Beyond the Manosphere: What Young Indian Men Actually Want from Masculinity

Imagine being told, from the moment you are born, that your worth as a man depends on your ability to provide, to be strong, and never to show pain. Now imagine coming of age in an economy where youth unemployment has doubled in a generation and where stable jobs are increasingly out of reach. 

This is the reality for millions of young men in India today, where rigid norms about what it means to be a man are increasingly conflicting with systemic difficulties.  

This tension is harming men, women, and society. Men now account for two-thirds of suicide victims in India, and more than half of the 1,254 young men we surveyed across India say, "no one really knows me." These pressures can fuel backlash against gender equality: three in five young men agree that when jobs are scarce, men have more of a right to a job than women. This in-turn can create social polarization and disrupt cohesion. 

Gender equality interventions have historically focused less on the male side of the equation. But if restrictive masculinity norms are holding everyone back, men cannot only be seen as the problem. They need to be part of the solution. 

Instead, some young men are finding answers in the wrong places. Recent work has documented the rise of the “manosphere” – a network of polarizing social media influencers who claim to have all the answers, even as researchers warn their appeal is more fragile than it looks.  But their playbooks fail to address the underlying problem: restrictive social norms about what it means to be a man that leave little room for how someone may want to live their life. 

But there is a more constructive angle to this story. Our survey, paired with an analysis of over 6K video transcripts and 808K comments on YouTube videos made by popular Indian male YouTubers, found that while men face strong pressures, particularly around provider-ship and emotional invulnerability, most are privately more supportive of expansive gender norms than public perception suggests. 

While most gender norms interventions have focused on women, young men hold more restrictive views

India has made substantial progress in gender equality, but social norms about appropriate roles for men and women remain. Economic development alone will not close these gaps: compared to similar-income peers, a lower share of Indian women participate in the labor force, but a higher share experience intimate partner violence.

Yet most social-norms interventions target women, even as young men hold more restrictive gender attitudes than young women, and the gap is widening. Around three in five men aged 15-29 believe that men make better business executives and political leaders than women, compared to less than two in five women of the same age. These figures represent a growing ideological divide between young men and young women that, left unaddressed, will make gender progress harder for everyone.

The pressures facing young men: provider and emotional invulnerability

Young Indian men face strong pressures to be a provider, but also a macroeconomic environment that makes these expectations increasingly hard to meet. Ask a young Indian man what it means to be a man, and in our survey, one word dominates: responsible. At the same time, young men feel substantial economic strain: three-quarters of our respondents believe it is harder for their generation to feel financially secure than their parents’ generation.  

This combination of strong expectations and unmet needs may fuel gendered competition and backlash against women: two-thirds of the young men we surveyed agree that efforts to promote women’s equality have gone so far that men are now discriminated against, with unemployed survey respondents holding less egalitarian gender attitudes than employed respondents.

Young men also feel strong pressures to suppress pain and carry responsibility. 83% of respondents agreed with the statement “Men don’t feel pain? Wrong. Men don’t SHOW pain because they know the whole house rests on their shoulders”. Loneliness and mental health struggles were also common: half felt “down, depressed, or hopeless” in the last two weeks.  Respondents with worse mental health also tended to have less egalitarian gender attitudes. Stakeholders we interviewed described how therapy is sometimes framed online as "Western," raising the identity cost of seeking help in the first place. A real shortage of therapists, particularly male ones (which comprises ~5-10% of practicing psychologists in India), likely exacerbates this issue. 

The manosphere may be one answer, but most men actually distrust its creators

While recent work has documented the rise of the “manosphere”, manosphere influencers are actually some of the least trusted and most polarizing social media creators. Only just over a third of survey respondents trust Andrew Tate and Elvish Yadav. By contrast, creators which address educational and geopolitical topics such as Khan Sir (Patna) and Dhruv Rathee were much more trusted; by 76% and 56% of respondents respectively. 

More broadly, heavier social media use was associated with worse mood and less egalitarian attitudes, though this relationship could also be bi-directional and is not necessarily causal. 

Instead, most men want to inhabit more expansive roles; but underestimate the extent to which others want too as well 

Most men surveyed privately desired a more expansive vision of masculinity. Despite the strong pressures to suppress pain documented earlier, 68% agreed that letting go of “the pressure to be perfect” and showing vulnerability improved their relationship, suggesting a private desire for different masculinity norms about emotional strength. In addition, four in five men agreed with the statement, “Changing diapers doesn't make you any less of a man. It is my child too. #DadGoals #Parenting”. Despite this, the average respondent thought only 67% of men their age agreed with this statement, 12pp lower than the actual rate. This gap suggests that beliefs about social acceptability may be inhibiting men from adopting this role, and that correcting these misperceptions could be a fruitful intervention. 

Interventions to role model expansive masculinity could permit men to live life on their terms

The ground is fertile for a different kind of intervention: one that models expansive masculinity norms. To improve the success of such interventions, it is important that they are delivered through the right channels. For example, cricketers, scientists, and businesspeople are the most popular role models for survey respondents. 

Messaging should be embedded in existing content rather than addressed head-on. Our analysis of over 6K YouTube videos found that most online content can be classified into three broad clusters: everyday identity and belonging (e.g., relationships, family, spirituality), aspiration and self-improvement (e.g., career and financial advice), and public authority (e.g., geopolitics, economics). 

While creators focusing on public authority (Cluster C) messages tended to have the highest level of trust among survey respondents, they also tended to have videos with more negative sentiment. Indeed, studies have shown that toxic content is more widely shared, and we found that YouTube creators which had more views per video and who were more trusted by survey respondents, also had content that tended to be more negative in sentiment. As a result, we recommend testing expansive messaging along a variety of clusters to both maximize engagement and promote uplifting messaging.

Conclusion 

Traditional gender norms that restrict what men can be and how they should act are clearly not serving them. As youth unemployment soars, provider norms exert heavy pressure on those who cannot meet them, and the expectation not to show pain may be preventing men from building the connections and emotional support needed to weather challenges. In this environment, the temptation can be to double down on rigid norms and follow the playbook laid out by manosphere creators or blame the gender equality movement for these changes. But most men actually desire a more expansive alternative: a broader definition of masculinity that allows them the freedom to live life however they wish to. 

When we started this project, we expected to find a familiar villain: men clinging to outdated norms, resistant to change. What we found instead was quieter and more hopeful: men who privately want something different but assume, wrongly, that they're alone in wanting it. That gap between private belief and perceived norm is not a reason for despair. It's the opening.

Note: Our full report, "Rethinking Masculinity Norms in India," was completed as a Second Year Policy Analysis at the Harvard Kennedy School for our client, the Centre for Men and Boys. It received the Jane Mansbridge Prize for best thesis on gender and public policy, and the Outstanding SYPA award for best MPA/ID thesis in our section. The full report is available here.