With the liberal consensus in steep decline over recent years, the progressive left has increasingly found itself gripped by a sense of constant moral panic. From micro-aggressions to pronoun alarmism, the chattering classes see signs of the end of times coming at them from every direction. In a state of swirly-eyed paranoia, they stand on the proverbial street corner, wailing about the inherent fascism of everything: from biological sex to the policing of national borders. But few topics have alarmed them as much as the manosphere — so much so that a late-stage Louis Theroux has finally decided to make one of his trademark documentaries on the subject matter.
Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere, recently dropped on Netflix. In it, Theroux re-covers much of the well-trodden ground first paved by the BBC in The Dangerous Rise of Andrew Tate — except, in this case, Louis failed to secure an interview with the Manosphere’s top dog and had to settle for a cast of its more minor characters instead, such as the personal trainer turned masculinity guru, Harrison Sullivan, or Justin Waller — a man who seemed like a real estate charged up on viagra-laced oysters. To compensate, he brings his earnestly-concerned geography teacher schtick to the table while Netflix tries to repeat the success of its 2025 drama Adolescence.
For fans of Louis Theroux’s oeuvre — and, despite my unstrained cynicism, I actually am one — it will be a satisfying watch because even when he’s mediocre and unoriginal Louis is still good at what he does. But the viewers who hold a right-wing perspective may well note a glaring omission here: like the rest of his elite milieu, Louis, the consummate BBC insider, completely overinflates the threat posed by misogynistic in influencers in rented sports cars at the expense of a much more tangible threat to women and Western civilisation more broadly — hardline Islam.
To paraphrase Mohammed Ali’s famous quote about the Vietcong: no manosphere loser ever crashed a plane into the Twin Towers. No manfluencer ever blew themselves up on a tube carriage during morning rush hour. Ain’t no Andrew Tate ever denied Afghan girls the right to an education. Ain’t none of his followers stormed the Batalcan in Paris to slaughter innocent concert goers. Now I don’t want to give the dudes of the guy-o-sphere a free pass here: they are, without a doubt, noxious grifters monetising the insecurities of troubled young men — and they absolutely deserve to be showered with unrelenting disdain for that. But they are not the Muslim Brotherhood.
The manosphere undoubtedly has less influence on Western youth than the Quran or the network of conservative imams that preach the Mecca brand of misogyny from the countless mosques that have been artificially grafted onto the European landmass like a Turkish hair transplant by decades of uncontrolled mass migration. Even if we remove jihadis from the equation here on the basis that they only represent an extremist fringe of the community, we can confidently argue that a far more oppressive form of misogyny is baked into Islamic dogma than Western patriarchy. But don’t expect Louis to interrogate this anytime soon.
Indeed, it’s interesting that Theroux’s new documentary completely fails to interrogate Andrew Tate’s reported conversion to Islam, not to mention any of the other manfluencers that have undergone this same religious transformation; such as Sneako or Myron Gaines. Far more people in Britain from ethnic minority backgrounds, tellingly — according to a Savanta survey — have approved of Mr Tate. Now this is something that deserves attention: it is no coincidence that two anti-liberal impulses have found a point of common convergence.
Yet, despite the similarities, there is a difference here. Islam does not just contain a style of male resentment but a governing logic. It regulates sex, marriage, family, dress, honour, speech, blasphemy, apostasy and authority. It does not merely encourage patriarchy but sacralises it.
The distinction matters because it is the difference between a niche malignancy and a social order. In societies dominated by sharia law, women don’t merely have to endure sexist attitudes, they have to live under harsh systems of domination: male guardianship, forced veiling, restrictions on movement, segregation, coercive marriage, and religiously-ordained polyamory.
It [is] indefensible that journalists are overlooking such a clear problem in religiously-ordained misogyny.
For the sake of balance, it should be acknowledged that some of the more extreme aspects of anti-women attitudes and behaviour in the West slip under the radar because they emerge from seemingly random rather than dogma. It has been documented that cases of domestic violence rise during international football tournaments, for example, because European football fans tend to drink all day during those heady, bi-annual summers that inevitably descend into collective sporting mania.
Yet it remains indefensible that journalists are overlooking such a clear problem in religiously-ordained misogyny. Indeed, the kind of left-wingers who fulminate against the manosphere are liable to see a potential ally in political Islam. In the previous general election, four independent Muslim MPs won parliamentary seats in constituencies with large south Asian populations by basing their campaigns around the war in Gaza. Having recognised the vote-winning potential of sectarian politics in England, Zack Polanski’s Green party has essentially traded the green of the environment for that of the Quran by going so far as to stoke ethnic tensions between Pakistani Muslims and Indian Hindus in the Gorton & Denton by-election last month. This makes it obvious that dangerous theo-political trends will be enabled as well as ignored if there are votes in it — and if it is convenient to the delusional egalitarian cast of mind.
The fact that liberal journalists are more animated by viral Internet phenomena than religiously sanctioned politics of domination reveals the extent to which they have ceased to think clearly about political power. For me, this is the most valuable insight produced by Theroux’s journey inside the manosphere.
