What do the main gurus of the manosphere have in common?

He is little known here, but Louis Theroux is one of those journalists who can head a report with his name. Popular for his work at the BBC, he has tackled hot topics such as Scientology, the genocide in Gaza, or the most marginal subcultures in the United States. On Netflix, he has released a documentary about the manosphere, a burning issue on which many reports have focused. The difference in this case is that Theroux uses his fame to interview influencers who are famous and would refuse other reporters. He does not manage to speak with the pimps Andrew and Christian Tate, possibly the best-known gurus of the manosphere, but he does speak with some of their collaborators and colleagues, such as Justin Waller, who runs these brothers' online business, The Real World, a website dedicated to selling courses and tutorials on how to become a millionaire. Also with Myron Gaines, host of the podcast Fresh and Fit; Sneako, a streamer whose channels have already been shut down for his misogynistic and antisemitic comments; or the British tiktoker HSTikkyTokky, who manages his businesses from Marbella and Ibiza, possibly because Miami, according to Theroux the spiritual home of these characters, is too far away. The journalist's strategy consists of positioning himself, with a non-hostile demeanor, in a position of authority regarding his subjects. As he argues from the outset, he is a journalism professional, while the others are influencers; and he is making a report for Netflix, not just content for social media. This distance legitimizes him in front of a group of men accustomed to speaking from a rhetoric of domination. In the documentary, Theroux plays at unmasking the codes with which they represent themselves on social networks. He places them in conversations where they lose control of the narrative, asks them to clarify the meaning of euphemistic expressions such as unilateral monogamy or questions them about some of their misogynistic statements in front of their girlfriends or mothers. In this way, he highlights the contradictions and the lack of solidity of the manosphere's discourses, and how they serve to monetize the anxieties of millions of young people to identify with a model of masculinity that they find attractive, through cryptocurrency businesses, OnlyFans accounts, or supposed courses to become a millionaire. Theroux draws the recurrent pattern of these misogynists: the discourse according to which women are born with value, beauty, while men have to learn to assert themselves, but at the same time can achieve what they set out to do; the conviction that, in a hetero couple, the man must be the provider and the woman must adopt a submissive role of caregiver; the conspiratorial belief in a system (the matrixan allusion to the Wachowskis' film from which the concept of red pill also originates) that deceives men from a very young age so that they are obedient and against which they teach to rebel; and an increasingly evident drift towards antisemitism and other forms of hatred beyond misogyny. The journalist also describes a recurrent scenario that, according to him, would partly explain the attitude of the protagonists: they have all grown up with absent or abusive fathers, or in dysfunctional homes, and would project their trauma onto society. Theroux acknowledges this vulnerable aspect of the manosphere leaders and at the same time warns of the matrix that they themselves generate and that traps millions of teenagers who obtain their emotional education on social networks.