{"id":342399,"date":"2026-03-22T15:35:09","date_gmt":"2026-03-22T15:35:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/342399\/"},"modified":"2026-03-22T15:35:09","modified_gmt":"2026-03-22T15:35:09","slug":"i-watched-inside-the-manosphere-with-my-son","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/342399\/","title":{"rendered":"I watched “Inside the Manosphere” with my son"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I told my 17-year-old son to set aside a couple of hours for us to watch Louis Theroux<\/a>\u2018s new Netflix documentary, I got pretty much exactly the huffy, eye-rolling irritation I expected. Which is fair: I wasn\u2019t exactly thrilled about watching \u201cInside the Manosphere<\/a>,\u201d either. As a mother, I\u2019ve tried to be as diligent as possible about keeping up with my kid\u2019s viewing habits; as someone who writes about gender, media, and pop culture, I\u2019m already too familiar with the online spaces where mostly, but not exclusively white men have gathered over the years to commiserate with<\/a> and convince one another that nobody gets a rawer deal<\/a> than men, and to blame their loneliness<\/a> and disconnection on women.<\/p>\n

These guys, my son explains, can do what they do because their followers understand them as alphas, but they generally aren\u2019t alpha enough to not worry about whether they look sufficiently alpha.<\/p>\n

Theroux\u2019s career as a documentarian has seen him embedding with a number of controversial individuals and subcultures in BBC series like \u201cWeird Weekends.\u201d His mild, watchful interview style and high tolerance for awkwardness is, on one hand, perfect for manosphere dwellers, who don\u2019t need too much rope to start hanging themselves. But it\u2019s also not clear how familiar Theroux is with the tangle of misogynists, chauvinists, trolls, pick-up artists, grievance peddlers, religious fundamentalists, incels, rape apologists, Gamergaters<\/a>, looksmaxxers, snake-oil salesmen and Men Going Their Own Way that populate the manosphere. And without knowing what he wants to know about them, \u201cInside the Manosphere\u201d unfolds without a real sense of purpose.<\/p>\n

The unifying emblem of the manosphere is the red pill,<\/a> the choice to see the real truth that\u2019s been hidden from men by feminists and various progressive social movements that have robbed men of the power, deference and freedom to be masculine that is their birthright. \u201cInside the Manosphere\u201d hints that while the red pill has has staying power, it\u2019s lost some gravitas; among Theroux\u2019s interviewees, it\u2019s more compulsory buzzword than secret handshake. If an earlier version of the manosphere was assembled from the grievances of men who felt neither understood nor valued, the updated one is about being visible as a peddler of enviable masculinity.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

(Netflix) Louis Theroux and Harrison Sullivan (HS Tikky Tokky) in \u201cInside the Manosphere\u201d<\/p>\n

Or, as my kid puts it, \u201cThese guys make their money scamming people.\u201d<\/p>\n

You barely have to look at the documentary\u2019s vibrant stars \u2014 among them a sculpted, square-jawed Brit named Harrison Sullivan (who goes by the handle HSTikkyTokky); his proteg\u00e9, a fellow Brit named Ed Matthews with Aryan, boy-band good looks; and Justin Waller, a tight-suited entrepreneur who looks like a mashup of John Cena and Channing Tatum minus the charm and self-awareness, to see how the manosphere has changed.\u00a0 In the sh*tposting, resentfully tribal manosphere of yesteryear, all three would have been considered interloping Chads<\/a> flaunting their bone structure and ability to pull women. Their manosphere is located in the attention economy, always on and always hyped. And its denizens aren\u2019t philosophers or bomb-throwers. They\u2019re salesmen.<\/p>\n

My son pauses the documentary after Sullivan, apparently forgetting that he\u2019s not on his own livestream, starts narrating to the camera before Theroux cuts in with a bemused, \u201cWhat are you doing?\u201d Sullivan chuckles for a sheepish moment: \u201cI\u2019m sorry, I\u2019m so used to social media,\u201d he tells Theroux. \u201cIf this was being livestreamed, he probably wouldn\u2019t have said that,\u201d my son explained. \u201cThat was a genuine reaction he had. I don\u2019t think that would have happened if he were on a livestream, because he wouldn\u2019t want to show his belly.\u201d<\/p>\n

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These guys, he goes on, can do what they do because their followers (in Sullivan\u2019s case, a few hundred thousand on each of a variety of platforms including YouTube, TikTok and Kick) understand them as alphas, but they generally aren\u2019t alpha enough to not worry about whether they look sufficiently alpha. \u201cPeople like him act like a completely different person when they\u2019re streaming. He knows he\u2019s being filmed here, but his whole fan base isn\u2019t actively looking at him while it\u2019s happening. So he\u2019s acting like somewhat of a normal person.\u201d<\/p>\n

The manosphere Theroux presents is a performance of capitalism, its main players the human embodiment of more than a decade of fragile-masculinity marketing that\u2019s been successful as much because consumers are in on the joke as because they aren\u2019t.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the case with another of Theroux\u2019s subjects, Myron Gaines, a 36-year-old Sudanese American blogger and podcaster whose media empire, Fresh & Fit, sounds more like a chain of cold-pressed juice bars. His proud misogyny makes Gaines the most Andrew Tate\u2013coded<\/a> of Theroux\u2019s interviewees, but my kid explains that this isn\u2019t the flex it might have been 4 or 5 years ago. \u201cThis guy has no credibility in the manosphere, or whatever it\u2019s called,\u201d he says. \u201cHe\u2019s known to be a loser.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gaines presents as incredibly confident, but gets notably less so in Theroux\u2019s presence; he shuts down a conversation between the filmmaker and one of his producers, and speaks for his much younger girlfriend, Angie, every time Theroux queries her about their relationship. \u201cHe\u2019s one of those people who thinks he\u2019s so much smarter than he actually is,\u201d my son says. \u201cLike that, there,\u201d he emphasizes when Theroux asks Gaines \u2014 a proponent of \u201cone-sided monogamy\u201d \u2014 how many women besides Angie are in his rotation. \u201cI do want to get multiple wives, but right now, I\u2019m just focusing on building things up,\u201d he says vaguely; the guy might be hustling, but he\u2019s definitely not pulling.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

(Netflix) Nico Balinthazy (Sneako) and Louis Theroux in \u201cInside the Manosphere\u201d<\/p>\n

The manosphere Theroux presents is a performance of capitalism, its main players the human embodiment of fragile-masculinity marketing that\u2019s been successful as much because consumers are in on the joke as because they aren\u2019t \u2014 an echo chamber of Dude Wipes, brogurt and Liquid Death. His interviewees keep women around, but are primarily concerned with how they look to other men. The performance they are selling to the young men who buy their subscription packages is high-roller cosplay: sharp suits, expensive watches, granular breakdowns of gym routines and supplement cocktails.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an update of early-2000s pickup-artist culture, which popularized terminology like negging<\/a> and peacocking, and made clear that gamification of the process<\/a> was the point: PUAs wanted women to know that they were being psychologically manipulated and be unable to resist anyway. The current manosphere barely puts any effort into peacocking for women because they aren\u2019t selling to them. My son keeps returning to one of the clips from early in the documentary, of HSTikkyTokky asking the woman earlier identified as his dishwasher what she finds. \u201cAnd she said \u2018your money\u2019 \u2014 he wanted to show all his followers that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Watching \u201cInside the Manosphere\u201d is a reminder that the lives of teens like mine are divided sharply by the before and the after of COVID. Because the influencers in Theroux\u2019s film are so social, so constantly bragging about and big-upping themselves, I\u2019m momentarily confused when my kid locates its origin in pandemic-era lockdowns. \u201cPeople were just alone on their phones for too long, and weren\u2019t talking enough to, like, a variety of people. It created little bubbles. I truly think if people weren\u2019t sat inside their houses for a year with nothing but the internet and their minds to entertain themselves, none of this would have happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having lived through the first era of the manosphere, whose spates of incel violence<\/a> unfolded very publicly on college campuses and group-fitness classes, my instinct is to oh-you-sweet-summer-child this assertion. But he\u2019s referring to something that\u2019s different, if almost as chilling: The suspicion that on a mental and interpersonal level, a lot of young people just never fully left lockdown<\/a>. Theroux\u2019s apparent disinterest in connecting dots like these makes \u201cInside the Manosphere,\u201d as it wears on, feel more and more late to the party; and his own bemused detachment like a disinterest in digging deeper.<\/p>\n

Watching \u201cInside the Manosphere\u201d is a reminder that the lives of teens like mine are divided sharply by the before and the after of COVID.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s happy to point out some of the influencers\u2019 glaring contradictions \u2014 for instance, how many of them claim to be disgusted by women with OnlyFans accounts, even as they are a sizable part of their profit structures. But this comes across less as pushback than as petty needling.<\/p>\n

As with the Netflix miniseries \u201cAdolescenc<\/a>\u201d (2025\u2019s winner for Achievement in Parental Anxiety), \u201cInside the Manosphere\u201d is framed in terms of its impact on preadolescent and adolescent boys who watch these streamers. Theroux makes no effort to contextualize his subjects\u2019 beliefs as more intense flavor of the misogyny and gender imperatives that have always been existed in the normative transition between childhood and adulthood. What he\u2019s showing us is regular old patriarchy after it\u2019s pounded a ton of energy drinks, injected itself with peptides and attempted to trigger us with inflammatory bits of evolutionary psychology; explicitly saying so might have eased some of the worries of parents and other invested adults; more important, it would have underscored that these young men are a new models in an age-old system.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

(Netflix) Justin Waller in \u201cInside the Manosphere\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to see why the manosphere is so concerning, but I also worry that taking it at face value \u2014 assuming that every boy who watches the streams of Sneako and HSTikkyTokky wants to emulate them \u2014 doesn\u2019t give boys very much credit. I\u2019m rattled by the fact that my son is at least passingly familiar with the influencers profiled in \u201cInside the Manosphere,\u201d but I can also see what he means when he says they\u2019re entertainment, not instructional videos. \u201cIt\u2019s one of the biggest stereotypes there is: the big buff dude is a misogynist,\u201d my son explains. \u201cWhether they\u2019re serious or they\u2019re doing it as a bit or a full act, it\u2019s funny no matter what.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also can\u2019t think of anyone he knows who takes manosphere content seriously (\u201cnot even my stupidest friends\u201d), and wonders out loud whether its rhetoric might be bigger threat to demoralized 20 and 30-something men than to impressionable youngsters. Some of the film\u2019s most affecting insights come from two postadolescent men, acolytes of Waller\u2019s who cling fervently to even his broadest, least nuanced pronouncements. But it feels like Theroux squanders a chance to ask what happens when the transformation promised by the products and programs they\u2019re told will change their lives don\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe could have asked better questions, but [the film] did show how these guys operate,\u201d is my son\u2019s verdict on the film. \u201cLike, a lot of dumb people still don\u2019t know that all that sh*t is a scam. [Theroux] didn\u2019t outright say it\u2019s a scam, but he showed everything that proved it. So I think that was good. [And] him finding those two other guys and sticking with them \u2014 it was good to get insight on their mindset. I remember the one guy said he just really wants to get rich for his brother who died. And, like, motivation is really important, but he doesn\u2019t have a plan. And you don\u2019t get rich by listening to a famous person tell you how to get rich. That\u2019s how you make them rich.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more<\/p>\n

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