In the chaotic blur of Brendan Kwiatkowski-Hartman’s second year of teaching, one student stood out: a farm kid in cowboy boots who loved The Lord of the Rings and lingered after class to talk.
“You’re not supposed to have favourite students,” recalled Hartman, who taught for years at a secondary school near Vancouver. “But if I was his age, we totally would have been friends.”
When that boy died by suicide in Grade 10, the shock moved through the school and beyond.
“It had a huge ripple effect on the community,” said Hartman.
The loss also left Hartman with questions that would eventually pull him out of the classroom and into a career studying masculinity, mental health and the challenges facing boys and young men.
“That got me focused on my master’s research on mental health of students,” said Hartman. “I found that 81 per cent of students diagnosed with emotional behavioural disorders were boys, so I started looking into the reasons why.”
What he found was that many boys and young men were grappling with loneliness, rejection and uncertainty about their place in the world. Online, so-called “manosphere influencers” have capitalized on those struggles, building enormous audiences by preaching messages rooted in victimhood, status and rigid ideas of masculinity.
But now, a growing group of online creators is trying to offer a healthier alternative to the manosphere.
“If we offer them a sense of belonging and connection and support, they’re not going to be drawn to those spaces in the first place,” said Jonathon Reed, a director at Next Gen Men, a Canadian non-profit that works with boys and men to promote healthier models of masculinity.
The appeal of certainty
The manosphere is an online ecosystem of creators and communities promoting ideas about masculinity.
Concern about the influence of the manosphere has been growing among Canadian policymakers.
In June, a House of Commons standing committee recommended Ottawa invest in school programs promoting healthy masculinity and preventing radicalization into misogynistic extremism. This spring, Ottawa also began work on Canada’s first ever men’s health strategy.
Currently, educators, non-profits and independent creators are leading efforts to engage boys before they are drawn into harmful online spaces. But these groups can often struggle to gain traction when boys and men are also immersed in online ecosystems that reward outrage, certainty and emotionally charged content.
Reed, of Next Gen Men, says the tone of manosphere videos is central to their appeal: they are fast, angry, dominant and unapologetically assertive.
“One of the most commonly socialized emotional registers for boys and young men is anger,” said Reed, who is based in Toronto. “It’s a lot easier to be angry about something than it is to feel desolate or defeated or overwhelmed.”
Hartman, who today works as a researcher and educator focused on boys and masculinity, says boys are rarely drawn in by misogyny, but the manosphere often veers in that direction.
“Boys don’t go to [manosphere influencers] for their misogyny — at least not initially,” he said. “[They] tend to go for their physical prowess … discipline aspect and the physical fitness … they like the way that these people offer black-and-white guidance.”
But algorithms can quickly deepen that exposure.
A 2024 academic study found that, over just five days, TikTok quadrupled the amount of misogynistic content recommended to teenage accounts interested in masculinity and loneliness.
Andrew “Bernie” Bernard, a U.K.-based creator with nearly 200,000 Instagram followers, says content often begins with a focus on self-improvement before shifting toward grievance-based ideas about gender.
“The same kind of people will talk in one video about how to get lean, how to become strong, how to use your body in a really positive way, and that will then morph into, ‘Because the only way you’re going to get a woman in 2026 is if you are one of the top 10 per cent of men’,” he said in an interview.
“That’s where it tips over into becoming harmful.”
Reed says this messaging can resonate because it is rooted in genuine problems. Young men do feel lonely, financially squeezed and uncertain about the future.
The manosphere validates those feelings, and then offers simple, emotionally satisfying explanations that redirect frustration toward women, immigrants and other perceived enemies.
Bernard calls this “manufactured male victimhood.”
“[These online spaces] are giving you an easy answer that allows you to look elsewhere and vilify somebody else.”
Male insecurity business
Creators that spoke to Canadian Affairs for this story say they are frustrated that manosphere influencers have turned young men’s search for identity and belonging into a business model.
“Young men are seeking a form of acceptance, community, validation,” said Dustin Pace, an Alberta-born bodybuilder who now lives in Salmon, Idaho, who has nearly 725,000 followers across Instagram and TikTok.
“What the manosphere has done is turn that into a way to monetize.”
One example is Andrew Tate’s Hustler’s University, a pricy subscription-based online platform that promises money-making skills and a path to “escape the matrix.”
Bernard described the model as a cycle: influencers sell men a problem, then sell them the solution.
“It’s ‘escape the matrix, but pay to join mine,’” he said.
A different model
For Pace, a healthier model of masculinity is built on service rather than dominance.
“Harmful masculinity walks into a room asking, ‘Who can I take advantage of? Who can I manipulate?’,” he said. “Healthy masculinity walks in asking, ‘How can I serve? How can I be helpful?’”
After years creating fitness content, Pace shifted his platform toward challenging “Christian nationalism and the influence of the patriarchal John Wayne idea of masculinity.”
Now, Pace describes masculinity not only as the weights men lift for themselves, but also “the weights that we remove from others.”
Jeff Perera, a Toronto-based motivational speaker on masculinity, says building healthier models of manhood requires developing what he calls “emotional muscle.”
“The work I’m asking men to do is to value the burn of emotional growth the same way they value the burn after leg day,” he said.
Reed’s Next Gen Men focuses on helping boys question narrow ideas of manhood and imagining a broader version of success that includes relationships, hobbies, emotional range and personal growth.
For more than a decade, his organization has run programs in schools and workplaces across Canada, and now hosts a Discord server where boys have exchanged more than 900,000 messages.
“We’re not actually directly combating the classic masculinity influencers or trying to go head-to-head with them,” he said.
“I really don’t, if ever, get ideological in my conversations with boys and young men online … What I’m doing is just making sure that boys feel grounded and connected.”
Hartman’s work as an educator and researcher centres on challenging three rigid messages boys receive about masculinity: suppress your emotions, be self-reliant, and seek power over others.
The third, he argues, is the hardest to dismantle because it requires rejecting the idea that success is a zero-sum game.
“That third message … the dog‑eat‑dog world … is the hardest because it requires a huge paradigm shift,” he said.
Hartman says boys need the opposite: adults who respond to distress with care instead of shame, communities they can rely on, and role models who lead through service rather than domination.
He says boys also benefit from seeing healthy relationships modeled by the adults around them.
“I want boys to experience these things … because one of the best antidotes I’ve seen for guys getting out of red-pilled [or] black-pilled spaces is when they notice contradictions,” he said.
