By Inger Storm Sandboe and Antara Chakraborthy
Introduction
Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary on the manosphere has renewed mainstream attention to online subcultures often dismissed as fringe. This coincides with a broader discursive shift: the normalisation of a distinct ‘biological’ vocabulary in manosphere discourse. This rhetoric usually relies on a weak scientific basis, selectively interpreted or removed from its original context. One example is the viral trend of ‘bone smashing,’ which misappropriates orthopedic principles to justify extreme jawline modification. Across the manosphere, this biological or ‘black pill’ language has become a default mode through which social identity, hierarchy, and outcomes are justified. This manifests in face ratings, ‘before-and-after’ glow-up images, and categorising men into “tiers” (e.g., chad vs average), reducing men’s bodies to quantifiable metrics, inherently resulting in hierarchies.
The normalisation of biological-deterministic vocabulary is anchored in a misogynistic worldview that seeks to justify the dominance of men in the guise of evolutionary necessity. Inequality is thereby recast as inevitable and ‘natural,’ stripping away social and political context, echoing earlier traditions such as phrenology, eugenics, and scientific racism where biology was used to reinforce existing hierarchies. In this sense, the vocabulary itself performs vital ideological work within the manosphere and far-right communities. Ideas are constantly co-opted and resignified as they move across digital environments. Platforms such as X and TikTok amplify this framing through highly visual, comparative content, reducing the nuances into self-evident ‘proof’ of what works. For instance, content creators like Clavicular exemplify this dynamic, presenting extreme physical modification as ‘ascension.’ This term describes a perceived transition from ‘ugly’ or ‘incel’ status to a ‘Chad’ archetype, a transformation now treated within these subcultures as a moral and biological imperative, selectively reinterpreting and embedding within these emotionally charged narratives in the manosphere.
Biological Language as Social Framework
The ‘red pill’ and ‘black pill’ should be understood as two positions within a shared hierarchy. The ‘red pill’ frames dating as a competitive sexual marketplace structured around ‘alpha’ and ‘beta’ categories, emphasising strategic self-optimisation. The black pill ideology extends this logic into a fatalistic worldview where biological traits are seen as immutable. Rather than distinct ideologies, both rely on misogynistic readings of biology that naturalise inequality. By selectively appropriating evolutionary data and skewed statistical models, such as the ’80/20′ sexual market distribution, misogyny is reframed as a rational response to a ‘natural’ order instead of a personal grievance. Within this framework, inequality and failure are recast as biological traits rather than social conditions. This worldview is further sustained through an evolving vocabulary, including terms such as clavicular width, SMV (sexual market value), and mogging, which circulate as shorthand for ranking human worth. These terms compress social hierarchies into bodily metrics, where attractiveness and statuses are assessed through height, facial symmetry, frame etc. In this way, social interaction is reframed as a process of continuous visual evaluation, in which individuals are positioned within an implicit hierarchy of desirability. In manosphere forums, users increasingly attribute rejection to height percentiles or jaw structure, leading to a state of ’agency collapse’ where personal growth is rejected in favor of a nihilistic, fatalistic identity.
Looksmaxxing forums often function as a low-barrier entry point into this way of thinking. While initially framed as self-improvement, this discourse pushes self-evaluation and optimisation of the body. This process often progresses from self-improvement to comparison and ranking, and ultimately to rigid hierarchies and fatalism. What begins as an aesthetic goal can morph into a sense of doom where effort is viewed as meaningless, further affirming black pill logic. This was starkly illustrated in the case of a 14-year-old student who was issued a restriction order under Singapore’s Internal Security Act in September 2025. The teenager identified as an incel, but was radicalised through a “salad bar” of ideologies, including looksmaxxing and far-right extremism, demonstrating overlap between these ecosystems. This overlap is epistemological: both the manosphere and the far-right share an investment in hierarchy as natural order, and a scepticism of social explanations, which foregrounds inequality, power, and history. Biological determinism thus provides a shared grammar through which misogyny, ethnonationalism, and authoritarianism are framed as objective reality. The same logics used to rank facial symmetry are extended to justify racial and political dominance, erasing the line between personal grievance and the formation of a far-right political identity.
Emotional Grievance and Affective Communities
The normalisation of biological determinism has become a way to reshape how political belief is expressed. Political beliefs are increasingly framed as biological truths rather than ideology, allowing them to reject the label of ‘extremist,’ while maintaining its central tenets. At the same time, these spaces are structured around shared emotional experiences using personal grievances to justify harmful narratives and rhetoric against their perceived enemy. Loneliness, rejection, the absence of social and romantic relationships, failed career trajectories, and lower socio-economic position are common but not inherently extremist. However, they are reframed through this fatalist perception of the world that serves as a gateway to far-right support. Biological deterministic explanations offer cognitive closure, reducing complex social realities to absolute ‘genetic facts’ and shifting blame from the self onto unchangeable traits. This paves the way to transform personal grievance into, for instance, a ‘war on woke’ or a defence of ‘natural order,’ effectively radicalising personal disappointment into a political identity, without explicitly terming it as such.
To understand the impact of the prevalence that this biological language has, it is necessary to look beyond the ideologies and into the affective grievances. These are the deep-seated feelings of rejection and failure that individuals seek to alleviate. While research on extremism has largely moved away from psychological profiling, recent years have seen a return to the role of personality and specifically emotional drivers in developing attachments to fringe and extreme communities such as the manosphere. This acknowledges how these online spaces function as affective communities, and not about creating a ‘profile’ of the perpetrator. In this context, very real, seemingly non-extremist experiences like loneliness, economic anxiety, or social marginalisation, can validate them through a lens of ‘fixed biological fate.’ In these spaces, shared grievances and feelings of inadequacy are continuously validated and reinforced, normalising hopelessness or encouraging others to interpret their circumstances similarly.
Conclusion
The grievances expressed in these sub-groups reflect relatively ‘normal’ concerns that individuals encounter in their daily life, including loneliness, status anxiety, and social rejection, making the transition from fringe discourse to extreme positions deceptively smooth. Their apparent normalcy allows deterministic and exclusionary ideas to spread with limited resistance, often bypassing filters targeting overt forms of misogyny and hate speech. The blurring of boundaries between the mainstream and the extreme make the extremist ideas within these discourses difficult to identify and even more challenging to dismantle.
The boundary between biology and ideology is inherently unstable within these spaces. Scientific observations are ideologically naturalised, shielding underlying extremist assumptions from behind a veneer of ‘objective truth.’ Understanding this shift is critical because it reveals how extremist thought adapts to the space it occupies, embedding itself in everyday discourses through the language of inevitability. Recognising this ‘biological’ mask therefore is crucial to preventing a fatalistic, fringe rhetoric from further embedding itself as a common-sense reality in the lives of young men.
Inger Storm Sandboe is a DPhil (PhD) candidate at the University of Oxford, currently specialising in the role of community and personality in the radicalisation of right-wing extremists and lone-actor terrorists.
Antara Chakraborthy is an Associate Research Fellow at the Center of Excellence for National Security, RSIS (Singapore), with research focus on diasporic studies, religious nationalism, and their impact on polarisation, social cohesion, and social resilience.