“I normally start my day off working out,” says 24-year-old Harrison Sullivan, chest puffed up, in full swagger mode, king of his turf in a Marbella gym. “Who are you talking to?” interrupts Louis Theroux, in his new Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere, bringing Sullivan crashing down to earth. “What, do I not talk to them?” the TikTokker enquires, pointing at the cameras in a jarring fourth wall break. “We’re not on social media now, this is a real documentary,” quips the journalist. “We just pretend those aren’t there.”
It’s vintage Theroux – funny in that gently undermining manner that has long been his USP. Sullivan, known as HSTikkyTokky to his scores of social followers, and who was handed a suspended sentence for dangerous driving in March 2024, is exposed as a clown, misunderstanding the reason the cameras are there – not to promote him, but to observe his problematic brand of masculinity. He slides awkwardly past this faux pas, back into performer mode and moves onto his workout to regain his alpha status. “Calves need a little work,” jibes Theroux, digging the knife deeper in.
I met Andrew Tate in the summer of 2022 (over Zoom from my home — him, in an unconfirmed location), so this kind of posturing is familiar to me. Tate was confident, casual, endlessly flattering — he appeared to believe our meeting (an interview as part of a Cosmopolitan UK investigation into online misogyny) was another opportunity, a chance to reach an even bigger audience. He told me he was “the only person in national or international consciousness who cares about how men feel”. He said men are “completely underrepresented on every single level, they always have been”.
At the time, Tate was the most Googled person on the planet and TikTok was awash with cuts of his to-camera diatribes. I chose to let him speak. I wanted to have a normal conversation with a man who had become a demigod among so many young men, to understand his appeal. And he, from a cramped room with piles of clothes around him, wanted to convince me of his reasonable mindset. That he was simply a traditionalist, and not the violent misogynist he appeared to be in videos in which he threatened women with machetes, referred to them as ‘bitch’, and said they were men’s property.
Some months after we spoke, Tate and his brother Tristan were arrested in their adopted home of Romania and are still awaiting trial for rape and human trafficking. Charges they both deny.
Theroux’s documentary exposes the manosphere as a bunch of desperate men willing to do and say most things for ‘clout’— even things they claim not to really believe in. The documentarian travels to Spain, Miami and New York to meet various YouTubers, TikTokkers and podcasters who espouse views about ‘one-sided monogamy’ with their wives, consider Only Fans performers to be ‘disgusting’ and yet happily make money from women on the platform, and believe the world is run by a shadowy cabal that wants to keep us all poor and miserable (otherwise known as the ‘Matrix’).
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Over 90 minutes, Inside the Manosphere shines a light on how shallow this movement is, and how little the fans mean to these men beyond data, contributing to their views to monetisation pipeline. “I’ve always been a salesman, I’m a salesman now,” says Sullivan. “The content gets attention and with the attention I can get more fame and monetise.” This open approach goes against the grain of traditional self-promotion. These influencers make no attempts to conceal that most of what they do online is grifting, exploiting online algorithms that reward controversy and rage bait.
But while it is easy (and makes for good television) to frame these men as silly, trip them up for showboating, let them shoot their mouths off and talk themselves into knots via nonsensical and utterly disproved hyperbolic statements, what this approach risks doing is failing to expose the real danger of their messaging.
What Theroux does expose is how quickly these men’s views go from that of showboating influencer to misogynistic, homophobic, and antisemitic. We see how the men can quickly turn from ‘fun geezer’ into aggressor, when another extreme internet personality Ed Matthews, conducts what he calls a ‘predator sting’, in which he confronts and humiliates people he accuses of being sex offenders. In one particularly alarming encounter, Matthews and his crew beat a man up during one such ‘sting’.
In another bizarre scene, influencer Sneako (real name Nicolas Kenn De Balinthazy and who has been banned from several mainstream platforms for ‘hateful conduct’) rants about a satanic cult that runs the world, led by the Rothschilds, which Theroux points out is a classic antisemitic trope. Sneako singles out pop star Sam Smith as one of member of this cult, pointing to the singer’s 2023 Grammy Awards performance of “Unholy” with Kim Petras in which the pair riffed on themes and costumes that included red latex and devil horns. “When you talk about the world being run by Satanists, you’ve gone off the deep end. The world isn’t run by Sam Smith”, quips Theroux. It’s funny, until it’s not.
What I wish we’d seen more of are the real-life consequences of these men's messaging. In 2022, I immersed myself in the manosphere for months, so I’m familiar with characters like Sneako, Fresh&Fit and Stirling Cooper (who each appear in Inside the Manosphere) and found that their small-minded, money-grabbing online bravado is simply a shop window, leading followers — often young teenage boys — down a funnel into the darkest corners of the internet, and further, to dangerous extremist and conspiratorial views. Influencers stand to gain financially from such extremist opinions, be it through platforms that push out high-view content (usually controversial) to more users, which creators earn a slice of ad revenue from, or through livestream ‘fan tips’ and ‘super chats’ in which YouTube viewers can pay to promote their comments; affiliate marketing, and selling nonsense online courses that promise them a quick route to fame, wealth and women.
As we saw in Jack Thorne’s outstanding Adolescence, in which a 13-year-old boy from a loving family lost his temper and stabbed a female schoolmate to death, apparently inspired by manosphere ideology, the impact of the violent messaging of these men runs deep. These ideologies largely target young, disaffected boys and men, often going unnoticed by parents, partners and friends. And the real-life ramifications are catastrophic. Just hours before 26-year-old Kyle Clifford entered the home of his ex-girlfriend Louise Hunt, and murdered her, her sister Hannah and her mother Carol with a crossbow, he had been looking at misogynistic content online — including that of Tate.
In fact, in summer 2024 the National Police Chiefs Council warned of an ‘epidemic’ of violence against women and called for a robust, joined-up approach to tackling the issue. A Home Office report leaked in January of last year revealed misogyny and violence against women had been identified as gateways to extremist beliefs. 2024 also saw a report by Global Action Plan that found 59% of teenage boys had been served misogynistic content online, without searching for it.
The impact? Gen Z males have now been found to be twice as likely as baby boomer men to hold so-called ‘traditional’ views about gender relationships. The global survey of 23,000 people across 29 countries by Ipsos and King’s College London found that 31% of Gen Z men believed that a wife should always obey her husband (compared with 13% men over 60) and that a husband should have the final word on important decisions (33% of Gen Z men agreed). The survey also showed 24% of Gen Z men believed women were ‘too independent’. Where do we think these young men are getting these opinions from?
The danger is there for men, too. Online influencers like 20-year-old Bradon Peters (who goes by Clavicular to his 760,000 TikTok followers and has been seen with Tate and white nationalist Nick Fuentes), have stretched the incel Red Pill looksmaxxing trend into its most extreme limits. Led by the 80/20 paradox: that 80% of women are attracted to just 20% of men, Clavicular, who refers to women as ‘foids’ (short for ‘female humanoids’), advocates smashing your jaw with a hammer to perfect a chiselled look in order to gain access to that 20%.
Tate is the high priest of a movement that preaches male victimhood and insists that men are hard done by in society while encouraging and normalising the extreme subjugation of women. It encourages men to take part in financial scams (often leaving the participant in the red while lining influencer pockets), to mutilate themselves in the name of aesthetics, and talks them out of healthy relationships. These creatin-pumped wind-up merchants don’t care for their teenage admirers, some of whom will ruin their lives in pursuit of these twisted goals. This is an ongoing crisis and it’s worth asking: Why is there still a way for such extremists to financially benefit from this? And even though — as Theroux so shrewdly shows — these men are actually ridiculous characters, does knowing that serve to protect us from their influence, or does it make the issue even darker? While we wait to find out, their insidious messaging reaches an even greater audience and women continue to be the collateral.
Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere is available on Netflix now.
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Harriet Hall is an award-winning journalist and the Features Director at Cosmopolitan. Most recently she was awarded Best Feature for her investigation into Andrew Tate and online misogyny at the 2023 Write to End Violence Against Women awards and the BSME for Best Lifestyle Journalist in 2022 for her work covering women’s safety, women's health, politics and pop culture. As a journalist of over a decade, her work has seen her interview celebrities from Zendaya to Zac Effron and politicians including Jeremy Corbyn (just five days before the 2017 general election); report on fashion weeks and take on stunts in the name of feminism. She has written for a range of publications including The Independent where she ran the lifestyle desk for four years, Evening Standard, Vogue, BBC News and Stylist. Harriet also regularly appears across numerous platforms to discuss her work, from Sky News to Radio 4 Woman’s Hour and on panels such as at the prestigious Woman of the World Festival. Her first book ‘She: A Celebration of 100 Renegade Women’ was published by Headline Home in 2018 and you can find her Tweeting, Instagramming and on Linkedin when she isn’t curled up on the sofa with a good book and the smallest dog in the world.
