The truth about the manosphere ‘influencers’

There’s a moment in Louis Theroux’s new Netflix documentary, Inside the Manosphere, in which Harrison Sullivan (an online influencer known by the oddly babyish moniker ‘HSTikkyTokky’) is at the gym, explaining his routine. He turns to Theroux’s camera and says: ‘I normally train a little bit earlier in the day. I like to start my day off working out.’ Theroux interrupts and asks him who he’s talking to. ‘What?’, says Sullivan. ‘Do I not talk to them?’ He is so accustomed to the direct address of TikTok that he is unaware of how fly-on-the-wall documentaries work.

It’s a neat encapsulation of the collision of legacy media and social media, and how the latter is an essentially narcissistic enterprise. Sullivan likes to analyse, not to be analysed. He is one of those tiresome pontificators whose self-certainty is inversely proportional to his insight. He relies on an uncritical audience. Specifically, male adolescents who have been starved of guidance and purpose by a culture that deems them inherently ‘toxic’.

Yet Theroux fails to grapple with the reasons why such an audience exists, swallowing instead the usual narrative of humanity as a species of mindless drones, easily herded by online demagogues. It’s the same snobbish mindset that infects much of our political and media class, making them suspicious of democracy and supportive of censorship.

While watching the parade of male influencers who have agreed to be interviewed – Theroux didn’t manage to snag Andrew Tate, the supposed alpha of the group – one is left with a heavy feeling that he is asking all the wrong questions. He spends some time dabbling in cod-psychology, asking why the likes of Ed Matthews, Justin Waller, Amrou Fudl (aka Myron Gaines) and Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy (aka Sneako) hold such identikit male-supremacist worldviews, but theories about absent or abusive fathers can only ever be speculative. Surely the innate human yearning for status and the lure of Mammon are explanation enough.

Throughout his documentary, Theroux acts as though the manosphere itself is more significant than the conditions that gave rise to it. A handful of men making money off the gullibility of others is infuriating, but it is nothing compared to the fostering of a culture that rewards mediocrity and elevates fame and clicks as the ultimate goal. Theroux’s approach is to take for granted that the manosphere is turning young men into sexist beasts. The likes of Matthews and Waller may be called ‘influencers’, but I would suggest that their influence is not so profound as Theroux assumes.

Their appeal, for the most part, is inadvertently made clear from one recurrent stylistic feature of Inside the Manosphere. The interviews are often interspersed with scrolling comments from beneath the influencers’ online posts. All of them tell the same story; most of the fans seem to be in it ‘for the lolz’. There is very little evidence of true conviction. It’s the same with self-declared ‘incel’ commentator Nick Fuentes, whose appeal is not so much his reactionary opinions as his willingness to express them. The manosphere, in other words, is a subculture based largely on the breaking of taboos.

While woke activists have spent years redefining terms such as ‘racist’ and ‘fascist’ as weapons to destroy non-racists and non-fascists, and successive government policies and educational practices have told young men that they are irredeemably privileged and toxic, popularity has been assured for anyone with a platform who is willing to flout the new rules. This is why at one point during Inside the Manosphere we see a young Jewish man who is grinning along while filming his friend Sullivan as he spouts conspiratorial anti-Semitic garbage. Theroux baulks at the apparent contradiction, while not seeming to realise that the strength of the arguments was never the point.

None of which is to suggest that these influencers are not grimly unpleasant. The tirade against women by Myron Gaines is typical of the genre:

‘Bitch, we ain’t equal. I’m the dictator, you are the subordinate. And I dictate when I want to put my dick in you, bitch. And then you dictate when the sandwiches come by my dictation. That’s how this goes.’

But the manosphere didn’t invent misogynistic men. Tom Cruise played a self-deluded Myron Gaines-type character back in 1999’s Magnolia, an influencer with the catchphrase: ‘Respect the cock and tame the cunt.’

It is astonishing to think that, for years, the media class attempted to paint Jordan Peterson as the ultimate pernicious influence for young men, advancing as he does such abominable philosophies as personal responsibility, moral fortitude, the possibility of redemption and – horror of all horrors – keeping your bedroom tidy. Just as the identitarian left has created an authentically racist backlash by demanding we prioritise skin colour over individual characteristics, so too the manosphere was the inevitable outcome of an establishment that insisted that Peterson was beyond the pale.

While performative misogyny is rife in the manosphere, the key attraction for young men remains the need for a sense of purpose. During one of Theroux’s discussions with the ‘success coach’, Justin Waller, two young men come over and enthuse about Waller’s ‘message’. One of them claims that ‘as a man, you’re born without value’. Women, Waller explains, can have innate value due to their beauty, but a young man ‘has to create value in the world. He has to be valuable to other men. Otherwise, nobody cares.’

It is lamentable that any young man should believe that his only value is to be accrued through gym memberships, bitcoin investments and the domination of women. But documentaries like Theroux’s risk overestimating the influence of those who peddle this nonsense. Young men will always find a way to do the opposite of what is expected of them. Such adolescent transgressions aside, we should consider the question posed by Harrison Sullivan’s mother during a livestream with Theroux: ‘If you don’t agree with what Harrison’s doing, then why are you making money off it on a programme by publicising it?’ Let’s be honest, she has a point.

Andrew Doyle is a writer, broadcaster and comedian. Find him on Substack here.