As a woman, I’m an unlikely contender to have spent so much time in the Manosphere, but through reporting on Grok’s image abuse, the epidemic of violence against women and girls, and how women’s safety is being hijacked by far-right vigilantism, I have, unfortunately, spent a considerable time in the murkiest corners of the internet. It is here that we meet the subjects of Louis Theroux’s new Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere.
I didn’t get far into the documentary before contradictions began to abound. The influencers at the centre of Louis Theroux’s film talk constantly about independence: self-reliance, alpha mentality, becoming the kind of man who needs nothing and no one (a sad aspiration, but not wholly uncommon in our increasingly individualistic society). Strength, these muscled men proclaim, means standing alone, lone-wolf style. And yet their entire world – and, for the most part, their finances – depends entirely on being watched.
Every tirade, podcast appearance, and livestream is designed for an audience. They’re not even shy about it; in fact, they’re astonishingly candid about – to use their parlance – creating content for the clout. Harrison, or ‘HS Tikytokky’, streams for up to seven hours a day, creating content that, as Theroux puts it, consists of “performing provocations for the chat.”
Their careers rely on views, engagement and monetisation. For men who claim to have transcended the need for approval, their livelihoods depend almost entirely on it.
The influencers Theroux meets present themselves as entrepreneurs of masculinity, offering advice on how men can reclaim power in a supposedly feminised world. Their language will sound familiar to anyone who has spent time on productivity TikTok or entrepreneurial podcasts like the increasingly controversial Diary of a CEO: optimise yourself, grind harder, build your brand, dominate the market. In this framework, masculinity becomes a project; something to scale, monetise and relentlessly improve, hence the moniker Looksmaxxing, and, I assume, the hours upon hours these men dedicate to getting ‘ripped’ and ‘shredded’.
Their careers rely on views, engagement and monetisation. For men who claim to have transcended the need for approval, their livelihoods depend almost entirely on it.
It’s tempting to treat the Manosphere as a strange internet fringe, but the ideas spread online have real world consequences. A study by Ipsos and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London, released just six days ago, shows that almost a third of Gen Z men believe a wife should obey her husband. An earlier study revealed that Gen Z boys and men think of feminism more negatively than any other generation. As Theroux makes a point to highlight, the Manosphere is mainstream, a fact made evident by more than one subject emphasising their ties to the Trump organisation. And while the worldview these influencers promote may be deeply misogynistic, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, and racist (the list goes on…), the underlying philosophy is reductively familiar. For decades, online culture has celebrated relentless self-improvement, personal branding, and the idea that success is the result of purely individual effort. The Manosphere applies that same logic to masculinity itself.
The result is an outlook in which men must constantly prove their worth through dominance and competition. Emotional vulnerability is weakness. Relationships, often subjected to a strange, deeply gendered ‘one-way monogamy system’, become transactions. Community only comes through cross-promoting content. HS promotes OnlyFans creators while simultaneously branding them “disgusting”. In the Manosphere, everything is part of an ecosystem, including the boys and men they claim to be helping through their supposed self-optimisation content.
Given that the whole setup of the Manosphere is supposedly designed to create a community of men (with a capital M), you get the distinct impression that these men are all ultimately alone. There’s no sense of community, and, to be frank, they don’t seem to be having much fun—a peculiarity given that the central tenet of their branding is how they’ve supposedly ‘hacked’ the system and are offering men (who are willing to pay) their ‘cheat sheet’ to quick riches, respect, and female subjugation. HS says he’s “playing the game of life,” but if we’re to go off the documentary, it looks more like he’s performing life for an ever-present audience that he is simultaneously in command of and reliant upon.
Seen in this light, the contradictions become even more pronounced. Influencers like HS, who condemn women for monetising platforms like OnlyFans, are relying on the same attention economy. They pitch themselves as anti-establishment (an ideology summed up as being ‘red-pilled’) even as they game its most lucrative dynamics. These men might espouse the benefits of hyper-independence, being your own boss, and answerable to no one, but this is only achieved by constant dependence on an audience they have to perform for.
The more these men insist they don’t need anyone, the more fragile that claim appears. Their livelihoods require constant validation in the form of views, subscribers, and online engagement. The ecosystem thrives on constant interaction; supporters, critics, and yes, curious onlookers like us all feeding the algorithm.
That doesn’t make the misogyny any less real or harmful. But it does show that we live in an online environment that prizes visibility, controversy, and relentless self-promotion. In the case of the Manosphere, this means monetising anger and selling male supremacy.
For a movement obsessed with dominance and self-sufficiency, the Manosphere feels surprisingly lonely. Again and again, its rhetoric circles back to isolation: distrust women, avoid emotional vulnerability, and treat relationships as strategic exchanges rather than sources of intimacy.
Ultimately, viewers will be left feeling that he Manosphere is a lonely stage, its stars performing pigeon-chested bravado for an audience they can’t live without. And while the men profit, women are left to bear the cost in harassment, misogyny, and real-world harm.
Louis Theroux: Inside The Manosphere is streaming on Netflix now. Sign up to Netflix here.
