loading . . . Louis Theroux’s new Netflix doco on the manosphere misses the story **Louis Theroux’s new documentary about the manosphere attempts to understand misogyny. In doing so, it obscures the important story we urgently need to tell, writes Dr Stephanie Wescott.**
Louis Theroux has built a career on curiosity. With a raised eyebrow and disarming patience, he has spent decades coaxing people on society’s margins to reveal themselves.
But in his new documentary _Inside the Manosphere_ , that curiosity begins to look less like an investigation and more like complicity.
The documentary promises to explore the manosphere: the sprawling online ecosystem where misogyny, grievance and conspiracy flourish and where women are routinely subjected to degradation and harm. In the opening scenes, Theroux explains that he wants to understand why men are drawn to it.
But that premise is the documentary’s central flaw.
We do not lack explanations for misogyny, and its causes are neither hidden nor mysterious. Women, queer and gender-diverse people encounter its consequences every day. Yet what Theroux offers is another cultural investment in the interior lives of men who are already _telling us exactly who they are_ , and in the case of the manosphere, increasingly building immense wealth by doing so.
From the opening moments, the documentary treats the manosphere as something to be decoded. A montage of men railing against women’s autonomy accompanies Theroux’s confession that he became curious about their ‘extreme beliefs’. The camera lingers on familiar imagery: hyper-muscular bodies in gyms, luxury cars, beachside mansions and jet skis.
Women, meanwhile, appear only as objects of contempt or utility. Men featured in the documentary refer to them as ‘dishwashers’ and ‘cleaners’. Occasionally, they appear as mothers. Mostly, they are absent altogether.
One of the documentary’s key suggestions is that the manosphere is reshaping what it means to be a man. But this diagnosis is entirely misleading and is frequently articulated in conversation about the manosphere without the interrogation it requires. The manosphere is not inventing masculinity anew. It is simply amplifying and mainstreaming an ancient script of male supremacy.
What _it is reshaping_ are the conditions under which women are permitted to exist in the world it is creating.
Women’s lives have always contracted in response to misogynistic ideologies, through harassment, intimidation and violence both online and offline. Men, by contrast, remain structurally protected by the very systems that uphold their power. And they are often afforded something women rarely receive: curiosity, psychological depth and narrative sympathy, even in the face of open cruelty.
Bizarrely, Theroux grants his subjects generous narrative authority.
One man describes himself as a ‘businessman’ because he profits from OnlyFans creators. The claim goes largely unchallenged. The women whose labour produces that profit remain unnamed and entirely off-screen.
For many viewers, the documentary’s supposed revelations will feel deeply familiar. The insults, conspiracies and fantasies of male supremacy are not new or shocking. They are the ordinary background noise of misogyny that women live with daily.
Yet the film invites the audience to observe these ideas with anthropological fascination, as though misogyny were an obscure subculture rather than a persistent social condition.
Some of the men Theroux interviews are presented as obvious antagonists. But others receive a surprising degree of narrative generosity. One figure, Justin Waller, an associate of alleged rapists and human traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate, is portrayed as complex and potentially redeemable. Under even minimal scrutiny, however, he appears less complicated than caricatured.
Theroux admits he was ‘intrigued’ by the motivations of the men in the manosphere. But the documentary’s own imagery quickly undermines this supposed mystery: expensive cars, tailored suits and displays of wealth dominate the screen. The motivations are hardly ambiguous.
Later, Waller gestures toward the skyline outside his office and declares: “Women haven’t built anything. It’s a fact.” Waller has two children with a partner whom he does not permit to appear on screen.
The comment lands without meaningful challenge from Theroux. In another scene, a group of men, including Theroux, casually debate women’s ‘value’ and beauty as though the conversation were benign and entirely acceptable.
**Misogyny as banter**
Strikingly, this scene mirrors one of the manosphere’s most insidious strategies: the casual delivery of degradation. Misogyny presented as common sense, as banter, as fact. It circulates across the online space, and now, in mainstream spaces, without scrutiny, as if men are entitled to profess it.
Then, in a tonal shift, childhood photographs of the documentary’s manosphere cast appear. Stories of hardship and violence are recounted, and the implication is clear: the manosphere offers belonging to men wounded by a world made increasingly difficult for them by feminist and gender equality progress. We are positioned to accept it as merely a refuge to those shaped by early struggle.
But this framing dangerously misdiagnoses the phenomenon. The manosphere is not a novel refuge for neglected men. It is a technologically updated amplifier for very old hierarchies: grievances against women, queer people, Jewish people and other minorities that have circulated for generations. Claims that the manosphere is offering solace, belonging and support for boys and men that otherwise wouldn’t exist need to be firmly dismissed.
A later moment of conflict unfolds between one of Theroux’s cast _, Hs Ticky Tocky_ and his mother, who plays an uneasy role that shifts between defender and disciplinarian. “I didn’t raise you like this,” she accuses her son, as he attempts to clean a mess on the floor of her home. The scene invites a curious reading: that her anger is directed less at his behaviour than at what his public persona exposes. Unfairly responsibilised for her son’s misogyny, homophobia and racism, she appears to not only reckon with who he has become, but with what that transformation reflects onto her.
And this brings us to a question the documentary never seriously asks.
Not why individual men are drawn to the manosphere, but why male entitlement to domination _has proven so durable_ , and why it adapts so easily to each new platform and media form. Most urgently, why are so many willing to not only examine men’s misogyny, but to find justifications for it?
That is where Theroux’s neutrality as a presenter falters. In _Inside the Manosphere_ , all viewers, but especially women, needed him to interrogate misogyny rather than simply stand by and observe it. Indeed, this is what we need all men to do, in every space it is encountered.
Instead, we are left watching a familiar cultural ritual unfold: the objective distance, the undeserved curiosity, the suggestion that there might be something intriguing about the psychology of men who enthusiastically degrade women. Theroux positions himself in relation to the manosphere just as so many other men do: with a passiveness that signals collusion and complicity.
The real message of Theroux’s documentary is not the one he intends to tell. The story is not that the manosphere is justified, nor that men’s attraction to it requires further explanation. The story is that misogyny continues to command curiosity, sympathy and narrative space, even when its consequences for women are devastating.
Theroux’s own curiosity towards the subject itself is not neutral, as the documentary would have us accept it. It is a form of attention, and anyone who has observed the manosphere and understands the calculated design of algorithms should recognise that attention is a form of power. What he offers the misogynists of _Inside the Manosphere_ is a flattering humanisation that is not only undeserved _but is also an act of harm_. Theroux inadvertently makes both himself, and his audience, a new cohort of manosphere victims.
In trying to understand the men of the manosphere, in extending them false complexity and attempting to make their motivations sophisticated, Theroux simply offers them something they crave: recognition, legitimacy and a wider audience.
The women targeted by the manosphere, whose lives have been made difficult, smaller and more dangerous by its misogyny, remain largely absent from the frame. And that absence tells us everything.
**Dr Stephanie Wescott is a Lecturer with the School of Education, Culture & Society at Monash University.**
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by Women's Agenda
22 hours ago
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