Men Who Hate Women

This year’s Louis Theroux: Into the Manosphere isn’t exactly groundbreaking; what the “manosphere” is, how many men have been entranced by it and how bigoted its views are is hardly news to most people with even a passing familiarity with the internet. However, we shouldn’t forget that this isn’t everyone. For many people, this documentary will be the first time they’re exposed to what the movement actually believes, as opposed to the sanitised image they’ve tried to present.

In the course of Theroux’s interviews with lesser known figures of this space (HSTikkyTokky, Justin Waller, Myron Gaines and Sneako), little is said about the philosophical underpinnings of the movement, which is just as well. The manosphere and its (especially younger) figureheads have completely abandoned any pretence of rationality and debate. The point is: men are smart, women are dumb; men are leaders, women are followers. Between a man and a woman, you should listen to the man; between two men, you should listen to the one who has more success with women, with the one that’s stronger, that makes more money, that looks “cooler.” Part of why the influencers involved in the documentary are so willing to talk with Theroux is, in my opinion, the fact that to them he looks like a prototypical “cuck.” He’s old, he’s weak, he does not try to pick up young women, he probably doesn’t even order his wife around. Any man who watches “HSTikkyTokky”'s content for hours on end is not going to be convinced by Theroux’s calm, polite presence. To them, he’s lost the argument the moment he showed up.

The documentary is unlikely to convince fans of these figures to change their worldview. At most it can be the first seed of doubt that could eventually lead them to integrate in polite society. Theroux is prima facie labeled as a member of the “matrix,” the mainstream media trying to keep men down. As a member of the matrix, he must also be a pedophile via his association with Jimmy Saville (his polite explanation that he actually helped expose Saville while he was alive goes ignored). Furthermore, his refusal to answer the straightforward question “Are [sic] Israel committing genocide?” is proof of him being a puppet of “the Jews.” The usage of are instead of is (which HS repeats twice) could perhaps be seen as an artefact of his meager intellectual faculties; I think it reflects something deeper. Israel doesn’t refer to a country with a government, a military and a people that make it up. Rather, to him it’s an irregular plural of Jew, much in the same way that the plural of person can be either persons or people. The real question isn’t: “Is Israel committing genocide?” What he means is: “Are Jews committing genocide?”

Here we arrive at the issue of antisemitism. When you start thinking conspiratorially, one conspiracy breeds another, usually bridged by the thought: “If they’re lying about this [the Moon landing, e.g.], what else are they lying about?”^[1] These conspiracies come to form a web of interconnected “facts” about the world in need of a single through-line to connect them. You need to put a name on the shadowy cabal at the top of society that lied about the Moon landing, lied about vaccines being effective, lied about microwaves being safe and is trying to make everyone sick and gay with the use of toxic-chemical-spraying airplanes. Antisemitism is a big taboo; everyone’s learned in school that the Nazis were evil and that claims of a Jewish conspiracy (such as the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion) are black propaganda. If society writ large tells us one thing, the converse is most likely true. Therefore, more often than not, the group being blamed ends up being the Jews. Generally though, the influencers in the documentary don’t go to this length. HS, presented with a video of him yelling: “Fuck the Jews!” denies being antisemitic. Justin Waller, to his credit, doesn’t mention it at all. Both Myron Gaines and Sneako, however, spread claims of a Jewish conspiracy quite openly.

There is something to be said about meme ideologies. None of the issues raised are actually issues of morality or of politics: the manosphere only talks about the Gaza genocide insofar as it’s an issue generally avoided by broader society and as it can serve to justify antisemitism. The problem isn’t Netanyahu, the Zionist project, the illegal settlements on the West Bank; the issue is the Jewish people, point blank. The US doesn’t support Israel because of its geopolitical interests; it’s because its government has been captured by “the Jews.” HS indirectly accuses Theroux of being a pedophile simply because of the viral obsession with the Epstein files. It’s not a matter of morality (and how could it be, when the faces of the movement face charges of human trafficking) — it’s a tool that can be used to discredit someone associated with the mainstream.

Theroux is then a boring, reasonable parent figure who tries to have a heart-to-heart with you about what you’ve been doing on the internet. You don’t need to listen to him; he’s uncool and out of touch. As one commenter on his appearance on the Modern Wisdom podcast puts it, he is “so far removed from the reality of western man” and it “seems like he was raised on soy and feminism.” So if there is little hope that his slight pushback may change the minds of the young men who are rooting for their idols, is there even a way to do it? I would argue there is: a very interesting moment happens at around 27 minutes into the documentary.

In this part, Theroux shows Myron a video of one his more incendiary comments: “Bitch, we ain’t equal! I’m the dictator, you are the subordinate. And I dictate when I want to put dick in you, bitch! And then you dictate when the sandwiches come by my dictation. That’s how this goes. And women love guys like this, that tell them what it is!” To paraphrase Myron’s words later in the clip, this comment “isn’t open to interpretation”; it’s a straightforward condoning of rape. When asked for clarification, Myron denies endorsing rape and starts claiming that it’s a part of the “leader mindset” he wants to instill in his listeners. If you were a listener of his podcast, this couldn’t be anything else but a sign of weakness. Faced with a mainstream journalist, Myron immediately backtracks and starts qualifying his statements; exactly the kind of thing a real “alpha male” wouldn’t stoop to.

As embarrassing as this part is, what follows is worse. When asked about his practice of “one-way monogamy” (the man sleeps with other women while the woman stays faithful to him), Myron starts talking big game about eventually getting multiple wives. As soon as his girlfriend Angie gets the mike, she says that “Myron is somebody in front of the cameras but behind them is somebody else with [her].” When Theroux asks her about Myron’s plan to have multiple wives, she starts stammering and states that she’ll see when it happens. Myron, up to this point nervously looking from Angie to Theroux to the camera, agrees: we’ll cross that bridge when we get there. Theroux applies some pressure and Myron hands the dog (a white poodle with a pink leash he’s been cradling in his arms up to this point) to his girlfriend and makes a half-hearted attempt at saving his dictator-husband image: “If you could clean up the room… I need some help, yeah, with that.”^[2]

Clips of this moment have been making the rounds on the internet lately, and for good reason. Far from projecting the alpha male image he would like to, Myron comes across (to his viewers, anyway) as a weak beta who’s afraid of his own girlfriend. His attempts to order her around and talk for her come across as exceedingly unnatural, like a bad actor with progressive politics cast as a raging misogynist. My hope is that at least some of the people who listen to his podcast will watch them and realise that, insofar as Myron is happy, that comes from the fact that he doesn’t live in perfect accord with the standards he sets for others. This will happen for some, no doubt — rolling a hundred-thousand-sided die a hundred thousand times will eventually make it land on one —, but they will be a minority.

The documentary qua documentary is not likely to change the minds of those that need it the most. The actual men and boys listening to Fresh & Fit and idolising Andrew Tate are not going to take the word of a man “raised on soy and Feminism.” The most that can be done for these people is to show them how embarrassing their idols are. The target audience is going to be of an entirely different kind: the average person who doesn’t spend a lot of time on the internet and who has little idea of what the kids are up to. Seen from the perspective of a person who has only heard about Andrew Tate in passing, it’s a very good introduction to what the manosphere is, rather than what it purports to be. There is validity in showing to mothers and fathers how thin the veil of “male self-improvement” is and how deep the hatred hiding under it goes.