell you whose fault that is. Then another industry shows up to offer a subscription.
And I say this as a guy who likes the internet. I make videos here. I have learned things online that would have taken me three days and an incredibly patient employee at Home Depot to figure out otherwise. I'm just less convinced that unlimited access to information is the same thing as having a life.
The group chat is not the same as seeing someone
When I moved from the Bay Area to San Luis Obispo with my wife and started working remotely, I thought I'd eventually make some new friends. Eventually is a surprisingly roomy word. About thirteen months later, I'd had one new hangout and gone out maybe two or three times. I was married, employed, and surrounded by ways to contact people. The practical question of who I was going to see on a random Tuesday remained weirdly unanswered.
The internet makes that situation easier to tolerate. You can keep up with old friends through little squares on your phone. You can spend two hours watching a stranger build a cabin, know every detail of the cabin, and still not have anyone nearby who would help you move a couch. I have nothing against the cabin. Honestly, the joinery is probably excellent. But the cabin guy is not coming over.
It would be tempting to turn this into “men are lonelier than women,” except Pew's 2025 survey didn't find men reporting loneliness more often or having fewer close friends. It did find men less likely to say they'd turn to a friend for emotional support: 38% of men versus 54% of women. Among people with close friends, men also reported communicating with them less often.
That's a more interesting and annoying problem than the meme version. The friend might be there. Your thumb is already hovering over his name. But instead of saying “I've had a rough week,” you send him a video of a raccoon getting into a vending machine. He sends back “lmao,” and now both of you are technically in contact.
A place to bring the problem, and a place to sell you one
If a guy is isolated, embarrassed, broke, anxious about dating, or just trying to get his life together, there is good stuff online for him. Actual communities. Training advice that isn't insane. People talking honestly about mental health. There are also people who look at that same guy and see a customer who will keep paying as long as he stays a little bit miserable.
The pitch can start small. Get in shape. Have standards. Stop wasting time. Fine. But in some corners it becomes a whole explanation for why your life isn't working, complete with villains, a hierarchy of men, and a man yelling into a very expensive microphone about what women supposedly want. Every failed date confirms the theory. Every rejection means you need another episode. The advice doesn't have to fix anything if it can make the next episode feel necessary.
Ofcom's qualitative research into men engaging with the manosphere is useful here. It interviewed 38 men and one woman and describes a range of material, from fitness and self-improvement to openly misogynistic content. That small interview study doesn't tell us how often an algorithm sends a particular guy down a particular path. It does show how varied these spaces are and why someone might enter for reasons that don't initially look sinister.
Some men need help and get a business model built around keeping them angry. Women are often the target of the anger, too. Those are connected harms, not competing complaints.
The slot machine fits in your pocket now
Then there are the less ideological traps. You can gamble from bed. You can scroll through an endless supply of porn from the same device where your boss asks about the spreadsheet. You can buy courses promising to fix your income, body, face, confidence, and probably your posture while you're sitting on the toilet. None of those things requires a trip somewhere or even enough time to reconsider the decision while looking for your keys.
A systematic review of gambling surveys across 68 countries and territories estimated higher past-year gambling participation among men than women, 49.1% versus 37.4%. Another international study of problematic pornography use found men reporting the highest levels in its survey. Those numbers don't mean every guy placing a bet or watching porn has an addiction. They also don't prove the internet invented either problem. The online version removes a lot of friction from behaviors that can already be hard to control.
It's like the convenience feature you would ask an app designer to remove if the app were selling a bad decision. No line, no closing time, no need to look another human in the face. Just a button waiting for you at 1:14 a.m. when your ability to make a thoughtful choice has clocked out three hours ago.
So are women doing better online?
No. That's where the big headline starts getting too comfortable.
Pew's online harassment survey found men somewhat more likely to report any harassment, but women much more likely to report sexual harassment online: 16% versus 5%. Among women under 35, it was 33%. And in a 2025 teen survey, girls were more likely than boys to say social media hurt their mental health, confidence, and sleep.
If I frame this as men winning a misery contest, I have to ignore all of that. I'd also be doing the same stupid thing I'm complaining about: turning people's problems into team merchandise.
I do think the damage can look different. A woman may be dealing with unwanted attention, harassment, and pressure to make herself look a certain way. A guy may disappear into content that tells him he's failing, offers him an explanation that feels good for twenty minutes, and then leaves him more isolated. Plenty of people experience more than one version. None of us gets to choose the harms that count for somebody else.
What I actually worry about
In the U.S., the CDC reports that the male suicide rate in 2024 was nearly four times the female rate. I won't pretend a graph of deaths can tell us how much of that came from the internet. It can't. Male suicide was a serious problem before anyone could put a phone in their pocket. But when you see that alongside men being less likely to turn to friends for support, it becomes harder for me to shrug off an online world that makes withdrawal feel so easy.
Sometimes it looks dramatic in a documentary. A young man enters a community, gets more extreme, and alienates everyone around him. Sometimes it looks like a very normal guy getting home from work, not calling the friend he keeps meaning to call, and spending another night with content that makes him feel connected enough to avoid doing anything about it. No ominous music. No final boss. He just does it again tomorrow.
That's the version that gets me. You don't have to believe the internet is uniquely evil, or that women had a wonderful time here, to notice that some men are using a machine built to hold their attention in place of people who might actually know them.
I don't have a neat fix for that. I can't uninstall the internet and make everyone go bowling. I can say that if I finish watching a video about how isolated men are and then spend the rest of the night alone watching twelve more videos about it, the algorithm has had a very successful evening. I haven't.
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