Over the past two years, viral clips, news headlines and TV series such as Adolescence have ensured much of the public has encountered the “manosphere” – an online ecosystem that repackages misogyny, anti-feminism and male grievance as self-improvement and hustle.
Journalist Louis Theroux is further lifting the lid on this dangerous ideology with his new Netflix documentary, Inside the Manosphere, in which he showcases the individuals driving this culture.
In his measured and sometimes risky style, Theroux traces not only the rhetoric of “high-value men”, but also the livestream formats and business models that sustain this world. The result is both illuminating and unsettling.
An insidious ideology
What emerges in Theroux’s exposé is not just provocation, but a clear misogynistic worldview. Across interviews and through influencers’ own content, we see the defence of a regressive gender hierarchy – and attempts to restore it.
Women are described as having innate value through their beauty and sexuality, yet dismissed as less rational and emotionally stable. Monogamy is framed as binding for women, but optional for men. Gender equality is blamed for cultural decline.
At times the language is openly authoritarian. Infamous influencer Myron Gaines describes himself to Theroux as a “dictator” in his romantic relationship. He casts intimacy as something he permits, and domestic care as something owed to men.
But Gaines also rejects that he is a misogynist; he claims he loves women, but that women don’t know what they want, and must be led.
The hypocrisy is striking. Several manosphere figures such as Harrison Sullivan publicly deride women who use platforms such as OnlyFans, while claiming to privately profit from managing their accounts.
Misogyny as a business model
Theroux also shows how the audiences of these influencers form.
In one early scene, young boys who look to be around tween age (with blurred faces) repeat lines about hating women and gay people with unsettling ease. Later, young adult men speak of having “no value” unless they accumulate wealth, status and dominance. Working a nine-to-five job is framed as submission to the “matrix” and the “hustle” as freedom.
The complaint that stable work no longer guarantees security will resonate with many. But in the manosphere, economic strain becomes personal failure: if you are struggling, you have not worked hard enough. This is not just ideology. It is a business model.
Subscription “academies”, private groups and coaching schemes convert insecurity into income. In one example from the documentary, we see American influencer Justin Waller promoting The Real World – an online university run by his close friend and business partner Andrew Tate (who is currently facing charges of rape and human trafficking in multiple countries).
Young men and boys are told they are deficient unless wealthy, muscular and emotionally invulnerable, and then charged for access to the mindset said to fix them. The hierarchy that elevates dominant men and denigrates women simultaneously and exploitatively monetises the boys beneath it.
The worldview is not confined to provocation. In one segment, Waller’s partner Kristen explains that she feels fulfilled staying in her “lane”, and caring for the children and home, while he occupies his role as provider and leader.
She speaks warmly of their respective “masculine and feminine energies”, presenting inequality not as constraint but as comfort – despite viewers learning she has no legal right to his wealth as they are not legally married.
Breeding ground for conspiracies
Running alongside the hustle narrative is a thread of conspiracy theorising. The “matrix” is invoked as a metaphor for societal and institutional systems said to keep men compliant and blind to alternative paths to power.
From there it darkens into talk of shadowy elites engineering cultural decline, including “moral” decline and the erosion of men’s place in the world (which they bizarrely link to the growth of pedophilia).
The “manfluencers”, notably Sullivan and Gaines, suggest recent political developments – such as the rise of President Trump – vindicate their worldview.
Theroux’s instinct is to return to the manfluencers’ own accounts of absent fathers and unstable upbringings. That humanising impulse tilts the story toward sympathy and, problematically, to trauma as a key explanation.
But misogyny does not require trauma to flourish, nor are most boys who experience hardship drawn into sexist worldviews. These ideas are ideological and structural, with long-standing gender hierarchies repackaged and broadcast at scale.
The real-life consequences
Inside the Manosphere does acknowledge harms to women, but doesn’t dwell on it very long.
One segment on schools uses news clips from English-speaking countries to signal the spread of misogynistic language among boys. But the documentary could have done more to highlight these significant manosphere-inspired flow-on effects.
Research I conducted with Stephanie Wescott and colleagues extensively documents how manosphere narratives have permeated schools internationally. This has resulted in higher levels of harassment and gender-based violence by some boys against girl peers and women teachers, eroding women’s workplace safety and girls’ participation.
Theroux is right to suggest we are all, in some sense, now living inside the manosphere. Understanding what drives the men at its centre matters – as does focusing on the real-world harms they cause.
Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere is on Netlix.
Steven Roberts, Professor of Sociology, School of Social Sciences, Monash University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
