Louis Theroux, the Lib Dem Alan Whicker, has now had his turn at the manosphere. His new Netflix film Inside the Manosphere has gone down more or less as you would expect: clippable footage of insecure men, prompted along by Theroux’s trademark awkward questioning.
But none of this is especially difficult. The men he films are not master manipulators or especially complex abusers. For the most part, they are self-evidently ludicrous. Their appeal lies less in intellectual depth than in the escapism they offer: flash cars, rented glamour, semi-professional girlfriends, and the chance for losers to live vicariously through a fantasy of sexual and social dominance. It is a show-don’t-tell medium.
Like an ageing rockstar who can still hit some of the notes, there are moments when the old technique still pays off. He remains very good at catching the small collapse of male vanity. When one, Justin Waller is asked how many children he has, there is a long and slightly painful hesitation, followed by an answer that sounds as though he has only just remembered it himself. There is something David Brentian about the moment: a faint suggestion that the number might have been quietly inflated for effect, before settling on the reality: two (daughters). It is funny hearing the hiss of a preening man’s ego slowly deflate.
It also true that Theroux’s awkward silences work particularly well with this type of person and with extrovert Americans generally. Their entire persona depends on being the largest presence in the room, filling every gap noise and assertion. His gift is to let the silence sit just long enough for the act to begin to wobble. But this is also a law of diminishing returns. We are no longer watching a hidden world being patiently uncovered, but a public performance faltering outside the safe confines of its own curated, short-form content.
This shows a deeper problem with Theroux’s method. It was developed in Weird Weekends, which belonged to a pre-internet world, when subcultures were genuinely difficult to access and required a real degree of commitment to enter. If you were, for example, a bodybuilder in the 1960s you had to invest financially and emotionally, organising your life around a relatively unusual set of beliefs and practices, offline, through word of mouth.
The internet has changed that. What Theroux now encounters are not ecosystems in the Weird Weekends oeuvre. The men he interviews are not gatekeepers but extroverts in a marketplace, optimising themselves for clicks, outrage and subsequent monetisation. To approach them with the same anthropological curiosity is to misread the nature of what they are doing. In Weird Weekends, Theroux uncovered subcultures. Here, he is mostly interviewing an algorithm.
There is also a familiar element of performance in Theroux himself. He presents as the mild, slightly awkward, urbane Englishman, the man with the false modest title (Louis Theroux from the BBC) and the raised eyebrow, quietly bamboozled by the imposingness of those he meets. Years ago, when cultural cross-pollination was limited and few people knew who he was, this encouraged subjects to let their guard down.
But the asymmetry is more obvious now. Theroux arrives backed by a Netflix crew interviewing men whose entire operation may consist of a ring light and a Go Pro. When one of them, HS Tikky Tokky, remarks on the size of the film crew’s cameras, the fiction briefly slips. This is not an encounter between equals, nor even between two subcultures. It is a performance of humility from a position of an enormously powerful media organisation.
There is also a slightly half-arsed feel to the documentary, as though it were commissioned less out of curiosity than from a desire to produce a kind of ‘behind the scenes of Adolescence’ for a concerned, establishment audience. Andrew Tate, the one figure who still gives the manosphere any real scale or coherence, is conspicuous by his absence (though he looms large in archive clips set to suitably menacing music – relations reportedly broke down when he wanted to be paid for his appearance).
For example: one learns very little about, however, is the more esoteric ecology of the ‘sphere’ itself: the strange fixation on aesthetics, looksmaxxing, frame-mogging, jawline paranoia, the endless, faintly deranged self-analysis of bone structure, height and sexual market value. Theroux does touch on the language of ‘sexual market value,’ but mostly in its loudest, most vulgar for a kind of prefabricated talk of dominance and ‘bitches’ – rather than the quieter, more neurotic minutiae that make the phenomenon genuinely interesting. To be charitable, the film was shot in 2025, before figures like Clavicular pushed looksmaxxing and ‘frame mogging’ into the mainstream in 2026. But it is also easier to film a handful of grifters saying outrageous things on camera than to engage with the quieter, stranger, and more psychologically revealing culture from which they draw their audience.
The weakness of this approach is that it flatters both itself and its audience. It gives viewers the agreeable sense that they are watching something brave, probing and psychologically acute, when in reality they are watching weak and stupid men hang themselves with their own rope.
None of this is to say the phenomenon itself is unreal. Plenty of boys and young men plainly do consume this material, recognise its figures, and absorb parts of its vocabulary. But that is not the same thing as saying the men Theroux films represent the true inner life of ordinary masculinity. What many young men share is not the lifestyle or even the worldview of these figures, but the loneliness, confusion and status anxiety on which they trade.
In truth, the manosphere is not especially interesting as a body of ideas. There is no buried philosophy here, no dark doctrine of sex and power waiting to be unearthed by a sufficiently solemn broadcaster. It is something thinner and more contemporary than that: a digital market in loneliness, resentment, status panic and sexual opportunism, populated by men performing a dominance they do not possess.
And those men did not appear out of nowhere. A great many young men are plainly not flourishing, socially, economically, romantically, in ways that respectable Britain still finds awkward to discuss. That is the harder story.
