On a recent episode of the Modern Wisdom podcast, during a conversation with documentary filmmaker Louis Theroux, Chris Williamson laid out an argument. He stated that the manosphere mirrors feminism far more closely than most people acknowledge, and that it has already moved through distinct generational phases.
Williamson opened by addressing how broadly the term manosphere gets applied. “Feminism is a very big broad bucket term that includes everything,” he said, “and I think that manosphere is basically… menism was just too weird of a term, so manosphere is sort of the online equivalent of what feminism is. And shared audiences don’t really indicate shared motives.”
Williamson proposed that the manosphere had developed in three distinct waves, much like the feminist movement.
“The first one was pickup artistry, and that was Neil Strauss and the game,” he said. “It was negging. And it was basically completely whitewashed when Me Too came along, because there was no way that this sort of brazen, we just want to have casual s*x with women, use them and discard them thing could have survived Harvey Weinstein. It just straight up couldn’t have existed anymore. It was seen as too unsanitary.”
From there, Williamson described the transition into a second wave. “Then what comes out next is more red pill, and that’s alphas and betas and c*cks and soy boys.”
He then argued that a third wave was forming, one defined not by seduction or dominance hierarchies, but by a near-total indifference to women altogether.
Referring to the Clavicular phenomenon, he said: “It seems to me that the next one that might be coming online is actually a disregarding of women. It’s actually much closer to the black pill than it is to the red pill. It’s literally about male-male intrasexual competition. It’s about I am the most formidable looking, even if I’m not the most formidable.”
What struck Williamson most about this third wave was its internal contradiction. “It’s actually a really feminized way of becoming super masculine,” he said. “It’s using cosmetic surgery, it’s using beautification and enhancement. It’s spending a lot of time thinking about the way that you look, not necessarily what you can do. So it’s a focus on appearance rather than competence.”
He also noted the absence of any romantic or relational motivation, distinguishing it sharply from earlier phases. “The red pill was the romantic pill because, regardless of whether or not it was typically romantic, it was still very much concerned with the approval of women. And I don’t think that we’re seeing that now.”
He cited writer Louise Perry’s framing to drive the point home: “Louise Perry calls it a male-to-male transsexual procedure, where you sort of parody the most masculine traits that you can.”
