By Naomi Miles, CEO, CEASE.
The manosphere influencers on Louis Theroux’s latest documentary are morbidly fascinating: arrogant and bombastic, appalling and outrageous but also rather absurd and even pitiful.
Their appeal to certain audiences comes from the fact that they hold out grand promises, even if they are utterly hollow:
They promise to speak truth. There’s the whole “red pill” idea- the claim that they’ve woken up to how the world really works, seeing through the illusions fed to everyone else. In this version of events, society is rigged: feminism has gone too far, and men are being systematically undermined and only a select few see what’s going on. In a world that feels increasingly complex, this kind of supposed clarity has a special appeal.
But their “truth” is little more than a hodgepodge of shallow, contradictory ideas and well-worn conspiracy theories. At its core is a narrative of male grievance: the idea that men are being unfairly sidelined and denied what they’re owed. Around this, various strange ideas emerge- for example, that shadowy elites are in charge of the world. pulling the strings and deliberately shaping society to men’s detriment. All this fosters a victim mentality that leaves vulnerable, disenfranchised young men even more angry and isolated- in fact, even more dependent on the very niche community that fuels their discontent. It has all the hallmarks of a cult.
They promise to care about young men They’re tapping into the very real sense that many have of being overlooked and unheard; the craving to be seen. As Louis suggests, what emerges is an ideology rooted in trauma, repackaged as a blueprint for how the world should work. There’s something rather moving about the way teenagers light up when they meet their heroes and get a fist-bump, encouragement and simple advice about working hard and taking responsibility.
This is makes what follows even more troubling because, as Louis observes, underneath the show of paternal concern is a flagrant willingness to exploit. Those same young men are funnelled towards porn sites the influencers privately despise, towards the fraudulent “get rich quick” schemes and online courses that all underwrite the influencers’ own lifestyles of conspicuous consumption.
The third promise is authenticity. I’m thinking of Sullivan’s rant towards the end, dismissing Louis’ edited, “establishment” TV as fake while presenting his own content as raw, real and therefore trustworthy. An OnlyFans creator even praised his authenticity, seemingly unfazed as Louis relayed what he’d said about women like her.
Not only are these Manosphere influencers inauthentic or disingenuous, it’s also hard to pin down anything stable or coherent about them at all. Everything they say feels like it’s designed to provoke and capture attention. Are they really as hateful as they appear, or is it performance? Certainly Sullivan’s assertions seem to shift depending on his audience. Even where he appears to expresses a clear value, for example describing OnlyFans as immoral, he doesn’t live by that value and is still perfectly willing to promote and profit from it.
In this dark world, there’s no integrity; it’s essentially nihilistic. Truth, responsibility, even basic coherence are sacrificed at the altar of money, sex and power. Life becomes a game, a funhouse of smoke and mirrors where everything is slippery and illusory. In this game, people become tools. Everyone’s there to be used.
One of the clearest illustrations of this is when Louis appears on the Fresh & Fit podcast. The format is simple: bring OnlyFans creators onto the show to mock and humiliate them, setting them up to look stupidin front of a live audience primed for the kill.
Why do these women go on in the first place? Presumably because it drives traffic to their OnlyFans account. Any publicity is good publicity. The men deride them, but still consume their content and fund what they do. And the influencers, of course, take a cut from both sides. This whole circus of mutual contempt is ultimately just about generating hard cash. Respect and integrity are traded away; cash is the only thing that manages to hold its value.
It’s bleak but, like most extreme examples, it holds up a mirror.
Around the sex industry, we’re perhaps not as far removed from this as we like to think. Like Sullivan, most people wouldn’t want their daughter or someone they love to be involved- but instead of asking why, we keep “sex workers” at arm’s length, telling ourselves they must be different somehow.
In other words, we “other” them; we objectify them, just as the manosphere does. Doing that we absolve ourselves of any empathy or responsibility towards them. It’s their life, their choice and as long as they’re making money, we stop asking questions about fairness, respect and harm. We stay in our lane.
Justin Waller’s wife, Kristen, uses the lane analogy to explain how their marriage works: “I like to tell people we have lanes… My lane is changing diapers, cooking and cleaning, and his lane is working. We don’t cross into each other’s lane. It works for us.”
Of course, most relationships involve some division of labour, but here it feels rigid, almost absolute with no overlap, no stepping in for one another or carrying of a shared burden.
Healthy relationships are messier than this. They involve compromise, sacrifice and mutual care; they require us to accept inconvenience if we are to treat one another as fully human, rather than as instruments of our own satisfaction.
This documentary feels like a cautionary tale, a glimpse of where things head if we strip away meaning, responsibility and regard for others. It’s a dystopia captured perfectly by the Eurythmics, where “[s]ome of them want to use you, some of them want to be used by you. Some of them want to abuse you, some of them want to be abused.”