What exactly is the manosphere? It’s an inexact, evolving term that describes an online culture featuring prominent male content creators. These men are united by an ethos of male supremacy and, so they claim — more on that later — a return to traditional gender roles. “What they believe is that society hates men,” Theroux says. “Or that society has no time for weak men, and that men are going to be crushed unless they make themselves uncrushable and create an armour.”
Many of these creators teach young men how to exist outside the “system” (often referred to as “the matrix”), which involves embracing the two pillars of their version of masculinity: money and muscles. They describe themselves as “red-pilled” — another term taken from a scene in The Matrix, where the protagonist, Neo, takes a red pill and finally begins to see the dystopian world as it is. Theroux says the “red pill” represents “the realisation that sexual equality is a myth being sold to them by a fraudulent culture of self-interested business moguls.”
This might sound very bizarre to anyone who believes what was once considered an accepted reality: that we live under a patriarchy that oppresses women. But it’s an example of what, in her 2023 book Doppelganger, author Naomi Klein refers to as the “mirror world” — a distorted, parallel reality fuelled by social media algorithms, conspiracy theories and self-branding, where mainstream norms are totally inverted. It’s a paranoid worldview that has gained more traction since the pandemic, where it often feels like all conspiracy theories have been rolled into one. Cue the manosphere, which positions men as the oppressed gender alongside anti-vax sentiment, great replacement theory, and antisemitic conspiracies about the media, which are presented through a lens of life improvement, fitness and entertainment.
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Theroux tells me that the manosphere is his “final boss battle” — a representation of so many of the mirror worlds he has explored in previous documentaries. “What brings all this together is this curation of a persona,” he says, before immediately apologising for sounding grandiose. “Whether it’s wrestling or gangster rap or the porn industry, these are worlds in which people perform versions of themselves. And often, they’ll take a new name. With these men, it’s a similar thing.” The “final boss” video game comparison is also conceptually appropriate. “These guys have used the internet to grow their platforms by putting up misogynistic content, but a big part of their message is that life is a video game, and you need to win the game by scoring high in various metrics — how many people you have sex with, how much money you have, how big your muscles are, how big your privates are,” he explains. “I think there’s something in a lot of us that enjoys things being gamified. And if life is the ultimate game, then they’re pretending or alleging that they can teach you how to win it.”