In retrospect, Kenzie Sproat thinks there were warning signs that all was not right in her year-long relationship. She says her partner seemed to shift from a gentleman to someone who controlled and ridiculed her.
“I’m kind of ashamed,” the 23-year-old university student said. “I totally just listened to him, and then at the end, I was like, ‘What am I doing? I don’t know what I’m doing.'”
She first got involved in the long-distance relationship with an American military man a few years ago. She said the red flags began popping up six months in, when he began shaming her over her appearance, blowing up her phone if she didn’t respond to his texts and expressing jealousy over her friendships with other men.
She realizes now she didn’t see how his behaviour started affecting her.
“I got used to it. I got used to the condescension,” she said.
She thinks the online content he consumed, such as “manosphere” creators like Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan, was part of what shaped his behaviour.
“He would make jokes about how many good points Andrew Tate has,” she said, referring to the kickboxer turned controversial social media influencer, who describes himself as a misogynist.
When they broke up more than a year later, she felt only fleeting sadness.
“The next day I felt physically lighter and I was over it.”
While Sproat got out of her relationship without headaches or paperwork, not everyone is so lucky.
Some women say their partners have changed for the worse, and they partly blame the ‘manosphere’ content they’re consuming online. One family lawyer says he’s seeing it brought up as a reason for divorce, and so are his colleagues.
Family lawyer Scott Byers, who’s based in Swift Current, Sask., said he and his colleagues have started seeing some of the factors Sproat described becoming a reason for divorce.
It started with the pandemic and couples having diverging views on things like vaccinations, but that’s shifted more recently, Byers said.
“As the years have passed since the pandemic, I’m certainly seeing more clients come in telling me, ‘My spouse isn’t the person that I knew when [we] met. He puts his ear buds in and he’s listening to these podcasts and a lot of thinkers associated with the so-called manosphere.'”
Byers said he believes online misogyny feeds a culture of coercion and abuse.
“It’s a new and unsettling dynamic.”
He said one woman he represented told him that her husband had been injured on the job and, unable to work, started spending more time online and consuming what Byers described as “radical ideas” about gender.
“He started to express views about how their children should be raised that my client just couldn’t accept,” he said.
Byers said these men often want to represent themselves during divorce proceedings, animated by a perception that the family court system is biased against husbands and fathers.
“They see this as the fight of their lives, and they’re fighting the good fight on behalf of men and boys everywhere,” he said.
Byers said this can make it hard to have practical discussions over important elements of a divorce, like child support and parenting schedules.
“Their head is just not there.”
What is the manosphere?
Neil Shyminsky, is a professor of English at Cambrian College in Sudbury, Ont., who has talked about the manosphere in podcasts and online videos. He describes it as “a misogynist movement that feels that feminism has won.”
“Women have not just achieved equality, but now women are in the driver’s seat and that this is wrong, and it is both natural and good for men to be in positions of power and leadership.”
The manosphere, broadly, takes the view that men and women should return to what are seen as traditional roles, he said.
Influencers who operate in this sphere suggest, “the only thing that women are good for is sex and popping out babies or maybe picking up after you,” he said.
When these online misogynistic trends began emerging a decade ago, it was really a movement of single men, Shyminsky said.
“The greatest predictor of somebody identifying as a member of the manosphere is that they’ve been rejected by a woman recently,” he said.
He said it’s surprising to see it gaining traction among married men.
“This is a sign that those tendrils of the manosphere that I was talking about earlier are just permeating deeper and deeper into spaces that are mostly populated by men.”
The importance of connection, conversation
Both Byers and Shyminsky see the manosphere as an issue driven by complex economic and societal problems, to which influencers offer simple solutions.
“The problem [in their view] is that men aren’t men anymore. You got laid off from your job, because you are not manly, your boss is not [manly]. Maybe your boss is a woman,” Shymisnky said.
“If we want to fix it, if we want to solve the problem, men just have to be men.… You gotta be that much more manly, that much more masculine. And that’s when we slip into being toxically masculine.”
Byers noted that he’s not a relationship counsellor, but said he does have an unique view on relationships through seeing how they come apart.
He said couples may be able to get ahead of marital breakdown over misogyny by having honest conversations about what they’re reading, watching and listening to online, and what they think about that content.
“If it’s not enough to salvage that relationship, it would at least allow people to catch this at an earlier stage and make educated decisions about whether to stay and whether to go,” Byers said.
As bad as her previous relationship became, Sproat hasn’t given up on her belief that men can also be uplifting and positive forces for their female partners.
“I do wish that there weren’t so many men who subscribed to the ideas of public figures like Andrew Tate and the manosphere weirdos, but there’s lots that don’t,” she said.
Sproat feels like she can tell a lot about her “wonderful, amazing” current partner by his friendships. He and his closest friends are loyal people who help support their female partners’ goals and want them to thrive, she said.
“There are good men. You just gotta find them.”
