: James Bloodworth
: Lost Boys A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere
: Atlantic Books
: 9781786499806
: 1
: CHF 12.60
:
: Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung
: English
: 320
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
**You've seen the hit Netflix drama, Adolescence. Now read the book that explains it.** 'So compelling' Financial Times An astonishing undercover investigation into the paranoid and misogynistic subcultures of the manosphere, by the Orwell Prize-longlisted author of Hired. Rarely has there seemed a more confusing time to be a man. This uncertainty has spawned an array of bizarre and harmful underground subcultures, collectively known as the 'manosphere', as men search for new forms of belonging. In Lost Boys, acclaimed journalist James Bloodworth delves into these worlds and asks: what does their emergence say about Western society? Why are so many men susceptible to the sinister beliefs these groups promote? And what can we do about their pernicious encroachment upon our social and political spheres? Along the way, he enlists in a bootcamp for 'alpha males', dissects cultural figures including Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, and accompanies modern day Hugh Hefners as they broadcast their jet-set lifestyles to millions of followers. Combining compulsive memoir with powerful reporting, Lost Boys is an essential guide to the contradictions in contemporary masculinity.

James Bloodworth is a journalist whose work has appeared in The Times, New York Review of Books, Guardian, Prospect and elsewhere. He is also the author of The Myth of Meritocracy and Hired: Six Months in Low-Wage Britain.

2


RETURN OF THE BRUTE


Minnie Lane is a dating and personal development coach for men based in London. She briefly became involved in the seduction community in 2007 when she was twenty-two. ‘I joined the industry by complete fluke or serendipity, depending on which way you look at it,’ she tells me over Zoom.

It all started when she was out at a bar. A man was hitting on her and she recognised some of the things he was doing. She had readThe Game and proceeded to call him out on it. As it turned out, he’d not only readThe Game but was a pickup coach. They then had a long conversation about the industry (Lane had recently completed a psychology degree and was interested in social dynamics). She was ‘fascinated by the whole [pickup] world’ but also not as ‘appalled by it’ as she ‘probably should have been’. The pickup instructor invited her along to one of his workshops and, her curiosity piqued, she accepted. Perhaps unsurprisingly she was the only woman present on the boot camp. ‘Some of the students would come and ask my opinion on things. And then one of the trainers was like, “Why don’t you have a go helping some of the guys with their conversation skills?” And it turned out I was very good at it, so they asked me to stay.’

Lane ended up going out with the instructors and their students to bars and clubs in London every weekend for several months. ‘It was a fun Saturday job. I’m getting paid cash in hand to go out and chat to people and go to bars.’ Almost two decades on, Lane is candid about the fact that she ‘got sucked into’ the pickup industry. ‘I think I justified it to myself by saying, “I’m not going to teach anything that I wouldn’t want done to me,”’ she says, before adding that at the time she had ‘very low standards about how people should or shouldn’t treat me’.

Lane describes the industry as full of ‘gateway behaviours’ that can escalate over time. ‘It’s the small things, like asking a client to rate a woman’s attractiveness on a scale of one to ten. At the time, I would just be like, that’s efficient and helps me to quickly learn his type. Now I would never do that because I can see how it affects the way people are thinking. You’re making