Sorry But the Manosphere is the Gayest Thing on the Internet

Everyone watching Louis Theroux's documentary sees misogyny. I see something else.

You’ve probably heard of the new Netflix doc Louis Theroux’s Inside the Manosphere or read the many think pieces about it. Viewers found the film disturbing, critics called it urgent, and approximately 4,000 women posted “this is terrifying” on their Instagram stories. The consensus was swift and unified: the manosphere is a hate movement targeting women, and we should all be very, very scared.

But here's my read, as someone who has been studying these guys before we had a term for them. My primary thought was not these men hate women. My primary thought was: wow these men are not thinking about women at all. What I witnessed was something far more interesting than misogyny. Not gay panic. Just gay.

Let me explain..

Louis Theroux describes the manosphere as a group of almost exclusively male influencers providing content about fitness, business, and self-improvement. What he doesn’t quite say, though the camera absolutely shows it, is that the entire ecosystem is men performing for men, evaluated by men, validated by men, in pursuit of other men’s approval. Women are an abstraction. A plot device, really. The manosphere doc is a movie that is entirely about male longing.

These influencers surround themselves with beautiful women not because they like women but because other men like women. The OnlyFans models, the entourages, the “harems,” they’re not relationships, they’re set dressing, props if you will, in a show performed entirely for a male audience. The influencers admit themselves to not even liking the beautiful women they’re surrounded by. Nothing makes this clearer than one scene in the documentary where one manfluencer shows Theroux a video of himself receiving a blowjob. He filmed it during the act. He kept it. And then he played it for another man with the energy of someone showing off a new car. The woman is but a prop. The real intimacy in that moment is between him and Theroux. His blowjob was, functionally, for other men. I cannot make this any clearer. I’m not saying it’s gay. I’m saying it’s incredibly, fascinatingly, textbook gay. I mean I have truly met gay men who are not as gay as this.

And it’s not just a fringe internet thing. It goes all the way to the top of the most aggressively heterosexual political movement in America right now. In February, the official Department of Health and Human Services account posted a video that opened with RFK Jr. and Kid Rock posing and flexing their muscles shirtless before launching into a gym workout montage, eventually moving into a sauna where they took turns on a stationary bike and doing push-ups. The strangest part came at the end when the two men sat together in an indoor hot tub, drinking glasses of milk as a graphic reading “WHOLE MILK” was splashed across the screen. Two shirtless men. Whole milk. American flags. And women were, notably, conspicuously absent from the promotion entirely, perhaps because a woman would have disrupted something very delicate that was happening between those two shirtless men. Much like the women who are technically present in the manosphere doc, they’re never quite the point.

The most revealing moments in Theroux’s doc aren’t the misogynist soundbites. They’re the quieter ones. The whole pitch of the manosphere, the entire reason millions of lonely young men are watching these videos at 2am, is to learn how to get women. That’s the product and that’s the promise. And yet watch what happens when an actual woman enters the room. The bravado evaporates. The chest-beating about female nature and hypergamy and the red pill just disappears. These titans of masculine truth go shy and mumbly. The man who just proudly showed Louis Theroux a video of his own blowjob cannot hold a conversation with the stunning OnlyFans models surrounding him, and in fact as I already said, he explicitly admits he doesn’t even like them!! The women are not there because he enjoys their company. They’re there because other men will see them with him. Many of these manfluencers are infinitely more comfortable performing for men than they are existing near women. Which raises a pretty obvious question about how heterosexual any of this actually is, when these men seem to spend considerably more time and energy telling us how much they admire other men than they ever do talking or thinking about women.

There’s an academic term for when men organize their entire emotional and social world around the approval of other men: homosociality. It’s not a slur, it’s a sociology word. It describes fraternities, men’s clubs, locker room culture, spaces where men define their worth entirely through other men’s eyes. The manosphere is just homosociality if it was an MLM. At the top you have a small group of men who have figured out that lonely, insecure young men will pay extraordinary amounts of money to be near them, to learn from them, to become them. The courses, the masterclasses, the telegram groups, the patreons. It’s not a self improvement, it’s a parasocial crush with a payment plan. These men at the top don’t want their followers to get women. They want their followers to keep watching them.

I mean think about it, the lonely 19 year old watching these videos at 2am isn't really trying to learn how to talk to women. He's trying to feel close to Andrew Tate. He has a crush. He is being charged for it.

Meanwhile, while the manosphere has been busy teaching men that women are the enemy, women have been busy simply leaving. Around 60% of Gen Z men are currently single, compared to only 30% of Gen Z women, because many of those women are increasingly choosing to date older millennial men who seem more emotionally mature and better equipped for adult relationships and who don’t fucking hate them. So the movement dedicated to male dominance over women has produced a generation of men who effectively arent’ getting laid. And those men are responding by watching more videos. About men. Made by men. For men. I mean I guess you have to respect the commitment to the bit.

At the end of the film, Theroux notes that nearly every influencer in this world grew up with an absent or violent father. So they built a replacement world, one made entirely of men, run by men, monetized by men, for men who are also looking for men. Misogyny is the brand. But the product, if you look closely, is male longing. And no amount of OnlyFans models or blowjob videos or sigma grindset content is going to fill that gap. Only men being honest with each other could do that. Which is, coincidentally, exactly what they think is gay. And it is considerably less gay than everything else they are currently doing.

If you need a chaser after this manosphere deep dive, come hang out with us on Boy Problems. This week we're talking about the RFK Jr. discourse, and I will be actively trying to dissuade you from dating a famous rich hot guy. It's fun. We promise. Also send me your boy problems and I might answer them on the show!!