The Manosphere Is Too Online for Louis Theroux

Louis Theroux’s job used to be a lot easier. The British-American documentarian made a career with offbeat TV series, specials, and features that embedded him deep inside various subcultures. On the BBC’s Weird Weekends, which ran from 1998 to 2000, he met porn stars, Las Vegas hypnotists and pickup artists, backwoods survivalists, UFOlogists, and born-again Christian televangelists, who had never heard of him. Affecting a kind of wide-eyed curiosity, bordering on faux-naïveté, he encouraged his strange subjects to open up to, or at least tolerate, him. His charming English manner—he’d always introduce himself cheerfully as “Louis! From the BBC!”—probably helped. It’s a shtick familiar to any journalist, who knows that they can often mine the best material from other people by playing a slightly goofier version of themselves.

Theroux’s career is also marked by more serious inquiries. He plunked himself among white nationalists, the Westboro Baptist Church, “ultra-Zionist” Jewish settlers in the West Bank (including in the recent doc The Settlers), various street gangs from different countries, and convicted child sex offenders seeking treatment for their perversions in a California mental hospital.

Although grimmer in subject matter, these films operated on the same basic principle of Weird Weekends: that Theroux was an eminently trustworthy, gregarious fellow who would give his subjects a fair shake. One imagines many of them were not always thrilled with the results, which see Theroux adopting a more critical pose than his in-person, quizzical posture might suggest. Call it a bait and switch; call it good journalism. In any case, as his new Netflix film makes clear, it’s now much harder to pull it off. In Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, Theroux often finds that his reputation precedes him. And even when his subjects have no clear idea who he is, they are so aware of being filmed—and so used to filming themselves—that the result is something very different from Theroux’s signature unguarded style.

Inside the Manosphere has Theroux infiltrating (or trying to, anyway) the weird, and altogether sinister, world of hyper-macho, anti-feminist content creators. From the tone-setting intro, it’s clear he’s going to face trouble. The major figures in this world are so totally online—streaming every thought, escapade, attempted pickup, and get-rich-quick scam to their massive audiences, 24/7—that they seem savvy to Theroux’s schtick. They’re expecting a hit piece. And so their participation comes with all kinds of conditions. Specifically: that they also be allowed to film Theroux as he and his crew film them. It serves both as a kind of insurance, lest the final documentary prove heavily one-sided. But more than anything, it’s just another way for these “red-pill” manosphere types to ply their trade, by turning every waking moment into monetizable “content.”

These sorts of production-level compromises raise a few problems for Inside the Manosphere (which is directed by Adrian Choa). For one thing, the film does not have great access. Major manosphere figures like Adin Ross, Tate brothers Andrew and Tristan (accused in multiple jurisdictions of sexual assault and human trafficking) and far-right steamer Nick Fuentes (who appeared in Theroux’s 2022 doc Extreme and Online) are conspicuously absent. As are personalities like podcaster Joe Rogan and the Canadian psychologist and author Jordan Peterson. Instead, Theroux is relegated to rubbing shoulders with a series of bit players, who seem to believe (probably correctly) that their participation will work to raise their own profiles. The most “notable” figure here is the streamer Sneako, who broke onto the scene with man-on-the-street interviews where he’d pay people to yell racial slurs.

It’s also never clear if Theroux is speaking with genuine people, or men merely performing their souped-up, and extremely enervating, identities for their audience. When, for example, Louis spends time with British TikToker HSTikkyTokky (real name: Harrison Sullivan), there’s a sense that clear delineations between the real Sullivan and his persona are blurred, if they exist at all. A similar problem besets the movie itself, when his interviewees turn their cameras on Theroux and exploit his very presence for their own content. He reluctantly enters various livestreams and finds that segments of his own interviews have been clipped and uploaded online, pretty much instantaneously. His own, typically rather subtle, gotcha tactics are neutralized, and even turned to the interviewees’ advantage.

One of the film’s strategies is to show Theroux allowing himself to be humiliated, in order to draw out his subjects’ crudest inclinations. In one scene, Sullivan and his entourage mock Theroux for pulling a low score on one of those arcade punching bag machines, while the preening lads in his orbit crush it in a bluntly obvious simulation of male strength. When Theroux meekly interrupts a streaming round-table program to suggest that a man might value a woman for her intelligence or sense of humor, he is all but laughed out of the room. He is also accused on-stream of being a “mate” of the late British pedophile Jimmy Savile—when in fact, as Theroux himself anxiously protests, he helped to expose Savile’s history of child abuse in a BBC Two documentary. In another stream, Sullivan claims that Theroux is “owned by the Jews.”

These sorts of outrageous moves are a key and unavoidable feature of this whole modern masculinist ecosystem. The manosphere abounds with a myriad creeps, weirdos, MAGA sycophants, virgins, jocks, pimps, sex traffickers, and virulent anti-feminists whose personalities can seem so absolutely outsize that they beggar belief. Attempting to figure out just how much of this is real and how much is steroidal, chest-puffing bluster is Inside the Manosphere’s primary ambition.

There are a few moments when Theroux and Choa pry open a few hairline cracks in the hypermasculine facade. Theroux spends some time with a wannabe influencer who admits that his pursuit of fame and strength has reduced him to living in his car, crying himself to sleep. (It would have been nice to spend more time with this character.) An interview with misogynist Miami-based YouTuber Myron Gaines (real name Amrou Fudl), author of the 2003 book Why Women Deserve Less, gets genuinely uncomfortable when Theroux insists on speaking to Gaines’s girlfriend, who has arrived unannounced to tidy his apartment-studio. In another scene, Theroux grills the wife of manosphere influencer Justin Waller (another Miami guy; there’s a theme here) about her husband’s insistence on “one-way monogamy,” in which she remains loyal to her spouse while he freely sleeps with other women.

Having to defend their noxious beliefs in the presence of their ostensible partners leaves these men a little discombobulated and wrong-footed. And, it would seem, some of the women too. In the days since the doc premiered, it has since been revealed that Gaines and his put-upon girlfriend had split and that Gaines’s girlfriend had asked to be cut from the documentary altogether.

The bigger problem with attempting to expose the fundamental hypocrisies of the manosphere is that these men do not care about things like intellectual consistency or fairness. In fact, they seem to make a virtue of their own mean-spirited incoherence.

In this regard, Sullivan is perhaps the most illustrative character. He insists that he cannot be antisemitic because his cameraman is Jewish. He says that threatening to disown his hypothetical son for being gay is, somehow, “not homophobic.” Likewise, he claims that there’s nothing wrong or confusing in denouncing female pornographic actresses and OnlyFans models as morally degenerate, while simultaneously managing and profiting off those same actresses and models. It’s all for content. And all for money. And the math not adding up, ethically or intellectually, doesn’t matter one bit. He makes his remarks, candidly and without shame, on camera.

This sort of marrow-level dishonesty is a feature (if that’s the right word) of contemporary right-wing politics. And it’s one Theroux’s film fails to recognize. When our host’s face falls into a disapproving scowl and he asks Sullivan, “Why not try and be a good person?” he is missing the point. Ideas of good and bad are not useful here. Because Sullivan appears to have no genuine values or principles, you cannot catch him in a lie.

In making sense of the space, Inside the Manosphere arguably underestimates just how profoundly rotten it is. The film is attentive to the misogyny. And to the shadowy conspiracy theories that are characteristically antisemitic. But it skates over the deeper nihilism. For all their talk of escaping “the matrix”—a term for the brutal grind of nine-to-five labor—all these influencers have done is reinvent capitalism from first principles. Everything is monetary. Every person has a dollar value. And even the worst, meanest, stupidest ideas imaginable acquire merit by virtue of their recirculation in a completely debauched online marketplace of so-called “ideas.”

Toward the end of the film, Theroux arrives at an insight that may offer occasion for cautious optimism. The increasing rage and anger that have come to dominate the manosphere, he speculates, “seemed like compensation for the fear of being exposed.” It’s an escalating, arms-race logic that seems self-evident in so many aspects of modern life, where both rhetoric and policy coarsen algorithmically. One hopes that Theroux and his team are right, and that these accounts will become so mutated and just self-evidently bad that people will catch on, and reject it. That’s certainly a nice idea.

But when Inside the Manosphere ends with Theroux returning to that arcade boxing machine, to test his mettle, take another crack at the plump punching bag, and smile at the camera as his score skyrockets, one cannot help but get the sense that he’s playing a game on terms he has not set—and, worse, does not even understand.