We All Live in the Manosphere Now
Everyone’s talking about “Inside the Manosphere,” but there’s one glaring omission.
By Nona Willis Aronowitz
Weeks after its release, everyone is still talking about Louis Theroux’s new documentary, “Inside the Manosphere.” Theroux isn’t the first filmmaker to attempt to capture this subculture, but he’s arguably the most high-profile, applying his Michael Moore-esque style to these guys as he did to similarly odious groups like the Westboro Baptist Church and Scientologists. He tries to get inside the heads of wildly bigoted influencers like Harrison Sullivan (HSTickyTocky), Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy (Sneako), Myron Gaines, and Justin Waller, focusing on how they profit off of marketing misogyny to young men.
Theroux, who has three sons of his own, mainly limits his scope to the influencers themselves and their throngs of young male fans, sons of the Millennial and Gen X women who ushered in a new era of feminist consciousness. Theroux makes it clear that we are now living through that movement’s backlash. And yet he seldom depicts the people who are most hurt by it: women.
It’s not that we don’t hear from women at all. Theroux briefly chats with the influencers’ women employees, wives, and girlfriends, whose remarks range from beatific assent (male domination is “how it’s supposed to be”) to resigned eye rolls (“Male audience. What can you expect?”). But Theroux never talks to them for more than a few minutes, and he almost never talks to them alone. The one time he manages to grab a few solo words with the woman who books guests on Myron Gaines’s show, Gaines immediately sends her a cease-and-desist text from the next room. The closest Theroux gets to a substantive interview with a woman is when he speaks with Harrison Sullivan’s mom, who supposedly “hates sexism.” Asked to comment on her son’s profession, she simply says, “Of course there’s things I don’t agree with.”
Maybe individual interviews with these particular women were impossible, but I was dying to know: Where are Sneako’s exes? Who are Waller’s former women employees or employers? Could we have heard from a girl who went to high school with Sullivan, or a woman who worked alongside Gaines when he was, ahem, a DHS agent? If Theroux really wanted to uncover their humanity, as he claims, that could have been a way to go.
The short interviews he does conduct with the wives and girlfriends often take on a distinctly paternalistic tone. Theroux harps on the one-sided monogamy many of these relationships have established; several of these men sleep with other women but expect their partners to remain “loyal.” It’s a valid data point about their chauvinism: As a practitioner of nonmonogamy myself, I can nevertheless concede that for more than a century, the jargon of “free love” has been twisted and manipulated by men to shame women into relationships they don’t want. But is polyamory the problem? Or just polyamory with misogynists?
And how, I was left wondering, do the women in these influencers’ lives feel about the rest of it? Why didn’t Theroux ask Waller’s partner, Kristen, about what she’s going to teach their two daughters, whose diapers Waller claims to never have changed? How did Gaines’s girlfriend, Angie, feel about being ordered to clean up their shared apartment before Theroux sees it? (Thank gawdess she’s no longer with him.) Does Sullivan’s mum worry about her son’s future wife, or her future grandchildren? When Theroux filmed Sneako taking selfies with a preteen boy—who jovially chants “Fuck the women!” and “All gays should die!”—did he give a passing thought to the girls or gays that go to school with him? Theroux interviews random male fans on the street about why they look up to Waller; perhaps he could have pulled aside a few women observing their fandom.
I found myself wanting to dispatch a girl gang to Theroux’s house, composed of regular women and girls who are exposed to this rhetoric on a daily basis. Like this 15-year-old girl who gave readers of The Guardian a glimpse into the “vile,” overtly misogynist content that social media feeds her, no matter how much she tries to steer the algorithm elsewhere. Or the girls in the classrooms of this educator, who reports that they’ve stopped raising their hands in class because “the social cost has become too high.”
And this isn’t just about one film. As Feminist points out, these glaring omissions mirror broader discussions about the “boy crisis” and the “male loneliness epidemic”—which, by the way, is not exclusively male; a recent Pew survey reported just as many women feeling lonely as men. These debates zero in on boys as victims of a patriarchal society, and they certainly are, but they’re not the only victims. A subset of these trend pieces blame feminism, not our society’s bedrock misogyny, which these influencers cynically enforce for their own gain. It feels ridiculous to even clarify this, but manosphere influencers are not akin to girlbosses; as Amanda Montei puts it, those women “may have run on white capitalist forms of exploitation, but they did not actively teach other women and girls to abuse, control, and dehumanize men, nor were they advocating for the end of men’s civil rights.” The women affected by this misogyny remain faceless and nameless while journalists give openly misogynist, racist, anti-Semitic influencers the royal treatment.
Not anymore. The Meteor will be rolling out a series on life and reality in this anti-feminist era, examining the backlash through the prism of women and girls who have to live through it. Stay tuned.