[11] The manosphere received significant media coverage following the 2014 Isla Vista killings in California, the 2015 Umpqua Community College shooting in Oregon, and the 2018 Toronto van attack, as well as the online harassment campaign against women in the video game industry known as GamerGate.
[12] The roots of the manosphere lie in the men's liberation movement of the 1970s and 80s,[13] which began as a critique of the limiting nature of traditional male gender roles.
[14] Media scholar Debbie Ging posits that the growth of the World Wide Web has enabled the spread of "virulent" anti-feminism, misogyny, and associated violent rhetoric.
[15] It was subsequently popularized by Ian Ironwood, a pornography marketer who collected a variety of blogs and forums in book form as The Manosphere: A New Hope For Masculinity.
[16] The term entered the popular lexicon when news media began to use it in stories about men who had committed acts of misogynist violence, sexual assault, and online harassment.
[17] Journalist Emma A. Jane identifies the late 2000s–early 2010s as a "tipping point" when manosphere communities moved from the fringes of the Internet towards the mainstream.
She hypothesizes this was related to the advent of Web 2.0 and the rise of social media, in combination with ongoing systemic misogyny within a patriarchal culture.
[21] Ging writes that subgroups such as MRAs and PUAs "exaggerate their differences in displays of infight posturing, in spite of the fact that their philosophies are almost identical".
[25] Criminologist Lisa Sugiura writes that disparate groups within the manosphere are "united by the central belief that feminine values, propelled by feminism, dominate society and promote a 'misandrist' ideology that needs to be overthrown".
[26] The idea of misandry (hatred of or prejudice against men) is commonly invoked, both as an equivalent to misogyny and a way to deny the existence of institutionalized sexism.
[11] Robin Mamié of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and colleagues associate radicalization into far-right ideologies via the manosphere with the idea of the alt-right pipeline.
[45] The manosphere has received significant coverage in the media from its association with high-profile violent attacks including the 2014 Isla Vista killings in California, the 2015 Umpqua Community College shooting in Oregon, and the 2018 Toronto van attack, as well as phenomena such as the sustained online abuse towards female members of the video game community that came to be known as GamerGate.
"[50] He added a caveat later that year, saying, "It should be mentioned that the SPLC did not label MRAs as members of a hate movement; nor did our article claim that the grievances they air on their websites – false rape accusations, ruinous divorce settlements and the like – are all without merit.