Briefly Noted: Is the manosphere gay?

My heart skipped a beat when I read the manosphere was gay.

That stinging insult to male sexuality felt so perfectly calibrated, and reading the piece below, the connection made sense: the manosphere is a cult of masculinity, just as gay male culture can be.

But I also think that kind of X is Y framing narrows the analysis too sharply. The author says the connection is not about sexuality as much as it’s about sociality.

I think it’s about something else: a developmental delay en masse.

On some level, I get the appeal of the manosphere because I remember being in middle school. The hierarchy, the posturing, the constant performance for other boys all felt vital, even essential.

The manosphere system runs on that same logic: status over substance, display over intimacy, approval from other boys as the only thing that really counts. Girls are present, othered, fetishized, and ultimately reduced to props.

Which is why the comparison to gay culture, while poignant, doesn’t go far enough. It names the performance, but not the delay.

This is a cult of masculinity built by men who haven’t outgrown adolescence. They’re not modeling manhood. They’re monetizing immaturity.

https://open.substack.com/pub/lizplank/p/sorry-but-the-manosphere-is-the-gayest