She Spent Years Writing About What Men Do to Women. Then I Asked Her About the Boys
She writes hard about patriarchy and male violence, and still refuses to hate the boys drifting toward the manosphere.
Readers in the Room is a series where I sit down with the people who fill my comment sections: the ones who push back, bring their own sources, and won’t let a point go unchallenged. The first profiled David Lawler, who went looking in the manosphere and found a men’s circle instead. This is the second. Elle Beau had been arguing with me in the margins for months, so we finally talked.
The young man did not know what to do with the hand.
He was about 17, big enough that Elle Beau remembers him as a strapping football player, and he was walking through a store beside Elle’s autistic son, who had known him for years and regarded him almost as a brother. Elle’s son likes physical affection when he trusts someone, and at some point during the outing he reached over and took the other boy’s hand. The boy turned to his mother.
“He’s holding my hand. What should I do?”
His mother gave him the obvious answer: hold his hand. So he did.
Elle has been thinking about that moment ever since, because she sees something in her adult son and the mostly male group of autistic young people he has spent years around that she rarely sees in the arguments about masculinity consuming the rest of us. They are affectionate with each other, she told me. They help one another. They show care without first checking whether care might make them look weak, feminine or gay. In her interpretation, they seem less preoccupied with performing manhood for an audience.
“I’ve known them for 10 years,” she told me. “They’re all just people, which I think is lovely and shows what’s possible.”
Elle said it herself before I could: this is anecdotal, a mother observing a small group whose neurological differences complicate any sweeping theory about socialization. Still, she wonders whether they reveal something about what happens when the usual instructions about manhood fail to land.
I have spent much of the past two years listening to men who would hear that story very differently.
Many of them have told me that being “just a person” is precisely the problem. They want a male identity. They believe men and women are different in ways culture cannot simply erase, and they are suspicious of a progressive project that seems to have become comfortable telling men what manhood should no longer be while offering little that feels distinctly male in its place.
Elle knows that argument because she has been having it with men for years.
“What’s the incentive?” some have asked her when she tells them to loosen their attachment to traditional masculinity. If the old male identity is supposed to go, what replaces it?
Her answer can sound almost provocatively simple.
“How about just being a person?”
Arguing in the margins
Elle and I had been talking for months without ever actually speaking.
She is one of those readers who enters my Medium comment sections carrying footnotes, arguments and enough words to turn a reply box into a seminar. On Medium she calls herself Elle Beau, describes herself as a social scientist writing “research driven stories,” and has more than 13,000 followers. Her writing about men predates Andrew Tate. In February 2020, before Tate became the global face of the manosphere, she published a prompt asking men about the contradictory cultural messages they had received about how a man was supposed to behave.
We disagreed often enough that eventually the comments began feeling inadequate.
So we talked.
This piece is part of The Manosphere, my reporting series on the online and offline forces reshaping how boys and men understand themselves.
Subscribe on Substack to get the next chapter.
I am calling her Elle Beau because that is the name under which she writes, and I am withholding where she lives and other details that could identify her offline. That boundary matters to her. Men online have occasionally said they wanted to find her, a few in ways that sounded threatening, which is why she keeps her physical life separate from the arguments she makes online.
What I encountered was more complicated than the feminist antagonist much of the manosphere constructs. Elle has been married for more than three decades. She has an adult autistic son who lives with her and will probably continue to need substantial support. At one point in her marriage, she stopped working outside the home and took on the domestic role that the internet now packages as “traditional.” She talks about her husband with affection and about the slow evolution of their marriage as both reconsidered who should notice the dirty floor, carry the mental inventory of a household and decide whose exhaustion counted.
She is also furious. Sometimes those two Elles appeared in the same answer.
The two Elles
I asked her about something I hear constantly from men when I report on the ground: that feminism may have begun as a movement for equal rights but eventually became hostile toward men, especially in its second, third and later waves. Elle did not hesitate.
“That it’s a deflection and an intentional misrepresentation so that you don’t have to deal with what women are actually saying.”
Then she started supplying the context she believes men routinely omit. She talked about sexual assault beginning in childhood, about women being groped, harassed and coerced and then told by men that the prevalence is exaggerated. She spoke about her own experiences, and as she did, the register of our conversation changed. The theoretical vocabulary was still there — patriarchy, socialization, dominance hierarchy — but suddenly there was a body underneath it.
She told me there was a kind of continuous stress she carries, “a constant, low-lying hum,” something she sometimes feels physically in her solar plexus. She knows that spending so much time online can make the hum louder. Her husband has asked whether she really wants to expose herself to so much of it. She has wondered the same thing.
Leaving the internet would also mean leaving one of the places where other women tell her that they recognize what she is describing. That exchange stopped me because I knew the machinery. I have spent two years reporting inside and around online male spaces where a young man arrives carrying a wound — loneliness, humiliation, rejection, anger at a parent, fear that he will never become financially independent — and encounters hundreds of people telling him they know exactly what happened to him. The feed then supplies another clip, another betrayal, another woman behaving badly, another study, until what begins as pain acquires an explanation, an audience and eventually a community.
Elle would reject any easy equivalence between feminist spaces and the manosphere, and the differences in ideology, conduct and consequences are substantial. But listening to her describe why she remained online even when it was hurting her, I could hear a mechanism I had encountered before: injury becomes easier to carry when other people recognize it, while the community built around that recognition can also keep furnishing reasons to remain injured.
Elle understands at least part of that paradox in herself. Some of her writing, she told me, is education, some is “blowing off steam,” and some is healing through contact with people who have been through similar things. The internet can aggravate the wound and tend to it in the same sitting.
What the studies actually say
During our conversation she referred to research showing, as she remembered it, that feminists “actually like men better than men like men.” The paper exists. Its conclusion is a little narrower. A 2024 paper in Psychology of Women Quarterly, drawing on six studies and nearly 9,800 people, found feminists’ attitudes toward men were positive overall and no more negative than men’s own attitudes toward men. That supports Elle’s objection to the stereotype of the man-hating feminist, though claiming feminists like men better than men like themselves stretches the paper’s actual finding.
This piece is part of The Manosphere, my reporting series on the online and offline forces reshaping how boys and men understand themselves.
Subscribe on Substack to get the next chapter.
Elle also sent me research to support one of her strongest propositions: the psychological differences between men and women are far less categorical than popular culture teaches. Bobbi Carothers and Harry Reis’s 2013 paper Men and Women Are From Earth examined 122 characteristics across 13,301 people and found that most did not sort human beings into two clean male and female categories. Average sex differences exist, the authors stressed, but they generally do not let you infer a person’s psychological profile from sex alone. A broader body of work, including Janet Shibley Hyde’s review of 46 meta-analyses, points the same way.
None of that establishes that male and female psychology is entirely created by culture, or that bodies, hormones and average differences are irrelevant. What makes it harder to sustain is the internet habit of treating “men” and “women” as two internally uniform psychological species.
The identity men fear losing
That is where Elle plants her flag.
When men tell her that they require a specifically male identity, she hears evidence of how thoroughly the culture has persuaded them that maleness needs a border around it. I hear something else too.
I hear men trying to describe an identity they fear is disappearing.
Elle believes the boxes themselves create much of the trouble. If masculinity requires being dominant, stoic, independent, heterosexual in the correct manner, sexually competent, economically productive and visibly unlike women, then every boy spends part of his life being inspected for violations.
Her preferred destination is a culture where people keep whatever traits feel authentic without those traits certifying membership in a sex. She likes makeup and painted nails, she told me, and once tried discarding some of it after recognizing how much femininity had been taught to her, then decided she actually enjoyed it. For her, liberation did not require becoming less feminine. It required telling the difference between preference and instruction.
I pushed her on the obvious problem. Nobody grows up outside a society. A boy cannot simply announce that he has transcended cultural expectations and then walk into a school hallway, a locker room, a date or a job interview as though those expectations have disappeared. The men I interview understand this instinctively because they experience masculinity socially: there are rewards for performing it well and penalties for failing.
Elle agreed that nobody becomes completely free of socialization. Her answer is awareness: Teaching children enough sociology and media literacy to notice the hands operating the machinery before they mistake every instruction for instinct.
When a theory can’t lose
But I kept noticing another problem.
Elle becomes frustrated when men tell women what women “really” want. She sees this constantly in manosphere discussions of dating, where women describe the qualities they find attractive only to have men explain that those women are confused, dishonest or unaware of their own preferences.
“I find it extremely condescending to be told you don’t know what you want or what you think,” she said.
Then, elsewhere, men who told her they experienced a meaningful psychological distinction between men and women were themselves read through her framework: socialization had taught them the distinction, and insecurity explained why some clung to a separate male identity.
The two situations differ in their evidence and their stakes, but the question is worth putting on both sides of the table. At what point does explaining another group become explaining that group away?
A red-pill dating coach can construct a theory so complete that a woman disagreeing with it becomes proof that women do not understand themselves. A social theory can face a similar temptation when a man’s disagreement is read primarily as evidence that the culture has prevented him from understanding himself. The danger begins when the theory becomes impossible to lose.
This piece is part of The Manosphere, my reporting series on the online and offline forces reshaping how boys and men understand themselves.
Subscribe on Substack to get the next chapter.
Measuring the wound
Then we got to male loneliness.
Elle cited a statistic she had recently encountered: men with no close friends had increased fivefold since 1990. That number checks out, with a timestamp attached. A 2021 Survey Center on American Life report found 15 percent of American men said they had no close friends, up from 3 percent in 1990. More recent evidence complicates the simple “men are uniquely lonely” story. A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found men and women reporting loneliness at roughly equal rates. The clearer gap was in what they do with their relationships: 54 percent of women said they would be very likely to turn to a friend for emotional support, against 38 percent of men.
So there is a wound, though defining it takes more care than the internet usually gives it.
I asked Elle what she says to women on her own side who hear all this and answer, essentially: men created patriarchy, men still hold most institutional power, men can fix themselves. She did not defend that response.
“I counter that every time I hear that coming from a woman,” she told me.
Elle understands the appeal of women deciding to stop organizing their lives around men, and knows women who have done exactly that and are happier. She understands the exhaustion behind “men are trash,” but will not allow the phrase in her own spaces, because she considers it both untrue and useless. She has a husband, a son and male friends she cares about, and sees no plausible society in which women simply detach from half the population.
“We can vent and rage and de-center men as much as we want,” she said. “That’s not going to improve our society.”
This was the Elle who some of the men reading her essays might never imagine exists. It was also the Elle I wanted them to have to contend with. Her anger does not disappear simply because she recognizes male pain.
The temperature of the room
During one stretch of the conversation, Elle told me about the sexual violence she has experienced and the experiences women have recounted to her, then described how exhausting it is to have men argue that these events are rare, exaggerated or politically weaponized. There is abundant evidence the underlying violence is widespread. CDC data say more than one in three women have experienced contact sexual violence, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner in their lifetime, with an enormous gender disparity in intimate-partner homicide. Elle also cited the widely circulated RAINN estimate, based on federal crime data, that an American is sexually assaulted nearly every minute.
Her anger has facts beneath it.
But anger also changes the temperature of a room, including when the person across from you did none of the things that caused it. I asked her how she reconciled the fury in her writing with her insistence that boys need spaces where they do not feel accused before they have even spoken. She thought those functions had to be separated.
A group intended to help young men, she said, “cannot be infused with anger and finger pointing because that’s just going to shut everybody down.” In the larger culture, she believes women still need room to express anger about what has happened to them, and she bristles when people tell them the problem would be easier to discuss if only they sounded nicer.
That leaves an unresolved problem at the center of the gender war. The boy experiences the whole culture, not the carefully separated rooms. He sees the viral post saying men are trash, the teacher talking about toxic masculinity, the woman explaining why she would choose the bear, the influencer telling him feminism despises him, the podcast host offering revenge disguised as self-improvement, the dating app, the pornography, the rejection and the comment section beneath all of it.
Women experience the whole culture too, including the men joking about rape, the influencer describing women as property, the stranger following them home, the politician discussing their bodies and the endless men online explaining that their fear is propaganda.
Neither arrives at the conversation empty.
This piece is part of The Manosphere, my reporting series on the online and offline forces reshaping how boys and men understand themselves.
Subscribe on Substack to get the next chapter.
The boy in the room
Near the end, I asked Elle to imagine that a 12-year-old boy had walked into the room. He has been watching the videos. He has begun repeating things about women. Maybe he thinks girls only want the top 10 percent of men. Maybe he thinks feminism has made him guilty simply for being male. Maybe he is lonely, angry, frightened about his future and thrilled that someone online has finally told him that none of his confusion is actually confusing because there is one enemy behind all of it.
What would she do?
After everything Elle had told me about patriarchy, harassment, violence and the anger in her body, I expected the answer to contain considerably more theory. Instead she started with the boy.
“You’ve got to hear them first and you’ve got to meet them where they are.”
She said she would ask questions rather than immediately correct him, because telling someone what to think rarely creates the opening to examine where a belief came from. She would want him to encounter actual women rather than the composite woman assembled for him by a feed, and women to understand the pressures boys actually face rather than the version they meet through the worst posts online.
She also wants him to learn how algorithms and marketing funnels work, because an adolescent who understands that somebody is making money from keeping him furious has at least one more fact for weighing the fury.Then she widens the bargain.
Women would have to listen too.
“I’ve definitely had guys say that women don’t really understand what we’re facing,” she said. “So, yeah, but let’s have it be reciprocal.”
By then we had been talking for almost two hours, and nothing in those minutes had disappeared. Elle still believed patriarchy was the central system organizing much of what we had discussed. She still believed men often mistake social conditioning for biological destiny. She still carried anger about what men had done to her and to women she knew, and I still had questions about whether her explanations of men left enough room for men to explain themselves.
The 12-year-old boy she imagined entering the room would eventually hear about all of that.
She just did not want it to be the first thing he heard.
This piece is part of The Manosphere, my reporting series on the online and offline forces reshaping how boys and men understand themselves.
Subscribe on Substack to get the next chapter.
Written by Luc Olinga
From a Cameroonian shantytown to the Boston Globe. Founder of The Manosphere newsletter. Covering masculinity, AI, power & culture. Ex-AFP, Gizmodo, TheStreet.
Thank you for a really lovely, powerful piece. I continue to appreciate our conversations.
And, I will also continue to assert that the only reason men want a unique male identity is because it has historically, and still today, comes with power and privilege that they know they don't want to give up. Young men, in particular, may not consciously feel that but they also push back against being a good human being enough with no other explanation. Part of being a man in this culture means believing you are better than women. For a demographic so bought into hierarchy, most don't want to give that part up and admit that they aren't materially different than women, with the exception of socialization.
I bolster this by giving the examples of the Aka, where men are deeply involved in child care and the Yoruba, where age and seniority have historically been greater distinctions than gender of status and economic roles. New research indicates that Paleolithic peoples did the same work, ate the same foods, and did not worry all that much about gender roles.
My anecdotal pool of autistic young men bolsters my belief that this is both true and possible, as does my scholarship around forager bands — both current and ancient. Men and women may have their own initiation rituals but personal autonomy combined with deep interdependence with the rest of the group means people are people and as long as they contribute to the band and do not violate the groups norms, they can pretty much do and act as they wish. That's the world I'd like to see for all of us.
I'll have to try again to find the quote that feminists like men better than other men do.
With deep appreciation for your writing and our continued discussions.
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1 day ago
Thank you, Elle. You've stated your thesis at full strength here, power is what men don't want to surrender, and the Aka, Yoruba and forager evidence behind it is exactly the range most of the men I meet never see. I'll keep the honest hedge I kept in the piece: some of them describe a felt distinction, not just a claim on rank, and I'd rather let the reporting settle how much is which than call it from here. And yes, send the quote when you find it.
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I left it in another comment - slightly misremembered - but still a powerful distinction, I believe.
100% agree about the desire for a distinctly male identity and why they cling to it. That's where I push back against the narrative from some men aiming allyship that boys are completely innocent and being corrupted by the manosphere "picking them up because they feel indicted before the ever did anything".
They may not be consciously aware of their agency and the choices they make, but it's there and they are making the choices that lead to theie own isolation.
A close friend of mine had a son before I had my daughter. I remember him as a little boy. Once we were at a local play (outside during intermission) when he was around 3 and a half. He started playing with this other little boy and they're running around the crowd. Some kind of made up tag game with changing dynamics, the way little kids do. He's zipping by us and pointing out his new best friend. His mom asked his name and he said, "i don't know". Within 5 minutes all the little kids of that age group are zipping around outside during intermission having the time of their lives.
This is the default we're born with. Before the Patriarchy programming sets in. I believe feminist moms see it best, when the gender switch gets flipped, despite everything they have done to protect their children. The kids go off to school and church, engaging in the broader culture and somewhere along the line, something happens. Within 5 years of that little boy making instant best friends to trashing his mother's computer she uses to provide for them all while screaming "LOOK WHAT YOU MADE ME DO WITH MY ANGER!".
Same little boy. 5 years. When his world existed predominantly within his family, he made one choice in how to engage with those around him. He was loving and kind to everyone. A joy, happy, Sunshine. And very much a little boy. When his world expanded to include more of the broader cultural norms, he made a different choice in how to engage with those around him. Mean, competitive, rage when he didn't get his way, jealous, resentful of his you get siblings.
The only way out is to go back to the first choice of being a person and discard the current cultural ideas about being "a man".
But most od them won't.
I don't believe 4B and decentering men is about creating a better society. I think it's more about giving up on the idea that men will allow a better society for women, so women are tapping out. Turning away from the failures of liberal feminism after a generation of trying and holding a flame for men to join us and being rejected and attacked again and again and again for wanting better for them as well as us. It's walking away from hope of a better future together with men. It's refusing to bef and plead for decent treatment anymore. It's shaking the dust from our feet and not casting our pearls before swine.
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No one should be defining who another person IS. Not men defining women, not women defining men. Self definition is BECOMING. The process of discovering identity yourself is important. By defining a persons identity for them you are making them a slave to your opinion. You take away their freedom to be, to grow, to make mistakes and learn. Only by having an inner coinviction of who you are makes you strong enough to live it.
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No one should be defining who each person is but that doesn't mean that sociological dynamics don't exist and that they don't tell us an immense amount about the the cultural forces that impact each of us. Cognitive science says that only about 2% of thought is conscious. The rest is stuff buried deep in your subconscious mind that comes from childhood indoctrination, media, peers, religion, politics, etc. The notion of the rational human is a 19th century one that doesn't hold up to modern scientific understanding. Plus, if you've been messaged since you were a baby that you must suppress all difficult emotions other than anger, you're twice as likely as someone who hasn't been to be run from behind the scenes by everything you've suppressed.
That being said, it's a good thing for each person to work at self-definition and to uncover as much as they can of their authentic self.
I believe it comes from this study:
Rudman & Goodwin, Gender Differences in Automatic In‑Group Bias (2004)
And has morphed since then from the original ingroup comparison the study looked at.
The morphed version is still true though, based on much of the same logic when looking at the violence one gender lays on the other a d where all that stems from.
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then every boy spends part of his life being inspected for violations.
Say the remaining part. If feminists are imploring men to leave that box, then feminists aren't the ones inspecting boys for violations.
That inspection mostly comes from other men.
We women know this because we have our own cultural box created by gender nonsense and our own policing issues. The majority of women will straight up tell you that their cruelest policing comes from other women. Men are mostly indifferent to us.
Why would it be any different for boys and men? Yet men continue to blame women, and particularly feminists, for being policed by other men.
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Most unthinking men are not indifferent to the possibility and patriarchal approval and privilege of of dominating women; happens all the time. They are indifferent to the human being behind the skin of a woman, cis or otherwise.
“actually like men better than men like men.
Ok, I slightly misremembered that. What the study actually says is this: "To provide some useful context to this finding, we note that women feminists were no more negative toward men than men in general were. In this sense, feminists are no more guilty of the charge of misandry than men are themselves."
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1 day ago
That's the one, Elle, and it's the same paper I cited in the piece. Your quote lands right where the reporting did: the study's claim is that feminists are no more negative toward men than men are toward men, which knocks down the man-hating-feminist stereotype cleanly. It's a sturdier finding than the "like men more than men do" version anyway, since nobody can wave it off as a stretch. Appreciate you running it down.
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