Clip Farming Their Way Through the ‘Manosphere’: Going Viral for Being Vile

A new Netflix documentary by the English filmmaker Louis Theroux takes viewers into the extreme fringes of the “manosphere,” a collection of content creators, podcasters, and YouTubers who preach to their young male audiences that masculinity and male success are defined by big muscles, big bank accounts, expensive cars, and denigrating women. To say this is a bleak view of masculinity and the world is an understatement, but it’s resonating with millions of young men — or at least they’re watching.The documentary, “Inside the Manosphere,” is also being heavily-watched, now trending in the top ten most watched videos on Netflix. ”Inside the Manosphere” is part dark comedy — the men hang themselves with their hypocrisy and outrageous takes — but it is mainly a warning to viewers about the corrosive influence these content creators are having on young men and how the algorithms of social media sites reward extremism. What the film fails to do is take seriously the reasons these misogynistic content creators attracted such large audiences — and their money — in the first place.The film opens with clips of Andrew Tate and other content creators railing against feminism, punctuated by Mr. Theroux’s voiceover describing the world of male influencers who have millions of followers and claim to be “giving young men the cheat codes to win at life.” In his signature noncombative, yet probing, style Mr. Theroux interviews and follows four of these content creators. He makes clear that this movie is not about mainstream manosphere podcasters like Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, or Theo Von. This is about “the edges” of the scene.One of these men is a 24-year-old mixed-race English influencer named Harrison Sullivan, who livestreams his gym workouts, picking up women, and fights under the name HSTikkyTokky. Through a Telegram channel, HS, as he’s called, also earns money by getting a share of profits from shady crypto apps, investment platforms, and OnlyFans girls he promotes. Most recently HS went viral for provoking Piers Morgan to abruptly end his own show. Like all the men in the film, HS flaunts his earnings and streams everything he does, constantly measuring success by the number of views his social media channels get. He says he’d disown a future daughter if she ever started an OnlyFans account, but he’s happy to profit from the online sexual content of the women around him. He livestreams a woman giving him oral sex in a bathroom. He sets up a meeting with an unsuspecting man and then has his hangers-on beat the man up on a livestream.“If I’d just done good things, I would have never really blown up on social media in the first place,” HS says to Mr. Theroux, justifying his actions and explaining the incentives of the attention economy.Another featured content creator is Justin Waller, a construction entrepreneur from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who drives a Lamborghini and claims to be worth $30 million from his social media “success coach” content and directing followers to sign up to Andrew Tate’s online “business school” for a fee. Clad in a too-tight suit to showcase his muscles, Mr. Waller’s main message is that women can ride on their looks while men need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, assert dominance, and make money to be of value in the world. Mr. Theroux meets Mr. Waller in Miami, where the influencer has moved to be closer to the center of the MAGA and manosphere universes. He says he’s been to Mar-a-Lago “four or five times” and posts photographs with Barron Trump and the president as his clout-chasing receipts.Mr. Waller is a father to two young daughters, but he is not a social conservative of the pre-Trump GOP. He describes his relationship with his daughters’ mother as “one-sided monogamy.” In other words, he is allowed to sleep around, but she can’t. Deriding feminism, bucking political correctness, and antisemitic rhetoric are common threads in this manosphere space, where men are told to take the metaphorical “red pill” and open their eyes to “the matrix” — the social structures trying to hold them back. Mr. Waller got into hot water in January for hanging out with the Tate brothers, Nick Fuentes, and the “looksmaxxer” Clavicular at a club in Miami Beach where they sang along to Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler.”When Mr. Theroux asks Mr. Waller whether his message is resonating with men as part of a backlash to the so-called feminization of the culture, Mr. Waller says yes. “I believe that the world really took a swing in the wrong direction when it comes to it being acceptable for a man to have a masculine energy about him, to be strong. It got called toxic,” Mr. Waller says.Unfortunately, Mr. Theroux doesn’t explore this further. There are many reasons why the manosphere — both the mainstream podcasters and fringe content creators — are attracting young men, from an increase in fatherless homes to the pathologizing of masculinity as “toxic” to the excesses of #MeToo. Men in the United States are falling behind women at all levels of education, and millions are dropping out of the workforce in their prime.This was a missed opportunity to explore in a measured way why so many young men are tuning in to these livestreams and turning to these men for guidance. Instead, the scene ends with Mr. Waller standing on his balcony, claiming that nothing in his sightline was created by a woman.A third manosphere content creator that Mr. Theroux interviews is Myron Gaines, a Sudanese-American YouTuber and former Homeland Security agent, who spews antisemitic rhetoric, wants to revoke women’s right to vote, and promotes traditional gender roles while also engaging in a one-sided monogamous relationship with his girlfriend. The fourth featured content creator is a pro-Trump streamer who goes by the name Sneako, recently converted to Islam, and claims the art world is being controlled by Satanists. It’s easy to laugh at the ridiculousness of the conspiracy theories and over-the-top misogynistic proclamations of these men, but as Mr. Theroux follows them in the street, young boys, many who look to barely be in high school, run up to the influencers to take selfies and profess their devotion.For all its flaws, the film is a fun if disturbing watch that grabs the viewer’s attention from beginning to end. One of the most poignant moments of the documentary is when Mr. Waller is driving Mr. Theroux through his hometown of Baton Rouge, describing his chaotic upbringing in a trailer park with an absent father. Financial hardship and fatherless homes is a common thread among these manosphere bros.“Across the board I had the sense that influencers still carrying the wounds of childhood, who’d had to learn brutal strategies of self-reliance, were projecting their trauma onto the wider world,” Mr. Theroux says in voiceover. It’s hard to know whether these influencers believe half the stuff they’re saying. When Mr. Theroux confronts HS about antisemitic comments, HS points to one of his crew filming and says he’s a Jew. “Have I said in a clip, ‘Fuck the Jews’? Yes,” HS responds. “Does that mean I’m antisemitic? No. I’m clip farming.”In other words, all this explosive rhetoric about women, Jews, and gays is about getting more eyeballs on his content and thus more money in his pocket. As the mother of two young boys, I worry about the manosphere’s influence on men. For young girls, the algorithm produces equally sinister content: on one extreme, OnlyFans; on the other, the trad wives phenomenon. The only hope is that trends like these fade, social media views don’t necessarily translate to hateful or violent behavior, and stable homes dim these influencers’ appeal. “It struck me that the matrix they rail against more accurately describes the algorithmic prison they’ve created for their followers: An illusion of endless wealth and power that actually only enriches a few at the top,” Mr. Theroux concludes. “We are all increasingly inside the manosphere, and it’s up to us how we get out.”

Clip Farming Their Way Through the ‘Manosphere’: Going Viral for Being Vile

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