We’ve come a long way since “men are from Mars, women are from Venus.” Still, men gathering together in online spaces can be a scary thought for some women. The knee-jerk assumption that there must be something sinister happening in the boys’ chat is one that’s hard to shake. Why would they need a separate, private forum for themselves, if not for something dark? In the age of the manosphere and toxic masculinity, should we be worried?
As it has appeared in popular culture recently, the boys’ chat can be a place where bad behavior is indulged and even rewarded. On the most recent season of Vanderpump Rules spin-off The Valley, a large text thread of boys (numbering into the thirties, allegedly) is revealed to entertain vicious rumors and gossip about ex-partners. The show devotes a lot of screen time to the fallout from a particular revelation and the subsequent efforts to smoke out the mole. (I have to think that the same outsized personalities that make these men compelling characters on a reality TV show also make them predisposed to be shit-stirrers in a pressure cooker 30-men strong.)
In the political sphere, we’ve seen group chats exposed for their shocking displays of racism, misogyny, homophobia, and anti-semitism. A Telegram chat made up of leaders in the Young Republicans’ circuit was unveiled by Politico last October, and the subsequent fallout resulted in resignations and firings. And who could forget the infamous leaked Signal chat, Houthi PC small group, and the disturbing reality of men speaking cavalierly of things as destructive as literal international warfare. Both of these political group chat incidents generated so much online and media discourse they each have their own Wikipedia pages—and they’re tame next to some of the more disturbing examples exposed in recent memory.
Naturally, these group chats are the newsworthy ones, the outliers. No innocuous chat about fantasy football has ever sent shockwaves through the mainstream media. They’re newsworthy because they’re everyone’s worst nightmare, revealing baser instincts and tendencies towards groupthink. Unsurprisingly, these public revelations only stoke our curiosity about these closed-door conversations. What’s really going on in the boys’ chats between the men in our lives? Are their conversations as quotidian as our own girls-only chats?
In an effort to pull back the curtain, Glamour asked eight respondents to give us the lowdown and share the inner workings of their chats. Some groups, especially ones that skewed younger or more explicit in their content, declined to share details on the record. The groups we did explore varied in their size, relationships, subject matters, and longevity, but each gave us hope that perhaps, after all, the boys are alright.
Names have been changed to maintain anonymity and conversations have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Location: New York City
Ages: 28–36
Number of members: 7
About: The chat is on Signal and has been around for about a year. Mix of some friends who met in college and others through mutual friends in NYC.
What’s going on in there?
“Most of the group contributes a lot; a couple guys have better self control and only weigh-in occasionally. I use it pretty consistently because it’s on my phone and computer, and I work remotely. The last topic was Kash Patel celebrating the USA hockey gold medal in the locker room (making fun of him, derogatory). I talk about politics and basketball the most, followed by internet culture stuff and our respective personal and professional lives. I’d say more serious interpersonal subjects (which are very, very rare) are handled outside of the chat.
I’d share stuff with my partner—I have! She’s asked me why I’m laughing out loud, and then I show her. Generally, she finds the chat to be boring and silly, which I understand. I like that the chat is a politically-minded group of left-leaning men that I can talk about the world with. It’s a healthy outlet to share my thoughts and feelings without Getting Mad On Main, which I think is much less productive.”
Location: Pittsburgh & Cleveland
Ages: 35–36
Number of members: 5
About: The chat is on iMessage and has been around for several years. The guys have been friends since their undergraduate days.
What’s going on in there?
“We use it probably every other day. There’s three doctors, a lawyer, and me on this group chat, so we get a pretty funny look into daily medical life or whatever’s going on at the D.A.’s office. We talk about sports all the time. We tend to focus on the down-the-middle guy stuff; we really don’t talk about politics or religion and stuff in the chat.
I wouldn’t say that there’s big secrets in there. We could all get ourselves into a little bit of light trouble if our partners looked at the group chat. We share some tools of the trade, like how long it actually takes to build your daughter’s play house for her birthday versus how long you want to sit in the garage and drink beers, stuff like that.
All engagement ideas, proposal executions, wedding planning—we’ve been through that with all of the guys. They all have kids, so all the birth announcements are really exciting, pregnancy announcements too. Baby photos, a lot of pictures of beers we’re drinking, what we’re having for dinner, getting dressed up with the wife.
One of the doctors had a vasectomy, and he live-chatted his whole process with us. He wasn’t put out for the procedure so he just texted straight through it. It was absolutely hysterical, him just giving his opinion on how everything’s going as well as the people that he kind of knew who were doing the surgery and prepping him. And then some follow up too. It is really funny to take all your college friends and think about them now, three kids later and getting vasectomies, like who’d have thought we’d get here. To this day these guys are some of my best friends, keeping all the old memories alive and growing up together, it’s been really rewarding.”
Location: Cities across North and Central America and Europe
Ages: 35–37
Number of members: 9
About: The chat exists primarily on WhatsApp and has existed since 2017. The group has been friends since high school.
What’s going on in there?
“We post in there a couple times a week, sometimes it’s just a picture or a post. It’s never really an in-depth conversation. It’s pretty exclusive to us. Since it’s been around for the last almost decade, I would never want it to see the light of day. But I can tell [my girlfriend] if we’re talking about something. Not all of it is super secret, but sometimes it turns into locker room talk. [For example,] typically when it’s somebody’s birthday, I would say happy birthday and send them a picture of a very attractive, hot, naked woman, like Playboy quality. Everyone started doing it to each other, and it became a funny thing.
We definitely say some pretty morbid, fucked-up shit that’s not politically correct, but it’s all in humor. It’s like, who can one up the other person with the most fucked up thing until the joke runs its course and we move on.
I’m very fortunate that I can say I’ve known these guys for close to 30 years, and we’re still hanging out. I look forward to seeing them on another trip, or the day I get to invite them to my wedding. I can call them up anytime and just be like, “Hey man, I had a question,” you know? I would take all their perspectives. They’re just good sources of information, and the random naked photo of a woman is kinda nice to get here and there.”
Location: London primarily
Ages: 30–34
Number of members: 14
About: The chat’s on WhatsApp and has been around for at least seven years or so.
What’s going on in there?
“The chat is called “Football.” It’s a bit generic, dude-bro stuff, like sports and all that jazz. That’s why I see it as the guys’ chat—emotionally, it’s a guys’ chat.
We have a lot of friends who are women, and we have a separate group chat with them where we talk about all sorts of things. This one started off as a sports one, but not for sexist reasons. None of the women in our friend group are sports-loving people. It’s mostly talking about sports, taking the piss out of each other, sharing memes. There’s a lot about organizing to meet up for the highest form of male bonding, which is going to a game. Some of the humor is a bit darker, not in a terrible way, just not the sort of thing you want to say in a public forum.
At its worst, it would be vaguely embarrassing in the sense that the humor is so juvenile. Having that kind of safe space with friends, even if there’s a written record of it, is actually useful. I think that everyone has a bit of toxic behavior in them. Let that out in a place where people will call you out if you are letting it affect you too much.”
Location: New York City and Long Island
Ages: 36–38
Number of members: 4
About: The chat is on iMessage currently, but started out on Blackberry Messenger (BBM!) when the group met in high school almost 20 years ago.
What’s going on in there?
“It’s not the most active group chat. It doesn’t turn into long conversations, but we send a lot of pictures. Yesterday, one of the more wild topics ever came up. Our friend is on vacation with his girlfriend, and they just got married. Like, Vegas-style, out of nowhere. We didn’t really believe him at first, but an hour later we were like, “Wait, did you really get fucking married? What are you talking about?” He just said, “Yeah, I’m serious, we got married.” And that was it, we haven’t spoken about it since.
It’s a funny dynamic in the chat, where two of us are married and one has a kid, we’re very settled down and boring, and then the other two are much more single and chaotic. So the tones can be very different because it’ll be this kind of thing and then a bunch of baby pictures.
It’s not really secret or private. These days I would show [my wife] if she wanted to look at the chat; I would let her read the whole thing. Generally, I think that she would find it insanely boring because it’s just us trying to decide what time to play video games. She was interested in this marriage thing; I let her read that.”
Location: Los Angeles and all over the USA
Ages: 32–33
Number of members: 7
About: Started on Facebook Messenger when the group was in college and migrated to iMessage in the last few years.
What’s going on in there?
“The energy when I get pinged by this group is like, Oh, I’m about to be part of something stupid. Imagine a comedy group with no tact, and they’re not good at comedy. They’re funny, silly boys—and I do really love them—but they’re very crass, they’re very dumb, and they’re so fucking boy.
There have been some sweet moments in it; that’s where all our marriage announcements are, and one friend was having a kid so he posted that in the group.
It’s just the worst back and forth. The classic is an earnest moment or a logistical question getting swept upstream in a bunch of cum jokes. Even this friend who just sent a picture of his baby, obviously it gets the hearts, it gets a couple rounds of serious stuff, but then it becomes nonsensical jokes and a bunch of photos of the friend from college, embarrassing pictures.
The group chat does very little for me. But I love how different everyone is, for better or for worse. And it keeps me connected to that. The wedding things are always nice, and it’s sweet for a moment before it’s not. I like to live in the sweet.”
Location: The UK
Ages: late-20s–early 40s
About: This chat is on WhatsApp, and it’s a recreational hockey team who have been playing together for about a year.
What’s going on in there?
“Most of our chat revolves around hockey. Messages outside [of hockey] are about when we’re going to get together for beers. I don’t think anything wildly inappropriate ever comes up. On hockey teams when I was younger, there were lots of chats about girls and it would get graphic and specific and derogatory. On this team there’s none of that type of language, everybody’s married and has boring lives. We really don’t talk much about things outside of hockey, travels, skiing, mundane things like that. It’s also a chronically closeted space in terms of what you share. Most of the time people keep their private lives private.
I haven’t told anyone in my group that I identify as non-binary because of the culture; it’s not inclusive to that, and you just try and not make things about yourself. I have been vocal about who [my nonbinary partner] is as a person and their identity, and there hasn’t been anything weird about that, so I know there wouldn’t be anything necessarily weird about my own identification. I’ve mentioned being queer as somebody whose both identity and sexuality is queer, but I haven’t really talked about my identity specifically.
None of it ever gets really serious. I think we could be having more difficult conversations, especially right now watching how the USA Olympic Men’s Hockey team celebrated this victory and mocked the women’s team. I’m furious about this USA victory [celebration] and how unsurprising it is, this locker room culture bullshit.”
Location: Los Angeles
Ages: 26–34
Number of members: 15
About: The chat is on iMessage and has been around for a few years.
What’s going on in there?
“The boys’ chat for the majority is an avenue to do little bits and joke around with each other. It can be pretty crass. I’ve never seen real misogyny in the chat. Everyone’s kind of a comedian so lines get blurred and people are doing bits, but I’ve never encountered real hatred of any person.
The thing that I get frustrated by is certain things you just don’t need to joke about. When you have so many guys who are interested in one upping each other in bits, people forget about that. They forget that, “Oh, maybe we shouldn’t make a rape joke.”
I like that I can just be like, “Guys, I just took a huge shit.” I like being able to dump that kind of energy—no pun intended—into the chat and have an outlet for that sort of boyishness. The older you get, the less you get to act like a 14 year old. And there’s a little bit of just wanting to be a boy and not feel like you have to be an approachable member of society all the time. I think that’s why I’m in it. There’s just so much bullshit in the world that you do need to have places like that where you can let loose a little bit. And hope that people are playing by the rules of not punching down or being just straight up offensive because that, to me, ruins it.”
In 2026, group chats are more than just a string of text messages. They’re hierarchical, emotional ecosystems. Who speaks, who reacts, who exits, who screenshots? Our Group Chat series decodes the etiquette and power dynamics shaping friendships, work relationships, family threads, and “girls’ girls” spaces. This is about modern intimacy—and modern conflict—happening in 6-inch rectangles.
