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I saw a thread about Louis Theroux's manosphere documentary. OP relates his teen daughter's alleged words and experiences to make a point about healthy values and teen male behaviours. The current verdict is that boys should have their screen times monitored or limited so they don't get corrupted by the manosphere, and raise them with feminist values. Okay. I agree with some of this. There are certainly incel adjacent online spaces that spiral into nihilism and hate. There are teenage boys with zero offline male role models to mainline this stuff and end up emerging more bitter than buff. Parental gatekeeping of violent porn, gambling apps, or extremist political content seems like basic risk management. If your heuristic is “anything that makes my daughter feel existentially unsafe is bad for my son too,” the monitoring prescription follows naturally. And yes, the generational digital literacy gap is real. Parents are often shocked their kids know the lore. I'd go further, I'm in favour of a blanket social media ban until they (both boys and girls) turn 16.
That being said. This comes just one day after Clavicular's recent clip with Leela Saraswat went viral. FWIW the "boyfriend" commented on Instagram that it was an old prom pic and they weren't dating. But are we allowed to question what message women's questionable dating choices (made of their free will with no external pressure) send to young boys and girls? We have a clip of an (allegedly) attached woman melting for a high value male on camera, yet the discourse pivots to “protect boys from the manosphere”. Here's the truth nuke: Clavicular is not an incel. He is living proof of the sexual marketplace the manosphere describes, which is heavily determined by looks, money, height, race, social status, etc. He pulls taken women with minimal effort. Young men are not “corrupted” into noticing these patterns. They notice them first (through lived failure) and then find the subculture that names the pattern instead of shaming them for noticing. So what is the problem with the manosphere? That it spreads dangerous lies and radicalises young men into subjugating and even killing women? Or that the rhetoric makes women look bad?
If it's the former, I need to see some evidence. Netflix's "Adolescence" made waves last year for catching the so called andrew tate problem that's apparently radicalising 13 year old boys into stabbing their classmates. Never mind the fact that homicide rates in the UK have been trending DOWN over the years, particularly against females. Are we allowed to discuss the harm caused by manufactured hysteria? If it's the latter, then you’re not protecting boys. You’re just delaying the day they notice the discrepancy between official feminist sermons and observed reality. And when they finally do notice, they’ll be angrier for the wasted years. And manosphere critics would tell us they've been "corrupted".
Lastly, since #notallmen was mentioned as a gotcha, can I point out how this "collective guilt" only flows one way? If every man should feel ashamed about the manosphere because we share genitals with them, what about the (overwhelmingly male) miners, linemen, firemen, welders, construction workers, road workers, steel workers, etc etc who commit to physically intensive and dangerous labour everyday to keep your lights on? Do we all get a collective male labour paycheck for that too, simply because we share genitals with the workers in these vocations? You don't need to hold yourself to consistent principles if you have sufficient social capital, like feminism does.
I've seen clips of the documentary. Not going to watch it.
Just seems like your standard scare piece, like they moved on from climate change, declining bee populations, or unhealthy fast food meals, and now its the big, scary red pill men who are corrupting the youth and we should be having a satanic panic about it RIGHT NOW.
What just viscerally puts me off is how there is, apparently, no sympathetic examination of what exactly appeals about these guys. Sure you can kind of handwave it "guys want to feel powerful, superior, and important, and these are effectively con men who prey upon those urges." Fine. Whatever. What conditions in the material world are such that young men are looking to these men as role models, what is missing in their lives that they seek to fill it with this?
And I make this point semi-often... they always fail to offer up a competing vision of true 'healthy' masculinity that men should aspire to instead. Or to point out a non-toxic male role model that actually engenders the values they suggest men ought to seek to represent.
This creates an inherently muddled message to men. "DON'T listen to the siren song of red pill grifters, DON'T give in to misogyny, DON'T become a parody of masculinity. That's VERY BAD."
"Okay okay, but what should I do instead?"
"Fuck you, figure it out yourself or die alone."
It is a critical problem if you ask me. There are very VERY few well-known, popular male figures who espouse and represent a form of masculinity that demonstrates an appealing and attainable path an otherwise average guy can follow to get a meaningful, fulfilling life. Mike Rowe tries but I also just recently learned that Mike Rowe and his long term romantic partner ARE NOT MARRIED and DO NOT HAVE KIDS. Dude.
And I'll hit on it one more time: Charlie Kirk fulfilled that function pretty well and got murdered, in cold blood, in broad daylight, on camera and there has been no real replacement forthcoming. Yes I'm mad.
And young men by and large don't seem to want to outsource this stuff to social media or celebrities. They'd rather have a father figure (ideally an actual father) in their life to personally guide them on the path and demonstrate a healthy, successful approach to romance, business, family, life. And its the fact that society fails to provide that for millions of men that we find ourselves where we are.
You can dip into the stats and studies, its beyond obvious that whatever impact social media influencers have on guys, you can assume there's double that impact occuring on the female of the species. Its not even really controversial to say that science confirms that women are more susceptible to groupthink, peer pressure, social shaming, and use conformity to maintain social status. Whatever you want to refer to the social mechanisms for consensus formation as, its women who are being guided by it.
Sabrina Carpenter gets thousands of women to sing a lyric about men being 'useless' and we don't get thinkpieces delving into what impact this has on impressionable young women.
And of course, if you're so worried about the takeaway men get from redpill culture, please, feel free to tell me how you think men should react to THAT. What exactly is the 'healthy' male response there?
Its like we have a culturally-enforced Women are Wonderful Effect. It doesn't matter if they're performing objectively anti-social, destructive behavior for all to see. Women can do no wrong therefore if women are doing it, it isn't wrong. If you say its wrong and level a critique, YOU are in fact the bad person.
So Louis Theroux tossing ANOTHER parcel of cultural baggage onto young men's backs is simply not going to help the situation much. And I daresay its emblematic of cowardice, to a certain extent. If he wanted to court controversy and invite discussion, do the approximate equivalent of this documentary on the female side, look into what they're pulling from tiktok, from the media they consume, and how THEY are being taken in by bad actors for personal profit at the expense of their mental health and relationship with the opposite gender.
I mean that might be its role for some and the reason it's been made, but it's Louis Theroux, he is just meeting influencers and asking them questions and then leaving long silences for them to hang themselves, just as he has done for many other interview subjects. There's not really any editorialising. You can say it's selectively edited to make them look bad but if you watch it, it's hard to say it does anything than show conversations with them play out in real time and leave it to the viewer to make their own judgements (which will surely be negative, because the interview subjects are objectively absolute bell-ends).
I think that's a hole in the culture generally, but this particular documentary is hard to watch without seeing a clear contrast between Louis Theroux himself and the influencers. He is weedy, softly spoken and awkward, but much more comfortable in his psoriasis-striken skin than they are in their suntanned muscle suits. He actually comes across as much more masculine and secure than they do. Albeit adorkable fearless modern day Socrates may not be an ideal your average teenage boy is going to gravitate towards (although I actually did as a teen).
Two criticisms: This documentary is biased and trying to pile on young men, and, Where are the female equivalents?
Focusing on the latter maintains your good points here about just Theroux just letting these people speak.
The most direct counterpart to this that springs to mind is another UK documentary that came in the midst of a similar moral panic (and also leaves the audience to make up their own mind): '1000 Men and Me, The Bonnie Blue story' by Victoria Silver. This had similar profile to the manosphere one in the UK but would not have benefitted from the Netflix effect globally.
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