Online creators monetize misogyny while shaping a generation’s understanding of masculinity and power.
On March 11, Netflix released Inside the Manosphere, a new documentary by Louis Theroux that hit the No. 1 spot on Netflix. It is an uncomfortable but necessary examination of how the manoverse—a loose conglomeration of men’s rights and red pill influencers, podcasters and politicians—exploits and harms young boys and teenagers.
At the heart of the documentary is a profound inequity in the influencer space between the experiences and expectations of men and women. While the male content creators are eager to proclaim traditional values, they exalt “one-sided monogamy,” where they expect women to remain loyal to them (“my wife doesn’t talk to any men”) while they have multiple partners. While they shame women who do sex work on OnlyFans, one of the influencers, Harrison Sullivan, funds an OnlyFans creator house. His excuses—that it’s just business, that he would never allow his own daughter to do OnlyFans—attempts to create distance and deniability between him and his commercial choices and consequences.
Watching Inside the Manosphere feels like watching a car crash; I found myself unable to look away from the bloody collapse of bodies and algorithmic machines.
The documentary is a necessary companion piece to Adolescence, a 2025 series about a young boy who stabbed a female classmate to death after being called an incel. Inside the Manosphere breaks down the infrastructure that taught and enabled the young boy at the heart of the fictional show to kill his classmate.
The first scene sets the tone for the doc: In the first five minutes, Sullivan refers to Kacey, a woman sitting in his living room, as “his dishwasher.” (Sullivan himself is a biracial man, with a white mother and a Black father.)
Theroux walks up and asks her name, but from that first interaction, you can feel the tension in the air as if Theroux (who himself holds privilege as a white man) wades into enemy territory.
Targeting Children
A majority of the influencers Theroux speaks to seem to be aware of the harm they cause. Sullivan even warns Theroux that young teenage boys should not be watching their content, and blames the parents that would allow their children to consume this content. Several seconds later, we see the influencer taking photos with young fans.
Even if Sullivan doesn’t believe the gospel he peddles, he has found a young, impressionable audience buying into it: Gen Z men (born between the ages of 1997 and 2012) are twice as likely as baby boomers to believe that a wife should defer to her husband, a recent survey shows.
What’s worse is witnessing how damaging the manosphere rhetoric is to men.
When content creator Justin Waller meets up with two of his fans on the street, one of them shares, “He’s one of my greatest role models,” and when asked what he has learned from Waller and others’ content says, “Life as a man, you’re born without value. We have to build that value.” Waller jumps in and says that women are born with value because of their beauty but “nobody’s gonna invite him on a trip to Miami. … He has to be valuable to other men.”
How devastating that these men are raised not just to accept, but to thank, influencers and content creators that tell them they are born without inherent value.
Some of the influencers Theroux speaks to, including Sullivan, claim not to believe what they share online. Sullivan spouts anti-Semitic, homophobic and sexist phrases in one breath, then points to friends and colleagues who are Jewish, are gay, are women, to claim that he cannot be bigoted.
Others like Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy, an influencer called Sneako, appear to wholeheartedly believe in the conspiracy theories that there is a Satanic cabal that “want to establish a one-world government,” as De Balinthazy says in the doc.
“It was part of a pattern across the world of influencers,” Theroux says in a voiceover over videos of De Balinthazy playing arcade games, “to push false narratives about a shadowy cabal who is plotting the social downfall of the west by promoting degeneracy often with an explicitly anti-Semitic flavor.”
Trump Drew Power From the Manosphere
Theroux does not shy away from showcasing how the manosphere is a key part of Trump’s second successful run as president. The conspiracy theories that De Balinthazy shares—that a shadowy, Satanic cabal is plotting the social downfall of the West, and that President Donald Trump is waging a secret war to dismantle this group—are the same ones circulated by QAnon leaders.
As Daniel Jolley and his colleagues reported back in 2022, conspiracy beliefs can have profound and harmful effects on communal and personal health, and may incite violence and extremism—best seen in the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Daniel Stockemer and Jean-Nicolas Bordeleau, scholars at the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada dedicated a whole issue of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Misinformation Review to study conspiracy theories. In their introduction they write, “Recent technological advancements have amplified the reach and adaptability of conspiracy theories. Social media platforms like Facebook, X (formerly Twitter) and TikTok serve as fertile grounds for their spread, enabling disinformation to traverse borders at unprecedented speeds,” which is exactly what we and Theroux are witnessing unfold in the documentary.
The conspiracy theories and hate speech that they peddle can have full afterlives beyond their social media content, with their clout and followers providing support for conspiracy theories that increasingly slant towards anti-Semitism.
The Problems Rooted in Capitalism
There are some problems with this documentary, notably Theroux’s implication that these influencers’ view of traditional gender roles is rooted in their own fatherless or abusive upbringing. This argument may make some sense on paper–and there are studies that show a correlation between father absence and high rates of aggression, but causation is still under investigation. For influencers of color and from poor, working-class families, the assumption that their family upbringing is to blame for the way (even partially) for how they act, seems shaky at best and in some ways, rooted in racism and classicism itself.
When we see Sullivan interact with his mother Elaine, he is surprisingly respectful, at least compared to his other interactions on camera. He even softens his views when he, his mom and Theroux talk together near the end of the documentary; whether this is his truer-held beliefs or rather an attempt to save face in front of his mom is unclear.
Inside the Manosphere reveals how a profit-driven network of influencers weaponizes misogyny, conspiracy theories and “traditional values” (while violating them in practice) to shape young audiences—teaching boys that their worth is conditional and earned through dominance, while conditioning girls and women to accept inequality as natural.
In doing so, it exposes the manosphere as a broader system—amplified by algorithms, media platforms and politics—that distorts relationships, normalizes harm and socializes a new generation into gendered hierarchies with real-world consequences.
Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere is available for streaming on: