Louis Theroux shares his take on the manosphere, after shocking new Netflix doc

Louis Theroux stayed mostly silent during his new Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere, letting the extreme male influencers he was interviewing do all the talking, but he’s now shared his take on the concerning subculture.

The hour-and-a-half-long documentary investigates the group of male content creators who spread their controversial ideas on life and women through online videos, and Theroux thinks the main problem is loneliness.

Speaking to Tudum after the documentary, he said: “I think there are a lot of lonely men out there, and there’s now a whole industry dedicated to them. There are millions of hours of podcasts that talk about the masculinity crisis — how we’ve seen a decline in manufacturing jobs in the West and how there have been efforts to correct the patriarchal skew in society that has in turn triggered a backlash.

Credit: Netflix

“As the saying goes, ‘If you’ve previously been privileged, then losing that privilege can feel like an assault’ — and that’s maybe how it’s been perceived by certain groups of men. I think a lot of boys and men are lost, and when they see easy answers — when they see a muscular guy who seems to be very rich, telling them it’s not their fault and here’s who’s to blame — then that’s massively appealing.”

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He said this is especially true when these boys are only 15, 16 or 17 years old, and it’s being widely “underestimated” how young a lot of this audience is. “It’s being marketed at kids, and sometimes for them it’s hard not to take it at face value,” he said.

In the same interview, the documentary maker explained that there are three key aspects to the manosphere: wealth, fitness, and sexual prowess.

“It’s almost like primate behaviour — you need to be an alpha who gets all the women and all the food. If you happen to be a skinny, bespectacled older primate, who’s maybe not handy in a scrap, well, then you may as well wither away and die. Thankfully, we live in a civilisation where there’s more to life than how tall you are or what your body count is,” he added.

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Featured image by: Netflix