Reviewed by Manus Lenihan
In the 2007 documentary The Most Hated Family in America, Louis Theroux interviewed members of the Westboro Baptist Church, a hate group that protested the funerals of dead soldiers and did paranoid, homophobic covers of Lady Gaga songs. Profiling these and other strange characters made Theroux’s name as a documentarian of the weird fringes of our culture. Nearly twenty years later, times have changed. With Inside the Manosphere (Netflix, 2026), as with his recent film about Israeli settlers, he no longer has to go to the fringes to find the bizarre and the offensive. Like the settlers, the agents of male grievance are supported by a lot of very powerful people. Fred Phelps, patriarch of the ‘Most Hated Family in America,’ certainly wasn’t having dinner with a sitting US president. But one of the unhinged subjects of this documentary brags to Theroux about having dinner with the Trumps at Mar-a-Lago.
In Inside the Manosphere, Theroux looks at five influencers with huge followings who preach a range of bizarre beliefs: from ‘men being strong has become toxic’ to ‘they are putting something that makes you trans in the water,’ all the way to ‘aliens built the pyramids.’ For brief moments they almost sound like socialists, condemning ‘those at the top’ who want to keep everyone else down through trapping them in 9-5 jobs. But a socialist would argue for working people of all races and genders to campaign for better pay and shorter hours, and to take the wealth of ‘those at the top’ into public ownership. By depressing contrast, the ‘escape from the matrix’ provided by the manosphere is for individual men and boys to gamble on stocks using dodgy brokerage services – with a cut going to the influencers, of course. It’s pathetic to see these jokers claiming to reject ‘the system’ and ‘the matrix’ while being obsessed with shallow status symbols: luxuries, possessions, muscles, money, clicks.
The ultimate escape is to become a successful entrepreneur and get rich. But because it’s very difficult to get rich, the influencers who are peddling these ideas use scammy, disreputable shortcuts. Behind the glamour and demagogy, we begin to discern the familiar figures of the con artist and the snake oil salesman.
The next part of manosphere ideology is their model for relationships. They believe a woman should be completely dependant on a man, to the point that two of the men interviewed by Theroux practise ‘one-way monogamy:’ they can sleep with other women, but their partners can’t sleep with other men. The manosphere influencers profiled in this film are very fond of going on about what women ‘really’ want. Every woman apparently has a deep innate desire to share a home and children with someone she is completely dependent on for money, who doesn’t ‘do bath, diapers, anything like that,’ who can cast her aside at any moment, and who sleeps around while she is forbidden from even talking to other men.
Unfortunately, the documentary deals very little with the victims of the manosphere, which is a very important omission. There’s no interviews which shine a light on how the misogynistic ideas promoted by these influencers has impacted women and girls, as well as female teachers. In The Settlers, Theroux features Palestinians who had experienced violence from Israeli settlers. A similar approach for this documentary would have more accurately portrayed how dangerous these influencers are and how much harm their ideas cause.
The arguments of the manosphere stand up better in a narrow self-selecting audience on social media. But presented here to a broad audience, they fly in the face of lived experience. For example, this reviewer thought of women he knows who work in highly skilled, technical, critical jobs, who in between, say, nursing a newborn and shuttling kids to school, creche and doctor, still find time and energy to hit the gym. Consider women who are respected leaders in trade unions, political parties and community campaigns; who are artists, writers and musicians; who are engineers, soldiers, doctors; who advocate for disabled children or support elderly people in their community. Contrast that to these absolute wasters whose day job consists of filming themselves. And they have the nerve to claim that only men ‘build, invent and maintain society.’
But the manosphere is equally wrong and insulting about what men and boys want. There’s no evidence that most males want to live in a world where if they don’t fit some rigid macho stereotype they will be despised and called a ‘soyboy gimp.’
What is considered ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ is fluid and changes over time. For example, the method of these influencers is to capture the young male viewer with superficial glamour, undermine his self-esteem, and then sell him products that promise to make him wealthier or more attractive. That method was pioneered on girls decades before these influencers started hammering boys over the head with it. It’s very sad to think of young boys trying to live up to the demands of complete strangers who view them with contempt.
This fascist vision is coupled with open, visceral hatred of Jewish people, which is a huge feature of this film. For years anti-Semitism was dishonestly used as a curse-word to throw at anyone who wanted to stand up for Palestinians. But this argument, based on the ridiculous idea that Jewish people and the Israeli state are somehow one and the same, has only given ammunition to the real anti-Semites. This is very obvious in Inside the Manosphere. Influencer HSTikkyTokky tells Theroux that chanting ‘F*** the Jews’ is ‘not anti-Semitism, it’s click farming.’ HS then has the incredible nerve to try to cover himself by pivoting to the subject of the horrifying genocide in Gaza. Unfortunately, Theroux declined, when challenged, to call the Gaza slaughter a genocide.
He could have pointed out the obvious fact that opposition to Israeli war crimes and to anti-Semitism are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, some of the most ardent supporters of the Zionist regime and its crimes are also fervent anti-Semites, notably the aforementioned Donald Trump. There is no contradiction between supporting a racist, genocidal ethno-state and spewing out far-right hate against Jews, Muslims, women and LGBTQ people—in fact, the two totally complement one another.
On the one hand you feel a bit sick watching this documentary, but on the other hand it’s gripping, at times dramatic, sometimes funny. Theroux walks a fine line skilfully during the interviews. The film does a great job of helping the audience to understand what the manosphere is, following the money, breaking down the ideology, and trying to understand some of these bizarre characters on a human level. Thanks to this film, more people understand now how the grift works. No surprise everyone’s talking about it. No surprise either that HSTikkyTokky has deleted all his social media accounts. ‘We are all increasingly inside the manosphere,’ Theroux says, ‘And it’s up to us how we get out.’ Thanks to this film, more people are forewarned and forearmed.
