The most revealing moment in Louis Theroux’s new documentary, Inside the Manosphere, comes not when one of its preening influencer subjects flexes a bicep or spouts an antisemitic slur in the same sentence as asserting that men should be the “dictators” in their marriages. It comes when one of the documentary’s subjects, a 24-year-old known as “HS”, is berated by his mother for using a disrespectful tone with her.
HS, who calls his mother “Mummy”, is caught on camera impatiently rejecting her repeated suggestions that he drink a juice. He doesn’t want to drink a juice, he tells her, his irritation rising.
“Don’t embarrass me,” she snaps, pointing an index finger at him (the internationally recognised gesture of a mother who has been pushed too far). “Don’t be rude. That’s not the way I brought you up. Do. Not. Be. Rude.”
HS backs right off. A few minutes later, he is filmed on his knees, scrubbing the floor with a towel, as his mum castigates him for dirty marks on the villa’s floor.
HS is known online as HSTikkyTokky, an unmanly moniker that sounds a little like a pet name his mum might have given him, but which actually refers to one of the many platforms on which he grifts his grift.
HSTikkyTokky – whose name is Harrison, as his mother insists to the documentary crew – is a star in the online constellation known as the manosphere, a loose collection of explicitly misogynistic, anti-feminist internet content creators who advocate a return to hypermasculinity and the “natural” rule of men over women. They are often antisemitic and homophobic, and they are intimately connected to the youth-hustle culture prevalent on social media. They promote to their young male followers the idea of escaping the “matrix”, which is shorthand for the suckers-only life of working at a 9-to-5 job.
As Theroux illustrates, this often translates to selling money-making subscriber scams to their followers, usually enabled by dubious cryptocurrency. The projection of wealth is essential to their power – so they are pictured in seaside villas and driving fast cars. They exist alongside an ecosystem of OnlyFans content-creator women, who they openly denigrate, while using them as props in their own content.
HS has many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, although the exact count is unclear because he keeps getting banned from platforms for his performatively controversial content.
At the beginning of the documentary, he professes total ignorance of who Theroux is, even Googling him as he speaks to his followers. That ignorance is easy to believe – this is a 24-year-old dude who doesn’t seem to own enough shirts, who lives in a villa in Marbella, Spain, because he is on the run from criminal charges in his native England, and who spends up to eight hours a day livestreaming his activities for his audience, a lifestyle that appears as exhausting as it is boring.
But HS is clear-eyed, to the point of being dead-eyed, about his business model. We live in an attention economy, he says, and “if I had just done good things, I would have never blown up on social media in the first place”. From here, it is a natural trajectory to proclamations such as “f— the Jews”, and luring a gay man into a meeting, only to bash him (with a group of cronies, naturally) while livestreaming the assault.
It’s not the kind of thing that would make many mothers proud.
But the genius and the pathos of the documentary is the way it exposes how dependent these hypermasculine figures are on the women around them. In so doing, Theroux reminds us of their basic humanity, even as they are telling their followers: “I dictate when I want to put d— in you, bitch … it doesn’t matter what you f—in’ think.”
That quote is courtesy of an American influencer called Myron Gaines, who stands next to his girlfriend as he explains to Theroux the concept of “one-way monogamy”, which means that the man can have multiple partners (as biology intended), while the woman stays faithful (as biology intended – with the somewhat confusing caveat that all women are also untrustworthy sluts).
As he nurses a fluffy white toy poodle in a hot pink pet halter, Gaines explains to Theroux that he is not a misogynist “because I love women, and because I understand them, I know what’s best for them”.
His girlfriend, Angie, says Myron is different off camera than he is on camera. She damns him with the faint declaration: “I love him very much, and I will love him as long as we’re together.”
Gaines tells Theroux that Angie accepts that he might have “multiple wives” one day. The camera focuses on Angie’s face. A frown creeps across it. “I’ll see when it happens … I don’t know how that will work,” she says, as her boyfriend back-pedals, now telling Theroux that “maybe I’ll change my mind down the road”.
Theroux points out that he has “backtracked on that already”, and Angie abruptly walks off camera. Apparently desperate to maintain his aura of control, Gaines calls after her that she needs to clean up his room, but a few seconds later, the camera catches her squeezing past Theroux and her boyfriend, on her way out the door, coat in hand. She hasn’t, presumably, cleaned his room.
Gaines tells his followers that women “want a guy who can dominate them and lead them”. According to the internet, he and Angie are no longer together.
Another of the documentary’s subjects is Florida-based influencer Justin Waller, who founded a construction company aged 24. He asserts that men “literally built society”, and insists that men (not women) built and invented absolutely everything in the world. He seems keen to impress Theroux with his proximity to the Trumps.
“I had dinner with Barron,” the 40-year-old father of three tells Theroux, referring to US President Donald Trump’s youngest son, who is half Waller’s age. “I’ve been to Mar-a-Lago four or five times.”
Later, as his toddler daughter gambols around the room, Waller tells Theroux he is also an adherent of “one-sided monogamy”, which often means threesomes with his “hot” partner.
Waller’s own childhood was chaotic and violent, and as Theroux notes, many of these guys had difficult or non-existent relationships with their fathers. Which perhaps explains why they hanker for the traditionalism of the male-breadwinner-model nuclear family. What they don’t seem to understand is that central to that model of masculinity is taking responsibility for others, and caring for them. And it is difficult not to see the desperation that underlies their desire to control women.
Because you only need to control a woman if you’re worried that, given her freedom, she might use it to leave you.
Jacqueline Maley is a columnist and senior writer at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
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