19.03.2026
One-dimensional men
Louis Theroux’s latest documentary has sparked perplexed commentary in the liberalosphere. Why is the tacky world of masculinist influencers so attractive to so many young men? Paul Demarty gives us his take
The subjects of Louis Theroux’s Inside the manosphere are the topic of great moral concern among contemporary liberals.
These men, we understand, give their young fans a bizarrely distorted picture of the proper relations between the sexes. In doing so, they perhaps play some role in the lurch of society to the far right, and above all the interruption of the general leftward drift of successive generations on questions of gender. The effect of the film, however, is not to paint these influencers as evil geniuses. Their ideas are contemptible merely as ideas, never mind political prescriptions. These men skim across life; they plumb no greater depth than the jet-ski we glimpse, at one moment, arcing across the bay of Marbella. They deliberately avow their shallowness, and that avowal counts perversely for sincerity among their followers.
In the course of 90 minutes, Theroux takes us first to Marbella, where he meets the Brits, Harrison Sullivan and Ed Matthews. Sullivan is plainly the bigger fish; Matthews more or less his Adderall-addled thrall. He then moves onto Miami, noting its pride of place in the manosphere scene, where he meets Louisiana-born businessman and masculinist Justin Waller and edgy podcaster Myron Gaines. Finally there is a stop in New York to meet the man best known as ‘Sneako’, certainly the best known of all these men, before a return to Marbella, for a bizarre confrontation with Sullivan in the company of his mother.
The nature of his subjects puts a strange twist on his tried and true formula, which is basically to interview very peculiar people in an assiduously guileless manner. Caught off guard, and probed with innocent-seeming questions by this strange, gangly, awkward Englishman, they say more than they ought.
Recursive
But the manosphere guys are not his usual subjects. Precisely because they are so superficial, they are paradoxically extremely reflexive. Their obsession with how their ‘content’ plays online puts them on their guard. Their fans, of course, are happy to warn them that Theroux is out to get them - which, to be strictly fair, he is. One remembers the second half of Don Quixote, where the knight’s adventures are shaped by the fact that he is already famous for the exploits recounted in the already-published first part (Theroux’s previous interview with Jimmy Savile is thrown in his face repeatedly). The interview scenes are strangely recursive, since both the Netflix crew and the subjects are constantly filming, duelling to master the narrative.
Or perhaps that is not quite right. There cannot be anyone who is both on Myron Gaines’s Telegram channel and in the market for this documentary. There is not actually a fight for the soul of young men taking place here: rather two perfectly symmetrical, but non-overlapping, acts of ideological warfare. One finds its place in the manosphere’s struggle against the feminising tendencies, as they see it, of modern culture, exemplified in the woke Netflix documentary; the other in the liberal battle against rightwing misinformation. In this instance, the liberals undoubtedly have the better share of the truth, but the film ends up haunted by its own futility.
The livestreams of the subjects are interpolated, typically vertical-format, phone-friendly video cropped in a trompe l’oeil. The relentless chatter of the viewer comments scrolls past. Theroux’s final confrontation with Sullivan is presented twice: firstly, as edited by the Netflix team, and, secondly, as clipped by Sullivan’s people. The Netflix version is notable for Sullivan’s increasing inability to distinguish clearly between views he actually holds and views he avers for more likes and investments into his plainly fraudulent financial schemes.
There is a glimpse into a kind of insanity here - the mask having fully eaten into the face of this attractive, hench, if slightly dim, young man. Sullivan’s take emphasises the moment when he reduces Theroux to silence by asking him if the Gaza war is a genocide. It’s a nicely executed gotcha, if a complete non-sequitur (it is also clearly fed to him by an online commentator).
A lukewarm review by The Guardian’s Lucy Mangan notes that Theroux’s interviewing style is a little more aggressive than normal, and thinks this is all to the good: “the silent supposed bafflement and dependence on giving people enough rope to hang themselves, which are such a large part of his arsenal, look like increasingly feeble weapons”. In the end, she concludes that the film is in any case a failure as an attack on the manosphere people: “I don’t think there’s been a documentary about these men presented by a woman … That, I think, might yield something new.”1
This is probably wrong - above all, for being too optimistic. Netflix has recently been dogged by rumours that the writers on its productions are told that they are creating “second screen” content - that is, one must assume that the viewer has the show on in the background, while they scroll through some feed on their phone. This is denied by Netflix and also by many jobbing writers, so may be literally false. But it is worth mentioning, since there can hardly be five minutes of this film’s 90 where there is nobody in the frame looking at their phone. To suppose that a documentary about people looking at their phones, broadcast on a platform that happily assumes its viewers are looking at their phones, could in fact puncture the balloon of a reactionary ideology seems, on reflection, ridiculous - whatever the director’s gender.
Success
Taking that impossible objective off the table, then, there are a couple of ways in which the film could succeed or fail. One is aesthetic: is it, in some way or another, worth watching? Does it have a strong narrative through-line, drama, cinematographic verve, and what have you? The other is a more restricted political objective: does it tell us anything useful about this ideology, its reach, its motivations and scope?
I think, on balance, it succeeds as spectacle. The postmodern meta stuff - filming people filming you filming them - is exploited quite nicely. The locations themselves are too: the absurd, shallow British outpost of Marbella and then Miami - increasingly a utopia of the American right, a kind of Caribbean Dubai; the perfect sun-kissed backdrops to false promises of a life of tacky leisure and limitless, indifferent sexual intercourse. In this respect, it could have done with less of the ‘second screen’ heavy-handedness. Most of Theroux’s ‘this is all very important’ voiceovers could have been cut without loss to the film’s clarity. Say what you like about Adam Curtis (no stranger to expository voiceover), but the man knows when to shut up and just let the B-roll unspool.
As a political text, the film has a few tasks: to explain what these men think, to give some account of why, and to also give some account of why it is attractive to so many others. On the first point, it seems - even given the threadbare pseudo-theoretical basis of manosphere ideology - too superficial. Perhaps, as football people say, you can only beat the team in front of you, and the interview subjects seem particularly shallow. Their interest in their own ideas seems entirely limited to how they can screw money out of them. All the same, the strange melange at work here - bowdlerised evolutionary psychology, self-help, prosperity gospel with god conveniently edited out of the picture - is occluded. In its place are scattered references to conspiracy theories and random bursts of gonzo misogyny.
The manosphere view of the world is that men are naturally highly sociosexual - that is, they pursue multiple sexual partners - and this sexuality is somehow connected to a natural role as heads of households and political societies. Women pursue security and avoid conflict, and prefer sexual exclusivity, selecting their mates carefully. Sexual success is a matter of antagonistic conflict between males, adjudicated in modern times by way of financial success. In the way stands a bureaucracy focused on safety, characteristically feminine - and also the malign influence of the most powerful men, trying to keep everyone else down.
Working a nine-to-five job is to surrender to the bureaucracy and the boss - castration in all but the gory physical reality. It is good to pursue the outward trappings of success - leisure, fast cars, vast harems of OnlyFans models. This worldview intrudes on the film occasionally, but there is nobody prepared to spell it out; or, if they did, it is on the cutting room floor.
There is more interest on the second point. Several of Theroux’s subjects seem to have fallen into it by accident. Sullivan started out his online media career as a fitness influencer, telling his followers how to get biceps like his, but seems to have noticed that tying this to the cartoonish vision of masculinity of the manosphere increased his success. It gathers a large audience, to which he then sells access to a plainly exploitative investment app. Some scam is always at the bottom of the rabbit hole: a worthless online success school, or a dodgy cryptocurrency. It is this sort of idiotic fraud that ultimately pays for all the Lamborghinis and mid-century home furnishings.
Missing dad
Theroux notes that some of these men were raised by single mothers abandoned by their fathers - including Sullivan, the estranged son of long-time England rugby star Victor Ubogu. This is the most conservative implication of the film: perhaps the lack of actual male role models made the cartoonish and wholly abstract masculinism of the manosphere more attractive? (Some on the online right have come to mock such influencers as “male-to-male transexuals”, performing their own sex as if they were in drag … Judith Butler, in her younger days, might have approved.)
To say this is conservative is not to reject it out of hand, but it needs expansion. In an interesting critique of the ‘post-liberal’ right, Nicolas Villarreal notes that it assumes that there is a ‘natural’ aristocracy in waiting to assume leadership over a new polity oriented to the common good. But no such layer exists:
No process of socialisation, the cultivation of individuals into specific social roles, exists to create such a strata. The cause of the post-liberal turn, the intense atomisation, precarity, deracinated civil society, and subsequent nihilism which drove people to abandon liberalism, is also what prevents post-liberalism from forming into a coherent social framework.2
The manosphere people are not exactly post-liberals, but the two phenomena are related. The essential problem that motivates both is this general breakdown in socialisation mentioned by Villarreal. Societies as atomised as contemporary Britain and America produce neither a competent ruling class nor - without great and proximately thankless effort - a threatening revolutionary class. In this void, the time is ripe for apparently grand explanations of dysfunction that have wholly individual purported solutions - and any number of grifts and scams.
That, of course, brings us to the followers of these influencers, whose interest in them is primarily on the self-help level. Most excruciating is an exchange with one of Waller’s fanboys. Under light interrogation, he reveals that he was recently living in his car, but Waller’s advice has helped him. He refuses to believe in the reality of depression. Of course, he was sad when his brother died, but he got over it. How did his brother die, asks Louis? By suicide.
If there is a lesson here, it is that the left - if it is to be equal to its tasks - has to be a pro-social force. Freedom, as a purely empty space of decision, is not enough as an end goal. Generations must replace each other, physically by way of sexual reproduction, but also as custodians of the good life. Socialism has no meaning except as a positive condition for morally defensible relations between individuals.
The prattlings of the manosphere are plainly worthless in this respect, but they are adequate to the lived reality of pervasive atomisation. Changing that reality is the problem before us.
Adrian Choa (director), Louis Theroux (presenter), Inside the manosphere, Netflix 2026