HuffPost: 'Manosphere' Is a 'Public Health' Emergency, Gets Doctor to Say it Must Be Shut Down 'Before It's Too Late'
Western society has, in the last 50 years, come up with some pretty daft things to pretend are real crises.
From the days of my youth, I remember how I was going to get choked to death by smog, swarmed by killer bees, and given LSD on pencil erasers some perfidious drug dealers would entice me to chew upon.
This was all pretty stupid, mind you; smog as a public health concern had been mostly eliminated by the time I got to school, killer bees have killed fewer people in the 40 or so years since that panic started than dogs will kill in half a month, and I don’t hang out with drug dealers as a rule, but I’m pretty sure they don’t waste primo product on school supplies.
All of these moral panics have been revealed for what they are: just panic. So thank heavens these grifters got the internet and social media sometime around the turn of the millennium. Unlike the fake psychedelic eraser scare, there are very real harms associated with the internet, particularly when it comes to predators and vulnerable minors. This makes it a lot easier for culture-war hustlers to launder their desire for control and censorship under the guise of a real threat, and to demand power in order to eradicate it.
In this vein, I give you Dr. Zak Zafrani, a British general practitioner who wrote a piece for the U.K. HuffPost published on Wednesday titled (no, seriously) “I’m A Doctor, We Need To Crack Down On The ‘Manosphere’ Before It’s Too Late.”
For those of you who’ve managed to avoid gawking at this silly internet subculture, it’s a diffuse, diverse group of click-chasers whose opinions about women are just as mephitic and misguided as … well, the HuffPost’s opinions about men. (Irony, thou art verily beautiful.)
The manosphere has made porn-monger (and walking advertisement for the dangers of chronic traumatic encephalopathy) Andrew Tate a minor celebrity, if primarily just as a figure of fun. It’s somehow made the phrase “Clavicular frame mogged by ASU frat leader” into an intelligible string of words for those in the know. It’s spawned so many strange, dumb communities with strange, dumb acronyms — MGTOWs, PUAs, MRAs — that it almost puts “2SLGBTQIA+” to shame. (Almost.)
However, just because I know what “frame mogging” is doesn’t mean that there’s a public health emergency afoot. Andrew Tate may be slimy and stupid, but it’s hard to take someone seriously when they’ve said their “brain is far too advanced” for the act of reading because they need to be “driving a supercar and f***ing fighting and f***ing a bunch of h**s and champagne and going crazy.”
The kind of person who’d be attracted to someone who uttered those words in earnest, and not just as a cultural rubbernecker, has already forged their own primrose path to a meaningless existence with or without these cretins. And, what’re you going to do to fight it, anyhow? Hide all internet-connected devices in libraries? Do that, and six months later, you’re declaring the “homelessosphere” a public health crisis, instead.
Anyhow, Dr. Zafrani stops short of advising that non-solution to this non-problem, but his piece makes one thing clear: The left has lost control of the social media censorship machine they once owned and operated, and they desperately want it back by making you inordinately fear something most people don’t know exists:
For the young men of 2026, the internet has become a dangerous soup of misinformation and misogyny repackaged as self-improvement tips peddled by bad actors.
Across all platforms, a growing ecosystem of ‘manosphere’ influencers are promoting harmful and extreme “health” trends to millions of people too young to know the difference between clickbait and genuine advice.
Content in this space normally begins innocently: advice on fitness, dating, and socializing, for instance. However it can quickly spiral into darker themes.
Like what? HuffPost links?
No, actually: “steroids rebranded as ‘biohacking’, starvation diets, and the pernicious ‘looksmaxxing’ trend (where participants have been encouraged to alter their faces using hammers) are all encouraging physical harm in the pursuit of a perfect appearance.”
That “alter their faces using hammers” line is a reference to the aforementioned Clavicular (driver’s license name Braden Eric Peters), who also takes amphetamines to help control his weight — among other uproariously extreme measures, at least if you’re into schadenfreude. Back in my day, to watch a methhead hit themselves in the face with a blunt metal object for money, you had to buy one of those “Bumfights” DVDs. You kids have it so easy.
Anyway, surprise of surprises, Dr. Zafrani says that these manosphere idiots “have no medical qualifications or understanding of the risks involved in what they are encouraging people to do” and prey upon “men who are struggling with body image, self esteem, and loneliness.”
“By taking drugs such as anabolic steroids or weight loss medication from unlicensed sellers, men are putting themselves at real risk from contaminated batches, incorrect dosing, or the drug simply being something else entirely,” Zafrani writes.
They needed a doctor to point this out? As in, like, a guy with a medical degree who practices? Your neighbor who flunked out of community college could have told you this.
Anyhow, the purpose of this whole exercise becomes apparent at the tail end of the story: Having brought in an expert in medicine to talk about something you do not need an expert in medicine to discuss, he then proceeds — despite not being an expert in either free speech or online censorship — to offer insanely bad slippery-slope, speech-stifling solutions to the “problem”:
There must also be tougher action on social media influencers who are found to be spreading this harmful misinformation online.
Advertisement - story continues belowPeople should not be allowed to continue to profit from encouraging dangerous behavior simply because they have worked out that the algorithm rewards scandal.
While the social media ban for under-16s, due to come in next year, will offer some protection from this kind of content; meaningful penalties such as removal from platforms, and thus loss of income, would go some way towards shutting down these dangerous online communities. [Emphasis ours]
Yes, years after governmental pressure on social media companies came into wholesale disrepute when it turned out censored voices speaking out against COVID-19 lockdowns and suppression of the lab-leak hypothesis were almost certainly right, we need to give the government these expansive powers over free speech online again.
Why? Because a bunch of dim clowns who get an audience specifically because they’re dim clowns — and who, while attempting to project an image of hypermasculinity, act so feminine in their cattiness, tendency toward drama for drama’s sake, and obsession over looks that we might as well rechristen the “manosphere” as “The Real Housewives of Twitch” — still have an audience, and there’s a theoretical danger that we haven’t seen realized. Just like those pencil erasers that would turn your fourth-grade teacher into a six-winged pterodactyl if you chewed on them.
A final thought: Dr. Zafrani (I suspect) and the people who published this piece (I am certain) are not concerned that social media is “encouraging dangerous behavior simply because they have worked out that the algorithm rewards scandal.” They are concerned because the algorithm doesn’t reward them anymore.
Few if any take these human sideshows seriously, including (probably) the sideshows themselves — and those that do would find another sideshow to latch onto if the government is handed expansive power to crack down on them. Furthermore, governments that adopt this tack wouldn’t stop at the “manosphere” — or if they did, they’d take such an expansive view of the sphere that pretty much anything they didn’t like fit that description, legally.
The HuffPost and the doctor, though? They take themselves Very Seriously™, and are annoyed that the algorithm or social media giants no longer bend to their whims. So they want the government to fix that.
TL;DR: When it comes to dangerous nonsense, Clavicular and his ilk have nothing on Dr. Zak Zafrani and those who listen to him.
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