Your Favorite Creator Is Not Your Father
How fatherless men became someone else's customer lifetime value
There’s a scene in the movie Fight Club where Tyler Durden tries to leave Project Mayhem.
Do you remember what happens? The members of his group threaten him.
That scene stuck with me, because while Chuck Palahniuk got a lot wrong about men, he got that part right. He was describing something real about how men’s groups work when they go bad.
This is something I’ve watched in the men’s movement. It happened in the public-facing Manosphere, in private group chats I was in during COVID, and I see it happening in the mainstream “masculinity” conversation now, too.
Men have built vibrant online communities around shared pain and need, because the challenges they’re addressing are real. But all too often, those communities become something you’re not allowed to question or leave.
This isn’t ever formally stated, of course. But try poking at a core dogma by identifying how it has a blind spot. “Guys, have you ever considered...?”
You’ll find out pretty quickly where you stand.
This pattern is consistent in men’s communities today. And I think pastors, faith leaders, fathers, and even movement followers need to know about it, to identify broken dynamics before they progress from bad to worse.
The C-Word
The word cult has a spooky aura, with overtones of authoritarianism and domination. These are both valid, but I think they’re imprecise measurements. Because what looks like a healthy hierarchy to one person can seem like ruthless domination to another, especially in an age where we’ve lost sight of what righteous authority looks like.
As usual, I’ve found that etymology contributes productively to the discussion. Etymology Online says “cult” is derived from the Latin cultus, which means “care, labor; worship, reverence.” You can see this root supporting words like agriculture and cultivate. There’s a sense of intention and directed growth towards a defined purpose.
In organizational terms, however, these things make “a cult” more of a feeling than anything specific. And feeling alone is a problematic way for people to determine what’s happening to them in the moment.
For example, a faithful pastor like mine can cultivate his flock. But so did David Koresh and Jim Jones with theirs. If a man is using the subjective feeling of being “cultivated,” it might be easy for him to confuse the two. (Though my pastor doesn’t wear sunglasses while preaching.)
Therefore, I think a more precise definition is required.
So I define a “cult” with a measurable, objectively-verifiable standard: any organization you are materially punished for leaving voluntarily.
I like this definition for a couple reasons. First, because it measures external behavior, not internal intention. I don’t know what’s in any man’s heart. But I can know and document what he does in response to me.
I also like my definition’s flexibility (if I do say so, myself) because it can be applied in non-religious contexts where bad behavior still thrives, like informal social groups.
For example, if you decide to voluntarily leave your bowling league, and the president of the league leaves a negative review of your small business on Google—or induces others to do the same—that will feel kinda “culty” for good reason. While this behavior happens rarely, it does happen. (Nothing against bowling, btw)
Behaviors like this are especially troubling in religious contexts, of course, because coercion and faith are rightly regarded as antithetical. God could have compelled us to love Him. He could have reached into Adam and Eve’s hearts and forcibly halted their desire to sin.
He didn’t. Instead, the Lord gave us our measure of free will specifically to prevent us from being coerced into loving and choosing Him.
As much as I’d like to chase a clarifying rabbit down a Calvinistic hole, I think that’s better saved for another time. Instead, I’ll simply stop at the observation that coercion in the name of God isn’t just wrong, it’s a contradiction of His design.
The Blood Oath You Didn’t Sign
Whereas people largely identify cult-like behavior in religion (Jim Jones, David Koresh, Heaven’s Gate, etc.), I believe we’re now seeing it in the mainstream men’s movement, too.
Again, none of this is made explicit to insiders. Upon joining a Signal chat, no one is told that they’ve made a blood oath to the bros. Instead, the cult-like behavior shows up in the internal dynamics of the group. Asking “the wrong questions” suggests that while being inside the group, you’re still outside it, or working on behalf of those who are. This is a huge problem, because the desire to improve the group by asking intelligent questions is understood instead as an attempt to destroy the group.
So skeptical members encounter comments like the following, often in not-so-many words:
“We don’t question [insert idea].”
“We don’t question this speaker or that creator.”
Wait, really—why not?
I don’t believe in any earthly authority that exists beyond question. But there’s a consistent pattern in conversations about masculinity: once you start questioning core dogmas or personalities, you get called a cuck, a simp, or a beta.
Don’t believe me? Try pushing back on disparaging statements about women made by Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, or Rollo Tomassi, author of the core Manosphere text The Rational Male. Attempting to grant women innate worth as being made in the image of God (Gen 1:27) invites a hate-storm. Their favored term for Bible-believers is “Christ-cuck.”
Try doing the same in private communities who support those men. You’ll get it double.
Then if you change your mind and leave? Or worse, if you leave and warn others about what you were involved in? Don’t be surprised to see your private chats sprayed all over your X timeline, with epithets, memes, and insulting AI artwork included.
Public name-calling and reputation destruction are forms of shaming. Public shaming is an attempt at material punishment. Material punishment for dissent is my definition of cult behavior.
If I’m a loser for disagreeing with you, first of all, that’s not an argument. Second, that bullying dynamic is exactly why groups of men invite suspicion today.
The “First Rule of Fight Club” is famously that you’re not allowed to talk about Fight Club. The second rule might as well be, “You’re not allowed to question Fight Club, either.”
The Product You’re Following
Our pervasive online life today obscures an important distinction: a personality is not a person. In fact, someone’s personality is just a sliver of who they are.
A person is a three-dimensional, 24-hour-a-day thing. He sleeps. He eats. He calls his mom. He has weaknesses, hangups, and quirky habits. He has preferences and moods on both good days and bad.
A personality, on the other hand, is more-or-less consistent. The goal is to provide the same thing every time, as much as humanly possible. This is why TV hosts are called TV personalities. When the cameras roll, they’re a product.
But a multi-dimensional person can’t actually become a product. So it’s better to view “social media personalities” like performers... with one big difference: they’re in a totalizing role.
Social media personalities don’t just read teleprompters for an hour in the evening or play scripted characters onscreen. The role they’re playing is themselves. And because the role is total, any break in the consistency of performance gets framed in such a way as to feed into it. Otherwise, the “willing suspension of disbelief” that hides the person/personality divide will slip, and we’ll see behind the curtain in ways that shatter the illusion.
You can see this on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok all the time, the confessional-sounding video that begins, “Sorry, I’m down today guys, but here’s why.” Then they carefully fit their mood into the narrative they’ve established in their content overall. The apparent “break” is all just part of the show.
And when it isn’t? That’s when content empires get destroyed in a day.
So when you follow a creator, what you’re interacting with isn’t a whole man. It’s a part of him. There’s the perception of interacting with a person, especially if he’s able to create the impression that he’s being genuine. But it’s just not true.
As a podcast host and content creator, I include myself in this. You’re not here with me while I’m cleaning my office or snoring when I sleep (hypothetically-speaking, of course.) I also wake up every day with different moods and feelings about my life. All of this makes me a person.
But when the camera rolls to record a podcast, I have to set all that aside for my guest and, ultimately, for my audience. Even in my most comfortable formats, I’m still a personality. As is every other man you interact with in this space.
That may be illusion-breaking, because we all long for connection. But embracing this reality is vital for what comes next.
Funnels, Not Fathers
Believe it or not, all of this is fine for what it is. After all, celebrity culture is nothing new.
In the case of the masculinity conversation, however, a novel problem has entered through the door of economics. And it’s what makes the whole thing dangerous.
For those who don’t know the term, a “sales funnel” is a system used to generate income for a content creator. It works like this:
First, he gets you on his email list. Then he tries to sell you a five-dollar product. Those five-dollar customers become candidates for a hundred-dollar, thousand-dollar, and even ten- or fifteen-thousand-dollar products.
As you move through those sales levels, the content creator is “working you through his funnel.” The objective is to derive the maximum amount of income over the duration of the relationship with each customer. The technical term is “CLV,” or “customer lifetime value.”
Now look, I don’t have a problem with people making money. I’d rather there be 87,000 men’s coaches than 87,000 IRS agents. And every business makes money by selling you an entry-level product or service, and then trying to bring you back to buy more of that product/service, or additional products/services at a higher cost. This is basic business practices, and there’s nothing wicked about it.
But in the masculinity conversation, there is an enormous blind spot. Men in this space are standing in for fathers.
We exist as a movement because of the war on manhood and masculinity. There was no need for men like me just three or four generations ago. Why would you need to listen to the gramophone—or the radio, or the hardwood-encased cathode-ray TV—about being a man?
You wouldn’t, because your dad showed you, alongside your grandfathers and other men in your family.
These fathers, grandfathers, and righteous men in the family and church still exist. I’m blessed to know some of them, like my pastor. But they’re rare enough that an entire multi-billion dollar worldwide industry has sprung up to fill the vacuum.
Somewhere in the mid-20th century, too many men gave up. The reasons why are too numerous to explore in this piece. But suffice it to say that the men leading the masculinity conversation today, standing in for our absentee relatives and leaders?
THEY AREN’T OUR FATHERS.
They may act fatherly, but in many cases their goal is the funnel. They’re not giving self-sacrificially like a father does. On some level, they’re hoping to receive in return—in some cases, millions of dollars.
Again, I don’t have a problem with people making money. I offer my own mentorship program, and it costs money. Because men’s need for guidance is real, and so is other men’s need to eat and build a living based on what they know about the topic. So this isn’t to incriminate coaching or coaches as a whole. If so, I’d only be incriminating myself.
But let’s put the pieces together.
You have a small sliver of a man, a personality—which might be entirely an act—presenting himself as a complete person and playing upon men’s societal father hunger. He’s doing this in order to make money, sometimes lots of it, and often unethically with high-pressure sales tactics and false promises he can’t or won’t deliver on.
And in this situation, you’re not allowed to ask questions or leave, or you’ll be punished, most often through shame and name-calling.
I call that a cult... of personality.
Scripture has a word for this. The prophet Ezekiel describes leaders who feed themselves instead of the flock:
“You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fat ones, but you do not feed the sheep. The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed, the injured you have not bound up, the strayed you have not brought back, the lost you have not sought, and with force and harshness you have ruled them.” — Ezekiel 34:3-4
That’s the pattern. Men are crying out for fathers, and wicked men hear that cry as a revenue opportunity.
The sheep are hungry. And the shepherds are hungry too.
This is by no means exclusive to the men’s movement. But it’s dangerous in the men’s movement specifically because our society is desperate for fathers. That desperation can be exploited, and often is.
If you have a seven-figure year making content, what are the odds that’s going to go to your head? That you’ll begin to think you are the answer, and other sources of healing and transformation aren’t?
We have a real problem in America with knowing when enough is enough, do we not?
If you as a man make money on your personality, it’s easy to let the personality take over past the point where you stop being a person. And if the men around you reinforce a policy of no question-asking, you become unaccountable. Then you get lost.
And so do they.
Hand Over the Keys, Old Man
When I first offered some of these observations in a solo podcast episode in 2023, the Manosphere was still mostly an internet subculture. Andrew Tate had surfaced pieces of it during his 2022 explosion into mainstream awareness. Dr. Jordan Peterson had also touched on parallel topics, though his education technically placed him outside the Manosphere umbrella.
Since then, the old Manosphere has imploded. But the ideas didn’t disappear.
Instead, they’ve gone mainstream through figures like Nick Fuentes, podcast host Myron Gaines, live-streamer Sneako, and “looksmaxxing” influencer Braden Peters, aka Clavicular. Take this for what it’s worth, but in 2025 Grok also claimed that Andrew Tate’s War Room was generating up to $8 million per month.
If “cults of personality” used to be a dangerous corruption of an otherwise necessary system, the cult has now become the product, especially for Gen Z men.
A couple years ago, disliking Andrew Tate meant that you were a “Boomer.” Feeling the same way about Nick Fuentes today means you’re “out of touch with young men’s pain.” And if you question Clavicular’s use of methamphetamines and testosterone replacement therapy? You must want young guys to be fat, ugly, and alone.
Hand over the keys already, old man! Your time has passed.
In this way, identifying with these influencers and their groups signals belonging not just to a club, but to a whole generation. And this generation has defined itself in opposition to everything that’s come before.
The fundamental problem hasn’t changed. When a personality reaches millions instead of thousands, the cult dynamics scale with it. The funnel gets wider and the father hunger gets exploited at volume, often by men who are younger than their own followers!
Meanwhile, the cost of questioning gets higher, because now there are millions of men ready to call you a cuck for asking.
What This Costs
These cults of personality don’t serve anyone. The leaders are incentivized to bring forth the worst aspects of themselves, which they gratefully do. The cults don’t serve the men in them, because the sheep are getting feasted on instead of fed. And they don’t serve our societal father hunger, either. A wayward older brother definitionally can’t meet the need.
The apostle James is blunt about this, at least in a Christian context: “Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers, for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness” (James 3:1). Any man with a platform, however, carries a weight he may not even realize. And Christ Himself is even more direct about what happens when leaders cause the vulnerable to stumble:
“Temptations to sin are sure to come, but woe to the one through whom they come! It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were cast into the sea than that he should cause one of these little ones to sin.” — Luke 17:1-2
The further we go into this dynamic, the worse it potentially gets when it all blows up.
And it will blow up. In some ways, it already has.
The original Manosphere collapsed because the nakedness of sinful men was revealed in their sexual deviancy, infidelity, substance abuse, and explosive temperaments.
Godless men will not, cannot solve the problem of father hunger. Like a man lost at sea drinking seawater to quench his thirst, they’ll only make it dramatically worse.
The great economic heights will be followed by crushing emotional depths when the truth comes out. And young men who already felt fatherless will end up feeling betrayed on top of it.
Son, Come Home
Many sons today are trying to resolve a hunger that history has likely never known. Never before has the world had so many living fathers, and so little fathering.
What are we to do with this?
In various ways, I’ve been participating in the conversation about masculinity for 25 years. I first started asking, “What does it mean to be a man?” in a college psychology course in 2001. I discovered the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement—inspired by Robert Bly’s bestselling book Iron John—in 2013. YouTube introduced me to the Manosphere in 2018, and I became a content creator in that space in 2020.
In 2021, I even attempted to produce and direct a Netflix-style documentary series about the history of the masculinity discussion. I crafted a 3-minute promotional trailer and a 20-minute mini-documentary with my footage, which I collected over a 14,000 mile road trip across the U.S. that summer.
From my own life story, I can tell you that this dialogue is both needed and useful. My intention with this piece is not to disparage the conversation as a whole, merely to point out where and how it’s going wrong.
But as I also learned, the answers the world provides are, at best, incomplete. Because after more than two decades of searching—through psychology, men's groups, world religions, psychedelics, and every secular framework I could find—I became a Christian.
I had run to the end of all of those roads, and found… nothing. In a real sense, Christ was my last stop. I knew if the answers weren’t there, they were nowhere.
So I went down into the water of the Spokane River, came back up, and found the beginning of those answers waiting for me on the shore.
Since then I’ve come to learn that if a man doesn’t have God above him, he becomes his own god. And for every young boy—at least for a brief time—his father IS god. So, fatherless men are seeking out father substitutes from men who are playing god.
Yet for all its brokenness, this still connects with a deep need dwelling in men’s souls today, a masculine “groaning too deep for words” (Rom 8:26).
Again, I don’t fault fatherless men for seeking. Nor do I fault most leaders, coaches, and content creators for trying. In meeting halls, offices, forests and in my own life, I have witnessed the depth of men’s pain in ways I cannot forget. A bandage on a grievous wound isn’t as good as sutures. But it’s better than bleeding out.
Praise God, the sutures are available. And antiseptic, medicine, and rest.
Because the answer is hiding in plain sight: in the loving, devoted relationship between God the Father, and Christ His Son.
Christianity is explicit that God reveals Himself to us in a loving Trinitarian bond between three masculine persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is a powerfully masculine vision, and it offers a satisfaction for father hunger that no other man can match.
This Father doesn’t punish you for asking questions. He invites them. “Come now, let us reason together” (Isaiah 1:18). God isn't a personality performing wholeness from behind a screen — He is whole! "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change" (James 1:17). And He isn’t running a funnel. Church is free, the preaching is free, the sacraments are free, and even some Bibles are free.
Because the price was already paid. It just wasn’t paid by you.
This Father doesn’t just feed our minds and hearts, but our very souls, forever.
No personality can do that. No funnel leads there.
And brother, if I’ve learned one thing in all my years of searching, it’s this: just one man, the God-Man, calls us home to Him:
A Field Guide for the Road Ahead
If you’re a young man exploring the online dialogue about masculinity, welcome. Truly.
With your help, we might be able to fix our society’s perspective on men and manhood in a generation or two, Lord willing.
But before you venture forth into this wild land, you’ll need some tools for how to avoid the cults of personality that you’re all but guaranteed to encounter.
As a veteran of these conversations (full story here and here) these are my recommendations for followers, fathers, and faith leaders on how to mark and avoid dangerous circles in the early stages.
See it. First, know when you’ve entered into or are participating in a cult of personality. Be aware that you’re not interacting with a man—even me—but rather just a sliver of him. And make sure that he’s willing to be honest about that.
Note that just because you’re spending money on a creator doesn’t mean you’re in a cult of personality. By all means, reward creators you draw value from! But when you start feeling that it’s becoming about the man rather than his creations, run.
Examine group dynamics. Be mindful of what happens when a man leaves the group you’re in. What gets said about him in private after he departs the group chat? Then watch what gets said in public.
Sometimes legitimate conflicts do arise, and men’s egos are a real thing—especially in text-based channels that lack body language and tonal cues. Also, if we’re being real, how a man asks his questions is as important as the questions he asks. A man who asks good questions while being a jerk about it will (and should) wear out his welcome, if he doesn't course-correct his attitude.
But if honest questions asked in a spirit of sincerity are consistently shut down without good answers, and if you get the sense that a respectful man with good insights is being “othered,” that’s a marker of a dangerous dynamic you need to be prepared to avoid.
Also note, the men who follow a creator can form a cult of personality around him without him even knowing. If you feel like this may be the case, and that others have become bullies in his name, let him know.
Diversify your intake. Don’t dive too deeply into any one secular perspective on masculinity. Read and absorb from many different sources, both modern and ancient. Every man has at least something to teach, even if it's how NOT to be. Similarly, watch out for the idea that any one man has all the answers for your life, or anyone else’s.
Ask questions. Exercise your discernment. Be curious. Ask, “Is this true? Is something being left out? What am I not seeing about this man or this teaching that might lend important context?” Be critical, including and especially of yourself.
Find a church. Not a podcast. Not a Discord server. Not a livestream. A physical church with a real pastor who knows your name, where you sit across from other men and are known.1
The father hunger you're trying to resolve will not be resolved through your smartphone. It will be resolved in a pew, at a table, in a room where a man can look you in the eye and ask how you're actually doing.
Give him the real answer.
If this resonated with you, subscribe. I write about Christianity, culture, and the formation of men. I examine the spiritual forces shaping modern narratives, where they fail, and what faithful living actually costs. You can also find me on YouTube.
I recommend the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC). You can find a church near you by visiting their website: https://crechurches.com/
So much good wisdom! I don't have man-style struggles, but I have experienced being caught up in a cult. Since then, I've learned a lot about what to look for in a leader. I actually posted on this subject earlier this morning.
https://dianewoerner.substack.com/p/seven-qualities-of-authentic-church .