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There’s something unnatural about legacy media colliding with the modern internet. It’s like a dog having sex with a giraffe. All that’s left is an unpleasant mess spun through with shame. Which brings me to Louis Theroux, the most eminently watchable representative of TV’s old guard, but a man whose methods of gentle, observational needling prove no match for an online culture defined by its apathetic immorality. In his latest documentary – the first under his new deal with Netflix – every wry question is met by TikTok-brained obfuscation; every attempt at a gotcha is blocked by a wall of protein-shake sociopathy. Inside the Manosphere, then, is a failure, one in which Theroux is repeatedly, depressingly bested by a swarm of ugly men with Bitcoin wallets and chin pubes.
Inside the Manosphere explores what could be termed The New Sexism, a social ill bred on YouTube, live streams and dodgy apps, where men instruct other men how to be better. Better, in this case, meaning becoming a dead-eyed misogynist with degenerative opinions about gender, money and sex, a fleet of supercars, and ideally two or three women on retainer to humiliate and subjugate when the impulse strikes. “I coach boys how to be f***ing boys,” explains Harrison Sullivan, a 24-year-old ghoul known online as HSTikkyTokky. “How to make money. How to be outside the system. How to not have a boss telling you what to do. I teach guys how to be proper guys, not these soy boy gimps who walk around in the modern day.”
This is the “manosphere”, notoriously exemplified by the influencer Andrew Tate but now perpetuated by a human centipede of imitators across the world. Theroux meets a handful of them, from the American streamers Myron Gaines and Sneako, to the British internet personality Ed Matthews. Matthews best illustrates the jack-of-all-trades, master-of-scum approach to digital infamy: his videos run the gamut of fitness tips, conspiracy theories, on-the-street sex chat, and live-streamed predator stings, like a greatest hits collection of everything awful.
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Louis Theroux with the American ‘success coach’ Justin Waller in ‘Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere’ (Netflix)
Sitting in on streams and lurking around Marbella gyms, Theroux struggles to get a handle on the people he orbits. He leans heavily on the idea of their hypocrisy, to ill effect. Isn’t it contradictory for Sullivan to simultaneously work alongside and monetise a fleet of OnlyFans models while endlessly disparaging what they do for a living? Isn’t it unfair for him to host the infamous porn performer Bonnie Blue on one of his streams only to call her a whore? Sullivan shrugs. “I did it for clout,” he explains. “For views.” Which, he gloats, worked like gangbusters.
Theroux seems unprepared to enter this kind of moral cesspool, in which every party – man or woman, rich or poor, pimp or porn star – positions personal financial gain above all else. His interaction with a so-called “sexy plasterer” named Ellie Nutts, an OnlyFans model and one of Sullivan’s female hangers-on, goes nowhere. “I don’t care about other people’s opinions about what I’m doing for myself,” she tells him. “I’m comfortable in my decisions.” Sullivan boasts that he can’t possibly be homophobic or antisemitic because he has gays and Jews on his payroll, one of whom hovers in the corner of the room with a smile on his face. Troupes of women gleefully submit themselves to debasement on Gaines’s streams, presumably because it’s a means to promote their OnlyFans pages or social media accounts. The virulent sexism, antisemitism and pseudo-science we witness is appalling, but also meaningless in a world that prioritises pure attention over anything. Everyone is here, everyone is paying, and no one cares.
There are occasional depictions of collateral damage. Gaines’s girlfriend Angie is a sad spectacle to behold, a woman clearly uncomfortable with the idea of her partner plotting to have multiple wives in the long-term. (Satisfyingly, she ends up leaving him, but this occurs once the cameras have stopped rolling.) Theroux also meets two desperate devotees of the manosphere, both of whom worship at the altar of a cigar-smoking “success coach” and believe that they will ultimately be rewarded for toiling through a life of homelessness, misery and depression (though depression, one insists, doesn’t actually exist).
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Theroux meets the influencer HSTikkyTokky during ‘Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere’ (Netflix)
But fundamentally there is no use to any of this. Theroux prods and points at these manosphere A-listers and the worlds they occupy, while vainly intellectualising them (“is it all to do with absentee fathers?” he asks). Meanwhile, he falls prey to individuals eager to capitalise on his presence to boost their own profiles. Sullivan is paranoid about Theroux’s intentions, but welcomes him back for more interactions because his celebrity has caused a spike in his video views. Theroux, and by proxy this very documentary, will make Sullivan a household name, which will further inflame the reach of the manosphere entirely. Theroux meets Sullivan’s mother, who disagrees with many of her son’s proclamations but seems to care far more about how he is depicted on TV. “If you don’t agree with what Harrison’s doing, then why are you making money off it on a programme by publicising it?” she asks him. It’s a frustratingly valid question, to which Theroux has no answer.
Inside the Manosphere may have set out to expose this particular sub-culture as one full of beasts and charlatans, all of whom are exploiting a lost generation of men with little in the way of material hope. But didn’t we know that already? Ultimately this is an expensive Netflix documentary that’s provided maximum exposure to individuals who consider any kind of attention a win. It leaves a bitter, nasty taste in the mouth.
At documentary’s end, Theroux laments Sullivan’s crossover into the mainstream, remarking that he is “riding high” as “mainstream papers and TV shows” have finally taken notice of him. “I’m playing the game of life,” Sullivan tells Theroux at one point. “I’m playing it very well.”
‘Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere’ is streaming on Netflix