Good evening, Meteor readers,

East-coast spring continues to be cold as hell, but I’m not that mad about it because I can still comfortably wear my brand-new, Carolyn Bessette-inspired rollneck sweater. “Love Story” is not good, per se, but I have failed to resist its hard sell of ‘90s fashion.

Today, we tackle what’s missing from that ubiquitous manosphere documentary. Plus, some optimism (!) about politics (!!) from diplomat-turned-playwright Julissa Reynoso.

Officially a fashion victim,
Nona Willis Aronowitz

WHAT’S GOING ON

The women beneath the men: 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.”

MYRON GAINES, IN ONE OF HIS MILDER MOMENTS. (CREDIT: YOUTUBE)

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.

NOTED HISTORIAN AND ARCHITECTURE EXPERT JUSTIN WALLER. (CREDIT: YOUTUBE)

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.

AND:

• PSA: If you have a flight scheduled in the next few weeks, get ready to record ICE’s every move. In response to the partial government shutdown that’s leaving TSA agents unpaid and abandoning their posts, ICE officers have been deployed to 14 airports, supposedly to help with “crowd control,” whatever that means. (It will not comfort you to know that Trump has boasted that the ICE deployment was his idea.) Amid these mixed messages, everyone and their mother remain confused about ICE’s role at these airports, especially since they haven’t alleviated the long security lines. So far there’s only been one reported incident of arrest—a crying woman from Guatemala and her daughter at San Francisco International Airport—but all it takes is one brutal scene for the fear to be effective.

• Speaking of DHS, Markwayne Mullin was confirmed by the Senate yesterday to replace Kristi Noem as the head of the department. These two Democrats and 52 Republicans did not seem to care about his violent streak, which includes challenging Sen. Rand Paul to a fight on the Senate floor and bragging about spanking his kids. Yeesh.

• Another day, another reminder that there is no expiration date on being a survivor: Donna Motsinger, who was just awarded more than $59 million in damages by a California civil jury that found Bill Cosby liable for drugging and sexually assaulting her, waited “54 years to get justice.”

• Not to be thirsty but this hero surf coach is hot!!

• Ms. Rachel for president.

Three Questions About…Government that Works

BY SHANNON MELERO

JULISSA REYNOSO IN 2024. (CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES)

“The best is yet to come…you’ll see.” These are the final words the audience hears in Public Charge, a political drama playing at The Public Theater in New York, which follows the true story of Julissa Reynoso, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State and Ambassador to Uruguay in the Obama administration. At the show’s end, the actor playing Reynoso is referring to the future presidency of Hillary Clinton—a reality the audience knows is never realized.

It is a bittersweet moment for both the character and the viewer; after years of work and small miracles, Reynoso’s character has realized her vision of easing relations with Cuba and freeing American political prisoner Alan Gross. In the final moments of the show, which ends in the winter of 2014, she is hopeful and full of belief in the power of good government. As a viewer, you feel some of that too—until you exit the theater and your phone flashes the latest headlines. The experience is jarring.

We spoke to the real Julissa Reynoso, who wrote Public Charge with playwright Michael J. Chapiga, about what it was like to strike such an optimistic note in such politically uncertain times.

In the play, there are a lot of references to a memo you and Ricardo Zuniga wrote in 2009 about the importance of connecting at a person-to-person level with representatives of Cuba, despite decades of silence as policy. What is it like revisiting that idea as the U.S. is moving more towards isolationism? 

That’s just…diplomacy. We need to talk to all types of people, from people you like or don’t to people who don’t like you. It’s the only way you really can get anything resolved. That is the whole function of the State Department.

[With this play] I wanted to help [people] understand what public servants do and the issues we face in trying to get things done. That was the main objective: explaining the life of a government official.

ZABRYNA GUEVARA AS JULISSA REYNOSO IN PUBLIC CHARGE. (COURTESY OF THE PUBLIC THEATER)

A lot of the characters in the show are Latine, and as they’re trying to open the door to relations with Cuba, I noticed a theme of how we as Latine people struggle to work together intraculturally in the U.S. Was that intentional? 

No, it just happened to be that the people dealing with these hard things at the time were all people of color! That’s just who was there and that’s really a testament to [then-Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton, who put us there. But also, growing up I would see films about foreign policy or international relations and I did not see people like me in any of those scenarios. [In the administration], I had a bunch of people of color whirling around with me trying to solve issues and trying to make things better. And with the people who were around at this time—Cheryl Mills, [Uruguayan] President Mujica, some of the Cuban officials—I always thought, Man you can’t make this stuff up. It was all so out of the ordinary.

[Now, with the current administration,] I think there’s a lot that we’ve lost along the way. I do have faith that some of the people at these institutions can get it back in the right direction. This is not the first time our institutions have been under attack. But we can come back and be stronger—it’s just going to take a lot of work. And good people are going to have to join in at some point.

It’s interesting you say that people have to join because there really is so much apathy right now. I don’t know that everyone still has the will to, you know, be the change they wish to see. 

People are gonna have to get over it. I always say, If it’s not me or you, then who? We can’t just say Oh God, everything is so bad and then do nothing about it. That’s not how this works. You can’t just give up.

I really want folks to understand that it is hard to make change but once you do it, it’s extraordinary. As a country we’re still able to do that, but it’s just hard. If it were easy, we would do it all the time. But change is a major investment and it takes a lot of failures along the way. We just have to keep at it.

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