Louis Theroux’s latest Netflix documentary will make your blood boil and your head spin, writes Alex Casey.
In one of the many infuriating, terrifying scenes in Louis Theroux’s new Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere, the veteran documentary maker visits the studio of Myron Gaines. The host of the Fresh and Fit podcast, Gaines is one of the most extreme content creators in the manosphere, espousing jaw-dropping views about gender roles in his near-constant live streams and podcasts to hundreds of thousands of people. “Bitch we ain’t equal,” he says in one clip. “I’m the dictator, you are the subordinate. I dictate when I want to put my dick in you, bitch.”
And yet, when speaking with Theroux, Gaines quickly and maddeningly rejects the characterisation that he is a misogynist. “I love women and I actually understand them,” he says. “And because I understand them, I know what’s best for them.”
“Better than them?” asks Theroux.
“In many ways, yes,” responds Gaines.
I’ll admit that it took me a really long time to get through this 90-minute documentary on account of having to pause, rewind, and rewatch to constantly check that I had actually just heard what I thought I heard. There’s HS TikkyTokky – Harrison to his mum – who introduces his female friend Kacey May as “my dishwasher, my cleaner” (“I’m not actually…” she trails off quietly). Or Justin Waller, a Lamborghini-driving “success coach” who says “most women don’t know what they want” and “women’s value is beauty”. He also has a wife and two daughters.
These are the figureheads of the manosphere, an online community run by male influencers who see themselves as redefining what it means to be a man, giving young men the “cheat codes” to life. Theroux, who has delved into such societal underbellies as the porn industry, the far right and conspiracy theorists, has described the manosphere as “the final boss subject in the video game of my career”. Encompassing toxic gender ideas, dodgy get-rich-quick schemes, fitness bio-hacking and even satanic cabals, it’s a big bastard to knock off indeed.
While the rampant misogyny and ideologically incoherent blather is indeed staggering, another surprisingly bleak part of the documentary is the constant presence of screens and cameras in almost every scene. Everyone Theroux meets is accompanied by a silent minion who is filming him, filming them. When he goes to the gym with HS TikkyTokky, the influencer starts to talk down the barrel of Netflix’s camera as if he’s doing a vlog. “Who are you talking to?” Theroux posits wryly. “We’re not on social media now, this is a documentary.”
Other times, the multiple layers of surveillance has a distinctly more ominous and paranoid feel. Gaines gets his own phone out immediately and starts filming Theroux when he arrives in the Fresh and Fit studio. “Whenever you are controversial, people try to make hit pieces on you,” he explains. Still, content remains king, and a captivating meta-narrative emerges throughout the documentary as the content creators endlessly clip, leak and stream their own interactions with Theroux, going viral several times over before his footage even gets back to the Netflix cutting room.
It’s a fascinating reminder of how social media has obliterated traditional media hierarchies, while also fueling a race to the bottom for the most extreme, inflammatory, conspiratorial content to come out on top. Several of the men admit they don’t necessarily believe everything they say online, and that their often deeply conservative values do not always align with their own modern money-making schemes. “Do I agree with it? No. Would I profit off it? Yes,” HS TikTokky says of his OnlyFans business, adding he would disown his daughter if she ever did OnlyFans.
All of this would be easier to stomach if these views were being shouted into the void, but these men are all armed with audiences of millions. “You’re the king, you’re one of my inspirations,” a group of young men tell Ed Matthews on the street, a man whose main content pillars seem to be “picking up birds” and forcing alleged sex offenders to eat pet food on camera. Sneako, who believes women shouldn’t vote and that the world is run by a satanic cabal, smiles and takes pictures with hordes of teenage boys while out and about with Theroux in New York City.
It is this chilling intersection between online and IRL, powerful adult men and wide-eyed boys, where the documentary could have spent much more more time. Sure, we got a montage of concerned breakfast TV hosts talking about kids these days, but there is so much more real-world impact to explore. Just last week a global survey found that Gen Z males are twice as likely as baby boomers to believe wives should obey husbands, and that nearly a quarter believed that men who cared for their own children were less masculine than those who didn’t.
The manosphere even has its hooks into Aotearoa. Last year’s gender attitudes survey found one in three New Zealand men aged 18-34 agree that gender equality has gone too far, and the number of people who agree that “hitting out is an understandable response for a man when his partner tries to end a relationship” has nearly doubled. Just last week, the SIS confirmed that the largest demographic currently being monitored by the agency are teenage boys and young men due to “fears of extremism and their desires to commit acts of violence”.
Towards the end of Inside the Manosphere, there’s a montage of all these angry, controlling, confused men when they were just young lads starting out on the internet. Ed Matthews, age 10, plays “chubby bunnies” with marshmallows, Sneako is a mild-mannered 15-year-old making vlogs for fun. Even in the present day, HS TikkyTokky squabbles with his mum over a throw blanket, a reminder that these are all just regular people who have found themselves trapped in what Theroux calls an “algorithmic prison” of their own making.
“We are all increasingly inside the manosphere,” he warns. “And it’s up to us how we get out.” If only someone knew the cheat code for that part.
