This anthology was coordinated by Rob Walker.
Prologue
‘So many of the influencers in the ‘manosphere’ claim to provide young men and boys with a ‘cheat code’ to being successful, the reality is that this alleged success comes hand in hand with misogyny. This, coupled with the rise in popularity of ‘trad wives’, which reinforce gender stereotypes and encourage women to be submissive, is becoming a worrying trend. Women’s Aid research clearly demonstrates that young people who view misogynist content online are five times more likely to view hurting someone physically as acceptable if they say sorry afterwards. The reality is that misogyny is, and should always be, completely unacceptable. Relationships must be rooted in consent and respect, and seeing the opposite promoted to so many children and young men is enormously disturbing. We must do more… Misogyny is at the core of all violence against women and girls, and it is only by eradicating these archaic and damaging beliefs that we can hope to build a society where women and children are safe’.
Isabelle Younane, Head of External Affairs at Women’s Aid
Introduction
This anthology is a considered response to the Louis Theroux documentary Inside the Manosphere and the rapid cycle of commentary it spawned. Rather than contributing another ‘hot take’, a more ‘simmered’ position was taken by the authors: one that allows us to move beyond surface critique and attend to the conditions that make the manosphere intelligible, affective, and durable. Our aim here is not to rehearse or rehash what is already visible, but to interrogate how it works, what it does, and why it persists.
We begin by locating the manosphere within its broader political and economic conditions. With The Manosphere as Reactionary Infrastructure, Benjamin Nangle argues that it is not a collection of aberrant individuals but a reactionary infrastructure embedded within racial capitalism and the contemporary far right. Alison Phipps shows us how this is operationalised and sustained through a gendered economy. In Gender Lens: Beyond ‘Backlash’, Phipps contends that framing the manosphere as an anti-feminist backlash is necessary but insufficient. Beneath it lies a political economy organised through platform capitalism and data colonialism, where gendered ressentiment is monetised through the attention economy to enable data extraction. Rob Walker explores how these structures and conditions take hold and circulate in everyday practice. In Affective Economies and the Commerce of Contempt, Walker asserts that the manosphere operates through affect rather than argument, organised as an affective economy in which feeling structures engagement. Contributing, David S. Smith shows us with Tick tock, TikTok: Normative masculinity and the social clock, how these dynamics are organised through time. Smith argues that normative timelines of success and adulthood persist despite the erosion of the conditions required to meet them, producing a disjuncture between expectation and reality, where the manosphere operates as a compensatory framework offering simplified pathways to status, wealth, and sexual success. Finally, Antje Joel examines how these dynamics are justified and normalised. With Righteous Violence, Joel argues that Theroux’s framing of his subjects through the lens of common morality does not disrupt these dynamics but reproduces them, allowing hegemonic moral beliefs and the power imbalances they sustain to appear familiar, justified, and ultimately unremarkable.
In closing, we emphasise that the manosphere operates as a system rooted in broader structural conditions, with identifiable beneficiaries and harms. The documentary is criticised for reducing these dynamics to individual behaviour, reflecting a liberal media tendency that obscures structural causes. We argue for responses that move beyond exposure or debunking, instead addressing underlying conditions, affective dynamics, and collective forms of resistance. The epilogue condenses the anthology’s analysis into a poetic critique of the manosphere as a system of commodified misogyny, closing by positioning the documentary as part of this same circuit, observing rather than disrupting the system it captures. This anthology is not a final judgement on the documentary, but an attempt to produce analysis that is adequate to the scale of the problem, and to move beyond reaction towards something more analytically generative, politically attentive, and pedagogically actionable.
The Manosphere as Reactionary Infrastructure
Benjamin Nangle
The subjects of Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere make visible a foundational mechanism of reactionary, and neoliberal, political strategy. This goes beyond simple ‘scapegoating’ into what I will refer to here as grievance capture, describing the hijack of legitimate material grievances, precarity, depression, and social alienation, into harmful individualised responses, often combining internalised self-reproach and externalised reactionary hostility. This dynamic has important precedents: Antonio Gramsci’s transformismo, his account of how ruling blocs neutralise opposition by absorbing it, converting potential antagonists into components of the existing order, Hall et al.’s account of how legitimate anxieties get articulated to authoritarian rather than solidaristic projects, and Brown’s analysis of how neoliberal rationality converts structural injuries into personal failures. Grievance capture describes the specific contemporary instantiation of this dynamic.
The ‘escape the matrix’ idiom[1] is a paradigmatic example. Structural oppression is repackaged as personal deficiency, to be overcome through consumption, self-optimisation, and deeper integration into the capitalist relations producing the original conditions of injury. The logic, as one interview in the documentary (at approximately 38:00 minutes in) with a formerly homeless fan made clear, is not to escape exploitation but to become its agent, a neoliberal resolution that forecloses solidarity. Depression is reframed as weakness or illusion rather than an outcome conditioned by the very arrangements from which manosphere figures profit, and one exacerbated by their ‘solutions’. Homelessness becomes a site of ‘rugged individualist’ pedagogy rather than systemic failure. These outcomes are constitutive of our neoliberal societies, and of racial capitalism more broadly, the system by which capital accumulation is organised through and dependent upon racial hierarchy. As Slobodian demonstrates, the contemporary far right did not emerge in opposition to neoliberal capitalism but from within it, deepening its competitive logic by anchoring claims about hierarchy and failure in a liberalised language of biology and individual capacity.
The manosphere is the logical cultural expression of this formation: a space where the injuries produced by these arrangements, the precarity, atomisation, and thwarted expectations of predominantly young, “Western” men navigating a post-industrial economy that has withdrawn the material and symbolic promises of traditional masculinity, are transformed into fuel for their reproduction. Biological pseudoscience abound in these spaces, alongside the scapegoating of women, racialised, and LGBTQ+ communities. As the documentary hints, antisemitism has become structurally central to this project. In one revealing sequence, multiple manosphere figures attribute societal dysfunction directly to Jewish control, framed as shadowy elite coordination. The ‘globalist elites’ framing is a classic expression of grievance capture, rerouting material precarity through conspiracy thinking with deep roots in classical antisemitism. This distracts from the structural outcomes of neoliberal capitalism through the spectre of a hidden, conspiratorial Jewish power. Whether or not the performers of conspiratorial antisemitic discourse believe what they say, the damage is concrete. The ironic and meta-reflexive registers through which much of this content circulates, framing explicit antisemitism as transgressive humour or subcultural in-joke, provide plausible deniability while sustaining ideological effect: the same content reads as satire to casual viewers and affirmation to committed adherents. Large, demonstrably malleable audiences are continuously exposed to racist frameworks presented as revelatory heterodox truth-telling, normalising and mainstreaming neo-Nazi conspiracy frames, discrediting legitimate campaigns against ongoing Israeli imperialist atrocities by association, and contributing to the conditions for real-world harassment, radicalisation, and violence against Jewish communities.
This content is particularly effective within the digital attention economy. Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, conducted with Western backing, has generated widespread anti-imperialist and humanitarian opposition. Cynical antisemitic content exploits this well of grievance, rerouting outrage at crimes against humanity through conspiratorial and racialised frameworks, redirecting critique away from structural understandings of imperialism and toward trajectories continuous with far-right antisemitism. This operation is facilitated by a parallel ideological manoeuvre: the deliberate conflation of anti-Zionist critique with antisemitism, which serves Western imperial interests by allowing the Israeli state to sustain the narrative that Jewish people face existential threat everywhere, and that opposition to its violence is motivated by ethnic hatred rather than political principle. Religious-nationalist framings, locating the brutality in divine mandate rather than in the material history of settler colonialism and military expansion, compound this obfuscation. In each case, structural and collective dimensions are suppressed, and the conditions for coherent, broad-based opposition are actively undermined. The manosphere’s antisemitism is parasitic upon this dynamic and deepens it.
Such dynamics are visible in an instructive moment in the documentary. Theroux’s method presupposes subjects unprepared for media scrutiny, not professional manipulators for whom a Netlfix documentary represents publicity and opportunity. This is made particularly apparent when Theroux is forced to respond on camera to a direct question about whether Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Theroux hedges, and is immediately outmanoeuvred, as a question with a clear moral answer is treated as too dangerous to answer. The failure is doubly damaging. To audiences sympathetic to the manosphere, his evasion confirms the narrative of media complicity and conspiratorial suppression; to many others, he appears cowardly or compromised.
Yet the effectiveness of such a manoeuvre depends on cynical parasitism of real, documented institutional failure. The Netflix and comparable liberal media outlets have demonstrated consistent structural bias in their coverage of Israel and Palestine. Asymmetries in sourcing, language, and casualty representation that favour Israeli official perspectives are compounded by the presence of pro-Israel voices in editorial and senior leadership positions. These manosphere figures reroute this structural problem through an antisemitic causal framework, substituting conspiratorial ‘Jewish power’ for the more accurate account of institutional deference, advertiser pressure, elite political consensus, effective lobbying, and liberal racism. Theroux’s hesitation inadvertently affirms, for the manosphere’s followers watching, a narrative that is cynical but not purely invented, increasing its persuasiveness.
Another important strategic feature of the contemporary far right, which is reflected but left unexamined in the documentary, is the emergence of a multiracial reactionary contingent. The increasingly diverse composition of these movements has become a standard far-right deflection, mobilised as evidence that their politics cannot be racist, insulating deeply exclusionary projects from being recognised as such. This is not a novel phenomenon. Right-wing governments pursuing brutal anti-immigrant agendas have routinely deployed racialised figureheads, frequently the children of migrants themselves, as cover against charges of racism: Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, and figures within the Trump administration being obvious examples. The pattern reveals something fundamental about the strategic flexibility of reactionary politics; wherein racial hierarchy is instrumentalisable rather than absolute. This reflects Lamour’s concept of “meta-communities”, describing the strategic construction of flexible coalitions that redraw boundaries of racial inclusion and exclusion situationally, presenting surface diversity whilst leaving the structural logic of hierarchy intact.
The manosphere operates by a similar logic, and the presence of figures like Sneako, Myron Gaines, and Nick Fuentes reflects a broad trend in which Latino and Black voices are disproportionately represented among those engaged in reactionary messaging, including Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi rhetoric. The far right has consciously targeted men of colour through the manosphere’s infrastructure, exploiting grievance frameworks around masculinity and economic marginalisation that translate across racial lines. Male supremacist ideology also offers a particular form of appeal: men who experience racialised marginalisation are offered a compensatory superiority over women and other groups, recasting their diminished position within a hierarchy that leaves its foundations intact. Indeed, the manosphere and adjacent reactionary communities are demonstrably rife with racism. The manosphere’s racial politics are structured by a hierarchy in which women of colour are subjected to combined racist and misogynist abuse that exceeds the generalised misogyny directed at others. The Black Manosphere reproduces this structure, directing particular hostility towards Black women while platforming white nationalists. The end result is the division of working-class people with shared material interests: culture war instead of class war, and the management of legitimate anger away from those who actually produce the conditions generating it.
The pattern is consistent. Real grievances, from media bias, racialised marginalisation, imperialist violence, are hijacked, misdirected from structural understandings and collective responses, towards reactionary ends. Liberal frameworks focused on individualised representation and identity are ill equipped to address such phenomena, and the documentary ultimately cannot provide an account of the manosphere adequate to its political stakes. Theroux’s method, patient, humanising, and individuating, is poorly suited to a group whose power derives from exploiting media framings and wide structural conditions. The manosphere must be understood through the landscape that produces it, racial capitalism, imperialist war, platform economies of attention, and the chronic failure of liberal media institutions to name what they see. A documentary that shares these institutional constraints will, inevitably, fall short.
Gender Lens: Beyond ‘Backlash’
Alison Phipps
Louis Theroux’s recent Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere was trailed as a rare glimpse into a strange new dystopia, though feminists have been researching this particular hellscape for well over a decade. The programme is a parade of supercars, Bitcoin wallets, ripped bodies and equally ripped hyperbole, platformed by Theroux with no input from any of the groups who have long been working to critique and counter digital misogyny. Theroux’s Xeroxed cast of characters includes influencers such as Harrison Sullivan (HS TikkyTokky), Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy (Sneako), Myron Gaines and Justin Waller, all of whom obtrusively sell the ‘cheat codes’ to success. Their various Ponzi schemes define ‘success’ in both financial and sexual terms – being a ‘proper’ man means exploitation and excess in all aspects of life.
The canon of feminist research on the manosphere includes ethnographic work on specific communities (incels, pick-up artists, red-pillers, ‘men going their own way’), analysis and theorisation of reactionary masculinities, and research with teachers on the growing influence of digital misogyny in classroom contexts, even amongst very young boys. Much of this work uses a cultural ‘backlash’ lens – backlash against the limited feminist gains in which a few (white, bourgeois) women have become the neoliberal subject par excellence. In manosphere-speak, ‘nasty women’, ‘femoids’ and ‘Stacys’ have got the upper hand – to avoid complete societal collapse, women must stop saying ‘time’s up’ and be put back in their place. Through digital misogyny, technological spaces are rendered intolerable, although this exclusionary discourse also paradoxically requires women to be platformed so they can be demeaned (in the documentary, Myron Gaines’ followers pay to abuse a group of female guests on his ‘Fresh & Fit’ podcast).
The backlash lens is a useful and necessary one, though it can overstate coherence, reduce the manosphere to ideology, and neglect platform logics, affect, and political economy. The manosphere can also be understood as part of the broader ‘anti-gender’ formations that coalesce online and off. However, the concept of the manosphere as a ‘culture war’ artefact that re-imposes conservative gender roles only gets us so far. There is a political economy at play here that needs to be understood. Manosphere influencers tend to have a studied appreciation of their own grift – indeed, in Theroux’s documentary, Sullivan drops the academic term ‘attention economy’ as he explains how the head salesmen of digital misogyny clip-farm rather than working to advance any collective strategy or politic.
Theroux’s film is positioned within this same political economy. This creates the familiar paradox whereby a media artefact designed to expose a system merely feeds the system it was designed to expose. In Inside the Manosphere, however, we are treated to a display of this in explicit terms and in real time. The most unintentionally effective chapters of the documentary, which constitute a damning critique of the film itself, are those where Theroux’s usual approach of feigning ignorance while his subjects expose themselves not only fails but becomes part of the system he is attempting to reveal. We watch, as Theroux’s main characters deploy their own clips of his mildly critical questioning and their deliberately outrageous and aggressive responses, for even more clout.
Beneath this attention economy, there is also a deeper political economy at work. And in contrast to the rigid gender ideology of the manosphere, this political economy is reliant on fluid processes of ungendering in which we all become zeroes and ones, in which gender differences are flattened into monetisable actions. Platform capitalism can be understood as incorporating substantial elements of technofeudalism, the system in which all our personal data is the ‘raw material’ extracted to generate massive wealth for the owners of cloud capital. While ‘manfluencers’ such as Gaines, Sullivan and Andrew Tate could be seen as lords of the online fief, a much more powerful capitalist class owns the digital land. Every act of networked rage-baiting, and the hashtagged outrage that follows, is both monetised by manosphere edgelords and enables data colonial extraction by cloud kings like Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison and Elon Musk.
Cloud billionaires represent the apogee of the late capitalist system in which obscene wealth is generated and hoarded while the masses pay the price through debt, precarity, violence (both slow and quick) and organised abandonment. The frustration, bitterness, and despair this produces finds expression online as well as off. And while some men and boys can buy what manfluencers are selling, others cannot get in on the deal. Despite the Matrix chat and triangular hand signs littered through Theroux’s documentary, the ressentiment (a resentful anger that can never be sated) of those who can never, ever measure up is channelled through far-right discourse away from elites and towards marginalised groups. At the extreme end, Blackpilled incels turn to self-harm and suicidal ideation as well as violence against women, in response to what they see as a congenital failure to get the girl.
Digital misogyny has been theorised as a new strategy of enclosure that prevents women from accessing and controlling the technological means of production. This has been compared to the earlier enclosure of women performed by the Early Modern witch hunts – a sexual pogrom that produced the patriarchal bargain granting proletarian men domestic power to manufacture their consent to racial capitalism. But the data colonialism that requires us all to be as online as possible, for as long as possible, demands a different deal. Cloud billionaires hold sway over both the economic conditions and the cultural discourses that fuel digital misogyny – and in the technofeudal covenant, downwardly mobile men are offered the opportunity to abuse women and other marginalised people with impunity (‘free speech’), which feeds the algorithm, which increases the value of the digital real estate. The manosphere’s digital wares are proffered in the absence of tenable social futures – furthermore, when the new hegemonic masculinities cannot be hacked and the ‘cheat codes’ to prosperity turn out to have expired, the online feedback loop is still there for men who need to act out. This is the political economy beneath the backlash – and despite who ends up victorious in the online ‘gender wars’, ultimately, the cloud kings will want us all to bend the knee.
Affective Economies and the Commerce of Contempt
Rob Walker
Inside the Manosphere is not just a documentary regarding a number of manfluencers; when viewed through an affective lens, it reveals a system that is organised through the circulation of feeling. Images of sports cars, bodies, 21st-century media, and confrontation are positioned as spectacle, orienting viewers towards particular forms of masculine value, before any argument is made. When Myron Gaines frames wealth and sexual access as markers of masculine success, or when ‘Sneako’ performs dominance through confrontational online exchanges, these moments operate as affective cues: they are not primarily trying to convince through argument, but are signalling how the viewer should feel and orient themselves. The repeated pairings of luxury, discipline, and control orient viewers before any argument is evaluated, allowing these associations to stick as recognisable markers of masculine worth. Moments in which Justin Waller or Harrison ‘HStikkytokky’ Sullivan categorise women, dismiss relationships, or assert male authority are delivered in clipped, punchline form, often followed by laughter or escalation from co-hosts. These exchanges are formatted for extraction; once clipped and circulated, they carry condensed affects of humour, contempt, and validation across multiple platforms. What moves is not simply an argument, but a repeatable emotional cue that is reactivated across audiences. The power of the manosphere lies within the repeated circulation of grievance, humiliation, aspiration, and belonging. Such affective intensities do not operate in isolation, but are entangled with gendered backlash, political-economic grievance capture, and pressures of normative masculinity; affect is the mechanism through which those systems operate on subjects, through the translation of structural conditions into felt experiences of aspiration, grievance, and crucially, belonging, thereby orienting behaviour and sustaining engagement.
In the exchanges on the ‘Fresh & Fit’ podcast segment with Myron Gaines, we see misogyny operating as an affective orientation rather than a discrete belief. Women are dichotomised as both reward for male success and as its obstacle; desired yet framed as manipulative and/or inferior. This is witnessed explicitly, when Gaines showcases a video asserting that ‘women’s body count matters, biologically’, framing sexual history as a determinant of value and cueing responses of suspicion, disgust, and judgement under the guise of objective truth. This oscillation between Madonna and the whore does not require resolution; it produces a stable affective pattern in which desire is continually accompanied by suspicion, stabilising the misogynistic position through causing the viewer to adopt a relational stance, rather than choose between them. In this segment, the pattern is made visible as it is enacted: his entourage laugh at misogynistic remarks, escalate each other’s claims, and perform exaggerated confidence. Participation in these spaces is not secured through agreement but through shared affective registers, where humour, bravado, and grievance operate as homosocial currencies. Agreement is signalled through shared reaction, not reason; interruption, laughter, and affirmation. What circulates, then, is a set of emotional alignments that tell participants what to admire, what to resent, and ultimately, where they belong. It is this affective register then (rather than propositional content), that secures group cohesion; it anchors masculine identity in opposition to the feminine and ranks men according to their proximity to dominance, producing not just community, but a stratified affective order.
Displays of dominance, wealth, and misogynistic humour are presented as moments of provocation, yet through affect they can be understood as objects that accumulate force through repetition, carrying and signalling value. Across various segments, we see the figure of the ‘high value man’ (for example: ‘I teach guys to be proper guys, not these little soy boys’ – Harrison Sullivan), defined using near-identical criteria: income, physique, sexual access, and authority – all functioning as affective markers of worth. Through regurgitation, it no longer requires explanation, for it carries accumulated affective weight, allowing viewers to immediately position themselves in relation to it: either aspiring toward the high value Vitruvian or measuring themselves against its criteria. In doing so, it becomes clear that it is not men, but masculinity itself that is the object of value, where success is measured not by wellbeing but by proximity to the (warped) idealised masculine form. From Inside the Manosphere, such moments are clipped, shared, and recontextualised, intensifying and forming a wider affective economy in which outrage, humour, and aspiration all reinforce one another, thereby reproducing and recalibrating what holds value within this system.
Crucially, these attachments endure even when the promises embedded within them fail (distinctly exemplified by one of Harrison Sullivan’s disciples’ denial of the reality of depression, even after the reality of personal loss). The aspiration to become a ‘high value man’, or to secure status and recognition, generates attachments that persist, producing a feedback loop in which failure intensifies negative affect, redirected outward, allowing these manfluencers to espouse evidence of systemic bias against men. Each retelling reinforces an association between personal failure and external blame, converting and converging into collective grievance, sustaining engagement without resolution. How neatly neoliberal: a system presenting itself as managing insecurities, yet depending on continually reproducing it in order to sustain itself. What Inside the Manosphere captures, then, are scattered fragments of a larger system. As it records the varied performances, the conditions that lie in the circulation, accumulation, and sticking of affect across digital infrastructures make such performances meaningful, and dare it be said, fruitful.
Within the manosphere then, affect is timed and structured by these actors to convert attention into revenue, aligning with Phipps’ gendered political economy, organised through platform capitalism and the monetisation of ressentiment. Inside the Manosphere shows these sequences but does not sufficiently analyse how they are embedded within a broader commercial infrastructure. In this infrastructure, moments of confrontation or controversy are frequently followed by references to courses, memberships, paid communities, political parties and education, linking emotional intensity directly to monetisation. This limitation is compounded by Theroux’s focus on the documentary’s highly visible figures, obscuring the more diffuse forms of misogyny circulating across digital culture.
Alongside its more overt statements, we are shown the manfluencers offering fitness advice, lifestyle routines, and self-improvement narratives in which misogynistic assumptions are subtly embedded (women cast as distraction, reward, object, tool). These low-intensity cues circulate more effectively because they do not require confrontation, embedding misogynistic orientations within seemingly banal content. Moreover, the almost total absence of women’s perspectives within Inside the Manosphere further limits its analysis; misogynistic statements are heard, but their effects are displaced, as women are positioned as objects within the discourse but excluded as speaking subjects, mirroring the asymmetry that the affective system depends on.
The emphasis on spectacle also shapes how audiences are positioned. Theroux’s style of allowing subjects to expose themselves through silence creates moments of irony and distance, encouraging viewers to see these figures as absurd or extreme. This framing, however, risks facilitating glamorisation through obscuring the affective appeal of the content, rendering its displays of wealth, dominance, sexual access as merely provocative or absurd, rather than recognising how they generate aspiration, identification, and desire in viewers. Rather than interrupting the circulation of affect, such representations can contribute to it, recirculated within the same attention economy that sustains the manosphere.
In sum, as Inside the Manosphere captures the visibility of misogyny within the manosphere, it does not fully account for the infrastructure within which it is sustained. Affect clarifies that what is at stake is not simply the presence of harmful ideas, but the systems through which those ideas are made to feel compelling, shareable, and socially meaningful. Manospheric ideologies endure and proliferate because its affective economy continuously produces attachment, even in the face of contradiction or failure. If we are to effectively challenge such nefarious frameworks, it is pivotal to understand these manipulations of emotion.
Tick tock, TikTok: Normative masculinity and the social clock
David S. Smith
Listen carefully, and you will hear the social clock ticking. With each stroke, it asks: ‘Why aren’t you doing better?’ Introduced by psychologist Bernice Neugarten, this construct refers to how the current sociohistorical context provides individuals with implicit or explicit prescriptions against which to measure themselves. For example, until recently, a socially sanctioned trajectory for a person in the UK might have been virginity loss and moving out in their late teens, career in their mid-twenties, hitched by thirty, children in their early thirties, purchasing a house in their mid-thirties, retiring at 65. It’s an idealised journey that echoes Berlant’s notion of the good life: an optimum state people reach through grit, hard work, and entrepreneurial spirit. To those in low-paid jobs or amassing tens of thousands in student debt, this schema could seem absurd. Off-time transitions are a source of shame, leading people to feel like they’ve done something wrong. In that respect, the social clock is less about what people do than what they believe they should do.
In the digital age, the social clock is louder than ever. Within seconds of opening social media and video sharing sites, such as TikTok, young men can see hyper-successful, hyper-masculine millionaire manfluencers, like the ones Louis interviews, flaunting wealth and women and may wonder why that isn’t happening for them. If they are curious about how these men came to get this lifestyle, so watch until the end, then the algorithm will note their interest and then send them similar content, potentially leading them down an online rabbit hole. A problematic element of Inside the Manosphere is that while he depicts the manfluencers as grifters, he simultaneously offers them a Miami skyscraper from which to broadcast their grift and reinforces how affluent they are. His “give them enough rope” approach works if subjects have carefully curated public images to protect, but not if they just want attention from the world’s biggest streaming service. By repeatedly letting them steamroll him, showing their assertiveness, he legitimises their claims to “authentic” masculinity. Parents may be better informed, but the young men they want to reach will see them as aspirational: they’re winning at life regardless of what a stuffy, middle-aged man says. There’s a telling moment when Justin Waller is stopped by his fans, who profess to love his work because he acknowledges that, as men, they have no inherent value beyond their ability to make money. He affirms this view, saying that without financial success, ‘nobody cares’ about them. If women’s value comes from their beauty, theirs can only come from their net worth, sexual prowess and dedication to self-mastery.
These ideas do not emerge in a vacuum. For young men in Western countries, sociologist Raewyn Connell characterises the dominant benchmark of masculinity, labelled hegemonic masculinity, through strength, stoicism, authority, aggression, socioeconomic dominance, and heterosexual intercourse. Few men embody it, even briefly, but many compare themselves to it. Two-thirds of American men aged 18 to 45 wish they could be more masculine, with over three-quarters of men and women sampled associating it with physical strength and economic power. One consequence is a masculinity discrepancy strain: men’s worry that they fall short of real manliness. Temporal factors can intensify this anxiety when they feel “left behind” in their transition to adulthood. For example, a person who is sexually or economically unsuccessful at 25 may internalise more pressure to change this than if they were 18. The trope of men proving themselves through their financial dominance is also increasingly out of step with an economy where jobs are precarious and the cost of living is high. Paradoxically, men are socialised to demonstrate ‘real’ masculinity but systematically prevented from doing so. Jonathan A. Allan likens this to cruel optimism: when something desirable prevents individuals from flourishing because it is unattainable.
It’s through this contradiction that reactionary communities draw young men in. Others in this anthology have detailed how the manosphere weaponises insecurity to propagate misogyny. I agree that this presentation is key to its emotional appeal; young millionaires like HStikkytokky are selling a dream and, apparently, giving people a means of achieving it. They offer certainty about something inherently uncertain: being a man. That certainty relies on the reframing of sexual experience as a product of market principles, with women thereby instrumentalised as rewards for masculine excellence: the more partners a man has, the more manly he must be. Especially nowadays, where dating apps encourage self-commodification, positioning users as sexual entrepreneurs while leaving people seconds away from rejection. Masculinity is regularly conflated with sexuality, hence the common practice of virgin shaming if inexperienced young men cannot ‘justify’ their virginity. Young men typically see virginity as a source of stigma, making intercourse an act of reassurance. Thus, the manosphere’s promise that fulfilling a particular criterion, such as cultivating an alpha male mindset or sculpting an alpha male body, will bring money, respect, and, by extension, sexual opportunities, is a welcome cheat sheet.
This promise within a broader view that treats gendered hierarchies as fixed and easily measured. Manosphere spokespeople don’t question power relations between and within genders; they naturalise them. The differences between men and women are an inevitable function of evolutionary pressures, and the taxonomy of men, ranging from alpha to beta, is a matter of objective science that will be manifest through their incomes and sexual conquest. Manosphere groups promise to teach men how to ascend the hierarchy (the red pill) or provide a framework that explains their place at the bottom (the black pill). Not that these two positions are mutually exclusive. The simultaneous decline of Pickup communities and the rise of misogynist incel communities, following a mass migration of active users, suggests that some try to unsuccessfully game the system. When they cannot make it work, some conclude that there is something fundamentally wrong with them. Others may spend even more time and money looksmaxxing or learning to hustle.
When I interviewed ex-incels, a common narrative was that they felt subordinated by the sorts of self-optimizing content Theroux’s subjects share. For example, they believed their claims that women are hardwired to selfishly pursue the best men for their genes, but also believed that they could never be those men because they didn’t look like them or have their financial resources. One described how he came to see trying at life as pointless: ‘Putting responsibility on myself meant I was contributing to my humiliation.’ Hence, they found comfort in the black pill’s insistence that their failure to thrive wasn’t their fault, but an inevitable consequence of their bad biology and feminist social engineering pushing women to prioritise men out of their league. Anger feels better than sadness, and inceldom justifies their rage by reframing sexual alienation as something done to them. Incel resentment is most common in areas with higher wealth gaps, where poorer men are more likely to see, or imagine, others living the good life.
None of this is to excuse manosphere involvement; to the extent people have free will, choosing to support its misogynistic content creators is a choice. Rather, it is to further argue that the way society is organised advances the dehumanisation of women and men’s struggle against masculine standards. As important as it is to challenge these attitudes on an individual level, through educating young people about empathy, groupthink, and self-esteem, there’s a responsibility to do so in a way that utilises the sociological imagination. Like a protection racket, social media manfluencers manufacture insecurity and extract social and economic capital from followers to manage it. Where they rely on young men feeling like failures, we must constructively reframe their struggles as response to rigid gender expectations and the pressures of neoliberalism, which now encroach on every part of life, including intimacy. I’d like to finish on a quote from the late Michael Brooks. ‘We need a material analysis, buttressed with a sense of humour and a recognition of human fallibility, that connects the fight for a better world to the immediate interests of the majority of the population.’ As reactionary narratives move from fringe spaces towards the corridors of power, these words ring truer than ever.
Righteous Violence: Morality as a White Male Virtue
Antje Joel
There is just too much shit; the never-ending bad news and backwards developments. The onslaught of moral crises and injustices. We know we should feel outraged, somehow. But we are no longer sure at what. Cracks start to appear: in our conviction of what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ and ‘just’; in what we have convinced ourselves is ‘common sense’. This is ‘outrage fatigue’. Evidently, there are players out there who have learned to induce it and use it for their nefarious goals. This is what Donald Trump’s former strategist Stephen Bannon and his cronies are talking about and doing when they ‘flood the zone with shit’, inducing a shift in our common morality and a recalibration of ‘right’, ‘wrong’ and ‘just’, in which the unthinkable will eventually start to feel acceptable and the outrageous manages to bore us. With Inside the Manosphere, Theroux’s depiction of male entitlement, an endless 90 minutes of lame tropes – introducing the girlfriend as “my dishwasher”, alleging women are clueless about what they want and need men to tell them, boasting about having acquired a “reputation for loving women too much” – managed to bore me. We, the viewers and relentlessly shit-flooded, need not be directly guilty to bear responsibility; by participating in and reproducing these social processes, we remain connected to the very conditions we claim to reject. As Ging demonstrates, the manosphere operates as a networked digital culture in which misogynistic ideas are standardised and circulated across platforms, producing a recognisable and repeatable script. This is not simply a collection of offensive views, but a persistent dulling of humanity and decency. It is the recalibration of a moral order through the means of ordinality.
We should ‘be outraged!’. Meanwhile, and after only a short four-year break, Trump ravages through his second term. A notorious liar and convicted serial fraudster; an unabashed racist and convicted sexual predator. A 2024 analysis of 20 of his rallies and campaign events found Trump’s language about immigrants and minority groups was getting ever darker. He demonised them in every speech, calling them ‘animals’, ‘rapists’, ‘blood-thirsty killers’, and, generally, ‘the worst people’. He threatened violence against them. He frequently alleged that migrants have ‘bad genes’, while assuring his nearly all-white audiences that they have ‘the good genes’. He repeatedly called people of colour and women ‘dumb’ and ‘pigs’ and alleged they can only advance in life when assisted by Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) laws. It did not stop us, the people, from elevating him to the highest office, yet again: this is moral recalibration in practice.
There is a cost to this. Men continuously overestimate the extent of other men’s sexual activity. Moreover, sexually aggressive men believe that other men approve of their coercive conduct. This belief has been shown to be a potent and consistent driver for men’s sexualised aggression towards women. Studies into racism find that of the factors actively driving racism, passivity or passive racism plays a significant role. And so, state and political leaders rolling out the red carpet for a misogynist and racist, hailing their ‘excellent relationship’, actively push racism and misogyny. Theroux’s signature documentary style, rarely commenting and leaving it to the subjects to reveal themselves, passively contributes to their dissemination, even if involuntarily. When Justin Waller, an internet personality whose trademark seem to be impossibly tight suit jackets, asks him to look around the Miami skyline and “name anything a woman has invented and built in our plain sight”, Theroux comes up with nothing but a mildly consternated facial expression. In this sense, mediation itself becomes part of the problem; by rendering harm distant, abstract, or consumable, it risks displacing moral evaluation with observation.
Responsibility is distributed across social processes; those who produce, circulate, and frame harmful norms are all implicated in their continuation. At its most extreme, this recalibration legitimises harm. ‘We are rarely violent because we fail to think about right and wrong. We do it because it feels like the right thing’, write Fiske and Rai. In August 2024, a primarily male mob took to the streets of Belfast and other cities in the UK, attacking and destroying homes and businesses of people from ethnic minority backgrounds. Allegedly in protest to the killing of three young girls in Southport the month before. Far-right activists and social media accounts mislabelled and justified the violence as an effort to protect women and children.
In our Western societies, the dominant definition of moral virtue is historically attached to masculinity and whiteness. Our laws have been primarily shaped by white men of high status, mirroring their experiences, resulting world view and interests. British songwriter Anne Clark aptly titled her 1993 album “THE LAW is an anagram of WEALTH”. What we have come to accept as ‘reasonable’ and ‘common sense’ are predominantly the reason and sense of white males. Their ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ serve to preserve. Primarily, they preserve power. An investigation into the Belfast rioters found that almost half of them (48%) had previously been reported for domestic abuse. Apparently, violence against women and children is okay. As long as it is the ‘right’ violence, committed by the ‘right’ men. This mindset is reflected at the highest societal level. US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a self-confessed Christian nationalist, oversaw the dismantling of a program of the Defense department (now named “Department of War”) aimed at reducing civilian harm in war and is responsible for the firing of experts who provided guidance on keeping military operations in line with international law. In a recent Christian worship service held at the Pentagon, Hegseth prayed for US forces: “Give them wisdom in every decision … and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.” One of the first targets in the United States’ recent war against Iran was a girl’s school. It reportedly killed more than 168 civilians, the majority of them children.
It mustn’t surprise that this prevalent view of “righteous violence” is frequently and effectively re-legitimised in online discussions. Gendered and racialised hierarchies are primarily reproduced in the context of meaning-making around the issue of violence: restating who is eligible to use it, against whom, and to what extent. In this context, it is not surprising that a white and wealthy sexual offender publicly railing against alleged immigrant rapists and promising to protect ‘our’ white women from them is not laughed off stage, but lauded. It follows common morality. It is common sense.
The rare time when he did try to challenge his protagonists and their views, Theroux let himself be derailed by this common morality. When the men contacted an older gay man online, lured him into the city centre and battered him, Theroux appeared genuinely mortified. Yet, he commented: ‘They had accused him of being a predator. I had no way of knowing if this was true.’ And if it was true, then what? Would that have changed what his protagonists did to the man? Would it make their violence ‘understandable’? Would it have made them ‘the good guys’ that they themselves present to their online audience? It appears we do not hate aggression and violence, if it is used by the ‘right’ and ‘eligible’ people, against those who ‘deserve’ it. Sure enough, morality fired back. Theroux’s protagonists had learned of his affiliation with Jimmy Saville, Britain’s most prominent and prolific yet largely forgotten child sexual predator, who had been another subject of two Theroux documentaries. But when the manosphere figures confronted him with this connection, Theroux appeared hurt. He attempted a defence: ‘I did help expose him in the end, you know.’
I wonder: what if he had embraced that he had let his guard down with Savile and had somehow become enamoured with him? If he had reflected on how Savile had been able to play and ensnare him? If he had drawn on the parallels between Saville exploiting and abusing children at scale, and his protagonists manipulating and ensnaring predominantly very young men, aged 13 to 15, for power and financial gain? You could call that child abuse, too. I think we should. These patterns extend beyond extreme cases. The few extreme actors with their performative views do not terrify me, but we do: the lot of us, with our morality-born and ingrained perceptions of right and wrong, of men and women, of white and black. On a global average, women earn 20% less than men. When men enter traditional women’s professions, wages for men and women rise. When women enter ‘men’s professions’, wages for everyone fall. It is not that we feel the work itself is worth less. We feel it is worth less when allegedly less worthy people, women, do it. Any indignation we might feel when Justin Waller suggests that women contribute next to nothing to society, or American blogger Myron Gaines states that ‘women deserve less’, is out of place.
This is how such morality sustains itself. A friend of mine had a term for this terrifying and prevalent self-distortion. He called it ‘monstrous righteousness’. The views of Theroux’s subjects, men and women, do not come out of nowhere. They are founded in our gendered moral beliefs and fed by our collective efforts to keep these views alive. All the while, we perceive and present ourselves as reformed, as progressive, as ‘better than’. What is required, then, is not simply renewed outrage, but recognition of our ongoing implication within these structures, and a willingness to assume responsibility for how they are sustained. Theroux could have focused on this. He should have. Not least because self-reflection is our hope for change.
Closing reflections
The contributors in this collection largely converge around a central thread: the manosphere is not a phenomenon of aberrant individuals, but rather part of a system, with clear beneficiaries and victims. It is part of a system produced and sustained by wider structural conditions. Nangle locates those conditions in racial capitalism and the far right’s deliberate capture of legitimate grievances. Phipps traces the political economy underneath, a gendered technofeudal architecture that monetises abandonment and sells the right to abuse as compensation for foreclosed futures. Walker shows how affective circuits of spectacle, humiliation, and aspiration drive the movement’s appeal beyond any explicit argument. Complementing this, Smith shows how the social clock and normative masculinity produce feelings of inadequacy, to which manfluencers exploit by reframing insecurity as individual deficiency and selling a dream, and providing a ‘cheat sheet’ for achieving masculine success, while Joel names the moral self-exemption of ordinary people, which enables these dynamics to exist. Theroux’s documentary fails to account for these dynamics in a way that risks exacerbating them. It reflects a liberal media culture that treats structural questions as matters of individual psychology. A culture which treats misogynistic and racist movements as aberrations rather than emerging from elite-driven structural conditions and reactionary strategy, and which near-uncritically platforms such savvy manipulators, will consistently misread and misrepresent what it is looking at. The manosphere does not need potentially-embarrassing exposure. It needs critical analysis adequate to the actual depth of the threat.
These failures have consequences. Media institutions cannot treat reach as a value-neutral outcome and then express surprise at what circulates. Educators working with young men need frameworks which account for affective manipulation and legitimate grievance, not rational-persuasion models premised on a deliberative subject who was never really there. Counter-discourse needs to operate at the level of structural narrative, genuine accounts of precarity, solidarity, and collective possibility, rather than futile attempts at debunking individual claims that were never really the point. And feminist, anti-racist, and labour movements need to reckon seriously with the manosphere’s multiracial reactionary contingent as deliberate strategy, one that can only be undermined by addressing the real conditions of marginalisation it feeds on.
Epilogue:
Exposed or Ensnared? 90+ minutes of Commodified Misogyny
Rob Walker
Shifting in form but not purpose, the poetry presented here is not merely decorative, but operates as a mode of analysis: condensing themes, patterns, and repetitions into a more immediate register. Poetry can function as an interpretative tool that draws out connections, intensities, and meanings that exceed conventional academic prose. What follows distils the dynamics traced across the anthology, rendering them in a way that remains open, affective, and deliberately unresolved.
Ninety+ minutes of bollocks on display.
Gym mirrors, crypto charts, bullshit on parade,
women like trophies that they must obtain.
Money means power; that’s the script they spin.
Wealth means women; they’re just a prize you win:
Repeat and rinse; let those views roll in.
A punch machine swings in theatrical motion
Where masculinity’s measured, in clicks and devotion;
Clout and cult praising the erroneous notion.
‘Sell, sell, sell’ is the skill of kings.
‘Give me attention, as the algorithm sings’:
Turning boys into markets, for such hollow things.
The camera observes but refuses to pry.
Showcasing its noise, but letting the BS fly;
Louis’ Qs are soft, as those dog-whistles ride high.
The business is simple: resentment for sale.
Package the anger; let grievance prevail.
It’s a big-bear market, where misogyny can’t fail.
Every loud boast sounds so rehearsed and frail:
Every certainty polished, aggressive and stale.
Its Neoliberal swagger on ‘roids that’s for sale.
Women as cleaners, as prizes, as fate.
Whilst empathy’s mocked; a weakness to hate,
With equality framed as a cultural mistake.
The podcasts roar in performative rhythm
As humiliations packaged and sold as a system,
With pseudo-science, dressed up as wisdom.
Conspiracies bloom beside misogynist cries:
Vaccines and satanists are clouding the skies,
As Feminisms causin’ civilisation’s demise.
So teenage boys listen and learn,
Misogyny stokes every anger they earn;
From grievance to fascism, slowly they turn.
With sermons on strength masking quiet hostility,
their empires of noise built on brittle futility,
all of it trembling with twisted male fragility.
It’s an algorithmic prison built purely for gain,
selling young boys the illusion of reign…
As Louis’ cameras keep rolling, again and again.
Rob Walker.
[1]“Escape the matrix” repurposes the film metaphor to signify rejection of mainstream social conditioning, targeting feminist gender norms, conventional relationships, wage labour, or Western liberal modernity broadly. The phrase positions the speaker as having seen through an artificial ideological imposition, functioning epistemically like conspiracy thinking: any challenge confirms the challenger remains “in the matrix.”
***
Rob Walker is a PhD researcher at the University of Stirling, focusing on the interplay between masculinities, misogynies, and their bridging for fascist ideologies. Drawing on post-structural and post-humanist lenses, his research explores how gender norms and misogynies act as gateways to extremist political beliefs, within the context of neoliberal and neoconservative politics in contemporary Western societies, particularly within education. Rob also examines wider educational inequalities, with an emphasis on the Othering of marginalised groups, promoting social justice by addressing disparities in educational opportunities and outcomes.
Alison Phipps is Professor of Sociology at York St John University. Her work focuses on gender and racial capitalism, feminist politics, and sexual violence. She is interested in ‘gender critical’ feminism as a reactionary formation and how that sits within broader contemporary right wing ecologies and histories of reactionary feminism. She is also interested in how ‘gender-critical’ feminists and other right-wing movements weaponise the issue of ‘women’s safety’ and imputations of sexual violence. Her work draws on and extends theoretical frameworks such as colonial feminism and the coloniality of gender, the afterlives of slavery, femo-nationalism and femocapitalism, and social reproduction theory.
Benjamin Nangle is a PhD researcher at KU Leuven, focused on the far right and migration issues, with a particular interest in digital communication, propaganda, and social media discourses. He is currently involved in investigating far right persuasion strategies, and developing counter measures and interventions to reduce youth susceptibility, as part of the DEMINE project (https://demine.eu/). He recently published a book on the construction of hostility to migrants during the Lithuanian/Belarusian border crisis with Palgrave Macmillan. Outside of research, he has have significant experience as a humanitarian worker in the refugee and asylum sector. He also has political organising experience.
Antje Joel’s master’s dissertation researched how media shapes the discourse around violence against women and girls essentially helping to maintain the status quo – while allegedly advocating for change. Her PhD research is into women’s resistance against violence and the suppression of this resistance through state actors. The research investigates the global decline of women’s rights against the backdrop of the active erosion of human rights and through the lens of moral convictions and the link between morality and power. Analysing the language and mechanics of marginalisation and linking misogyny, racism and oppression of marginalised groups.
David S. Smith is a psychologist who is interested in studying reactionary identity movements. In particular, he has published research relating to the manosphere in journals and magazines. His first book, The Incel Mindset: Entering and Exiting Inceldom, was published in March 2026.
Rob, Alison, Benjamin, Antje and David are all members of the RPRN.
Thanks for Elsa Bengtsson Meuller, Briar Dickey and Aurelien Mondon for the reviews.