How evolutionary biology became an unwilling ally of the manosphere

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: From steroid use to "bone smashing", the "looksmaxxing" movement is only the latest example of the manosphere's toxic hold on young people. Less obvious is the role ecologists have unwittingly played in its rise.

Contemporary male supremacist arguments routinely borrow from evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology, and that should give ecologists pause. As a professor of environmental science at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR), I study, among other things, how these sciences and philosophy have shaped one another over the centuries. My co-author, a master's student, researches the distribution of chemical elements in aquatic ecosystems and the social and political implications of advances in environmental science.

Before the internet, men's rights and anti-feminist movements rarely invoked biology. They relied mainly on psychological and sociological arguments to justify keeping men above women in the social hierarchy. Today, members of the manosphere ground their ideology primarily in biology.

This shift gives them a rhetorical advantage: they can claim that their fatalism and misogyny simply reflect the natural order. Their grievances then appear to rest on facts while feminist demands are dismissed as ideology. The concept of the alpha male is the most glaring example of the manosphere's appropriation of what's known as behavioral ecology.

The term was first used nearly a century ago in a study of social hierarchy in mice. It gained popularity in the 1980s through the work of scholars David L. Mech on wolves and Frans de Waal on chimpanzees.

While this research made no misogynistic arguments, it did show a certain gender bias. Alpha males received more attention than alpha females, who were mentioned mainly in the context of reproduction; alpha males were described in a much wider range of roles. Since then, the concept of the alpha male (unlike that of the alpha female) has spread widely in public discourse and it has taken on particular significance within the manosphere, where it now refers to a virile, confident man who attracts many women effortlessly.