‘Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere’ confronts some of the Internet’s worst men
The ideal antidote for the rise of redpill content, it turns out, is a mild-mannered, middle-aged British documentarian, who's willing to interview these guys in front of their mothers and girlfriends
In the last decade or so, a large number of documentaries of wildly varying quality have been made about the rise of the overlapping phenomena known as the alt-right, QAnon, general conspiracism, the pickup artist community, and the manosphere.
In his new Netflix documentary, Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, the British documentarian Theroux seems to have come up with a cheat code for dealing with this sort of interview subject: If you’re going to interview them on camera, if possible, make sure the guy’s girlfriend and/or mother is part of the interview too.
This is Theroux’s first Netflix feature documentary. He was much better known, at least until recently, in the U.K. than in the U.S., although he did work for Michael Moore at one point during the TV Nation era. But Theroux’s interview style is nothing like Moore’s- rather than browbeat people, he approaches them calmly, without getting in their faces.
Theroux poses, needless to say, a massive contrast to the people he’s interviewing. For one thing, he doesn’t go by a silly nickname. For another, he’s an expert at hanging them with their own words. His previous documentary, last year’s Louis Theroux: The Settlers, applied a similar lens to extremist West Bank settlers. But more on that later.
I first encountered the “manosphere” about 15 years ago, during the blog era. It had a different style and different key figures, but the general formula remains the same: A combination of offering young men advice about how to get better at picking up chicks, fused with far-right politics, almost always at the cutting edge of being much more racist, sexist, and antisemitic than even mainstream conservative politics were willing to go.
But that was before guys like this became a key part of Donald Trump’s winning coalition in 2024.
Now, in the age of TikTok, that cohort has moved to social media and the world of influencers, with guys pushing a cartoonish, performative version of masculinity focused on big muscles, fancy cars, lots of money, and harems of women. Some of the men interviewed are acolytes of accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate, who was brought back into the U.S. from Romanian exile in the early days of the second Trump presidency.
The subjects have nicknames like HSTikkyTokky, Sneako and Myron Gaines. Their schticks differ slightly from one another, but the main key seems to be insulting and denigrating women, denouncing them as gold diggers and whores, and in some cases inviting women onto their podcasts and streams to insult them to their faces.
These guys are, for the most part, charlatans and con men. In the ‘80s or ‘90s, these guys would have had infomercials. But now, they have Instagram and TikTok, which are bringing them massive viewership.
Myron Gaines’ show, in particular, seems influenced by the early 1990s version of Howard Stern’s show, although there’s not much of a hint of anything funny ever happening.
More than one of them claims to practice “one-way monogamy,” meaning they get to cheat but their wives/girlfriends don’t. There’s also talk about “telegony,” a popular but laughably fake Incel folk belief that women retain DNA from all of their past sexual partners, and pass parts of it on to their children.
But the most fascinating part is when Myron Gaines becomes a completely different guy around his now-ex-girlfriend.
A different interviewee is questioned with his mother present, which is a whole other level of pathetic:
We’re also introduced to “a dating coach and penis extension expert named Sterling Cooper,” which is a sentence that gets funnier the longer it goes. Did he name himself after the advertising firm in Mad Men? Is this an unconcious self-admission that he’s the same type of flim-flam man Don Draper was?
Also, in the end, Theroux exposes that all of these guys, like most brain-dead conspiracy theorists, are huge antisemites.
Theroux himself is accused of being Jewish (he’s not), and also called a Zionist plant, which is pretty laughable since his The Settlers documentary didn’t exactly do much to endear Theroux to the Zionist cause.
And one interviewee brings up Theroux’s past documentary about the late Jimmy Savile, the British TV and radio host who turned out to be a sex abuser. Theroux makes clear that he played a role in exposing Savile, but that’s not enough to prevent his subject from implying Theroux is himself complicit in Savile’s crimes. (Like way too many cohorts these days, the redpill guys have accusing their opponent of being a pedophile as their go-to move.)
Is this documentary going to change anyone’s mind? No, probably not. But it’s still probably the most effective challenge I’ve seen to this particular brotherhood of grifters and schmucks.
well, I hope the documentary is better than the trailer because that doesn't even approach the level of toxicity that comes from those clowns.