There’s something unnatural about legacy media colliding with the modern internet. It’s like a dog having sex with a giraffe. All that’s left is an unpleasant mess spun through with shame. Which brings me to Louis Theroux, the most eminently watchable representative of TV’s old guard, but a man whose methods of gentle, observational needling prove no match for an online culture defined by its apathetic immorality. In his latest documentary – the first under his new deal with Netflix – every wry question is met by TikTok-brained obfuscation; every attempt at a gotcha is blocked by a wall of protein-shake sociopathy. Inside the Manosphere, then, is a failure, one in which Theroux is repeatedly, depressingly bested by a swarm of ugly men with Bitcoin wallets and chin pubes.
Inside the Manosphere explores what could be termed The New Sexism, a social ill bred on YouTube, live streams and dodgy apps, where men instruct other men how to be better. Better, in this case, meaning becoming a dead-eyed misogynist with degenerative opinions about gender, money and sex, a fleet of supercars, and ideally two or three women on retainer to humiliate and subjugate when the impulse strikes. “I coach boys how to be f***ing boys,” explains Harrison Sullivan, a 24-year-old ghoul known online as HSTikkyTokky. “How to make money. How to be outside the system. How to not have a boss telling you what to do. I teach guys how to be proper guys, not these soy boy gimps who walk around in the modern day.”
