By feminist reviewer.
📹 Louis Theroux’s new Netflix documentary “Inside the Manosphere” is being praised for some for shining a light on a disturbing current issue. I watched it. I wasn’t reassured. I was troubled. And not just by the men in it.
👎🏼 It adds nothing new to what journalists, academics, and women’s organisations have been documenting for years. If you know anything on the rise of Andrew Tate, incel culture, or the radicalisation pipeline targeting teenage boys (and sometimes younger), you’ll recognise the patterns.
🤔There are no revelations here, just a 90 min amplification of men who have already perfected the art of making any attention work in their favour. Several reviewers have noted the same: that the film risks giving these figures the mainstream platform they were seeking all along. One of the subjects’ own mothers asked Theroux directly why he was making money off publicising her son’s views. He couldn’t answer.
⚠️ What’s missing is more revealing than what’s there. Theroux’s famously gentle, detached style, effective with subjects who don’t realise they’re being held up to ridicule, is no match for men who are professional performers, entirely comfortable in front of a camera, and who calculated that appearing in a Netflix documentary would spike their follower numbers. He needed to come prepared.
❓Where were the stats on violence against women and girls? Where was the data on the documented harm of this content to boys’ mental health, to their relationships, to their futures? Where were the researchers, the psychologists, the educators who work with the young men being radicalised by exactly this content every day? Theroux intellectualises his subjects, asking whether absent fathers might explain them, but never meaningfully challenges them. He is totally out done by them. They humiliate him at every turn and this time he’s the one not seeing it.
♂️ The only female voices present are those who uphold, excuse, or enable the ideologies of the men involved: the girlfriend squirming as her partner discusses taking multiple wives but still by his side, the mother more concerned about her son’s portrayal than his views. There are no women present to push back, to name the harm, or to speak from their own experience of navigating a world shaped by this thinking. For younger women and girls watching, this is doubly damaging: not only are their perspectives absent, but the only models of womanhood on screen are those who have accommodated misogyny. That is not balance. That is reinforcement.
💪🏼 We deserve a counterpart. A documentary that centres the experiences of women and girls navigating a world where this content is shaping the boys and men around them. That talks to teachers seeing it play out in classrooms. To domestic abuse workers. To young women who have had relationships corroded by these ideas. To girls who are already adapting their behaviour, online and off, because of the culture these men are building. That is the documentary that needs to be made.
👎🏼 Until then, we should be honest about what this show is: a maybe well intentioned, surface level piece that asked too little, challenged too little, and may well have given these men exactly what they wanted.
👉🏼 My recommendation – don’t bother watching it.
