While the rampant misogyny and ideologically incoherent blather is indeed staggering, another surprisingly bleak part of the documentary is the constant presence of screens and cameras in almost every scene. Everyone Theroux meets is accompanied by a silent minion who is filming him, filming them. When he goes to the gym with HS TikkyTokky, the influencer starts to talk down the barrel of Netflix\u2019s camera as if he\u2019s doing a vlog. \u201cWho are you talking to?\u201d Theroux posits wryly. \u201cWe\u2019re not on social media now, this is a documentary.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Cameras filming cameras. Image: Netflix<\/p>\n
Other times, the multiple layers of surveillance has a distinctly more ominous and paranoid feel. Gaines gets his own phone out immediately and starts filming Theroux when he arrives in the Fresh and Fit studio. \u201cWhenever you are controversial, people try to make hit pieces on you,\u201d he explains. Still, content remains king, and a captivating meta-narrative emerges throughout the documentary as the content creators endlessly clip, leak and stream their own interactions with Theroux, going viral several times over before his footage even gets back to the Netflix cutting room.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a fascinating reminder of how social media has obliterated traditional media hierarchies, while also fueling a race to the bottom for the most extreme, inflammatory, conspiratorial content to come out on top. Several of the men admit they don\u2019t necessarily believe everything they say online, and that their often deeply conservative values do not always align with their own modern money-making schemes. \u201cDo I agree with it? No. Would I profit off it? Yes,\u201d HS TikTokky says of his OnlyFans business, adding he would disown his daughter if she ever did OnlyFans.<\/p>\n
All of this would be easier to stomach if these views were being shouted into the void, but these men are all armed with audiences of millions. \u201cYou\u2019re the king, you\u2019re one of my inspirations,\u201d a group of young men tell Ed Matthews on the street, a man whose main content pillars seem to be \u201cpicking up birds\u201d and forcing alleged sex offenders to eat pet food on camera. Sneako, who believes women shouldn\u2019t vote and that the world is run by a satanic cabal, smiles and takes pictures with hordes of teenage boys while out and about with Theroux in New York City.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Sneako meets Theroux. Image: Netflix<\/p>\n
It is this chilling intersection between online and IRL, powerful adult men and wide-eyed boys, where the documentary could have spent much more more time. Sure, we got a montage of concerned breakfast TV hosts talking about kids these days, but there is so much more real-world impact to explore. Just last week a global survey found that Gen Z males are twice as likely as baby boomers to believe wives should obey husbands<\/a>, and that nearly a quarter believed that men who cared for their own children were less masculine than those who didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n The manosphere even has its hooks into Aotearoa. Last year\u2019s gender attitudes survey found one in three New Zealand men aged 18-34 agree that gender equality has gone too far<\/a>, and the number of people who agree that \u201chitting out is an understandable response for a man when his partner tries to end a relationship\u201d has nearly doubled. Just last week, the SIS confirmed that the largest demographic currently being monitored by the agency are teenage boys and young men<\/a> due to \u201cfears of extremism and their desires to commit acts of violence\u201d.<\/p>\n Towards the end of Inside the Manosphere, there\u2019s a montage of all these angry, controlling, confused men when they were just young lads starting out on the internet. Ed Matthews, age 10, plays \u201cchubby bunnies\u201d with marshmallows, Sneako is a mild-mannered 15-year-old making vlogs for fun. Even in the present day, HS TikkyTokky squabbles with his mum over a throw blanket, a reminder that these are all just regular people who have found themselves trapped in what Theroux calls an \u201calgorithmic prison\u201d of their own making.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe are all increasingly inside the manosphere,\u201d he warns. \u201cAnd it\u2019s up to us how we get out.\u201d If only someone knew the cheat code for that part.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Louis Theroux\u2019s latest Netflix documentary will make your blood boil and your head spin, writes Alex Casey.\u00a0 In…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":324980,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[859,156,120166,175306,1094,111,139,69,1066,31194,2179],"class_list":["post-324979","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-documentary","tag-entertainment","tag-louis-theroux","tag-manosphere","tag-netflix","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-pop-culture","tag-sexism","tag-trump"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/324980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}