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.
