This summer, two trials amassed crowds of men and women, respectively, who came to support two different types of defendants. In Plymouth, Massachusetts, women in pink tops and dresses stood outside the trial of Lindsay Clancy, the woman charged with murdering her three children. She claims she did it because of postpartum psychosis, and her case ended in a frustrating mistrial; it’s still to be determined if she’ll be tried again. Meanwhile in Miami, young men in polo shirts and baseball caps were doing pushups outside of the trial for Andrew and Tristan Tate, who are facing extradition to the U.K. on charges of rape, sex trafficking, and assault.
These seem like decidedly gendered proceedings, but in reality, both are dominated by discussions about men. The Tate case is about whether we can use the justice system to punish the most heinous form of masculinity, a measure of how much the courts care about the treatment of women. But the Clancy case too has ended up being all about men: The judge declared a mistrial all because a single, male juror was the holdout. While the other 11 jurors of all genders were convinced by her mental health defense, he wasn’t.
Men still rule the world, so we keep trying to make sense of them. Explorations from every possible angle of “the manosphere” are now routine in all media: the Liver King rucksacking on his YouTube channel where he talks about his “ancestral lifestyle” while eating organ meats and lying about taking steroids, Louis Theroux hanging out with twentysomething influencers on Netflix who largely call him a cuck for 90 minutes, feminists activists online trying to beat back the surge of angry straight men in the shadow of Gloria Steinem’s death. The latest addition is a book from a both likely and unlikely source, a reporter who’s always been able to hide in plain sight, who can get along with the guys without being co-opted by their ideology.
“It’s for men like me. And women like me!” Jon Ronson tells me in his immaculate downtown Manhattan apartment. He lives in upstate New York most of the time, with his wife, journalist Elaine Patterson, and their new puppy Bonnie, now that his 28-year-old son Joel has moved out on his own in Brooklyn. Ronson has been stateside for more than a decade now, even though he’s more “ubiquitous” in the U.K. When I ask him if “ubiquitous” is a Britishism for “famous,” he gets bashful, trying to shrink back into his T-shirt. “I’ve been around a long time,” he says.
Ronson’s new book, The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men, follows his investigation into Chris Mark, the 60-year-old heir to steel industrialist Clayton Mark. In an effort to make himself feel more like a king, Mark built a castle in Woodstock, Connecticut, with family money. His plan was to host a harem of women—a pretty typical goal of many of the guys in the manosphere—in the castle. Mark eventually wanted to film a reality-show series in the castle called 101 Princesses, which would chronicle his attempt to find an obedient, much younger girlfriend (or two, or three). “I’m the lord,” Mark says. “I’m looking for my queen, and I’ve got 101 princesses to choose from.”
Joel accompanied a friend to the castle, where they were asked to participate in the show. He told his dad about his strange night and Ronson began investigating. “It’s not a good idea to lure a journalist’s son to a castle of mysteries,” Ronson says in the live stage performance of his book, now touring through the U.K., “because I decided to visit the castle myself.” Ronson eventually speaks to the women in Mark’s life, and finds out that he’s allegedly been abusing them, sexually and emotionally, sometimes holding them captive.
The Castle is part page-turner and part didact on the mansophere. Alongside Mark’s story, Ronson looks at a host of men who have lost their purpose in the world, from YouTube “success” stories to Armie Hammer and the cannibalistic sex play that torpedoed his career. (Much like Mark, Hammer comes from a family of uber-rich industrialists and has struggled to find purpose as an heir.) There have been plenty of examinations of the manosphere, but what Ronson gets especially right—and wouldn’t you need an anxious, bespectacled British guy to be the one to define it—is the role that shame is playing in bringing men into this space and keeping them there.
The thesis of his book is that men are becoming more misogynistic, more aggressive, and are seeking more worldly dominance and control because they’ve lost their sense of purpose. Men were once relegated to supporting their families, but women are starting families later than ever and are more often becoming the breadwinners. “The men in this book are from very different walks of life … but they had something in common,” Ronson writes in The Castle. “They were men out of time. They couldn’t keep up—and in some cases didn’t want to keep up—with a dramatically changing world.”
That loss of purpose for men around the world has been written about. What Ronson adds to the conversation is a deep understanding of male shame. He thinks what’s driving these men’s misbehavior is a renewed sense of inhibition, a lack of proportional shame. “Refusing to feel ashamed was healthy if the shaming had been inappropriate,” Ronson writes, “but people started brushing the shame off no matter the seriousness of their wrongdoing.”
Ronson isn’t exactly a paragon of traditional masculinity; “90 percent of men and women identify as strongly or quite strongly their gender,” he tells me. “And I’m one of the 10 percent who doesn’t. I just don’t think about it.” But he is still a man, and so he has access to spaces and conversations that only other men are privy to. The manosphere is compelling, and the figures within it—like Tate, like Mark, like the president—are frightening enough that we keep trying to understand it as a means of flattening it down.
But this greater understanding, or at least greater awareness of what the problem is, still doesn’t provide a solution. Ronson wasn’t aiming to. He isn’t a representative of the manosphere; he’s just a willing interlocutor. “I see this as something much stranger and bigger and odder and more surprising than a manosphere book,” Ronson says. “But in the midst of all this, it’s speaking to this weird moment of men not knowing their place anymore. It’s not tub-thumping for men, nor is it self-flagellating about men.” The Castle isn’t a polemic, a guidebook, a how-to, or even a how-not-to. It’s a reminder of our perplexing, alarming, and steadily worsening status quo. If you have any concerns about how women are treated in or out of the manosphere, The Castle is a five-alarm fire.
It’s a good thing Ronson is such a funny writer; it’s a decidedly unfunny book.
The Castle marks Ronson’s ninth book, all of which tell stories of extreme people or extreme factions of our culture. His works include 2004’s The Men Who Stare at Goats, an investigation into the U.S. Army later adapted into a 2009 George Clooney movie. In 2011, he published The Psychopath Test, a look at the concept of psychopathy and the mental health industry, and in 2015, he authored So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, featuring interviews with the victims of online public disgraces. Knit together with The Castle, Ronson’s oeuvre is an investigation into what people—namely men—do when they feel devalued, forgotten, and insulted.
By Jon Ronson. Riverhead Books.
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As he does in all his books, Ronson gets his sources to say and admit their ugliest and truest thoughts in The Castle. Meeting him, you can see how he gets the goods. He’s disarming and gentle—when he sees me off after our interview, he raises his arm tight by his side, his hand disappearing into the sleeve of his sweatshirt, and gives me a perky wave. He answers my calls and greets his onstage audience with a singsong “Hiiii-iiii.” At his home, he’s wearing a zip-up hoodie and a teal T-shirt with a hole in it, indoor Crocs, and his trademark Dilbert-round glasses. He shows me the only magic trick he knows: pretending to separate his thumb from his hand, which he does serviceably, to my delight.
Ronson looks a little like Beaker from the Muppets; he has an inherently trustful but worried face and a tender voice. No wonder he managed to get all these people to tell him about their worst instincts in The Castle. Wouldn’t you tell all your secrets to Beaker if he asked?
Ronson is staying in Manhattan to kick off the promotion, and it’s the first time he hasn’t been anxious on the eve of a book release. “God, I remember when Them came out in 2000, I was on my way to give a talk and I was so stressed out—I haven’t said this to anyone before—I was crying in the back of the taxi,” he says. “Men Who Stare At Goats, I was worried. Psychopath Test, I was worried. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, I was worried.”
Ronson runs a hand through his stick-straight hair, making it stand on end even more. “This is the first time I’ve had a book come out where I’m not worried.”
Maybe he should be: Mark was far from a compliant source through The Castle. Even while he gives Ronson access to his home and his harebrained schemes, while he tells him about his plan to entrap young women on his reality show where they treat him like a king, he also digs at Ronson with constant hostility. He demands Ronson sign a nondisclosure agreement (which he refuses to do, saying he’s never signed one and isn’t going to start now with some guy in his castle), he threatens him with legal warnings, and he even says his friends will come after him. “I’m going to be sending you some of my friends that were in prison for killing somebody,” Mark texts Ronson. “Do not mention anything negative about the castle because this guy will get really upset … He just got out of jail like a week ago and has been in there for like 15 years.”
Mark tells him that “Carlos and Brandon” are on their way to meet Ronson in person, ostensibly to fulfill Mark’s many threats. “Yes,” Ronson writes in The Castle. “This is good.”
Ronson is even more equipped for manosphere discourse because of his reporting in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed. In that book, Ronson writes about Max Mosley, the former president of the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile for Formula One. He’s also the son of a fascist leader. In 2008, he was caught in what was often described as a “sick Nazi orgy,” which Mosley said was merely consensual sadomasochism, a private party that didn’t hurt anyone and was very much not Nazi-themed. Mosley survived the scandal—in fact, it made him more popular than ever, especially with anti-kink-shaming types. Before he died, Ronson asked him why the scandal didn’t fell him completely in the public eye. “He emailed me a couple of weeks later and said, ‘A shaming is a pact between a shamer and a shamee, and as soon as the shamee steps out of the pact by refusing to feel ashamed, then the whole thing crumbles,’ ” Ronson says. “That turned out to be the most prophetic moment in the book, because we saw this wave of unashamedness sweeping across society, which I think was, to a large extent, a kind of response to the overuse of shame as a weapon.”
Ronson compares 2026’s shame culture to a hospital superbug—a virus that’s gotten sanitized so much that it becomes impervious to treatment. This might sound like Woke 1 opprobrium, but is maybe more about how the internet gamified piling onto one person for their perceived failures. Ronson writes about Greg Chism, a former lawn-care YouTuber who started to make real bank when he featured his daughters in his increasingly bizarre videos where the three of them pretended to be babies. “Greg was surrendering his life to YouTube and its algorithm, to what it indicated Greg should be,” Ronson wrote in his New York Times Magazine story about Chism. Chism wasn’t a part of the manosphere, but he was a part of the machine that helps weird internet detritus float to the very top. He made those videos to make more money, to turn his hobby into a real career, but he followed a dark path to success. “That’s the part of the book that I personally really connect to,” Ronson says. “All of this stuff about men feeling tossed around in a sea of conflicting ideologies as to what being a man actually means.” Chism’s is a story that could have easily fit in So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed; in The Castle, it’s a story about the long tail of public shaming.
“What you’re seeing now is a further mutation from unashamedness into disinhibition,” Ronson says. “When society’s rules abruptly change, institutions collapse, structures collapse. Even if they’re institutions that were bad, it still has this bizarre impact on people’s inner lives.” As men (and everyone else) unburden themselves from perhaps unfair modalities of shame, we’ve seen the brutalizing side effects. “If society’s rules don’t mean anything to you anymore for whatever reason, then it enables some people to just rip off their faces,” he tells me.
Further enabling everyone is A.I., designed to compliment and never push back. If The Castle feels like the natural descendent to Publicly Shamed, it seems likely Ronson’s next book will be about LLMs. “So many items on the psychopath checklist apply to ChatGPT: the lovebombing, the obsequiousness, the aping human emotion,” Ronson says. “The pathological lying and not being the slightest bit embarrassed. It has no shame.”
I haven’t read or watched anything about the manosphere that’s left me with much hope. Earlier this year, I watched British journalist (and friend of Ronson’s) Louis Theroux in his Netflix documentary where he haplessly follows around some of the more condescending and anti-feminist among manosphere influencers like Sneako and HSTikkyTokky, listening to them belittle him and all the women around them. It’s a brutal watch, a cringe-worthy display from these guys flailing around in public, searching for some meaning in their lives.
The Castle is similar in some regards: It’s tough not to read it with dread. At the end of the book, there are no consequences for Mark, including for his harassment and abuse of his girlfriend, Leanne. Increased Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations across the country seem to have led to a slowdown in the investigation into Mark. He eventually went to Argentina, where he was investigated, but he was determined to be “not criminally responsible” for his crimes with women because of an unnamed “psychiatric disorder” which prevented him from understanding that he was committing crimes in the first place. He still owns the castle, and the American investigation into him continues.
But in person, Ronson is much more optimistic about the future of the manosphere. He’s finding hope in an unlikely place: the UFC ring. Last month, he went to the White House for the UFC match on the South Lawn. “The UFC definitely tries to sell itself as a free-speech utopia,” he says. “But I saw occasions when it was like real life was snapping back to put them back in their place.” Take the example of MMA fighter Sean O’Malley—he’s talked at length about his one-sided open marriage with Danya Gonzalez, where he’s allowed to sleep with other women while she isn’t permitted to sleep with other men. “He revealed to me that Danya said, ‘No more sleeping with other women,’ ” Ronson says. “He looked so baffled at this change in his fortunes. I thought, OK, maybe the future is Danya. It’s people putting their foot down.” But as usual, it’s women—and access to us as caregivers and sexual objects—that forces the pendulum to sway even an inch back toward gender parity.
To me—a woman, ugh—this modest swing back doesn’t provide me with a lot of optimism for the future of gender relations. But maybe I’m not acknowledging even the small wins of getting a man to change his mind, and maybe I’m also too unwilling to see their vulnerabilities on display. Like everyone else in the world, I’ve been conditioned to accept a fundamental “truth” about gender: that vulnerability from men is much tougher to tolerate than it is from women. “What do you think about the chapter of the book where it turns out there’s occasions when men do exactly what you’re saying men should do: take off their masks, be vulnerable towards women?” Ronson asks. “Then they notice the women are recoiling in disgust.” I know I’ve recoiled from it before too, unfairly. Ronson cites Brené Brown in his live show, saying that most of us “fear” male vulnerability because it’s too strange and uncomfortable for people of all genders. “It’s a kind of primordial revulsion when they’re too far from their role as a stone-cold provider,” Ronson says. “But exactly the same thing is true the other way: All these male feminists get really pissed off when women they’re dating are doing well. It’s both groups.”
Near the end of our interview, Ronson starts asking me about my experiences with masculinity, which have been, in a few words, not very good. But even I, a notorious man-hater, have a soft spot for men and the ways they love each other. Last year, I went to the Oasis concert at Wembley Stadium in London, and saw firsthand what non-toxic masculinity can look like: blokes hugging, singing, crying, kissing each other and calling each other a cunt. It was beautiful. These are, it seems, the kinds of guys Ronson is more in tune with than the men of The Castle. (He even knows one of the Gallagher brothers; their kids went to the same school.) It makes sense he would possess more hope for the men of the world than I ever have.
“You’re more in this world than I am: Is there an argument that the Oasis crowd is more the norm? And the guys throwing dildos [at WNBA games] are the outliers?” he asks me. I think he might be right. As usual, though, a minority of men remain the loudest, and the scariest.
Before The Castle’s U.S. release, it came out in the U.K. and was an immediate bestseller. “It’s the only time it’s happened to me other than when I rode the George Clooney wave in 2009,” he tells me, beaming. “So this is a No. 1 without movie-star help.”
At Ronson’s publication-day event at Brooklyn’s Bell House theater, the crowd was unexpectedly made up of mostly straight couples. In line for a drink or to get a seat inside, everyone seemed paired off, and to my eye, they all seemed like the stereotypes of the straight couples that Ronson writes about. In front of me, a lug of a man was drinking a beer with his dainty wife; she was in a brown polka-dot dress, and he was wearing a T-shirt and shorts. Behind me, a first date or a new crush seemed to be unfurling: a young man rushed through the swell of rain outside to meet her, and he just couldn’t stop sweating even once inside. “I don’t know anything about this book, but I’ll definitely read it,” he said, T-shirt drenched.
What to make of a Ronson event acting as a hot date night for white Brooklyn intellectuals? Is his intended audience the elder–Gen X women sipping white wine on folding chairs or is it the men he’s writing about in his book, the ones who so sorely need rescuing? “I don’t think the manosphere men are going to read this book,” Ronson tells me. “They’re going to see me as this beta cuck. I guess that was the pitfall as I was writing it: I wanted this to be a book written for women as well as men, because it’s a fun page-turning mystery story.”
On stage, Ronson is dressed in a more formal version of his home wear: a crewneck layered over another crewneck, gray pants, black Hokas. His show is just over 90 minutes, and takes the audience through him meeting Mark, going to the castle, and a few of the book’s digressions. But what the stage show does that the book cannot is show the audience how fucked up this world is. There’s a black-and-white photo of the castle printed in The Castle, but that doesn’t help you understand the building’s scale quite like a blown-up high-res photo projected onto a 7-foot screen at the front of a performance hall. Everyone gasps at the sight of the monstrosity, along with Chism’s bizarre YouTube videos and audio recordings of Ronson’s more perplexing interviews. The visuals remind the audience of how gross and strange this story is; it’s less about the politics of the manosphere and more about the repugnance of it all. It’s scary.
When Ronson projects one final image of the inside of Mark’s castle—an underground double-hot-tub grotto, lit by hideous purple lights as if Hugh Hefner were hosting Grimace for the evening—everyone groans. It’s spooky and discomfiting, but above all, god, it’s ugly.
After Ronson’s set, he takes some questions from the audience, all of which come from younger women. And as the prophecy foretold, the first wasn’t really a question so much as a comment. “The focus is on these guys,” she says. “And the women are just throwaways.”
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Ronson told her that in the book, the women aren’t dashed-off characters, which is true. But Ronson is painted in this corner now no matter what he does: He’s still a man offering a view of masculinity to a mostly feminized audience. The men are here, but they’re here with their wives or girlfriends or besties. They’re listening, but not necessarily asking questions. “This book would’ve been worse if women weren’t interested in reading it,” he tells me after his event. “My crowd is a lot of women—thank god.”
After Ronson’s event, I left the venue behind two people who seemed to be transitioning their friendship into something more. “Do you want to get another drink or call it a night?” the woman asked the man, who practically tripped over himself to say yes when she gently touched his arm.
“There’s a bourbon bar up the street,” he said, following her out the door. He was taking her to a restaurant nearby where you can order a burger with a syringe of special sauce. I walked by, and the whole place was bathed in reddish-purple lights, mostly empty except for a few people, on a rainy Tuesday night. It looked, actually, much like the castle’s underground double-hot-tub grotto.