Only by Being Terrible Do They Avoid Being Comic

Sarah AlKahly-Mills explores James Bloodworth’s “Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere.”

By Sarah AlKahly-MillsAugust 24, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

• Gender & Sexuality

JAMES BLOODWORTH, the Orwell Prize long-listed author of Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain (2018), has now published a similar work of immersive journalism, Lost Boys: A Personal Journey Through the Manosphere. This time, Bloodworth embeds himself in the world of “red-pilled” men and boys, pickup artists, incels, and masculinity coaches and their acolytes. Part memoir, part deep dive into the online and offline communities populated by such misogynists, Bloodworth’s account links the proliferation of their ideologies to a wider political and historical context, in the process ascribing due importance to a phenomenon whose dangers often have been woefully underestimated.

I went into my reading of Lost Boys skeptical of the new value Bloodworth could bring to the topic. What was there to be added that Laura Bates, for instance, hadn’t already said in her 2020 book Men Who Hate Women, another journey into the network of males united over their shared virulent hatred of the opposite sex? Women had been sounding the alarm for years, warning of sealioning, the dressing-up of misogyny in pseudoscience, the dog whistles and coded language that were increasingly popping up online. But in the first few pages, Bloodworth demonstrates that he is well positioned to write this story, having dabbled in a part of the manosphere before it was even known as such, and in a way that only a man could.

It’s 2006, and he’s on a mission to pick up a woman, having forked over £2,000 to spend a weekend with a famed pickup artist, the “best in the business,” and learn “how to mimic the traits of the sexual elite of ‘alphas’ and ‘naturals.’” What follows are clumsy, painfully awkward attempts to approach women in a nightclub that lend sense to the C. S. Lewis epigraph: “Only by being terrible do they avoid being comic.” For while the failed shots are funny, the pep talks and lessons in dating theory that precede them are anything but. Even in the pickup sphere, where members are often afforded a degree of sympathy (because who among us hasn’t struggled with the dating scene?), women are treated with ferocious contempt, objectified, portrayed as slaves to their subconscious desire to be dominated—“machine-like and programmable.”

A strong sense of self-awareness permeates Bloodworth’s narration, which, in those parts where he does play protagonist, reads like a confessional—though he isn’t necessarily looking for exoneration, either for himself or for the men who inhabit the spaces he eventually returns to as a mole. “It wasn’t that I had abandoned all of my moral scruples,” he writes on joining Real Social Dynamics’ pickup boot camp. “It was more that I’d rationalized my misgivings away.” And it would take a hefty dose of rationalization to seek help from a community that built its practices on the back of what Bloodworth describes as its “holy book,” Neil Strauss’s The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (2005), a best-selling book that describes a girl as “all holes: ears to listen to me, a mouth to talk at me, and a vagina to squeeze orgasms out of me.” In any cult, and Bloodworth rightfully draws parallels to the cult mentality, there must be a message that resonates with devotees, and in this case, it was that women were a monolith who could be manipulated just by pulling the right strings. That “the pickup artists cribbed most of their theories from evolutionary psychology” will come as a surprise to no one. For me, it raised the question of whether we should treat as hapless victims the men frequenting these communities if they liked what they were hearing long enough to stick around. Thankfully, there is no absolution in these pages. “In 2006 I was almost certainly sexist by today’s standards,” Bloodworth admits. “But then, to depict the pickup community as uniquely sexist might be to let wider society off the hook,” he writes, tracing a neat line between the community’s dehumanizing rhetoric and the sleazy tabloids of the 1990s and 2000s, which “featured surreptitious paparazzi ‘upskirt’ shots of female celebrities.”

There would be many such dots to connect over the course of the book, and this is where Lost Boys excels. Bloodworth seamlessly links the loosely connected beliefs that comprise the right-wing value system—internet trolling culture, conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement, and the rise of the MAGA movement, for instance—and that, to the uninitiated eye, might seem like disparate phenomena. In situating this latest iteration of age-old misogyny in a broader context—and, perhaps more importantly, in showing the spillover from the online into the “real world,” if any such distinction can be made at this point—Bloodworth demonstrates the pervasive, enduring nature of misogyny, dispelling the notion that any of this is unusual or new. In the process, he alerts us to the violent consequences of what is a veritable radicalization process: the various misogynistic terrorist attacks, of which the 2014 Isla Vista killings and 2021 Denver and Lakewood shootings are only a couple of examples.

Also amply accounted for are the overlapping belief systems that have hatred for the Other at their core, fueled by anxieties concerning the supremacy and virility of the men who promulgate them. Men who hate women, strip them of their humanity and agency, and simultaneously hold them responsible for societal decline and personal failure are also likely to do the same for Black, Jewish, and gay people. “Indeed, the ubiquity of anti-gay rhetoric at the conference is such that I will feel short-changed if none of the speakers ever shows up in the news under a heap of male prostitutes,” writes Bloodworth of his observations at the 21 Convention in Orlando, Florida, where “for four days every October the alpha males of the internet come together to rail against the feminist conspiracy which they believe runs the world.”

For someone handling such sobering subject matter, Bloodworth displays a sharp humor in laying bare the absurdity underpinning these men’s various enterprises. He exposes the inherent contradictions in the core tenets of their Church of Misogyny: saying that women are gold diggers and simultaneously using a pretense of wealth to attract them; pining for idyllic bygone days of happy matrimony for all, while also coveting a harem of options for oneself; decrying the “Oppression Olympics,” and then parroting bogus claims and statistics about male victimhood. Making what would otherwise be a dreary exposé infinitely more enjoyable, Lost Boys is rife with prime comedic material, from an unfortunate-looking boot camp coach, who “didn’t necessarily look like someone who was ‘drowning in pu$$y’”—promising a return on investment in the form of an “abundant sex life with high-calibre women”—to the unironic observations of Nick, one of the “lost boys” Bloodworth meets, about the benefits of hypergamy, derived from a surface-level knowledge of Genghis Khan that “blithely leav[es] out the raping and pillaging.”

I was hoping for a more intimate window onto Bloodworth’s personal experiences in the manosphere—which, given the subtitle, I expected would occupy a more prominent position. Also missing from Lost Boys is the substantial issue of online pornography, which children have been exposed to at alarmingly young ages. This has fueled sexist behavior even in elementary school classrooms, and has shaped sexual scripts between men and women for the worse, with young women reporting being physically harmed during intimate encounters and pressured to engage in acts they find degrading due to their ubiquity in porn. Considering Andrew Tate’s involvement in trafficking girls for cam work and encouraging his followers to engage in misogynistic violence, the link between the manosphere and pornography should have been delved into.

Despite these oversights, Bloodworth delivers a comprehensive, important, and enjoyable read (insofar as a book about the manosphere can be enjoyable). With the book’s frequent acknowledgment of the struggles women face (we’ve been looksmaxxing since before it was cool) and its generous citations of women’s words throughout, there is never a sense that the author is talking over us. Moreover, that a man should lend his voice to this discussion is valuable in itself. Hopefully, more men will take heed and extricate themselves from spaces that are exploiting them and making the world a more desperate, dangerous place for everyone.