3 hours ago
7
He’s a bit late to the party, is the first thought that crosses your mind when faced with the prospect of 90 minutes of Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere. I’ve lost count of the number of documentaries there have been on either specific leading lights in the lucrative online misogyny business, such as Andrew Tate, or the general phenomenon (the latter most recently by James Blake with Men of the Manosphere).
Still, can a subject really be said to have been “done” until we have seen what Louis T makes of it? Evidently not, so here he is, repeating his shtick as he covers ground that other less high-profile documentarians have done before him. To be fair, he approaches his interviewees with a slightly harder, less ignorant-ingenue vibe than usual. This is pleasing on many levels. I find the latter quite an effortful pose and increasingly hard to endure, and he rightly intuits that the full version wouldn’t fly here. It’s also simply getting old. We know he is an intelligent man who lives in this world – the silent supposed bafflement and dependence on giving people enough rope to hang themselves, which are such a large part of his arsenal, look like increasingly feeble weapons when the matters are of such increasing importance in all of our lives.
So it is good to see him fronting up to the online stars who are peddling their anti-women “red pill” ideology (a phrase taken from the film The Matrix, referring to how they help followers see through the mainstream media’s supposed lies to the truth about society and how it is bent on keeping men down) and finding ways to break through their posturing. This is most satisfyingly illustrated during an early interview with 23-year-old Harrison Sullivan, in Marbella after fleeing the scene of a car crash in the UK (since filming he has returned to the UK and been convicted of dangerous driving), and known to his million followers as hstikkytokky.
Sullivan began his online life as a fitness instructor before expanding into “coaching boys how to be fucking boys, not soy boys or gimps.” “Is that how you see me?” asks Theroux mildly, as they begin a workout session at an outdoor gym together. There is a fleeting pause. “Did you just look at my arms?” laughs Theroux, encapsulating so much of the superficiality of the movement in one question that Sullivan is flustered. Theroux follows it up by asking if it’s leg day. Sullivan, feeling back on safe ground, shows him his fantastically muscular thigh. “Silly question, mate,” he says, striding away to a weights machine. “Calves need work,” Theroux remarks. Even Sullivan laughs this time. “They do, they do.”
This evidence of ordinary humanity is what makes the rest so depressing. It is the usual agglomeration of increasingly extreme content made for clicks that can be monetised by its creators, the joy they take in providing it via humiliating and abusing women and encouraging followers to do likewise and not be “cucks”. “Destroy her life.” “I dictate when I wanna put my dick in you, bitch … Women love guys like this, that tell it like it is.” The aggression is endless, the hypocrisy too. Sullivan says his mum hates racism, homophobia and especially misogyny and that he’d get a slap if she heard him. He owns an agency that promotes OnlyFans accounts but would disown a daughter if she did it. He would disown a son for being gay. Theroux presses him on both matters but receives only the traditional flurry of non sequiturs and illogical self-justifications that would take too much screen time to unpick and are thus left.
There are a few, potentially very interesting, appearances from the girlfriends and wives in the men’s lives (mostly the relationships are of “one-sided monogamy”, which means exactly what you would suspect), and from Sullivan’s mother. They are rarely seen for a second time, when the men realise how easily they could go off-script. You wish Theroux had pursued what this means, along with how the manosphere affects those who have not chosen to be part of it – schoolgirls and teachers dealing with the teenage boys exposed to this content, the young women who can hardly find men in their circles to date who are unaffected by or reject this insidious stuff. Instead he focuses on the childhoods of the interviewees, which begins to seem a lot like excuse-hunting instead of an interrogation of the vast appetite of men for their women-hating spew and the endless willingness to feed it and the delight taken in doing so.
I don’t think there’s been a documentary about these men presented by a woman. Maybe one by Sullivan’s mum or someone her age? That, I think, might yield something new.
