Catfishing the Manosphere

Fake facts from a fake influencer, but the sales pitch is real

Much of my content over the years has been about dispelling and countering hard to dislodge misogynistic myths from various parts of the manosphere. From the myth that women who identify as Lesbian have the highest rates of divorce and IPV to the myth that 70% of young men who grow up in single mother households end up in prison. Or is it 90%? No-one’s really sure what the number is, which is typically a very good sign it’s bogus.

Over time that evolved into one of my more popular bits over on TikTok, the rather lengthily titled “These are not facts, they’re just things you made up to justify your feelings”. Where I’d stumble across a video proudly stating one of these kinds of myths, think to myself “that doesn’t seem likely” and in looking up the research, discover it is entirely false.

That these myths are indeed myths is hardly the point, as the old adage goes “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it”. Before one has time to ask “And what’s your source for this?” the myth has been shared on a dozen podcasts drawing an inevitable “women ☕” from their audience who clip it, post it, and spread it faster than norovirus on a cruise ship.

Weaponizing misinformation about women isn’t anything new, but the creator economy has created an opportunity to monetize for those willing to continue to carry a torch that's been burning witches for centuries. There’s engagement, a platform and a profitable merch store to be found in giving people what they want to hear, even if it isn't true.

Lacking a grounding in facts, the manosphere has a highly coveted method for adding credibility to their mythology. Nothing drives engagement from men who think women are the problem quite like a woman prepared to swallow the lie and tell them they’re right.

Pearl Davis built a multi-million subscriber career on exactly that. Divorce should be illegal. Men should be allowed to cheat. Single mother homes are destined to raise criminals. All the greatest hits are here, including the completely false claim that lesbian relationships have the highest rates of divorce and IPV that always resurfaces no matter how many times it is debunked. The research provided as the basis for these positions ranges from thin to nonexistent, but research was never really the point. It was about finding a woman willing to overlook the facts, to look straight down a camera lens and validate these men’s feelings about women.

The issue is that the manosphere is not, as it turns out, a particularly stable employer.

In 2023 Pearl Davis had explosive growth, crossing 1.6 million subscribers and becoming one of the most prominent female voices in the space. Then as fast as her platform rose, it came crashing back down to the ground. Pearl went viral for stating the 19th Amendment, which gave (white) women the right to vote, should be repealed. The next month the 26-year-old Pearl posted to Twitter that 16-year-olds are more attractive than 26-year-olds. A post she deleted when both her critics and her own audience united in calling her out. Also deleted was a video Davis released of a song “Why can’t we talk about the Jews?” dedicated to noted White Supremacist Nick Fuentes. The controversies continued to stack up, including complaints about her featuring interviews asking children about their sex life. Eventually, YouTube had had enough and demonetized her platform and with it her growth stalled and she was quickly abandoned by the manosphere. She recently posted a video reflecting on how her experience had taught her to steer away from controversial soundbites, “if you’re under 40, what do you really know?”. She also opened up how her two million subscribers had failed to translate into any meaningful power or influence. An audience of two million, but no leverage. That’s the manosphere’s relationship with the women who serve it, laid bare.

Lauren Southern’s exit from the space is a sharper lesson still. A prominent alt-right content creator, she showed up to a protest against sexual violence carrying a counter-protest sign arguing there was no rape culture in the west. She built a career on the foundational manosphere position that women who experience gendered violence had, on some level, brought it upon themselves. During a trip to Romania to discuss a new business venture, Southern was physically and sexually assaulted. After, the business deal was abandoned, it was all a ruse to get close to Southern. By her own account she was in an impossible position: her entire brand was built on dismissing exactly what had just happened to her and ridiculing the women it happened to. There was no way to speak honestly about her experience without dismantling the architecture and mythology she’d spent years helping to construct.

It’s a sentiment echoed by other manosphere creators. A father’s rights advocate on TikTok once privately confided she felt pulled towards feeding and enabling the extreme of her audience. What made it hard to resist was the violence and outrage they received from their own fan base whenever they didn’t.

That's the fundamental instability of supporting a movement that treats women who step out of line as enemy combatants. The only direction is inward and downward, chasing an audience whose appetite for extremism and depravity has no floor, trying to outpace their violence until one day it catches you up and swallows you whole.

Which leaves the manosphere posing the question: “Where can we find a woman who will stay on message?”.

A woman pliable enough to recite the mythology, but not so much as to stray into racist conspiracies. Who speaks with authority and intellect, but won’t question the sources. Importantly a woman with a compassion for the poor plight of unfairly maligned and oppressed men that will never ever run out, no matter how much violence they inflict upon her.

Simple. You build one.

Meet Stacey De Leon, a conservative influencer sharing her thoughts on love, relationships and dating. Most of her videos have a consistent style, shot in a carefully crafted interior, speaking into a microphone. Stacey has a soft smile she directs slightly off camera as though speaking to her co-host. Rather than addressing the audience directly, she creates the sense that we're listening in to a conversation, a warm, upscale podcast with gravitas. Stacey’s delivery avoids the overly emotional, bombastic and sensationalist outrage typically found in manosphere creators. Instead, her delivery is even and composed, never raising her voice as she walks through manosphere talking points with the calm authority of someone who has thought about this topic on a deep intellectual level.

The content itself trends towards evangelical Christianity, where marriage is a religious covenant under God and a women’s purpose is producing children. Feminism is a corruption that has drifted us away from the truth of Complementarianism. It comes pre-mixed with the usual junk pseudo-science, such as the revelation that going just seven days without sex makes your brain forget your romantic partner. There’s some memories of regrettable encounters in my 20s that prove this not to be the case.

Scattered through her posts are selfies where Stacey shares more personal views on relationships in the captions. On one she states that: “Not every woman wants to dominate. Some of us want to build”. In another she describes what she’s looking for in a relationship and that she’s “choosing depth over attention”. Yet attention is exactly what this drives. Styling herself as a “sweet, but demure” woman just looking for a good man to be submissive to is chum in the water to a frenzied Incel audience who pour into her comments to shoot their shot, with one responding: “Emotionally stable enough for dinner, unstable enough to make it interesting. Wanna go out?”.

She is, in short, algorithmically optimized to be exactly what the manosphere believes a woman to be. Available, submissive and eager to advocate for opinions that are not her own. She’s articulate. She’s consistent. She never has an off day, never posts something ill-advised at 2am. She has never, not once, given serious consideration to an opposing opinion, been able to be reasoned out of her convictions or been alarmed or concerned for her safety by the community she champions.

She can’t. Because Stacey doesn’t exist, she’s an AI-generated persona.

Many of Stacey's videos feature her reacting to clips, offering commentary while other content plays. During longer clips Stacey’s avatar drops into tell-tale idle animations. A distinctive blinking pattern, a downward glance with her mouth slightly open. Behavioral tics that don't just repeat, they are on an identical frame-by-frame loop.

I discovered Stacey through a video in my feed where she plays a two minute clip of an interview with Erin Pizzey. The clip features Pizzey talking about the lack of support for her refuge for male victims and concludes with Stacey adding “Abuse doesn’t become less real because the victim is a man”. The comments are a completely unsurprising outpouring of red-pill talking points about how “Feminism has cost the lives of thousands of men” and that it is “socially acceptable to hit a man”.

The problem with this narrative is that it is a complete fabrication. When TMZ posted a video of Secret Lives of Mormon Wives star Taylor Frankie Paul doing just that, her brand deals and projects were immediately shelved. Erin Pizzey meanwhile has spent the last 30 years insisting she was shunned and ostracized for advocating for male victims of violence, when the reality is her refuge for men was a sanctuary for male perpetrators of violence.

In the introduction of the 1976 second binding of her book Scream quietly or the neighbours will hear, Pizzey details the purpose of the newly opened refuge:

There is now also a men’s house which offers therapy and is open twenty-four hours a day for urgent need as well as regular group meetings. It is available to any of the husbands of the battered women, or any man who will accept the fact that he is violent. Previously they would have been offered tranquillisers [sic] and custodial care, but now they can be involved in understanding their own problems and in seeing how they compare with other men with similar problems.

However, the project was short lived and when the 1977 American Edition of Scream quietly was published, Pizzey again referred to the project in her introduction describing it’s goal of providing a refuge for violent offenders and recent closure.

I bitterly regret that we had to close the project for husbands because of a lack of funds. This work was done with the cooperation of the violent partner, who admitted his violence and discussed his rage and anger, in the safe and secure understanding that we did not consider him a brute but a badly damaged child.

The men's refuge Erin Pizzey opened wasn't a sanctuary for male victims of violence. It was a therapeutic space for the men committing it. The manosphere has spent thirty years citing a woman whose life's work was rehabilitating the abusers they refuse to believe exist.

There’s a predictable irony that the manosphere's patron saint is a woman whose books they've never read.

Neither has Stacey. Which, if you think about it, is the perfect qualification for this particular job. Stacey is immune to facts and no amount of debunking or arguing with her is going to change her mind. In the words of Sarah Connor, Stacey can't be bargained with. She can't be reasoned with. She doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And she absolutely will not stop… so long as someone keeps paying for tokens.

Which brings us to who is footing the bill for Stacey, and Why?

The clue is in Stacey’s Instagram bio which, entirely out of character, states “Become a Very Powerful Man, Become a Woman Magnet” and links to an online course, “The Trained Eye Program” by Denis Bel. It is here the vocabulary and marketing shifts to the more familiar emotional and exaggerated aspirations of the manosphere. “Master MONEY, POWER, and SEX” the course promises, offering a blueprint to print money, unlock passive income and do so while attracting a harem of women. Secrets which can be unlocked for just $197.

Denis Bel does not appear to be a true believer. Rather, Bel is part of a YouTube collective that teaches people how to monetize content using AI tools. In particular, TubeMagic, an AI script generating service that promises “Viral YouTube Scripts in Seconds”. Bel is one of a number of creators offering tutorials on the channel about how to generate large sums of passive income from faceless AI accounts that in reality just product demos for TubeMagic itself.

Which is to say, Bel built Stacey less to fight an ideological crusade on the front lines of a war against feminism. She’s simply a lead generator. Bel is an entrepreneur and businessman who identified a hungry market and is feeding it. He’s manufacturing a product and the product is resentment. The target audience are men who are convinced that women are to blame for why their lives aren't what they want them to be. While Stacey is the bait on the hook, a woman who gives them hope as the embodiment of their perfect fantasy woman. Then comes the upsell, a course promising power, income, and the kind of lifestyle the algorithm keeps showing them.

The great lie at the center of red-pill culture is that none of it seems to produce men who are content. The podcasts, the courses, the academies promising passive income and the attention of beautiful women hold no interest for men who are thriving. They are sold to men who are isolated, insecure, and unhappy, and the business model requires them to stay that way. After all, you can’t sell a man a solution to his loneliness if he freely fixes the problem himself.

While we could (and should) rightly point out the horror of violent misogyny being so systemic it is casually used as a marketing strategy, it is well trodden ground already thoroughly examined by those far smarter, educated and with more authority to talk on it than I. It is also a conversation that, sadly, seems not to move the needle. Matt Rife still managed to sell out Madison Square Garden.

Instead, I continue to be bewildered, confused and disappointed in my male peers. Who, in the same manner as they have let Erin Pizzey co-opt their empathy in order to rewrite her problematic history of sympathizing with abusers, seem to miss entirely the manipulation at hand here.

That the manosphere’s entire monetization model relies on exploiting men's psychological pain as a revenue stream.

Bel is far from the first to adopt this model. Manosphere creator Harrison, better known as HSTikkyTokky, was one of the subjects in Louis Theroux’s recent documentary “Into the Manosphere”. Theroux put to him the fairly obvious contradiction of his public condemnation and disdain for women who do sex work while simultaneously running an agency that profited from promoting those same women to his own following. Harrison's response was, at minimum, honest: “I don't give a fuck. I'm doing it for money.”

Occasionally, the manosphere stumbles awkwardly, unscripted and unplanned, into a truthful moment. The Great and Powerful Oz is, in fact, a manipulative man behind the curtain, knowing full well the entire thing is a charade.

However grim the realization of men manipulating other men and their pain for profit may be, it is the logical endpoint of everything we’ve been watching build in the manosphere. If the talking heads of the movement are willing to lie, cheat, deceive and abandon their firmly held principles for money. If they are willing to construct an entire fake mythology devoid of facts to spin you a story. Then can we really be so surprised they are equally dishonest about their motives and reason for doing so? That they are reluctant to admit men’s pain and anguish is a marketable and desirable commodity, a prerequisite to creating an audience of consumers desperate to purchase relief from their isolation, loneliness and sadness.

An ecosystem built from the foundation of deliberately avoiding truth isn’t going to suddenly wake up to find an issue with the counterfeit. It also makes sense that since the manosphere devotes its energy to stripping the humanity away from the women it attacks, it would find the inconsistent and unpredictable humanity of the women delivering it’s mythology an inconvenience. One best stripped away completely.

With AI tooling, removing it is becomes less a moral question and more a technical one. The end result is Stacey, a woman who will deliver the manosphere’s propaganda with perfect composure, forever. An eager accomplice who will never tire of dismissing and invalidating the lives of other women, despite never having had a single lived experience of her own.