The manosphere isn’t breaking the system – it’s selling it back to boys

It’s been a couple of weeks since Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere aired, and the response has settled into a predictable split: some viewers praising its subtlety, others frustrated by what they see as a lack of depth, confrontation, or solutions. I understood that frustration immediately. My first watch left me slightly underwhelmed, and it took me a while to work out why. Then it clicked: I’m exactly the kind of person this documentary isn’t for.

I’ve spent years in feminist spaces, reading, writing, arguing about the manosphere and its offshoots. I’ve watched the content, debated the talking points, tried – often unsuccessfully – to counter the logic. So watching the documentary, there was a constant sense of recognition. Men peddling misogyny to other men? Check. That misogyny bleeding into racism, homophobia, antisemitism? Check. Men expressing disgust at sexually active women while building platforms that depend on those same women, profiting from OnlyFans performers and passing around videos of themselves having sex while talking about “purity” and “value”? Check. Endless limiting rules about what a “real man” should be, delivered with total certainty and no curiosity? Check. A complete absence of critical thinking? Check. A huge amount of anger, derision and judgement and not an ounce of originality, joy, gratitude, freedom or morality? Check, check, check. None of it felt new. And that, initially, felt like a failure. There is so much about this world that could have been explored more deeply: the way these influencers dress up their arguments in the language of science, borrowing selectively from evolutionary psychology or simply inventing “facts” to give misogyny a veneer of legitimacy; the broader impact on women, who are increasingly encountering these ideas not as abstract internet discourse but in their dating lives, workplaces and classrooms; the role of platforms in funnelling very young boys toward increasingly extreme content.

One of the documentary’s strangest moments comes when Myron Gaines plays a video of a supposed neuroscientist claiming that women retain DNA from every man they’ve slept with, which supposedly explains why children might resemble ex-partners. It is obvious nonsense, but that is the point. The manosphere thrives on this kind of pseudo-authority – junk science, fake expertise, anything that makes misogyny sound rigorous rather than reactive. The documentary presents it as a bizarre aside, but it’s part of a much broader strategy.

There are other absences too. We see Harrison Sullivan exploiting women while calling sex workers “disgusting.” We see how Gaines treats the women he invites onto his podcast, and how Justin Waller talks about commitment and provision while arranging his life to avoid both. But we don’t really see how ordinary women are navigating a world where their peers are increasingly influenced by these ideas. Nor does the documentary fully address how young the audience is, or how attractive this content is to boys looking for direction, discipline, or something that feels like guidance.

The more distance I got from that first viewing, the clearer it became that I was asking the documentary to do something it was never trying to do. This is not a film for people who have spent years arguing with red pill men online or trying to undo the damage of these ideas. For those of us who know this world already, much of it reads as repetition. But for viewers who don’t, Louis Theroux is doing something else: entering the space, letting these men speak, and trusting that they will reveal themselves. That has always been his method. He is not interested in solving problems or offering structural analysis. He immerses himself in extreme environments, whether that’s prisons, brothels, Scientology, or the Westboro Baptist Church, and lets people expose their own logic. Those worlds, though, felt distant, far away from the everyday lives of his audience. The extremity came with a safe remove. This doesn’t.

The manosphere is not niche anymore. Its language shows up in dating, in classrooms, in the behaviour of students and peers. It appears culturally and politically, in voting patterns and in the growing evidence that Gen Z men are, on some issues, more conservative than those before them. Research from King’s College London found that 31 per cent of Gen Z men agree that a wife should always obey her husband, while 33 per cent say a husband should have the final word on important decisions. The stakes feel closer, more immediate. So when Theroux uses the same observational style here, it can feel too soft – not because he has changed, but because the context has.

What’s important to remember is that this is not actually an exploration of the manosphere as a whole. That would be impossible. The manosphere is a wide-ranging digital organism made up of influencers, ordinary men, podcasts, forums, subcultures and ideologies that overlap, splinter and contradict each other. Theroux is not attempting to map all of that. What he is actually documenting is not simply a set of beliefs, but a business model. Louis Theroux’s documentary is specifically about red pill grifters, a subset of men gaining seeking attention and influence via outrage in the form of extreme rhetoric, often misogynistic, racist, and homophobic, then using the clicks, attention and audience they gain to sell young men fitness plans, supplements, dodgy crypto scams, subscriptions to private chat rooms, access to Only Fans performers, and even dodgy “university” courses where men are exposed to even more misogyny and nonsense. These men are businesspeople. As influencer Harrison Sullivan says “Sales are everything.” They are selling something, and what they are selling follows a clear marketing plan. First, you convince your audience that they are lacking – that they are weak, undesirable, failing. You tell them their worth depends on wealth, dominance, physical strength, constant self-optimisation. You frame vulnerability as weakness and connection as suspect. Then you sell the solution: programmes, supplements, crypto schemes, private chats, “universities.” Pay me and I’ll teach you how to become a man. Except the solution never works, because it is built on the same logic that produced the insecurity in the first place.

These men claim to be rebelling against “the system,” but they replicate it almost perfectly. They chase wealth and status while claiming to reject them. They mock conventional work while being entirely beholden to the algorithm. They preach freedom while enforcing stricter rules about masculinity than the ones they claim to escape. The contradictions are constant. Myron Gaines, for example, builds his platform around humiliating women. The 36-year-old invites on young female guests, often literal teenage girls, only to test, mock and dismiss them. He peppers them with general knowledge questions, sneers if they do not know the answers, mocks their appearance, then orders them off the show as if they are worthless. Yet he never places himself in a position where he might be challenged. He never interviews women his own age, academics, women who have pursued education, women with the confidence, knowledge or life experience to ask him questions back or expose the weakness of his thinking. He controls the environment completely, ensuring that his version of dominance is never actually tested. When Theroux approaches one of his bookers to ask how female guests are selected, Gaines throws a hissy fit and messages the booker telling her not to speak to Louis about anything. All of it is a pathetically fragile performance of power pretending to be confidence and control.

And it is a performance. Gaines spends his time shouting into a microphone about dominance and control, talking about being the “dictator” of his relationships and promoting one-way monogamy. But when pressed, the certainty slips. “Maybe I’ll say I just want to be with one girl,” he concedes. When Theroux suggests his girlfriend may not agree with his envisioned future of him having several wives, Gaines cuts the conversation short and blocks her from appearing. She has since left him. He, meanwhile, remains alone, still selling a vision of male success that his own life does not reflect. He has also admitted on his videos that he has no social life – an extraordinary admission when you consider how many boys are being told this is what winning looks like.

Waller’s contradictions are just as stark. Waller believes in “one-way monogamy” and talks about how women should submit to men, care for children and the household, while men should make money and sleep with other women, all while presenting himself as a natural “provider.” Then he reveals that he and his partner are not actually legally married because of the financial complications of that. He wants the role of provider without providing any material protection or genuine partnership to the mother of his children. Again, the language of authority is there, but the substance of it is noticeably absent.

Then there are figures like Harrison Sullivan, who strip away even the pretence of ideological commitment. Theroux spends much of the documentary with him, and what comes through is not conviction so much as naked opportunism. He openly admits that everything he does is about money. When Theroux asks him why he does not simply try to be a good person, he answers with the truth: if he had just done good things, he would never have blown up on social media in the first place. It is one of the clearest moments in the film, because it lays bare the structure underneath all the rhetoric. This is about attention, and attention is driven by extremity. The system rewards outrage, so outrage is what gets produced.

Within that context, coherence stops mattering. These men can criticise sex work while profiting from it, promote traditional family values while undermining the conditions that sustain relationships, position themselves as anti-establishment while aspiring to extreme wealth. They can be homophobic until pressed, at which point they insist they are not. They can be racist and then deny that too. They can speak bitterly about the elites at the top of the world while desperately wanting to join the billionaire class. They can view hyper-sexualised young women as clout, profit from women’s sexual labour, then turn around and talk about morality and tradition. They can bully women into describing what they want in a partner, then shame them for the answers. They can talk endlessly about women’s “body counts,” about the market value of sex, about women’s bodies as economic currency, while remaining almost totally incurious about women as people. They make no real sense, and they do not need to, because the goal is not consistency but engagement. But it is still worth saying plainly: these men display not just contempt for women and equality, but a startling lack of interest in basic humanity, integrity, or being a decent person. They also make no goddamn sense, because sense isn’t the currency, extremism is.

If the influencers come across as hollow, their audiences do not. Teenage boys approach them in public asking for photos, repeating their language, clearly invested. Most of the faces are blurred because these are clearly minors, boys who look 14, 15, 16. At one point, one child asking for a photo seems barely older than ten. Few older men do the same. That does not mean older men are not influenced, but it shows where this content lands hardest: with boys who do not yet have the experience to recognise the grift. For them, this is not entertainment. It is instruction.

In Miami, two young fans explain that men are meant to suffer, not to be happy. One dismisses depression as unreal, even while referencing a brother who died by suicide. Unlike the influencers, who occasionally admit this is performance, these boys take it seriously – except they’re not making money from these beliefs, they’re just shrinking their lives down. And that is where the documentary lands hardest. The men selling the ideology know, at least partially, that it is constructed. The boys consuming it do not.

That gap matters because the frustrations being targeted are real. Many boys feel disconnected, unsure of themselves, unclear on how to build meaningful lives or relationships. Patriarchy and capitalism do damage men: they suppress emotion, stigmatise vulnerability, and tie worth to money in a world where financial stability is increasingly out of reach. They leave men without the tools to relate to themselves or others, limiting friendships, flattening romantic lives, and narrowing purpose to dominance – financial, physical, emotional – rather than connection or care. The manosphere does not challenge those conditions. It redirects them. Women, queer people, migrants, people of colour all become the enemy and explanation. Boys are told these groups are the reason they feel rejected or overlooked, and are sold misogyny, body obsession, financial schemes and alpha posturing as solutions.

Those solutions obviously do not work. They do not help men build intimacy, sustain relationships, or develop any stable sense of self-worth. They do not lead to connection or purpose. What they produce instead is deeper isolation, more anger, more insecurity – the very conditions that keep boys returning to the same men selling the cure.

So the question that remains – one parents should be asking their sons, and teaching them to constantly ask of the world around them and the messages they are being sold – is simple: who is actually benefiting from all of this? Because it is not the teenage boy being told his worth depends on his body, his income, or his ability to control others. It is not the young man being told intimacy is weakness. It is not the men being taught to hate women and then left unable to connect with anyone. If boys and men can learn to recognise when their insecurity is being exploited, when their loneliness is being monetised, when their anger is being tuned against possible allies – then they can begin to see that pattern more clearly, not just in themselves but in the wider world. That creates the possibility of directing frustration toward the structures producing it, rather than toward the people they’ve been taught to blame. And if boys could do that, they could start to see that the people they’ve been taught to see as adversaries are often the ones already challenging those systems: feminist movements, queer communities, anti-racist organisers. We are the ones actually fighting for the world to be better for boys and men, for them to able to feel worthy just because they are, for the systems round us to be more inclusive, empowering, equal for all. To actually see that though, boys and men would have to step away from the comforting promise of dominance. They would have to fight for equality, not their position atop the hierarchy. They would have to re-envision masculinity as something that exists alongside other people, not subjugating them. And that might be hard. To those with more privilege, equality can feel oppression.

Stepping away from the manosphere requires letting go of the ideas it presents as certainty: that masculinity is proven through dominance, that control equals success, that hierarchy guarantees value. It means recognising that these ideas do not lead to stability, connection or respect, even if they promise to. What replaces them is less immediate but more sustainable: ways of relating to others that aren’t built on control or performance, and a sense of purpose not tied entirely to status or income. It also opens up the possibility of recognising common ground with those resisting the same systems.

Theroux’s documentary doesn’t offer solutions. But it does leave us with a useful question: who is this system actually serving? If boys and men realise the answer is not them, they might begin to step outside the systems that are currently harming them – and, in doing so, become part of the work of making the world better, for all of us.

Photography by Netflix.