Bro-Science: Expertise, Authority, and Reactionary Gender Politics in the Manosphere

This paper examines how scientific language and authority are mobilized within the contemporary manosphere. While existing scholarship has documented the misogynistic and anti-feminist discourses of the manosphere, less attention has been paid to how claims to scientific legitimacy are constructed, circulated, and adapted across these spaces. Drawing on multi-sited digital ethnography, this study maps the dominant scientific domains invoked in manosphere and manosphere-adjacent content, including evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, endocrinology, and personality psychology. Across platforms, influencers and users selectively draw on language and ideas of these fields to legitimize gender essentialism, sexual hierarchies, and neoliberal self-optimisation logics. These claims circulate through a multi-sited ecosystem: including high-visibility podcasts with public intellectuals such as Andrew Huberman and Jordan Peterson, mid-tier “manfluencers” accounts, and smaller manosphere forums and wikis. The analysis identifies a typology of science claims that function ideologically to naturalise inequality, reify “natural” gender roles, and frame masculinity as a neoliberal self-optimisation project. The paper argues that manosphere “bro-science” should be understood as a hybrid formation, where pop science, neoliberal self-help, and reactionary gender politics coalesce. Moreover, the paper challenges the framing of the manosphere’s engagement with academic thought as a simple “misuse” of neutral science. Instead, it examines how this discourse amplifies epistemic tendencies already embedded in popularised versions of these fields, particularly emphases on biological determinism, gender binaries, and individual-level explanations.