|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Every few months, social media produces another self-proclaimed expert promising men the secret to success, money and relationships. Their message is rarely new: Women are inferior, emotional vulnerability is weakness, and men are not loved enough. The formula is familiar because it has become a profitable corner of the internet known globally as the manosphere. Nigeria has its own versions of this, and one of the most prominent names is content creator Emmanuel Obruste, popularly known as GehGeh.
If you’ve spent enough time on the Nigerian part of social media, especially TikTok, you’ve probably come across one of his livestreams. According to GehGeh, too many women are entitled and expect men to provide. The message changes depending on the topic, but it almost always circles back to the same conclusion: men are victims of women and of a society that has become too sympathetic to them. That has earned him a fiercely loyal audience. He has built an entire brand around that image, attracting thousands of viewers to his livestreams and launching what he calls GehGeh University, where followers pay to learn about masculinity and his philosophy on life. But the thing about building a brand around certainty is that people stop seeing you as just an influencer and start seeing you as someone actually worth following.
Earlier this week, videos appearing to show GehGeh taking part in a traditional wedding began circulating online. Under different circumstances, it might have passed as another influencer wedding celebration. Instead, it triggered accusations of hypocrisy from his followers who had spent years listening to a man who repeatedly questioned the value of marriage itself.
In another video that quickly circulated across social media, a man who identified as Iamkowho and as GehGeh’s former manager alleged that he had known him since 2008 and had once considered him both a mentor and trusted adviser. According to him, he was persuaded to leave his wife of three years after repeatedly listening to GehGeh’s relationship advice. He now says he regrets that decision, accusing the influencer of hypocrisy after videos emerged appearing to show GehGeh at his traditional wedding ceremony.
“Gehgeh is a deceiver, he ruined my life. I was his manager, I listened to him, fought with my wife of three years and left my marriage, only for him to betray me by getting married”
These admissions fuelled debate online quickly, not only because of the personal allegations but because many argued that the wedding contradicted the image GehGeh has built over time. While several reports and accounts have maintained that the ceremony genuinely took place, GehGeh has rejected claims that he secretly got married. In separate responses posted online, he argued that he had never instructed anyone not to marry, challenged his accusers to produce evidence that he had done so, and later claimed that the viral wedding images and videos were either taken out of context or generated using artificial intelligence.
Whether the wedding happened or not, or whether Iamkowho’s allegations permanently change how people see GehGeh is one thing, but the bigger story is how men like GehGeh come to hold this kind of influence in the first place and why thousands of young men trust internet personalities to define women, masculinity and relationships for them. The answer begins in a corner of the internet that has spent years turning misogyny into a product: the manosphere.
The manosphere is often described as an online movement, but that barely captures what it is or has become. Over the last decade, a growing number of influencers have discovered that outrage is profitable. These creators rarely introduce themselves as misogynists. They are life coaches, relationship experts, alpha male mentors, high-value men, and even financial educators. Their content is packaged as self-improvement, and their followers are promised confidence, discipline, wealth and purpose. This formula no doubt seems remarkably effective. A short clip goes viral because it is controversial, new followers arrive out of curiosity, paid communities begin to form, books and courses are launched, exclusive memberships are advertised, merch is sold, donations and subscriptions follow. The more rage-bait and inflammatory the content becomes, the more attention it receives and on social media, attention is monetised.
GehGeh may not be solely responsible for creating these systems and their beliefs; in fact, they have existed long before social media, but what platforms like TikTok have done is give them a faster way to spread and a business model that rewards the people who repeat them most successfully. That is why this goes beyond whether GehGeh married or whether IamKowho’s allegations are true.
It is the growing influence of online personalities who profit from presenting women as problems. Long after this controversy disappears from public attention, these ideas will continue to circulate and shape conversations about women in ways that extend far beyond social media. It is easy to dismiss stories like these as internet drama, but doing so overlooks what misogyny actually is. Misogyny is not limited to offensive jokes, viral podcasts or livestreams where women are insulted for entertainment.
At its core, it is a system of beliefs that positions women as less deserving of power, credibility and autonomy than men. Those beliefs shape how women are treated at home, in schools, in workplaces and in public life. When misogynistic ideas become normalised, their effects do not remain online. They feed rape culture by encouraging entitlement to women’s bodies. They also reinforce victim-blaming by questioning women’s credibility whenever they report abuse and make coercive control appear like leadership and domination appear like masculinity. Long before violence occurs, these beliefs teach people that women matter less, and that belief rarely stays inside a comment section.
