face the strange

So, just about everyone I know irl has been talking about this new Louis Theroux documentary in which he interviews manosphere influencers and tries to figure out what makes them tick.

I found it a worthwhile but frustrating watch. Frustrating not because of anything Theroux does - he is courteous and perceptive throughout, and imo strikes a very good balance between his moral obligation to challenge toxic rhetoric and his pragmatic need to be non-threatening so his subjects will keep talking - but frustrating because the whole topic is just so wretched, and because, as with all far right movements, there really is no mutual good-faith conversation to be had. The men who are profiting off the manosphere aren't interested in good faith. As this documentary exposes, they're barely even interested in their own professed ideology. The only thing they care about is making money, and they've learnt through experience that saying vile shit gets them attention they can cash in on. So it doesn't matter how much blatant bullshit you catch them out on. Bullshit is controversy, and controversy is attention, and attention is profit. Heads they win, tails you lose.

What I will say is that their "victory" is one of the most hollow things I've ever witnessed in my life. These influencers are spending their whole lives pumping iron, prowling the streets for "content", and making the shallowest possible small talk with parasocially overinvested strangers. Young men whose lives supposedly revolve around all the hot sex they're getting (that YOU could get too, if only you stopped making excuses for yourself and invested all the savings from your after-school McDonalds job in this crypto scam they're flogging!) are hosting pool parties for crowds of OnlyFans models just to sit in a corner glued to their phones, too busy keeping up with the tepid memes being spammed by teenage boys in their livestream chats to notice all the near-naked women flaunting tits and ass right in their faces. They brag about the freedom of not having to attend a nine-to-five job, but instead of answering to a traditional boss, they're instead beholden to fickle social media algorithms and the whims of attention-span-challenged audiences who require ever more extreme behaviour to keep them engaged. Like, fuck. I'd take a regular human manager any day of the week.

I will also say that the contrast between all these puffed-up, roided-out, hypermasculine peacocks and the polite, scrawny, middle-aged British man interviewing them was really something to behold. It was fragile overcompensation vs authentic self-confidence blown up to an almost cartoonish degree. I particularly enjoyed the little tongue-in-cheek sting at the end where Theroux, having been good-naturedly "humiliated" on the boxing arcade machine earlier in the documentary, got in one last make-up swing on his own that earned a far more impressive score. It was a very sly way of saying "See, I could hold my own in you guys' macho dick-waving contests if I wanted to! I just don't want to, because why the fuck would I?" and I love him for it.

I also love him for the compassion he was able to maintain towards the men he talked to, even and especially when they wanted to make it all into some him-vs-them fight for survival. Manosphere influencers are some of social media's lowest-hanging fruit in terms of hateability. Looking at the bright-eyed little boys they used to be and reflecting, with an open heart, on what went wrong in their lives to make a life of vapid and viciously competitive materialism look like something to aspire to is much less emotionally satisfying than fuming over their outrageous behaviour. But at some point I guess we just have to reflect anyway, because a whole new generation of bright-eyed little boys are being drawn in by this content before they've developed the critical thinking skills to resist it. Seeing that part - seeing crowds of boys whose voices had barely dropped yet flock to these jerks on the street - was more upsetting by far than anything the jerks themselves have ever said. Theroux didn't offer a solution and I sure as shit don't have one either, but at least making the effort to step outside the cycle of outrage seems as good a place as any to start.