The inane politics of the chronically online bro
The manosphere is built on the erotic thrill men get from abusing women online and pretending to know everything. The antifeminist backlash wants us all to play by the same rules.
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Watching Louis Theroux’s documentary on the manosphere, I was struck by a half-formed thought: we are living in a time when moral clarity and ideological cohesion are extremely rare, and because of this, two things matter very much: that we cut through the bullshit when bros grandstand about their views on human nature and on what “most women” and “most men” want; that anyone who cares about liberation stop letting the manosphere define feminism for us.
If you have not yet watched it, Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere documentary is surprisingly not as rage-inducing as one might expect. The doc follows several red-pilled influencers. Each one comes off as pathetic, uninformed, and transparently insecure. I do understand the accusations of himpathy that have been leveraged against the film. But I’m not sure I felt any sympathy for these men.
Instead, I felt fear for the women we see hanging around these misogynists, even those women who accidentally pass them on the streets. Women whose stories we are all quite glaringly overlooking. The women these men date and exploit are often Insta models and Only Fans girls. I found myself asking repeatedly: where is their documentary or drama?
Coverage of this doc, like Adolescence before it, has largely focused on how the manosphere “preys on young boys” but not how—to Theroux’s credit, this is addressed briefly in the film—these guys directly prey on young women to build their dumb-ass, morally vacuous, absolutely culturally useless empires.
Surprisingly, I laughed a lot watching the doc, at what idiots these guys are.
But that’s the point, and also misses the point.
To merely laugh at these guys makes it easy to forget the violent messages they are hawking. And again, not just to young boys, but to young girls coming of age online today.
Here are just a few examples of those messages: One guy argues he can put his dick in women whenever he wants and tell her exactly when to make him a sandwich. Another accuses women of being liars; one invites women on his podcast, only to harass and degrade them. In the first few minutes of the doc, one says, “If your bitch is going to a club when you said no, destroy her fucking life.” Another says women have done nothing to build society, but of course, he “loves women.”
And we know that men not covered in the doc (I’m not naming any of these assholes here), both online and in conservative media, have said far worse, including things like: rape is not real, women want to be raped, women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, women should be punched in the mouth if they threaten men’s masculinity, etc.
A key tenant of red-pill thinking comes up in the doc: that women have inherent economic currency. Women’s “vaginas and titties,” these men claim, give women power, which men do not have access to. So, men have to build wealth by exploiting and dehumanzing women, and through outrageous stunts online.
Because the men themselves are equally incurious about women, they spend their days streaming to huge audiences, making content not only about fitness and lifestyle crap, but about men’s and women’s alleged desires, things like how important a “body count” is in a mate, and the general economy of sex and relationships. One bullies women into listing what it is they want in a man, then shames those same women for answering the question in a way he doesn’t like.
These men live within many contradictions. They view, for instance, hyper-sexualized young women they fuck or date as clout, and make money of women’s sex work, while also claiming trad views of family and spouting anti-porn views. These guys are critical of “the people at the top of the world” who want to keep everyone down, but also want to be part of the billionaire class. They are homophobic, until pressed, then claim they are not. They are racist, but claim they are not.
These men have, in other words, a complete lack of interest not only in women and equality, but basic humanity, integrity, and being a decent person. They also make no fucking sense.
Some will try to say these are men who feel put out by the economy. To them, I say, BRO, these men could join an anti-capitalist movement literally anytime.
But they don’t. Instead, these guys express their disillusionment with late capitalism, and live by the illusion that they are overthrowing the system by exploiting women and algorithms for personal financial gain. They are playing exactly by the rules they seek to break. And they have no interest in any worldviews that might actually seek to overthrow the systems from which they suffer.
What “most women” want
How do these guys validate this behavior? By claiming to know what literally everyone in the world wants, which just so happens to be what they themselves want—or think they want, in the shadow of some pretty clear childhood trauma.
So many mothers today seem to carry the weight of preventing boys from getting sucked into red pill thinking. But most of the men covered in the doc (and in politics today) seem to be suffering from some pretty clear daddy issues (one influencer in the doc alleges his mother abused him, but there’s no verifiable record of this).
Others have dismissed these guys as simple grifters. I understand the impulse to diminish the cultural power of these influencers in this way. Guys with stupid handles like HSTikkyTokky should not be taken seriously. I mean, come on. But it is precisely their unseriousness that makes them—and their political counterparts—so popular.
The logic right-wing men have embraced today, in the shadow of their trauma and blind allegiance to late capitalism, is brain-rotted, inconsistent, and deeply averse to critical thinking, fact, and the slightest hint of self-reflection. Their idiocy is their appeal, because it implies a life free of accountability or effort. Instead, these guys live in a world where men can just say anything, and make it true.
As a result, they go deep on all sorts of conspiracy theories. The idea that these men know everything, the secrets of the world as it were, feeds and validates their narcissism and megalomania, in a vicious cycle.
When Theroux visits one of the influencer’s homes, his wife speaks to their traditional gender roles. “That’s what works for us,” they both say a few times, followed always by an almost compulsive need to defend (as if for an online audience) their lives by insisting that, actually, what works for them is what works for all humans naturally, innately, biologically. That’s how gender works, bro.
The men do this constantly, claim that “most women” want this or that thing; that “most men” want another. They live in constant paranoia not really of cancellation (which as we know, doesn’t really exist for men), but of simply being wrong.
And that, my friends, to give a little preview of where we’re going here, is not a product of feminism, but a result of being way too online.
A recent NY Mag piece on women leaving the new right tells a similar story: right-wing politics has become full-on brain rot, AI-slop, a meme mess of ideological contradictions shored up by the gospel of personal self-interest. In this era of inane bro politics, the central tenant is not only that men must lead, but that they are entitled to everything.
This idea, in and of itself, relies on the logic of the internet: this is what I want, what I like, what I think is true, and so it’s true for everyone.
Just watch this guy—the CEO of Palantir, an AI company that has multiple contracts with ICE and the US military—say absolutely nothing at all, other than that he hates smart women:
Or this guy, former DOGE bro, who is a walking bot:
The influencers covered in Theroux’s doc similarly have, self-admittedly, absolutely no ethics or morals to speak of. They are simply hollowed out men who feel they deserve whatever they want as “a young, white, male man,” as Erika Kirk put it recently.
Not all of the men in Theroux’s doc are white, but they are all, to be sure, “male men,” more likely to stay within such a movement than young women for obvious reasons, namely that the worldview of the right relies on the exploitation and dehumanization of women. Even so, it’s clear in several on-camera interviews that the women around them are uncomfortable with all the extreme positioning, and perhaps telling them so behind closed doors.
In one scene, for instance, one guy’s girlfriend makes it known that she is not on board with his dream of having multiple wives someday. He tells her to get off camera and do some cleaning—a transparent, childlike effort to reassert his dominance. He is embarrassed that his girlfriend expressed an opinion that differed from his, and doesn’t want to be caught caring about it.
Theroux does a fantastic job breaking through these guys’ public personas to highlight moments like these—when the false images on which these guys have built their platforms drop away. In front of his mom, one guy pulls back on his extreme views. When pressed to defend themselves, the men are all visibly shaken, insecure, not used to having to engage with anyone who doesn’t think like them.