Can we reduce the manosphere to mental health? | Sarah Fletcher

Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, I kept asking my friends if they recognised anyone from the film’s quick succession of biceps, Chad-jaws, and bad suits. They don’t. And I don’t either. But swarms of excitable young men ask to take selfies with the four influencers Theroux follows on the street. Justin Waller, Myron Gaines, Sneako and HSTikkyTokky are recognised on the streets of Miami, New York City, and Marbella. One young man tells Justin Waller that he saved his life. In response, Waller says “I love you”. The manosphere content creators brag that they’ve been to Mar-A-Lago and have personal access to the president. Their livestreams get tens of thousands of viewers. Despite being banned by most mainstream platforms, they regularly go viral across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and more.     

Regardless, the manosphere still seems underground. How many boys are imbibing their message? How many of their followers take them seriously? Are they there for the boobs in bikinis and the cool cars, or for the rants about the modern day woman, who has little more on her mind than dating Chad Thundercock? It’s difficult to find the boundaries and scale of its influence. It’s as if we’re underwater, hearing something on a sonar beep closer and closer. Is it just a school of fish, or is it a nuclear submarine? 

We never quite get an answer. Theroux is much more interested in exposing the men themselves than investigating their impact. What drives them towards the red pill ideology? Is it a persona, or have they really bought into their own hype? About halfway through the documentary, Theroux reaches a thesis as to why these influencers are so obsessed with performing a brute, brusque masculinity: “I felt that influencers were still carrying the wounds from childhood… and were projecting trauma onto the wider world”. 

This observation doesn’t come out of nowhere. We learn that HSTikkyTokky was raised by a single mother who worked six days a week to be able to send him to private school. Justin Waller drives Louis through ramshackle trailer parks on the outskirts of Baton Rouge, and cavalierly mentions the two times his mother arsoned houses for insurance money. Andrew Tate, the kingpin of the movement, is clipped saying, “My dad beat the shit out of me.” This is the same dad that he, in other interviews, he’d call “the best father on earth.” This could explain an element of their motivations; part of me also wonders if anyone who seeks to be a public figure on platforms driven by audience validation might not have a similar story. 

So sure. Maybe Theroux is on to something. But the emphasis on trauma left me feeling cynical. After all, he is making a documentary. As much as we want to believe that Theroux is a hard-hitting hatchet man, he is, at his heart, a contrarian in the entertainment industry. He is aware that he has to give us a plot; straddle the line between ridicule and exposé; create fully-fleshed out character arcs.  

We like our villains to be complex. And there is no question here that these men are meant to be the villains of this documentary. They, in turn, are all too obliging to step into the role of the bad guy, who talks fast, delivers tough truths, and might steal your girl. Theroux’s “trauma” framing is Sigmund Freud filtered through Hollywood: we are motivated unconsciously by our inner children. Even the worst of the worst have an origin story. The bad are not truly bad, but merely unhealed. Theroux’s intended audience would likely find the company of such provocateurs difficult to stomach without a caveat. So he throws us a bone. Now, as well as hating them, we can feel sorry for them as well. 

But is this genuine empathy? There’s a certain smugness, even, in chalking up their motivations to trauma. Especially as the influencers in question take such pride in their self-reliance and strength. Theroux knows that acknowledging real pain would be emasculating to them, and this is partly why he brings it up. It seems a way of humiliating them, to show their armour of abs as shielding real wounds of the heart. The men are scared little boys after all. Theroux, in contrast, is the “real man”. 

 Reducing their motivations to “trauma” also ends the conversation. Trauma is individual and tragic. We simply cannot do anything to fix it. But what other factors might have influenced these men to create such content? And what factors make it so compelling for young men and boys? Off the top of my head, I wonder about easy access to hardcore pornography, economic stagnation and bullshit jobs, and increasingly algorithmic approaches to dating as causes that might be stoking this animosity towards the opposite sex. These questions are much more interesting than tragic backstories. The best way of weakening these men is by poking holes in their points and exposing their worldviews as paranoid and farcical. This “facts and logic” approach is likely to resonate more with young men. Weakening the influencers by bringing up a father who was never there seems almost cheap. Implying that misogyny comes from trauma undermines centuries of ways women have been subjugated and punished for having sex, not having sex, seeking education or staying dumb. 

Ascribing politics to trauma is a dangerous game with few winners

Of course, in bringing up trauma, Theroux also draws attention to the elephant in the room. Andrew Tate isn’t interviewed in the documentary, but his presence is always there. Theroux names him as the leader of the existing movement. But besides a perfunctory comment in the introduction, he doesn’t bring up the allegations against Andrew Tate, who is facing serious legal difficulties, in multiple countries, over accusations of human trafficking, rape, money laundering, sexual exploitation, and more. One of his victims told the BBC: “Out of the blue he just grabbed me by the throat, smashed me to the back of the bed, strangling me extremely hard… I was absolutely terrified. I remember gasping for air.” These are more uncomfortable areas of enquiry. Theroux’s focus on exposing vulnerability beneath the bravado overshadows real crimes. The imagined trauma he ascribes to the influences has become more real than the existing trauma of women who have spoken against the Tate brothers. Their trauma is inconspicuously missing. 

But overall, Theroux should be careful. Ascribing politics to trauma is a dangerous game with few winners. Many victims of trauma become politically motivated. Jeffrey Epstein would not have been exposed had there been multiple brave women who went public with their traumas. Could we imagine dismissing their advocacy for sexual assault survivors as coming from a place of being “unhealed”? The left are used to being called crazy, but it is none the better for them to call the right crazy, even when encoded in the polite and cosy gauze of therapy speak. Pathologising political anger means any movements outside the acceptable liberal conversation become signs of illness. I find the views, in so much as they are even cohesive views, shown in the documentary to be incorrect. But not diseased. 

I think of the Twitter meme: men need to go to therapy. It’s a rallying cry, and admonition, even, rather than an earnest plea. And it comes with implications that therapy is not a challenging process of self-investigation, an often confrontational experience in which one is forced to reckon with maladaptive coping mechanisms. Rather, therapy is an HR meeting, in which one enters unhealed and leaves a liberal. Sometimes I imagine the outcomes of such a world, in which this “therapy” acts as a great political equaliser. A world free from narcissists and trauma-dumping. We are all healed; we bask in endless validation with the strongest boundaries. Would you like a cup of tea? Welcome to Heaven, where our politics are as secure as our attachment style.