“Listen, it’s a big family, the Louis family,” says broadcaster Louis Theroux. I’ve just told him that my name is also Louis and joked that I’m a young challenger who is coming for his journalistic crown. He starts listing other namesakes, like One Direction’s Louis Tomlinson and X Factor judge Louis Walsh, before realising there aren’t many examples. It’s the type of small-talk that anyone who has watched his extensive back-catalogue of documentaries, or listens to his eponymous podcast, will instantly recognise.
In the 2000s, I grew up watching Theroux’s BBC programmes, which took viewers into the world of conspiracy theorists, religious cults, gun fanatics, drug addicts, prisoners, porn stars and many more. Looking back, these immersive documentaries were one of the first spaces where, as a teenager, I was permitted to engage with more adult subject matter within the safety of the documentary format. He has a voyeuristic interview technique: he appears reserved and gives his subjects space to show their own absurdity. It's a signature style that has earned him fans, awards and critical acclaim, but also criticism for poking fun at his subjects, or not pushing back hard enough against their more extreme views.
Aside from a first name, another thing that Theroux and I share is that we’re both men — men who are, in different ways, decidedly not the target audience for the “manosphere,” the disturbing world he’s exploring in his first Netflix documentary, Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere. I’m an effeminate gay guy whose greatest fear is being asked to kick an errant football back in the park, and Theroux is an unassuming 55-year-old man who sits in what I will affectionately describe as a “centrist dad” look (various garments in different hues of grey), which juxtaposes with the futuristic-looking, sculptural sofa in which he sits in Netflix’s modern London office. We’re a far cry from jacked-up, bravado-obsessed men of the manosphere, who preach about power and dominance and, as Theroux puts it in his documentary, represent “a Darwinian view of alpha supremacy.”
What exactly is the manosphere? It’s an inexact, evolving term that describes an online culture featuring prominent male content creators. These men are united by an ethos of male supremacy and, so they claim — more on that later — a return to traditional gender roles. “What they believe is that society hates men,” Theroux says. “Or that society has no time for weak men, and that men are going to be crushed unless they make themselves uncrushable and create an armour.”
Many of these creators teach young men how to exist outside the “system” (often referred to as “the matrix”), which involves embracing the two pillars of their version of masculinity: money and muscles. They describe themselves as “red-pilled” — another term taken from a scene in The Matrix, where the protagonist, Neo, takes a red pill and finally begins to see the dystopian world as it is. Theroux says the “red pill” represents “the realisation that sexual equality is a myth being sold to them by a fraudulent culture of self-interested business moguls.”
This might sound very bizarre to anyone who believes what was once considered an accepted reality: that we live under a patriarchy that oppresses women. But it’s an example of what, in her 2023 book Doppelganger, author Naomi Klein refers to as the “mirror world” — a distorted, parallel reality fuelled by social media algorithms, conspiracy theories and self-branding, where mainstream norms are totally inverted. It’s a paranoid worldview that has gained more traction since the pandemic, where it often feels like all conspiracy theories have been rolled into one. Cue the manosphere, which positions men as the oppressed gender alongside anti-vax sentiment, great replacement theory, and antisemitic conspiracies about the media, which are presented through a lens of life improvement, fitness and entertainment.
Theroux tells me that the manosphere is his “final boss battle” — a representation of so many of the mirror worlds he has explored in previous documentaries. “What brings all this together is this curation of a persona,” he says, before immediately apologising for sounding grandiose. “Whether it's wrestling or gangster rap or the porn industry, these are worlds in which people perform versions of themselves. And often, they'll take a new name. With these men, it’s a similar thing.” The “final boss” video game comparison is also conceptually appropriate. “These guys have used the internet to grow their platforms by putting up misogynistic content, but a big part of their message is that life is a video game, and you need to win the game by scoring high in various metrics — how many people you have sex with, how much money you have, how big your muscles are, how big your privates are,” he explains. “I think there’s something in a lot of us that enjoys things being gamified. And if life is the ultimate game, then they’re pretending or alleging that they can teach you how to win it.”
In the documentary, Theroux travels between New York, Miami, and Marbella to meet various content creators who claim to be giving young men “The cheat code to win at life.” In New York, he meets “Sneako” (real name Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy), who was banned from YouTube, TikTok and Twitch for “hateful conduct.” In Miami, Theroux follows Justin Waller and Myron Gaines (born Amrou Fudl), a podcaster who believes women shouldn’t have the right to vote. And in Marbella, he spends time with Ed Matthews and Harrison Sullivan, also known as “HS Tikky Tokky,” who tells Theroux: “I coach boys how to make money and how to be out of the system.”
On the “spectrum” of the manosphere, Theroux says that these men are “at the extreme end of it.” (In January, Sullivan made Nazi salutes and praised Hitler on one of his live streams.) Theroux’s interactions with these men are fascinating and, sometimes, very funny. They don’t make much of his “stature” (lack of biceps) or his mainstream media credentials. (They often mention an interview with notorious paedophile Jimmy Savile.) But they’re impressed by his social media following and are chasing something Theroux has an abundance of: clout. Sullivan, in particular, alternates between shit-talking him, but also wanting to make content with him.
We also see many clips of Andrew Tate, the self-proclaimed misogynist whose rise has further propelled the manosphere into mainstream culture. Theroux says he had an “extensive back and forth” with Tate, whose violently misogynistic rhetoric started going mega-viral on TikTok in 2022. “I think he was in two minds about appearing in the documentary,” he says. “Maybe he was worried about how he would come across, which is almost a compliment to me, right?”
The stars of the manosphere share a certain evangelical quality. It’s unsurprising that they fascinate Theroux, who has previously investigated the Westboro Baptist Church and the Church of Scientology, because they characterise themselves as preachers of a self-styled Church of Maschismo. And, as with many religious cults, there is a financial element. Sullivan encourages his Telegram followers to invest in various financial schemes, of which he gets a cut even if they lose all their money. (In the documentary, Theroux invested £500 and lost most of it by the time filming wrapped.) Waller is a proponent of the Tate brothers’ The Real World — a paid subscription service promising financial advice from “multi-millionaire mentors” on topics such as crypto trading, AI and fitness.
The manosphere also operates within what I’d call the New Internet. When most people think of social media, they think of platforms like TikTok and Instagram. But these apps are now the old guard. Moderation rules have pushed many of the manosphere’s creators onto newer platforms, such as Rumble, a YouTube alternative that bills itself as “immune to cancel culture,” where Russell Brand continues to stream. Harrison Sullivan and Ed Matthews boasted about conducting “pred stings” on Kick — another seemingly lawless livestreaming site where creators can broadcast live to paid subscribers. Matthews proudly shows Theroux clips of him confronting alleged sexual predators and forcing them to do humiliating rituals on camera, such as eating dog food. (These clips aren’t just shared by the manosphere creators, but “clip farmers” who edit together snippets from their livestreams and post for engagement themselves.)
In one of the documentary’s most shocking moments, Theroux watched as Sullivan and his friends attacked a man they accused of being a predator in the middle of the street and streamed it live. (This was never confirmed, and his identity was not revealed.) Theroux remembers returning home after filming in Marbella, and being asked about the “pred sting” by his sons (aged 20, 18 and 11), who had already seen the clips online. “We're in this world where we're inflicting our own mini-Hunger Games on ourselves, where we’re incentivised to surveil and brutalise ourselves,” he says. “We’re already seeing live-streamed assaults. And famously, the incident [mass shooting] in Christchurch was live-streamed on Facebook. This is going to become more or less routine, because people are being incentivised with attention and money to behave in the worst way imaginable.”
If the manosphere is a story of the New Internet, then its sudden rise — enabled by a mixture of culture and technology — reminds me of another notoriously misogynistic era: the 2000s. In the early aughts, reality TV was the new, disruptive medium. And just like how Big Brother and The X Factor provided a fresh cast of characters every year, the endless content cycle of the manosphere requires the creation of new stars like Clavicular, the 20-year-old influencer who advocates for “looksmaxxing” — the incel-adjacent pursuit of physical perfection in order to maximise your “sexual market value.” (His methods include steroids, surgery and taking a hammer to his jaw.) The specific type of fame these young men represent also feels reality-TV-infused. I’ll admit that I had no idea who most of Theroux’s subjects were before watching this documentary, but they kept being stopped on the street by gushing male fans who idolised them — real people, not just numbers on a screen. This represents a further fracturing of the mainstream — and fame — that began during the 2000s, where reality stars were “A-list famous” to their fans, but totally unknown to people outside their orbit.
Not only does manosphere create its own alternate reality, but in the case of streamers like Sullivan and Matthews, they’re literally filming, producing and starring in their own reality shows. Similarly to the mid-2000s, when we saw the emergence of more unethical, Jeremy-Kyle-style reality TV — including the original "pred sting" To Catch a Predator, which Jimmy Kimmel once described as “Punk’d for pedophiles” — the manosphere’s hamster wheel of content encourages extreme behaviour. Ethical red lines (if any exist) are much less clear in the unregulated online space these men inhabit, where it’s acceptable to live-stream yourself attacking someone. As Theroux noticed Sullivan’s own behaviour becoming more erratic and shocking, he noted: “Instead of being cancelled, he was riding high.” In the so-called "attention economy" of social media, creators can cash in on even the most negative controversies.
And speaking of being un-cancellable, President Donald Trump is like a spectre who haunts Theroux’s documentary. In fact, part of the reason why Miami is considered the worldwide capital of the manosphere is because of its proximity to Mar-a-Lago — Trump’s luxurious Florida estate, where his subjects can flaunt their facelifts and clamour for access to him. Many of the men Theroux spoke to are following a Trumpian model of branding themselves as symbols of success and luxury — fast cars, blingy gold chains, private planes — then selling various forms of content as the secret to that success. It’s no coincidence that former Big Brother star Andrew Tate and Trump both had their breakout moment on reality TV — or that Tate’s now-shuttered “Hustler’s University” subscription service was basically a new-age version of the president’s Trump University, which was widely accused of fraud, though Trump called the claims “a total lie”.
I wonder if these men are as successful as they make out? On the whole, Theroux was surprised by how “real” their lives seemed, but he couldn’t figure out whether they were actually rich or merely pretending to be. “I don't think Justin Waller is worth $30 million [as he claimed], but he makes a good living. With Harrison Sullivan, how much is he worth? Who fucking knows.” But really, he thinks their exact bank balance is almost besides the point. “Whether they’re worth five million or 50 million, it's still a grift, because they’re purporting to sell young men the keys to getting rich, but they’re not sharing how they actually get rich themselves, which is by deceiving their followers and selling them crappy products.”
The men of the manosphere are bound together by a shared enemy — feminism — and a desire for money and fame, but elsewhere their beliefs are more difficult to untangle. They advocate for a sense of masculinised hyper-individualism, where a man’s success is completely determined by the size of his biceps, his “body count”, or what’s in his bank account. Yet their content also suggests a desire for community — or at least, a simulation of community that they can monetise. In the documentary, Justin Waller and Myron Gaines are also proponents of “one-sided monogamy,” where — you’ve guessed it! — their partners are faithful, but they get to sleep with whoever they want. Gaines even boasted that his girlfriend packs his condoms whenever he travels. (The relationship didn’t last.)
It seems like the manosphere is a web of contradictions. “Oh my God, tell me about it,” Theroux agrees. “They say women should be modest. But meanwhile, they’re encouraging these girls in their orbit to do OnlyFans. They say family is everything, but they also want multiple wives. That doesn't sound like a strong family structure, to me — that sounds like a recipe for heartbreak and confusion. I think the bottom line is, you can't look for too much coherence in it, because it really is a confabulation of slogans rather than a thought-out life philosophy or worldview.”
As a gay man, one of the more ironic parts of the documentary was that, for all the talk about how “innate” masculinity is to men, Theroux’s subjects spent so much time visually performing masculinity and describing the labour that goes into it. The watches, the chains, the rented cars, the spray tans, the muscles — I personally know professional drag queens who spend less time and money performing gender. And for all their homophobic statements (Sullivan said he would “disown” his son if he were gay), they are also completely obsessed with male validation. As Theroux puts it: “It's guys trying to look their best for other guys.”
In fact, one of the deeper truths of the documentary is not just how much the manosphere hates women — and it does — but the sheer loathing it has for men, too. So much of their content revolves around the type of man you don’t want to be — weak, “beta,” broke, liberal, weedy. And one of their recurring talking points portrays a deep self-loathing: Waller and Gaines are convinced that all men have to “create their value” in the world. Women, they claim, are born with beauty and the ability to procreate, whereas men are born without any worth. What a terrible thing to think about yourself — or anyone. “We're used to seeing women as the victims of the manosphere, which obviously they are,” Theroux says. “But in addition to that, men are being preyed upon. I think we have to see this as these people being both perpetrators, but also victims, of the culture.”
As the documentary comes to a close, we’re confronted by the reality that, despite professing to be against “the system,” the manosphere is becoming more mainstream. “This culture is extreme and in some respects marginal and secret — it's in layers of the internet that older people aren't necessarily exposed to,” Theroux tells me. “But there are parts of it that do sort of seep out into the wider culture. Trump is not saying women shouldn't vote, right? But it’s definitely the case that parts of the mainstream are adopting manosphere talking points.” Award-winning dramas like Adolescence and Theroux’s documentary itself have further increased its prominence, albeit critically. “I do understand that, in a way, we're acknowledging that this content has some sort of appeal to it,” Theroux says. “Even if it's the appeal of being enticingly horrific.”
The documentary ends on a sombre note. “We are all increasingly inside the manosphere,” Theroux narrates. “It’s up to us how we get out.” I wonder, after spending so much time in this world, if he sees a way out — or even the first step? He refers to a clip near the end of the film, of 10-year-old Ed Matthews filming himself for a YouTube challenge, where he tries to fit as many marshmallows in his mouth as possible. In that moment, we see that this is a generation who have grown up online and have been moulded by the material they encountered there — and the promise of fame, money and attention.
“I think we have to look at the way tech companies and tech devices are indoctrinating our kids,” Theroux says. He doesn’t think it’s realistic to rely on parents, because young people are more savvy about the internet than they are. (“My kids are always getting into my Instagram and changing my avatar and making me look like a slug.”) Instead, he’s curious about what’s happening in Australia, where the government has just banned under-16s from social media accounts. “I am not a libertarian,” he says. “I do think that there are elements of state intervention that are going to be helpful in this context.”
It’s true that, throughout the documentary, all roads lead back to the algorithm. Misogyny, homophobia and conspiracy theories are, sadly, not new. But the method through which the manosphere is spreading these ideas — beaming them into the phones of young men and presenting them as entertainment — is new. Social media has made it immensely profitable to be a villain — and Theroux’s subjects were all too aware of their role. In Marbella, he asked Sullivan why he does things that he knows are wrong. Why not try to be a good person? “That’s a good question,” he says, before pausing for what feels like the first time ever. “If I’d just done good things, I would have never blown up on social media in the first place. I wouldn’t be where I’m at now.”
We'll be honest, it's a lot to watch.
