Confession: I’ve never been a fan of Louis Theroux. There’s something about his particular style of documentary making which has always felt cheap to me: A tendency to seek out the holders of particularly extreme views and, in the process, present them as the face of a wider movement. He does – and anyone who works in the media should note this – have a wonderful sense of when to use his own silence as a weapon, however, frequently providing his subjects or victims with just enough empty air to entice them into filling it with often self-filleting babble. So, when I sat down at the weekend to watch his inaugural Netflix offering “Inside the Manosphere”, I did so with the bias of a skeptic: I was going to be alert to his tricks.
The tricks are there, alright: Sharing footage of one participant getting ticked off by his mother for being insufficiently attentive to cleaning was, I thought, a typical Theroux cheap shot. But… in the round this is a show worth watching.
Theroux does not present the views of his subjects inaccurately. Almost everything they say to him is the stuff that they routinely say to their followers online. Men are born without intrinsic value; Women are feckless and manipulative; The world is controlled by a shadowy “matrix” (Jews) that wants to keep good western men down.
The question that Theroux doesn’t ask – the question that really is the most relevant of all – is not “why do these men profess to believe these things?”. He tries to answer that question in the documentary, and roughly lands somewhere between “they had no dads or bad dads” and “they’re just doing it for the grift and to make money”.
But what he does not ask is “why is this stuff so popular?”.
That it is popular is not in doubt, and to Therouxs’ credit, he does not hide its popularity in the documentary. We see these influencers out and about in the wild, being spontaneously greeted and cheered by their hordes of teenaged and early-20s young men.
Theroux lets the influencers make their case, and they do so in a way that will not harm their popularity with anybody who doesn’t already think them an unpleasant bunch: As one of them shouts from a stage that women’s value comes from their breasts and vaginas, you can practically hear fifty million middle class heads shaking slowly in disgust. But why that statement makes logical sense to so many young men? That goes unaddressed and unexplored.
The easy, cliched answer to that question is that many young men need somebody or something to blame for their relative failure in the job and marriage markets, and that these predators make their money by hawking snake oil of a kind to them: You too can be rich and swarmed by women if you just adopt this attitude, say these things, do this workout routine, invest your earnings in this crypto scam. And if you fail, it’s down to the capitalists, or the communists, or the Jews, or the feminists. It’s the oldest grift under the sun.
Theroux himself, of course, is a quintessentially successful man, and achieved that success without doing any of those things. He is married, fabulously wealthy, and has children. In many ways he lives the life that the manosphere influencers say that their audience should aspire to. What’s missing in this documentary is simple: What is Louis Theroux’s view on how to be a prosperous and successful man? What was his secret? And how does he measure success?
The manosphere lads have a metric for their success. Or several: Lamborghinis. “Body Counts” of the number of women they have had sex with. Bank balances.
One of the most touching moments, bizarrely, in the documentary, is the exchange between US influencer Myron Gaines and his girlfriend. Gaines insists publicly that she is essentially his subordinate in the relationship. That she cooks and cleans and encourages or tolerates his aim to ultimately have multiple wives. Yet it is impossible to mistake the fear in his eyes as Theroux questions the girlfriend about what she wants, and whether she might decide to leave and find another man (spoiler alert: She eventually does).
What you see there is a sort of teenage boy masculinity, in which Gaines sees his value solely and entirely as being validated by the fact that he has a girlfriend. His value as a person is defined by what he has, not who he is.
This scene alone – which I have rather spoiled I fear – makes the whole documentary worth watching. There are questions here for those of us who both embrace masculinity and reject the version of it sold by the likes of HStikkytokky on social media. Those questions are ably raised by Theroux.
The problem is, they are never answered. Perhaps, I fear, because the question of “why is this stuff so popular” is not one that western progressives want to answer, lest it expose a massive failing in the society that they have, over the past three decades, built.