Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere (2026)

TV-MA, not because of anything that Theroux does, but because the subject matter is inherently pretty darned gross.  If this is an expose on the Manosphere, the film only skims the surface at the amount of sex, misogyny, antisemitism, and all around bigotry that the culture embraces.  Theroux makes a point to blur out some of the more truly heinous content, but it doesn't change the fact that the audience is aware that it is happening.

DIRECTOR: Adrian Choa

There is a very real chance that I am going to become the left wing version of what I criticize the right wing of doing.  When I see people online pushing documentaries about the awful underbelly of a political spectrum, automatically walls go up.  Often, these documentaries take unreliable data and present it in a way that gives these stories a vibe of validity.   Now, Louis Theroux has earned a sense of respectability.  He's been in the game for long enough that his name carries a bit of weight behind it.  But even the most objective journalist holds onto bias.  Theroux has his bias.  I don't think you could make this documentary without having a bias.  Still, I am getting to the notion that this is a documentary that people should watch and --God forbid --trust because it is the thing that needed to be said.

The absolute hellscape (Am I just embracing hyperbole at this point?) that we're in today has a lot to do with the Manosphere.  Anecdotes hold weight, but shouldn't be used as the end-all-be-all of an argument.  That being said, almost all of the frustrations that I have as a teacher come from the sheer presence of the Manosphere in my students' lives.   It is a cancer.  It's weird how I can recognize seemingly innocuous buzzwords and understand that someone has been redpilled almost immediately.  (It's weird that "beef tallow" and "seed oils" let me know a lot about what teenagers think about women.)  There was a time when I first started teaching when the students kept me accountable about being more tolerant and progressive.  Now, it feels like I am fighting for my male students to have even a modicum of empathy for anyone but their own tribe.  It's gotten pretty darned bad.  I always wondered how Kindergarten teachers adapt their teaching to account for simple subjects.  I show a kid the color "red".  If they don't get it, how do I simplify that?  That's how it feels like to teach humanities nowadays.  I teach about treating other people as valuable human beings, capable of love and pain.  If a student doesn't think that someone else deserves the most basic of respect, how do I adapt to make them understand that?

If we're looking at Theroux's attempt to understand that, I feel he's in the same place.  I don't think Theroux ever gets shocked by the answers he receives.  If anything, I think Theroux got the exact coverage that he was looking for.  The way that Theroux goes after information in this is pretty standard for a documentary: he interviews his subjects.  It's incredibly telling that HS doesn't understand how documentaries work as he starts treating the documentary as a content farm, talking directly to the cameras to explain what he's doing in every moment and why.  One of the things that is evident is the sheer hypocrisy of the major players in the manosphere.  I'm going to use Harrison (HS) as my prime example because he seems to be the core of this documentary, even though Theroux highlights other culture influencers.  Harrison, from moment one, never comes across as a good dude.  He's always a jerk, but he's either a jerk who likes you or a jerk who thinks that you should be destroyed.  Considering how much Harrison is distrustful of big media, it's odd that he didn't even do a cursory Google search on who Louis Theroux is.  It took his comments on his real-time content to discover that Theroux is probably doing a hit piece on him.  When he becomes a monster, he goes full-on evil.  Still, the one thing that is paradoxical is that Harrison --as the other influencers kind of are --hates the world he created and will do anything to bolster that evil.

There's something really disgusting about these guys.  Harrison is perhaps the least savvy about his own hypocrisy.  He hates sexual promiscuity in women, yet owns talent agencies pushing OnlyFans content.  He sleeps around himself.  He says that he finds it disgusting that 13-year-olds are modeling their behavior off of his hedonism, and yet is constantly taking pictures with thirteen-year-olds and encouraging them to keep watching.  He is both incredibly self-aware and lacks even the most basic understanding of how he is maybe one of the most problematic human beings alive.  And all of it comes from his apathy about humanity.  I don't want to get as basic as one can get, but it's a worship of money as the ultimate root of all evil.  All of these people worship at the altar of money and fame and find it to be a good.  The thing is, Harrison has a moral code.  He spells it out quite clearly.  He just does have the sense of awareness to see that the moral code applies to him as much as it does to everyone else.  It's not like he's the first person to have that hypocrisy to them.  But he's also a guy who advocates for his own lifestyle that he wants other people to emulate his behavior. 

Maybe that's what makes me the most frustrated.  He is someone who understands right and wrong and cannot give a ______.

That's the thing that pisses me off.  It's knowing that something is wrong and either not caring or, even worse, advocating for that evil.  The rest of these guys, the same deal?  And the thing that makes it worse is that we have guys like Myron Gaines playing roles in how our government functions.  This guy worked for the government.  When we hear stories of corrupt officials and officers, it's guys like Myron Gaines who should scare us.  That guy might be even worse than Harrison because he tries enforcing his awful stances.  Watching that scene where Gaines's girlfriend was in the room explaining their dynamic, you could see the rage behind his eyes that his girlfriend might have had a different opinion than he did. He hated her in that moment.  That entire invite for Louis Theroux to come back on the podcast as just revenge.  These are tiny people full of so much emotion that it undermines everything sexist thing that they've ever said about women.  

The thing that might be the most horrifying --and I don't like writing this one bit --are the people who are enabling these podcasters.  I'm going to be gross, but let me explain immediately afterwards.  There are so many women involved in the Manosphere and that is so much of the problem.  Now, I am angry at these women.  Specifically these women.  Not all women.  Not women in general.  These women.  These male influencers go out of their way to show how easily manipulated and superficial women are and then have these women to prove their points.  These are women who know that they are going to be exploited, but don't care because either they are getting paid a lot or their social media presence will be bolstered.  Heck, let's ignore the people that are on the podcasts.  I can't help but look at Harrison's mother.  Harrison has a weak spot for his mother.  He looks at her like a saint.  Theroux, when he asks about Harrison's mother, seems to awaken an even darker demon inside of Harrison.  So when Harrison's mother is there for the podcast, you would think that she would live up to the expectations that Harrison established.  But the second that Theroux questions Harrison's criminal background