What the online gurus get wrong

Marcus is twenty-two. Between sets at the gym, he scrolls short videos. A workout tip. Then a guy saying real men don't chase women. Then a guy saying women only want money. By his last set, his whole feed is telling him the same thing. Women are the problem, and he's losing.

That isn't a coincidence. In twenty twenty-four, researchers at Dublin City University set up ten brand-new phone accounts posing as teenage boys. Every one of them was shown this kind of content within the first twenty-three minutes. It was a small study, and a study of real users found that people's own searching matters a lot too. But the lesson is simple. It will find you.

And it's everywhere. A twenty twenty-five Movember survey of more than three thousand young men in Britain, the United States and Australia found that most of them regularly watch what it called masculinity influencers. Heavy viewers had worse mental health, on average. That's a link, not proof of cause. But it's worth noticing how you feel after an hour of it.

So the question is, are they right? Let's check three of their favourite claims against the research.

Claim one. Be the alpha, like a wolf pack. The idea came from studies of unrelated wolves thrown together in captivity. The biologist David Mech studied wild wolves for decades and found that a wild pack is a family, led by the parents. He spent years asking people to stop using the alpha idea. Even wolves aren't alphas.

Claim two. Eighty percent of women chase the top twenty percent of men. That traces back to photo ratings on one dating site in two thousand nine. Women rated most men's photos harshly, yet the messages they actually sent were spread fairly evenly. And a rating of a photo isn't a relationship. Couples who knew each other a long time before dating matched far less on looks.

Claim three. Women want jerks. In David Buss's study of thirty-seven cultures, when people ranked what they wanted in a partner, both men and women put kind and understanding first, then intelligent. Looks and money were on the list, but lower down, for both sexes.

Now, her side. When a man repeats those lines on a date, she hears it within a minute. Talk of alphas, or of women being shallow, sounds like contempt. And contempt is the one thing nobody wants to sit across from. She isn't rejecting a winner. She's leaving a guy who seems to dislike women.

Let's change one fact. Marcus swaps twenty minutes of those videos for twenty minutes on the phone with a friend, or a pickup basketball game. Nothing about his looks or his bank account has changed. But he walks into his week less angry, and people can feel that.

The mistake guys make is trusting someone who profits from their anger. Many of these voices sell courses and memberships. Research on online forums found that pickup-artist communities often became a stepping stone to angrier, more hopeless ones.

Here's the rule, in one breath. If the advice makes you angrier and lonelier, it's bad advice, no matter who's selling it.

This week, notice how you feel after twenty minutes of that content, and after twenty minutes with a real person. Next time, what women actually respond to.