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We watched Louis Theroux: Inside The Manosphere on Netflix. Theroux’s documentary style is to take viewers along on his journey of discovery, capturing interviews and images of his subjects, interspersing them with his own commentary. His tone is fairly even and mild despite the extremity of the views and personalities he features.
For readers who’ve been on Mars for the last few years, the “manosphere” refers to a universe of influencers, self-styled gurus, salesmen, and bullshit artists whose stock-in-trade is to offer a healing balm to boys and men shaken by a reality in which women and girls have energy, ambition, autonomy, and the ability to pursue all the rights that society formerly granted to men alone. The manosphere’s denizens run the gamut from the somewhat dignified (e.g., Jordan Peterson) to the entirely depraved (e.g., the brothers Andrew and Tristan Tate, under indictment, investigation, and being sued for various charges including rape, sex trafficking, and organized crime against women in Romania, the U.K., and the U.S.).
The film includes many memorable scenes, but the ones that keep popping onto my mind-screen were short and fairly late. On busy streets at night, manosphere influencers known for their mistreatment of women, poisonous salesmanship, and invidious prejudice are greeted by delighted groups of boys. The boys faces have been blurred, but their stature, dress, voices, and vocabulary make their ages clear. The boys know these men. Arguably, they make up the chief audience demographic for their videos. They adore them. They follow them onto every platform that still allows their material to be shared, seeking out clips—the main visual currency of the manosphere, very short sequences clipped from a longer recording to bring home a quick, sharp, shocking point—in the interstices of sites that have banned their full programs.
It’s impossible to know how many boys and young men are avid fans of this material, but there are certainly indications that the numbers are large. What does it say about the future, about relations between men and women, about further dangers to the body politic—most of these influencers claim Trump or his sons as friends—if the culture of the manosphere spreads?
The manosphere is confusing. Its denizens are wildly ambitious in the style of snake-oil salesmen. They don’t seem to care all that much what they sell: how-tos on muscles, mysogyny, sex, antisemitism, and more. A number of major figures—Andrew Tate and Sneako (who is featured in the film), for instance—have converted to a form of Islam that prizes strict rules of conduct including the suppression of women and sexual minorities; others claim to have derived such codes from their own heritages, Christian and Muslim alike. They repeatedly deny any conflict between these codes of conduct and their desire, evidently richly fulfilled, to make vast sums of money from their sales pitches. There is no hint of modesty or anti-materialism, just appetite and boasting. They know that their conduct is easily condemned—one featured character, HSTikkyTokky, says “Call me racist, call me a misogynist, call me homophobic, call me a scammer. I’m all those things”—and still make it clear that attracting acolytes and making money justifies any and everything.
What’s confusing about this? The yawning gap between their stated belief in strict social order and the way they behave, which violates every aspect of human dignity in the name of profit. If they made claims to virtue, I could call them hypocrites, but no such luck.
They borrow from tales like The Matrix to express their conviction that the larger society is being controlled by exploitative forces promoting beliefs and values that keep them subjugated. They appeal directly to boys and young men to break away from what they may have been taught, to follow them as role models and consume their lessons and products so as to be free to dominate, acquire, and exploit as lavishly as their elders (most of whom are in their twenties or early thirties). They have a chief villain in mind when they name the crimes they abhor, such as supporting the freedom to inhabit transgender and LGBTQ identities: the Jews, while comprising 2/10 of one percent of global population, are named a dozen times in Theroux’s film as driving a vast Satanist plot that must be stopped.
What’s confusing about this? They exploit the widespread feeling that the privileged are in charge to the detriment of ordinary people, but ignore the actual existing elite in favor of focusing on one of the smallest groups on the planet.
Many of these “influencers” are black or biracial: the Tates, several of Theroux’s characters including Harrison Sullivan (HSTikkyTokky, a boxer with a Black father and white mother who came to prominence via advice on crypto, fitness, and dating, and has been forthrightly misogynistic, homophobic, and antisemitic), Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy (Sneako, a Muslim convert whose father is Haitian and mother Filipina, gained fame on YouTube and X, but was been banned from nearly all social media platforms, and is violently racist, antisemitic, and misogynistic), and Amrou Fudl (Myron Gaines, a Sudanese American influencer who offers advice on fitness and controlling women and also traffics in Holocaust denial). All feature prominently in Theroux’s film along with Justin Waller, a white steel construction entrepreneur who branched out as a manosphere influencer.
What’s confusing about this? I’m used to most people of color understanding their own identities as putting themselves on the side of equality. None of the interviewees make statements glorifying or attacking a particular racial identity. But all of them are viciously antisemitic and speak of women as if we were lower animals, dumb, pliable, fit only for menial tasks, and eager to be used.
All of them have built their own bodies into avatars of domination, preferring form-fitting clothing that emphasizes their muscles. All of their videos feature women involved in the porn trade—chiefly with Only Fans, a large user-generated subscription-based video site hosting mostly pornography but other things as well. The women featured in Theroux’s documentary favor a style of make-up and hair uncannily similar to the MAGA style of Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem, but with fewer clothes and more silicone. They describe themselves as responding to a principle the manosphere influencers endorse, “one-sided monogamy,” where men in a couple are free to sleep with other women but women must remain faithful, even to the extent of not speaking to other men. This is justified on the grounds that a woman who loves a man won’t want to sleep with anyone else, one point in a gender theology endorsed by the characters in Theroux’s film that asserts women’s inferiority and desire to submit to a man rather than to possess wills of their own.
The film is eye-opening for anyone (me, for instance) who hasn’t observed these operators firsthand. It has shortcomings. It would have been better if women affected by the manosphere were given a voice. And as the comedian Josh Johnson pointed out after seeing the film, it would have been good to show something of the damage done to boys and young men. Reviewers have suggested that Theroux’s approach of letting subjects draw out enough rope to hang themselves may not be sufficient in this case, when so many potential audience members view them uncritically. Could the film actually enhance their influence? I’d like to be certain that’s not possible, but I see reason to doubt.
Some of what seems missing is hinted at in subtext, as Kara Swisher pointed out in her interview with Theroux. For instance, we see footage of women who are partnered with Waller and Gaines called upon to verify these men’s declarations about relationships, including one-sided monogamy. They hesitate. Gaines’ partner has left him since the film was made (on what grounds isn’t clear). Justin Waller’s partner is pregnant with their third child. He explains not wanting to be legally married as maintaining his freedom to have multiple partners, but it is also suggested that he doesn’t want his fortune to be community property. His partner Kristin, a former X-ray technician, describes their relationship this way: “I like to tell people we have lanes. My lane is changing diapers, cooking and cleaning, and his lane is working. We don’t cross into each other’s lane. It works for us.”
In the documentary Theroux gets pushback from influencers who feel he wants to make them look bad or expose aspects of their lives they prefer to keep private—true, no doubt. They livestream him on YouTube without his knowledge, inviting ridicule as their audiences mock his middle-aged body in comparison with the influencers’ beefy physiques. Their chief defense is not to deny the accusations made against them, but to revel in them.
I’d like to think this is a fringe phenomenon. But I’m worried that it may simply be another side of the dehumanization MAGA and its counterparts are promulgating, one that is more insidious simply because it winds itself like a serpent into individual human hearts and minds, rather than appearing as a raft of executive orders or Truth Social pronouncements.
Do you know anyone firsthand who is engaged with this? What do you think?
I’ll let Bob Marley have the last word. “Can’t Blame the Youth.”