Online, it's called 'The Manosphere': a loose, algorithm-fuelled ecosystem of male influencers, forums and podcasts offering young men advice on self-improvement, masculinity, dating, and power.
On the surface, it can look like self-help - and for some, it offers a sense of direction, discipline or belonging.
But woven through much of this content is a worldview which frames gender relations in adversarial terms and can lead to hostility towards women and progressive ideas.
Prime Time spoke to four men who engaged with this content in different ways, and who, in their own words, recognised how the content could quietly shift their thinking over time.
Some of their names and locations have been changed to protect their identities.
Sean (25), Longford
In late 2019, while in college, he became emotionally attached to a girl he was casually seeing.
"I wasn’t hugely experienced with women at this stage and got very clingy very quickly. I just ended up setting myself up for failure and got my own heart broken," Sean says.
When Covid hit, the emotional fallout deepened.
"I was addicted to marijuana at this stage, crippled with loneliness and self-imposed heartbreak."
That’s when he came across creator Alexander Grace on YouTube.
Grace is a YouTuber who explores dating and male self-improvement, often presenting concepts about seducing women in a thoughtful tone - though some of his content touches on gender dynamics in ways critics say can reinforce adversarial views.
"At first, I wasn’t too sure about what he was saying - and it wasn’t all that bad. Concepts like hypergamy started becoming ingrained in my psyche over time though."
Hypergamy is the belief that women are biologically driven to pursue higher-status partners. It is a concept that reappears constantly in such influencers’ content. Certain types of YouTubers use the term to frame modern dating as a competitive hierarchy.
Sean says the combination of repetition, isolation, and substance use created a feedback loop.
"I didn’t hate women per se, but I envied them. I believed they had it easier. That men were disposable."
Read more: 'The Manosphere': Why some young men turn to negative influencers
He says his shyness as a teenager and lack of self-confidence also made him more susceptible.
"I didn’t see myself as interesting or attractive at all, and I guess that attitude made others treat me the same."
Over time, things shifted. He met other girls, quit smoking, and became close friends with women who, he says, helped him reset.
While he acknowledges that some of the content he consumed at the time did harm, Sean points out that going through that phase allowed him to reach the contentment he has found since then.
"Going through the whole 'red pill’ era and going in the complete opposite direction was a necessary step for me to find the middle ground personally," he says.
"I’m much healthier now. I have a girl I’m seeing semi-consistently, but I don’t have these ridiculous beliefs that love will work out like it does in Disney movies, nor do I have ridiculous beliefs that it doesn’t exist at all."
Aaron (23), Co Kerry
Aaron’s entry point was through Ben Shapiro - a right-wing political commentator known for his combative style and critiques of feminism and identity politics. Soon, Andrew Tate, a former kickboxer turned globally prominent influencer whose views on gender have been widely criticised as misogynistic, was appearing in his social media feeds.
The parts that landed with him were about direction. Many influencers, like Tate, who say women should be submissive and men dominant wrap their messages in rhetoric about self-discipline and personal development.
"I started helping more at home. I began seeing my role as someone who supports my mam and sisters, not just someone out for himself."
What appealed to him most, Aaron says, was the sense of structure.
"It gave me focus. It taught me to think about how I present myself, how I treat people, and how I show up for the people I care about. That wasn’t something I really got from school or anywhere else."
But he’s clear that not everything Tate speaks about sits well with him, particularly the parts he now recognises as misogynistic.
"Some of the things Tate says about women - I can’t stand them. But I also can’t deny that some of what he said made me think differently about how I treat the people I care about."
Pornography, he says, had a more direct negative effect.
"It warped how I thought about sex. I used to act like it was all a joke, like feelings didn’t matter. I realise now I was treating people like objects."
While Aaron still sees value in some of what he engaged with - he says he’s more careful now about where he gets his ideas.
"You can learn something from anyone. But I also know now how bitterness builds - especially when young lads feel like the world owes them something. I was heading that way for a while. I’m glad I stepped back."
Rob (36), Co Donegal
Rob was in his mid-twenties when his best friend died. To deal with the grief, he turned to YouTube and soon the platform began recommending Jordan B Peterson videos that stressed personal responsibility and endurance.
"I blamed myself for my friend’s death, and JBP’s ‘carry your burden’ stuff gave me a way to channel that," he says.
That entry point opened the door to more polarising content, which he soon found the social media algorithms were showing to him consistently.
"I was consuming hours of it. [Joe] Rogan, the Peterson-adjacent crowd. It was dressed up as self-help, but it turned into this confrontational, anti-feminist worldview. I started spouting lines just to feel like I was winning arguments."
The content being served to Rob ranged from anti-trans messaging to outright Islamophobic conspiracy theories.
"I started to think about the great replacement theory and all that stuff started coming up in my feed. I didn't really fall for that one, but I did fall for a lot of the fear."
Misogyny, he says, was always embedded in the subtext, something that eventually allowed him to ‘escape’.
He said his experience "wasn't specifically misogynistic at the beginning anyway, and by the time it was misogynistic, I had figured it out that this was toxic, so I left".
But before that came months of consuming content that ended up negatively impacting his life.
"It was affecting my personal relationships in some ways, not to the point where people were falling out with me, but people would be less interested in talking to me. I was bringing up the same things over and over again and antagonising everyone. It was making people uncomfortable."
A moment of clarity came years later.
"I saw a quote from Iggy Pop: ‘I’m not ashamed to dress like a woman because I’m not ashamed of women.’ That hit me hard. I realised so much of this culture is just a dressed-up hatred of femininity."
As Rob began to question those ideas, conversations with close friends played a role in helping him step outside the worldview he’d absorbed.
"On a human level, I started to realise it was just that hate itself in any form is just wrong. It's bad for you. It's bad for everybody. It just spreads like wildfire."
Michael (31), Co Meath
Michael, now 31, never fully bought into any hardline ideologies, but he recognises how close he came.
As a teenager, he spent hours online, absorbing content from early YouTubers like TheAmazingAtheist.
TheAmazingAtheist, a controversial YouTuber active in the 2000s and 2010s, became known for his confrontational, rant-style, format.
"It started with anti-religion stuff, but quickly became anti-feminist, anti-woke - all the usual," Michael said.
"I found myself nodding along to the odd post about how men ‘used to be different,’ and clicking on the occasional ‘Omg feminazi gets owned’ video. A lot of the language was used to degrade and undermine, and I ate it up."
At the time, it felt validating.
"I didn’t feel like I fit in. I wasn’t into sports, wasn’t conventionally masculine. That content told me: you’re not failing, the world’s just stacked against you."
What stopped him going further was what he calls "passive resistance" - strong female friendships, sisters who challenged his thinking, and parents who didn’t tolerate sexist talk.
"I didn’t have an epiphany. I just had people around me who wouldn’t let that worldview settle in."
Today, he reflects on how easily he might have slipped deeper.
"There’s something very seductive about simple answers. Especially when you’re young, insecure, and looking for someone to blame."
Though each man’s experience with this online world was different, shaped by age, background, and personal circumstances, common patterns emerged.
For some, it started with self-help. For others, with a search for belonging.
What followed was a steady stream of content that often blurred the line between advice and ideology.
Misogyny-related content didn’t always appear at the beginning, but over time, it became harder to ignore, a progression that is not accidental according to some experts.
Dr Kaitlyn Regehr, a lecturer in digital culture at University College London and author of Smartphone Nation says this pattern is by design.
"My work has looked at ways in which microdosing of content online can then lead to behavioural shifts offline because those ideas become so normalised for you," Dr Regehr said.
What begins as lifestyle advice, she explains, can harden into ideology.
"What was once a fairly low-level interest can be expanded and exaggerated and over time, can lead to behavioural shifts offline."
Dr Regehr says this type of content has become strikingly more prevalent in recent years.
"When I first started working in this space, that content was relegated to platforms like 4Chan and 8Chan, which are relatively niche platforms.
"More recently, that content has moved on to TikTok, to much more mainstream platforms, and it is being fed to young people en masse, and it is saturating into mainstream youth culture much more generally," Dr Regehr added.
She believes education must now catch up with this shift.
"We need to be having much more discussions holistically across the education sector with young people about how algorithms work, about the attention economy."
In-depth coverage of the impact of negative masculinity influencers from the RTÉ Current Affairs Digital Unit and Prime Time is available to read at rte.ie/primetime, with a special programme available to watch on the RTÉ Player.
