They Ran Big Corporations. In Private, They Wept.
The Hunger the Red Pill Cannot Feed
He arrived, as they often did, in the early evening or on an extended lunch break.
Successful by every measure the culture offers. The kind of man who had built success— a company, a reputation, a life that from the outside appeared to lack nothing. He spoke carefully, in the register of men accustomed to being listened to. He had done his research before coming. He knew what to expect, or thought he did.
Within thirty minutes he was crying on my therapy table.
Men entered my spaces and unravelled in ways that they don’t normally — even in the safety of their own homes. They cried because they were moved — something deep inside of them was touched by a type of grace they had not experienced before.
From the unfamiliar and slightly terrifying experience of being in a room where his performance was neither required nor rewarded — where his carefully curated sense of self and identity had no function — something more honest moved in through the gap.
I witnessed this pattern so many times over six years of working as a Tantric Dakini that I stopped being surprised by it. What surprised me instead was the consistency of what lay underneath — not darkness, not perversion, not the hidden pathology the culture assumes must be present in men who seek this kind of work. What lay underneath, in almost every case, was a boy who had learned very early that power meant control, that safety meant performance, and that desire — real desire, the kind that makes you vulnerable, the kind that connects you to something larger than yourself — was a liability to be managed rather than an intelligence to be followed.
These men had not failed. In fact, they had succeeded— but only at the project the empire asked of them. And the project, I came to understand, was killing them.
The Symptom We Keep Misreading
The Manosphere — that loose, fractious, algorithmically accelerated ecosystem of red pill philosophy, incel forums, Andrew Tate disciples, and men going their own way — is one of the most discussed and least understood cultural phenomena of our time.
The mainstream response to it follows a predictable arc: alarm, condemnation, the careful extraction of its most egregious statements for public display, followed by bewilderment that so many men — young men especially — find it compelling. The conclusion most commentators reach is that these men are broken, radicalised, or simply misogynistic. The solution, implicitly or explicitly offered, is better education, better therapy, better feminist consciousness.
I want to suggest something different, entirely.
And don’t get me wrong, I am not saying I agree with the behaviour of the men being showcased in the Manosphere… I just… understand them.
The hunger that drives men into these spaces is real. And it is a hunger that no one — not the Manosphere, not mainstream feminism, not the therapy industry, not the church — is currently feeding.
That hunger is the hunger for initiation.
What Initiation Actually Is
Every traditional culture in human history has understood something that modernity has almost entirely forgotten: boys do not become men automatically. The transition requires a deliberate rupture — a passage through something difficult, disorienting, and transformative, held by elders who have made the crossing themselves and can guide others through it.
Initiation, in it’s truest form, is not hazing. It is not dominance training. It is not the suppression of emotion in the service of toughness. It is something far more demanding and far more tender than any of those things: it is the deliberate dismantling of the boy’s identity, followed by the careful reconstruction of something larger, more grounded, and more genuinely powerful in its place.
In initiation, a boy learns what his body is for beyond performance. He learns that strength is not the absence of vulnerability but its mastery. He learns, often for the first time, that he is not alone — that the men who came before him struggled with the same fears, the same hungers, the same terror of inadequacy — and survived them, and became something worth becoming.
The West dismantled its initiatory structures centuries ago. What replaced them — school, sport, the military, corporate hierarchy — are not initiations. They are performance training. They teach boys how to compete, how to produce, how to suppress what is inconvenient. They do not teach boys how to feel. They do not teach them what desire is for. They do not introduce them to the interior life that every human being carries and that, in the absence of guidance, either atrophies or explodes.
The men who arrive in the Manosphere are men carrying the full weight of an uninitiated masculine energy — the hunger, the aggression, the desperate need for meaning and belonging and genuine power — with no container, no elder, no tradition that knows what to do with it.
Andrew Tate did not create this hunger. He found it and he monetised the wound.
What Feminism Got Wrong — And Right
I want to be careful here, because this is the part of the conversation that most quickly collapses into bad faith.
Feminism is not the cause of the crisis in masculinity. The cause of the crisis in masculinity is the same force that is the cause of the crisis in femininity: a civilisation that organised itself around the suppression of genuine feeling, the performance of prescribed roles, and the extraction of human beings as instruments of production and power. Men and women have been equally deformed by this structural reality within society — differently, but equally.
And yet.
Feminism, in its most visible cultural forms, has not always known how to speak to men’s pain without making it a threat. The legitimate and necessary project of naming male violence and male entitlement has sometimes produced a cultural atmosphere in which male vulnerability is treated with suspicion — in which a man who admits to longing, confusion, or genuine suffering is assumed to be performing victimhood as a power move.
I have seen it time and time again— men come in and express that there is no safe place for the oceans of feelings they have. Not even in their marriage. Actually, often especially not in their marriages. This is where I see this pattern play out the most, with mens emotional bodies being subjugated by women who do not know how to go beyond the cultural conditioning of “men don’t cry”. Yes, that conditioning runs in both men and women, and that is why we are here.
The men I worked with — the men in those rooms, crying without knowing why — were not the enemy of women. They were the product of the same system that oppressed women: a system that required men to partition themselves from their own feeling in order to function as instruments of power. The same force that exiled the feminine exiled the interior life of men. The wound is shared. The liberation, if it comes, will be shared too.
The Manosphere has located a real pain and misidentified its source. The pain is real: the loneliness, the purposelessness, the sense of being disposable, the absence of genuine belonging, the hunger for something that means something. These are not fabrications. I have sat with them, in body, in breath, in the specific weight of a man who has never been given permission to be anything other than useful.
The misidentification is the claim that women — feminism, modernity, the erosion of traditional gender roles — are responsible for this pain. They are not. The pain precedes all of that. It is older than the culture wars. It is the pain of a civilisation that has not known how to initiate its men for centuries.
What These Men Are Actually Hungry For
In six years of working as a Dakini, I met countless men who performed dominance because it was the only language they had been given for the thing they actually wanted — which was, almost without exception, some version of the same thing: to be seen. To be met. To exist in the presence of something that did not require their performance and did not flinch from their reality. To feel, even briefly, that they were more than what they produced.
The red pill promises men power. What men actually want is presence — their own presence, returned to them from wherever it went when they were taught to lock it away.
The red pill promises men that the problem is women’s liberation. What men are actually experiencing is their own captivity — inside roles, inside performances, inside a model of masculinity that has no room for the interior life that every human being carries and that does not stop existing simply because it has been denied.
The red pill promises men a return to hierarchy as the solution to their confusion. What men are actually longing for is initiation — the experience of being taken seriously enough to be challenged, of being held by something larger than themselves, of being brought through a passage that leaves them more themselves on the other side.
None of this is available in the Manosphere. What is available in the Manosphere is the performance of these things — a simulation of initiation without any of its actual costs or transformations, a community built around shared resentment rather than shared growth, a model of power that is recognisable precisely because it is the same model that produced the wound in the first place.
The men in these spaces are not looking for Andrew Tate. They are looking for an elder. And they are going to Tate because no elder has shown up.
The Elder Who Has Not Arrived
This is the absence at the centre of the crisis.
Every genuine initiatory tradition was held by elders — men and women who had made the crossing themselves, who carried the scars of it, who knew from the inside what the passage required and what it made possible. The elder’s authority was not the authority of dominance or performance. It was the authority of having been through the fire and come back changed, and of being willing to go back into it with the next generation.
The West does not have these elders. Not in sufficient numbers, not in positions of cultural visibility, not in forms that young men can find and trust. What it has instead are celebrities, influencers, and algorithms that have learned to serve men the most inflammatory version of what their pain is already telling them.
Jordan Peterson is the closest thing the mainstream has produced to a masculine elder in recent years — and his partial success, the genuine hunger he has met in millions of young men, is itself evidence of how starved the culture is. But Peterson is a psychologist and a moralist, not an initiator. He can tell men what to do. He cannot take them through the fire.
What genuine initiation requires is not instruction, but embodied experience through first hand encounter. It is the experience of being met by something larger than the self — a tradition, a practice, a presence, a force — that does not flatter the ego but dismantles it, carefully and without cruelty, in service of something more real.
I know what this looks like. I have held it. Not as a teacher standing above, but as a presence moving alongside — as a Dakini whose function is not to tell a man who he should be but to reflect back, with precision and without flinching, who he actually is beneath everything he has performed.
The men who came to me did not leave with a doctrine. They left with themselves — or the beginning of themselves, which is all any genuine initiation can offer.
But I am also not a man — and men being initiated by the feminine is a whole different form of initiation. Men also need male only spaces to journey pl
What the Manosphere Cannot Give and What Might
The Manosphere will not solve the crisis it is profiting from. It cannot, because it is built on the same architecture that created the wound: the architecture of dominance, performance, and the suppression of genuine feeling in the service of power.
What might actually help is harder to name and harder to find — because it has been deliberately dismantled, and its reconstruction is slow, unglamorous, and cannot be monetised at scale.
It looks like men sitting with other men in spaces that are not organised around competition or productivity. It looks like somatic practice — the slow, painstaking work of returning to a body that has been used as an instrument for decades. It looks like genuine encounter with the feminine — not the performance of it, not the commodity version of it, but the actual, destabilising, initiatory feminine that does not flatter and does not flinch. It looks like art, and grief, and the willingness to admit, in the presence of witnesses, that something has been lost and that the loss has a cost.
It looks, in other words, like everything the Manosphere explicitly rejects.
And yet the hunger it is failing to feed is real. The loneliness is real. The purposelessness is real. The desperate need for something that means something — for belonging, for genuine power, for a life that is more than the accumulation of dominance and the performance of not needing anything — is real.
These men deserve better than what they are being offered.
Not because they are victims. But because the uninitiated masculine is one of the most dangerous forces on earth — and the world cannot afford to keep producing it.
I am personally a part of many circles and communities that offer real initiation in this way — and I have been priviliged to be witness to a culture where it still remains.
This is what the Manosphere is looking for. It will not find it there.
But it exists. It has always existed. And the men who are ready for it — who are tired enough of the performance, hungry enough for something real, brave enough to walk into a room and let the architecture of their selfhood come undone — will find their way to it.
Sigourney Belle is the author of When Eros Overthrows an Empire*, the first book in* The Body Gospels — a four-book autotheory series tracing the suppression and return of Eros through civilisation, love, the body, and the shadow. She worked for six years as a Tantric Dakini in Melbourne, and has spent two decades at the intersection of medicine, mysticism, and cultural transformation.
