The Male Complaint argues it's unhelpful to blame toxic masculinity for digital misogyny. We should try to understand the manosphere - even if we disagree with it.

"Imagine her tenderly pressing her soft lips against yours", writes one incel on Reddit, before concluding, "you will never get to experience this because your skeleton is too small or the bones in your face are not the right shape".

In his debut book, The Male Complaint, Simon Copland escorts his readers through the manosphere and into the minds of its inhabitants. He illustrates how boys and men who are "terrifyingly normal" become attracted to the manosphere's grim logic - and the cognitive distortions of anti-feminist influencers like Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson.

While mainstream debates often cite toxic masculinity as the cause of online misogyny, Copland, a writer and researcher at the Australian National University, shifts the blame to a deeper cultural malaise.

It's caused, he argues, by the cruel optimism of the manosphere, the multiple social and economic crises of late-stage capitalism and a collective nihilistic misery in which complaint becomes futile and destruction "the only way out".

The manosphere is a network of loosely related...