It appears only at the very end of Louis Theroux’s documentary Inside the Manosphere. A ten-year-old boy in a red-and-blue striped T-shirt holds up a bag of marshmallows and speaks into the camera. “Put one marshmallow in your mouth, and then you say, ‘Chubby Bunny.’” He is bright-faced and eager, performing for attention with an ease that children today seem to acquire almost by default.
This is Ed Matthews, one of the online influencers featured in the film as part of the manosphere ecosystem.
The clip — a throwback to his childhood — is one of the documentary’s most striking choices. More than anything these influencers say about themselves, this brief look backwards tells the story Theroux is really after. Not one of fully formed manipulators arriving online, but of boys shaped by the attention economy, boys who grow into men selling misogyny, paranoia and resentment as a kind of lifestyle brand.
In the nearly 90-minute film, Theroux introduces a cluster of men who are, in many ways, painfully legible. Alongside Ed is Harrison Sullivan, better known as HS TikkyTokky, as well as Justin Waller, Myron Gaines, Sneako, and others orbiting the same ecosystem.
Many of them began with the kind of content that now acts as a gateway into this world: fitness, money, dating, self-improvement, gaming, confidence. None of it is sinister on its own. But the internet rewards escalation, and these men have learnt that outrage travels far faster than aspiration ever will.
By the time Theroux meets them, self-help has given way to something more rigid: a worldview. In it, women are framed as obstacles, assets, or markers of male success, and masculinity is something to be constantly earned through money, dominance, sexual access, and physical toughness.
The promise, as Theroux neatly puts it, is that these men possess the cheat codes. They know the hidden rules of the game. Follow them, and life can be hacked.
That pitch works because it taps into something real. The manosphere did not become influential because millions of young men suddenly developed a taste for misogyny. It grew because it offers quick, seductive answers to lives shaped by precarity, loneliness, humiliation, alienation, and the relentless pressure to build a successful self online.
It gives them a ready-made enemy, a script to follow, and a ladder to climb. The ladder is rotten but seductive.
The influencers featured here command enormous audiences, many of them strikingly young. The shift in their worldview is not abstract. It is already measurable.
A recent King’s College London study found that 31% of Gen Z men agree that wives should obey their husbands, compared with 13% of baby boomers — a gap that points to a troubling revival of patriarchal attitudes.
What Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere captures most precisely is not just the ugliness, but the business model. These men are not simply ranting online. They are brands who turn the attention they receive into subscriptions, private groups, coaching schemes, affiliate sales, pornography, and status.
Their authority is manufactured through displays of cars, villas, women, muscles, and followers. And in turn, they monetise that display.
Young men and boys are told they are deficient unless they are rich, ripped, dominant, and emotionally impermeable — and then charged for access to the mindset that supposedly fixes them.
It is a well-oiled scam. The same hierarchy that glorifies dominant men and diminishes women also profits from the insecurities of the boys beneath it.
Hypocrisy is one of the ecosystem’s operating principles. Men like Myron Gaines insist they are not misogynists even as they describe their relationships in unapologetically authoritarian terms. He calls himself a “dictator” in his relationship. He speaks as if intimacy is his to grant, and care is something women owe men. He says he loves women, only to argue that they do not know what they want and must therefore be directed.
Elsewhere, figures like Harrison Sullivan sneer at women on platforms such as OnlyFans while openly profiting from sexualised content, and, by some accounts, even managing women’s pages for a cut.
The contradiction is the point, and Theroux is particularly adept at exposing it. One of his enduring strengths as an interviewer is restraint. He does not rush to fill the silence. He lets people keep talking until they expose the flimsiness of their own logic. The men explain themselves, contradict themselves, and occasionally unravel in full view. Their slogans about strength and order often collapse the moment they are challenged. What remains is not mastery, but touchiness, hurt, vanity, and an almost adolescent defensiveness.
There has been some criticism that Theroux does not confront his subjects forcefully enough. I am not entirely persuaded. If anything, he is more openly sceptical here than he often is. And his documentaries have never worked through righteous monologues.
His method rests on trusting the audience to notice the gap between what people say and what the film shows. This film is full of those gaps. A man declares he loves women; in the next moment, he himself undercuts him. A figure presents himself as a mentor to lost boys; the surrounding scenes reveal a cynical salesman hawking degradation for profit.
Young fans swarm these men not as thinkers, but as celebrities. The point lands.
That does not mean the documentary is beyond critique. Its biggest weakness is that it brushes against the scale of the manosphere without fully mapping it. The movement is larger, older, and more ideologically rooted than the film suggests.
These influencers may look like a contemporary internet phenomenon, but the ideas they circulate are not new. They draw on older anti-feminist traditions: men’s rights rhetoric, backlash politics, pseudo-evolutionary hierarchies, and long-standing fantasies of male dispossession.
The manosphere’s novelty lies less in its beliefs than in its delivery. Podcasts, livestreams, memes, self-help aesthetics, and algorithmic virality have given old misogyny a new texture, a new medium.
That matters because the documentary sometimes risks reducing the manosphere to a lurid parade of clowns, hustlers, and provocateurs. There are certainly clowns here — and hustlers, and provocateurs. Some are also breathtakingly stupid. But stupidity is not the same as harmlessness.
The danger is not that these men are impressive. It is that they are influential.
The film captures their style with clarity. The flexing, the pseudo-confidence, the language of domination and escape from “the matrix.” What it spends less time on is the scale of the damage such politics can do, especially to boys absorbing these messages, and to women forced to live with their consequences.
The “red pill” mythology is central here. Borrowed and vulgarised from the 1999 sci-fi film The Matrix, it offers followers the thrill of secret knowledge — the sense that they, unlike the gullible masses, understand how power really works.
It is a perfect internet narrative. It flatters the believer even as it deepens their paranoia. They are told that institutions are corrupt, that feminism is a lie, that elites are conspiring, and that only these influencers can reveal the truth.
The appeal is obvious. So is the trap. Once the world is framed this way, every failure can be blamed on women, liberals, queer people, Jews, or some combination of the above.
And yet one of the film’s quieter insights is that the real prison is not some vast external conspiracy, but the closed loop these men build for themselves. The algorithm rewards escalation, and that attention demands further provocation. To remain visible, they must become more extreme, more performative, more shameless.
Even their claims to liberation often turn out to be another sales funnel. In one example, Justin Waller promotes The Real World, Andrew Tate’s online “university,” which packages masculinity, wealth, and rebellion as purchasable knowledge.
That Tate is himself facing rape and human trafficking charges in multiple countries lingers in the background — a reminder of where this pipeline can lead.
The film also shows how this worldview can be made to feel comforting, even consensual. In one segment, Waller’s partner, Kristen, speaks warmly about staying in her “lane,” caring for the home and children while he takes on the role of provider and leader. She frames this arrangement in the language of masculine and feminine energies, presenting inequality not as restriction but as fulfilment.
Theroux leaves one material detail hanging: she has no legal claim to his wealth because they are not married.
There are glimpses, too, of the wounds that make this ecosystem legible to its participants. Fathers who were absent. Homes marked by violence. Childhoods shaped by instability, poverty, and neglect.
Of course, none of that excuses what these men become. But it helps explain why audiences respond to them, and why their emotional lives seem so warped by humiliation and fantasy. Strip away the bravado, and something sad often comes into view — men taught that vulnerability is weakness, tenderness is emasculating, and worth must be earned through domination.
They end up preaching a version of masculinity that is as punishing to men as it is dangerous to women.
There is a valid concern that a documentary like this might end up feeding the very machine it is trying to expose. After all, attention is the currency on which the manosphere runs.
There is no doubt that in exposing the spectacle, Theroux also, inevitably, reproduces some of it. But that objection only goes so far. These men already command enormous audiences, including children. Pretending they do not exist is not a serious option.
Adults should know what boys are watching. Journalists, parents, teachers, and anyone still tempted to dismiss this as online nonsense should understand the scale, the style, and the salesmanship involved.
No, Inside the Manosphere is not a comprehensive anatomy of misogynist radicalisation. It does not fully trace the historical roots of these ideas, nor does it dwell enough on the broader consequences of their normalisation.
But it does something useful — and timely. It shows that behind the expensive watches, the hard-man theatrics, and the endless talk of truth and strength lies something much shabbier: a profitable racket built on male insecurity, female subordination, and the monetisation of anti-feminist grievance.
Disclaimer: This article was not paid for or commissioned by anyone associated with the film. Neither TNM nor any of its reviewers have any sort of business relationship with the film’s producers or any other members of its cast and crew.
Views expressed are the author’s own.
Note: In 2025, TNM published a two-part series on the sprawling online “manosphere,” examining how it draws in young Indian boys and how its misogyny is intertwined with religious, nationalist, and supremacist ideologies globally.