Louis Theroux’s ‘Manosphere’ shows men aren’t the problem, platforms are

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Louis Theroux is a master of letting hardline ideologues hang themselves. In his decades-long career, he’s used his faux-naïve journalistic persona to wheedle cult leaders, neo-Nazis, members of the Westboro Baptist Church, and Israeli settlers in the West Bank alike into speaking more frankly than they might do otherwise. His latest documentary, Inside the Manosphere, leads the male influencer economy next into the gallows. In typical Theroux fashion, it follows various internet personalities who make a living hawking red pill ideology and ​“traditional” masculine values in an attempt to understand their motivations and interior lives on their own terms.

Once considered a misogynistic ​“fringe” movement, manosphere talking points – from pick-up artistry and anti-feminism all the way to promoting bigamy and rape – have crept into the mainstream and taken root over the last half-decade (not totally unprecedented, given that most of them were firmly in place in the 2000s and only briefly interrupted by the discussions around #MeToo). Its influence can now be felt everywhere from primary schools to electoral politics. However, rather than the ride-or-die delusions we typically see propping up extremist beliefs in Theroux’s films, what we find at the heart of the manosphere is… absolutely nothing. 

Among those interviewed are Harrison Sullivan (HSTikkyTokky), a manchild from Redbridge whose single mother worked six jobs to put him through private school only for him to emerge a chat-controlled puppet who looks like he claps with his fingers spread, and Justin Waller, a former constructor from Louisiana who is now like a cross between Dan Bilzerian and a Syndrome from the Incredibles. They’re the main character studies. Then there are less intensive appearances from Ed Matthews (Jay Cartwright if he grew up on Twitch), Sneako (a man-on-the-street YouTuber turned right-wing troll currently banned from several social media platforms), and Myron Gaines (a former tactical unit agent who left the Department of Homeland Security to focus on co-hosting the Fresh and Fit podcast and writing his first book, Why Women Deserve Less). Over the course of the documentary we meet their mothers, girlfriends, employees, and fans – each of whom reveals a new hypocrisy or hairline crack in the image they present to their audiences. All of them have absent fathers, which is revealing in its own right.

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Despite slamming OnlyFans girls as ​“disgusting,” Sullivan owns an agency that manages them and promotes them on his Telegram channel. Despite telling the camera he plans to have multiple wives, Gaines backs down when his actual girlfriend is interviewed alongside him. Despite his sermons about the importance of traditional gender roles and the nuclear family, Waller is unmarried (he has a partner and two, soon to be three, children). They each brag about their emancipation from the 9‑to‑5 grind while pledging allegiance to the algorithm, and that’s ultimately how they court viewers: by bigging themselves up as examples of self-made ​“high status” individuals, and ostensibly offering young men the tools to achieve the same. 

The documentary also shows how the manosphere finds its parallel in OnlyFans. For all the ​“gender wars” of it all, the two have a symbiotic relationship. The girls leverage manosphere podcasts, livestreams, and Telegram channels to promote their pages. The men need the girls to drive their engagement. On a broader individual level, both avenues appeal because they present self-serving opportunism as a profitable alternative to a broken economic system. Why run to stand still working for bosses or shareholders that make five times as much as you, pay taxes in exchange for rapidly declining public services, and spend over 40% of your salary on rent, when you could put yourself through medical school by sending feet pics to isolated men with disposable income? That’s been the narrative around OnlyFans for the last six years. Why wouldn’t the same logic apply to misogynist influencers? Why climb the ladder when you can make a name for yourself insulting women on TikTok Live and funnelling isolated men towards crypto investment services?

When I was 18 I worked, very briefly, for a door to door sales company. On the first morning, the branch manager drew a line down the middle of a whiteboard, wrote ​“Primark, Adidas, Ford” on one side and ​“Versace, Rolex, Porsche” on the other and asked people which they’d rather be on. The mentality behind the ​“internet personality” economy, especially at the more extreme ideological ends, is the same. The manosphere is a pyramid scheme of big name grifters selling a dream of money, power, and control to aspiring young copycats regardless of whether or not they’re actually living it themselves. It’s pure sales. Sullivan says as much himself in the documentary: ​“I’ve always been a salesman. I’m a salesman now. Sales is the most important skill you can have. You’re never going to be ultra-successful if you can’t sell.” 

And a good salesman doesn’t need to believe in the product they’re selling. They just have to convince you they do. If there’s one thing I took away from Inside the Manosphere, it’s that very few if any of its central players believe what they’re saying at all. In many respects, it’s not the ​“hatred” at the core of the manosphere project that makes it so difficult to deal with, it’s the ambivalence.

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Inside the Manosphere has faced some criticism, particularly from feminists who felt it should have focussed more on the impact on women and girls, and that Theroux didn’t push back enough. I don’t necessarily agree with either of those points. We know what the impact of misogyny is. The influencers know what the impact of misogyny is. Young boys are told, repeatedly, by teachers if no one else, what the impact of misogyny is. The problem is that the influencers don’t care, because it doesn’t benefit them to.

There is a prevailing – and sadly naïve – belief that if you interrogate these people strongly enough, use the right words and hit them in the right spots, they’ll suddenly do a 180, throw their hands up, and apologise. That might be the case for neo-Nazis indoctrinated into ideology alone, but it is not the case here. This isn’t American History X. This is their job. Their entire business model rests on making the most outrageous statements possible – not just about women, but race and politics too – in order to boost their visibility and therefore their income on tech platforms that have a rage-based reward system baked in. ​“Why not try and be a good person?” Theroux asks Sullivan, who has just told him verbatim that he doesn’t give a fuck about what he promotes and he’s just doing it for money. Sullivan sighs. ​“If I’d just done good things, I would never have really blown up on social media in the first place.” You might just as well ask Bonnie Blue why she didn’t stay working in recruitment.

Still, Inside the Manosphere is at its best when showing the impact on the people around the influencers, particularly their audiences. The most illuminating interviews come from two young men living in Miami. They fell on hard times – one lost his brother to suicide – and they credit Justin Waller with giving them the requisite tools to keep pushing forward. When they meet him, they express their gratitude and appear genuinely emotional. The film could have stood to have more of that, focussing less on the influencers themselves and more on what men are actually taking from their content – which isn’t always a misogynistic worldview stemming from a sincere hatred of women, but a sense of purpose, self-belief, and understanding they were struggling to find elsewhere. In short, they make young men feel seen.

An entirely separate film could also be made on the real malignant force: the platforms these influencers use to make money, which is the only reason any of them are doing what they do in the first place. By the end of Inside the Manosphere, it’s still unclear exactly how most of them make their alleged millions. At least some of it comes through promoting gambling companies, OnlyFans pages, and crypto – often to teenagers. Sullivan, for his part, has been issued several warnings by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for doing this. The regulatory body says he’s operating without authorisation. There is evidence to suggest that most of their millions are inflated, a mere part of the performance, but even so, there is very little interrogation in the documentary or anywhere else of the platform owners and financial pyramid schemes that make extremist influencing such a profitable grift, and subsequently such a powerful engine of political culture. 

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Young men are currently facing a constellation of hardships and uncertainties that have long outstripped the scripts society has given them. Ironically, they’re facing the same existential crisis as young women and girls, which is why the so-called ​“gender wars” is an utterly fabricated concept. We have created a miserable ecosystem in which hard work is meaningless, creativity can be computer generated, sex is transactional, and being ​“a good person” (as Theroux puts it) is secondary to money – the only measurable anchor in a turbulent world. The integrity of the Department of Homeland Security aside, it’s worth asking what’s compelling people to leave stable jobs to make a living grilling eight women at once about their body count. Misogynist grifter or OnlyFans girl, people don’t need moral admonishment, they need compelling alternatives. 

As ever, when a high-profile study of contemporary masculinity drops, we see a call for more positive male role models. This is usually futile, since they already exist but are rarely rewarded by the algorithm. This time, however, one such model seems to have arrived in the form of a man in a playdough-coloured tracksuit. British boys are calling him ​“the Brentwood mogger,” but he is more widely known as Gymskin. 

If you’ve not had him pop up on your feed in recent weeks, perhaps ​“dropping the shoulder” to Madonna’s ​“Into the Groove” or lamenting that Costa has ​“burnt the bean again,” Gymskin is a Kick streamer who goes about London and Essex with his brother having a massive laugh. The Natural History Museum, a Pokémon convention, cosplayers in fursuits – nowhere, nothing, and no one is safe from this jacked man with his preposterous jawline and childlike sense of wonder. ​“Bruv that’s 154 million fuckin’ years old,” he says in one video, kneeling down to place his hands gently on an ancient tree stump to ponder the enormity of time. ​“You need to seriously fuckin’ respect that. Oh my god, that’s fuckin’ amazing.”

The type of guy who would have had an early season of Big Brother in a chokehold, Gymskin has been embraced en masse for his kid-high-on-Skittles energy and positive outlook on life (frequent highlights include asking the elderly how their day is going and ​“no racism in the chat”). Not to venerate him too much – he’s only been famous for a few weeks; in employment terms he’s still on probation – but his skyrocketing popularity among young men who keep pulling up on Lime bikes in the middle of his livestream to dance with him in the street shows that if you throw a genuinely charismatic bloke with a good head on his shoulders into the mix it will immediately make his peers look like twats. He’s like that one popular football player at school who was nice to the goths. We can continue to argue about this for another ten years, but at the end of the day the only figure with the power to destroy a desperate little man is an effortlessly cool one.

Emma Garland is a culture writer and editor based in London. Follow her on Instagram.

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