In the new documentary “Inside the Manosphere,” the English filmmaker and host Louis Theroux describes the buff, screen-addled U.S. and British influencers he interviews as creators of “the new world of men who are redefining what it means to be a man.” But I came away from the movie, now on Netflix, thinking that it eclipsed this framing.
Young men may finally be waking up to the utter emptiness of the manosphere’s messaging.
The manosphere — a loose collection of male podcasters and social media stars who push misogynistic and ultraconservative views — is not new. The term is at least 15 years old and rose to a frequent topic of mainstream discourse during Donald Trump’s first presidential term.
The men Theroux interviews are pushing some of the oldest grifts and ancient hatreds in the book, even if they’ve been using new technology to beam those views out to a global audience. The creators Theroux follows — young men with handles like HSTikkyTokky and Sneako — share very familiar ideas of what it means to be a man, ones that predated the rise of social media: making money, having big muscles, driving expensive cars and sleeping with as many women as possible. Though Theroux does not talk to Andrew or Tristan Tate, the most prominent modern manosphere influencers, clips of the Tate brothers appear throughout the film.
Superficially, these men are selling their audiences bizarre and extremist ideas — women shouldn’t vote; covering one eye in a photograph is a reference to a satanic plot — against the backdrop of the babes and Lamborghinis they “possess.” There’s a whole section of the documentary where it seems like every conversation Theroux has devolves into an antisemitic conspiracy theory involving the Rothschilds, citing “the Jews” who control the one world government and/or the media and/or Theroux himself. These specific conspiracy theories have been appearing in pamphlets — the old-timey version of viral videos — since the 19th century.
It’s unclear if any of the men actually believe what they say, or if they’re just shouting the most outrageous nonsense possible in order to maintain the attention of their audiences and get a rise out of Theroux and other spectators. They are quite self-aware about their place in the attention economy. “If I’d just done good things, I would never have really blown up on social media in the first place,” one of the men tells Theroux.
Some of the men featured are streamers, so they have cameras “Truman Show”-ing themselves to live audiences. Their lives are actually quite boring (how many times can we watch them go to the gym?) so the only way for them to maintain the attention of their audiences is to ramp up their behavior. They go beyond slurs and conspiracy theories to filming sex acts and beating strangers in the streets.
Late in the documentary, Theroux identifies this calculated acceleration and also its ultimate purpose. He describes one of the creators as “seemingly leaping onto a bandwagon of hate because he knew it was so shocking, it would be clippable. It almost felt like an inflationary spiral of racism and bigotry in order to get people’s attention and that this could quickly escalate. Stranger still, it seemed to me, it was all with the aim of selling products to teenagers.”
And that’s the real takeaway of the film: Most of these manosphere creators are just grifters preying on vulnerable young men for cash, via dodgy online investment advice or unaccredited internet universities that claim to sell freedom from a 9-to-5 job. The British Financial Conduct Authority warns its citizens about HSTikkyTokky’s advice: “This firm may be providing or promoting financial services or products without our permission. You should avoid dealing with this firm and beware of scams.”
Why do people keep watching? While the popularity of the influencers Theroux features is certainly disturbing — he shows some of them getting mobbed by excited teenage boys on the street in Europe and in the United States — there is some evidence that their power is waning and their constituency may never have been that large in the first place.
You can gauge this by the way support for Trump has recently fallen off among young men. Some of the creators featured in “Inside the Manosphere” tout their relationships to the president and his family, and Theroux links the manosphere’s rise to Trump’s 2024 win. The current administration appears to answer the question: What would it look like to give a bunch of soulless media personalities control of the most powerful government in the world?
The results are so grim. As Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explained in an article about the truly appalling “trivializing propaganda” content our government is pumping out about its activities in Iran, “The Trump administration is staffed, from top to bottom, by inveterate posters. They have turned everything — from the end of foreign aid to ICE raids — into memes.”
The chaos unleashed by the antics of Trump’s second administration, which is somehow even more meme-addled and norm-busting than the first one, is part of why the president’s appeal among young men seems to have dropped. According to Reuters/Ipsos polling in February, “some 33 percent of men ages 18to 29 approved of Trump’s performance in the White House, down from 43 percent in February 2025.” In another poll, from The Economist and YouGov, also from February, only about a quarter of voters ages 18 to 29 said that Trump is doing better than President Joe Biden. That statistic is pretty damning, considering how disappointed many young people were with Biden and how disaffected they are with the political process more broadly.
Gen Z men specifically are not excited about the war in Iran. “I feel betrayed,” one 20-something man who voted for Trump in 2024 told The Washington Post. “I don’t know why we are fighting [in Iran] if we have never been attacked.” To what extent the hard-core believers in the manosphere agree with these new dissenters isn’t clear, but Gen Z men are not turning into a reliable conservative voting bloc.
I don’t mean to minimize the substantial damage these creators have done and continue to do. But I also think it’s important to remind ourselves that the manosphere’s views are not in the majority and, even at the peak of their powers, these creators did not speak for all boys or men.
In a 2026 survey of over 20,000 adults from 29 countries conducted by King’s College London and Ipsos, on average, more than half of Gen Z men in each country agreed with the statement “Things would work better if more women held positions with responsibilities in government and companies.” Considering that some of those polled came from countries with fairly conservative attitudes toward gender roles, that figure is surprisingly modern.
It is not surprising to see that one of the creators Theroux features, Sneako, has been critical of Trump lately, and is fighting with some of the other manosphere figures, including Andrew Tate, about his relationship with Israel and Jews and, by extension, the war in Iran. This shouldn’t shock us — their personas were always built on endless online conflict and appearing to be countercultural.
With Trump back in office, the broad worldview of the manosphere is in charge again, and yelling slurs no longer carries that same spark of transgression that these young men seek to deliver to their audiences of dopamine addicts looking for the next shock.
I’m not sure what their next grift is going to look like, but at least more young people appear to be realizing that these men aren’t going to help them get a fast car or a pretty girl, just like Trump’s not helping them afford groceries.
End Notes
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I was riveted by McKay Coppins’s yearlong experiment with gambling for The Atlantic (which seems like a companion piece to “Inside the Manosphere”). What stuck out to me the most in this fascinating long-form story is how online gambling seems engineered to be addictive, and how dependent companies are on their sickest users. “As much as 90 percent of the sportsbooks’ revenue comes from less than 10 percent of their users. Their apps seem clearly designed, much like TikTok and Candy Crush, to keep users scrolling and tapping in a hypnotic stupor,” Coppins writes.
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Another companion piece! In New York Magazine, Sam Adler-Bell speaks to the young women who left the so-called new right because they realized how deeply misogynistic it is. A woman who was irritated by the censoriousness of the left said she “was in love with the frisson of transgression” that the right provided her. That seems like a decent explanation for the appeal of the manosphere for many young men, too.
Feel free to drop me a line about anything here. (If your sons or other relatives are affected by online gambling, I particularly want to hear from you this week.)
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