Is The Manosphere Really That Dangerous? - Louis Theroux - #1070

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Louis, you've got three sons, 2018 and 2011 Why were you interested in doing this documentary?

**Louis Theroux** (0:09)
Well, for reasons closely related to that. I mean, yeah, that's obviously part of it. As a dad, I saw my kids were consuming. I mean, consuming maybe sounds more active than it was. They were being exposed to influencer content, Manosphere-type content, specifically Andrew Tate, back in the post-COVID era when he first blew up. I remember the boys saying, oh, Andrew Tate said this or that, and thinking like, well, who is Andrew Tate?
Wasn't someone I'd ever heard of. Then the content obviously turned out to be things like, women can't drive or shouldn't be allowed to drive, or women shouldn't be allowed to vote.
It was hard to, they were saying like, well, he just says it as a joke, everyone's freaking out about this, but we know what it is, like it's clearly clickbait or rage bait. But nevertheless, its level of virality was kind of, it would be too far to say at this stage was concerning, but it was kind of weird. It was just weird to see someone blow up like that, that quickly, and to sort of commandeer swathes of the Internet so purposefully. Like he kind of hacked, he figured something out about the algorithm, about Twitter and social media in general, TikTok really specifically, doing podcasts, saying outrageous things, having an army of clippers, repurpose those into short snippets, and those being picked up by the algorithm so that everyone, literally millions were being, worldwide were being exposed to his content. So fast forward a few years and he continued to become famous. Other people in his stead or in associated contexts were putting out similarly viral clickbait content and the whole culture felt like it was being inundated. I say the whole, like swathes of male skewing internet spaces were being inundated with it. Then meanwhile, as a program maker of 30 years standing, I'm always looking for ideas and I was talking to Netflix about making a program and it seemed front and center of what I should be covering. I've been joking that it's like the final boss battle of the Louis Theroux subject. As someone who specialized over the years, I've done stuff about racists, cults, sex workers of different stripes, people involved in pro wrestling and gangster rap. This aspect of the Manosphere, like this subset section of the Manosphere, feels like all those things mixed together. You know what I mean? They look a bit like wrestlers, they speak a little bit like rappers, and the content is clearly highly dubious at best. Whether or not it's sincere is a different question. So I was like, well, this is made to measure for whatever my skill set is in terms of making documentaries.

**Chris Williamson** (3:13)
I think the wrestling analogy is apt because a lot of the stuff that we see online, even from Trump sometimes, is this weird kayfabe. I don't know, is this a joke or is this real? And if what nobody wants is to be accused of having pointed the finger at someone for telling a joke saying that it was real, and there's always the sort of the comedian get out of jail free card of, well, I'm not being serious with that. But at some points, the seriousness actually comes in to touch reality.

**Louis Theroux** (3:46)
Big time. The wrestling metaphor is, as you say, is very apropos. We're in a culture now where everyone has access to the media.
We all have our own mini, you know, it used to be, I'm older than you are, but I grew up in an era of three or four TV channels. When cable arrived, that was a big deal. Oh, wow, you've got like 40 channels. Like, what? Mind blowing. Now, there's a real sense in which we kind of have millions of channels. Everyone can have a YouTube account and broadcast what they like. So we can all curate a media persona, and we all have access to the airwaves of our choosing, and part of that is employing personas and, as you say, kayfabe alongside that, you know, someone who, I mean, I'm a fan of, in a sense, self-impersonation. I find all of that. It's not coincidental that I go into these worlds where people take off the peg identities, like, my name is Waldo and I'm a wrestler, you know, and actually, no, your name is Louis Theroux and you're a BBC documentary maker or Netflix documentary maker. Do you know what I mean? Or the worlds of adult film stars. You know, a lot of these worlds I've gone into are places where you take a new name. And the online world, which I was looking at, same thing, one of the main guys I looked at is Harrison Sullivan's name, but he goes by HS Tiki Toki Online. There's also a guy called Nicholas Balanthazi, and he uses the handle Sneako. So it's another realm in which you're performing yourself, and you can employ irony, you can employ hyperbole, you can employ a sort of performative self-parody, all of them obfuscating who you really are, but sneaking in the whole time. I mean, I sometimes say puckishly, like there's no such thing as a joke. I mean, obviously, there is such a thing as a joke, but the sense in which all jokes contain a masked truth. And so you can be racist as a joke up to a point, I guess, but there comes a time when actually you're just being racist.