What Louis Theroux’s Manosphere Documentary Misses - A Psychotherapist’s View

A psychotherapist’s reflection on "Inside the Manosphere"

I watched Louis Theroux’s ‘Inside the Manosphere’ and then sat with it for a couple of days before writing anything. That pause felt important. There’s something unsettling about a documentary that raises the right questions, but then moves on.

Regardless of what you might think of Theroux's work, his approach is patient, curious, and almost deceptively gentle. It allows people to reveal themselves in ways that a more confrontational style never could. The men in ‘Inside the Manosphere’ do reveal themselves - often more than they intend to. The contradictions are laid bare without Theroux needing to push very hard at all: the man who says he would disown his daughter for opening an OnlyFans account while running an OnlyFans agency himself; the relationship coach whose partner admits she's never really agreed to the terms he's been selling to millions of followers. Theroux simply allows the conversation to unfold, and the gaps between what is said and what is lived become visible.

So why did I leave the documentary feeling unsettled?

The Wound Is Named. The Healing Isn’t

Partly because it brings to the surface something real and troubling; but never quite stays with it long enough to explore the deeper question underneath. In many ways the wound is named, but the healing isn’t.

What the documentary does show clearly is that there are a great many young men searching for a code to live by. One moment in particular stuck with me. A young man whose brother had died by suicide, yet doesn't beleive in depression, looked into the camera and explained that men are not supposed to be happy - that we are supposed to suffer. He said it with a strange mixture of resignation and gratitude, as though he had been handed a hard but valuable truth.

From where I sit, working with men on their mental fitness - men who’ve carried versions of that belief for decades - I recognise the costs. Suppression becomes a form of survival and emotional life narrows. Pain builds in the background until it begins to emerge sideways - in relationships, in addiction, in bursts of anger, or in moments of crisis that seem to arrive without warning. Much of what these influencers offer young men isn’t healing at all. It’s the monetisation of that wound.

Whilst the documentary hints at this dynamic ; it never quite names it.

It’s Not About Absent Fathers. It’s About the Algorithm.

One of the points that generated debate after the programme aired was Theroux’s observation that many of the influencers he encountered had grown up without fathers. Several colleagues pushed back on this, and rightly so. Plenty of men grow up without fathers and become thoughtful, connected human beings. Plenty grow up with fathers present and still receive very little guidance about how to inhabit adulthood well.

The absent father narrative is seductive because it contains some clinical truth. Early attachment matters, and the experience of being seen and guided by older men can be profoundly important in shaping identity. However, as a single explanation it quickly becomes too neat. It risks pathologising millions of families while allowing the systems that actively funnel young men toward these online worlds to remain largely invisible.

Algorithms are not neutral. Platforms that feed increasingly extreme content to curious and often isolated teenage boys (while rewarding the men producing it with status, money, and attention) are not a minor detail in this story. They are part of the machinery that keeps the cycle running.

Yet even this observation feels secondary to the deeper absence running through the film.

The Wrong End of the Telescope

Much of the public conversation about the ‘manosphere’ focuses on the influencers themselves - their contradictions, their business models and their hypocrisies. But, in many ways, that's the wrong end of the telescope. The real story isn’t the men selling the message. It’s the boys buying it.

Somewhere tonight there’s a sixteen-year-old boy watching this content alone in his room. He’s not thinking he is being radicalised. He’s thinking he’s finally found someone who takes him seriously. Someone who appears to name the anger or confusion he’s been carrying without language for it. Someone who seems to offer him a map.

In the therapy space, I meet older versions of that boy every week. Not radicalised young men; but men who were once searching for belonging and direction and who found guidance in places that taught them to distrust almost everyone around them.

Let's stop for a minute and reflect on who that boy actually is: The teenager who feels invisible at school; the young man who senses he's failing at a game he was never properly taught to play; the boy who feels a growing anger about something he can't quite name and who discovers that someone online appears to share that anger and explain it.

That boy isn’t broken. He is searching.

The Wider Worldview Nobody's really Talking About

Another aspect of the documentary that briefly surfaced but never received sustained attention is the wider worldview embedded in much of this content. The misogyny is the most visible strand; but it’s rarely the only one. Homophobia, anti-semitism, and the casual dehumanisation of anyone who sits outside a very narrow definition of masculinity often sit alongside it. These threads aren't separate issues. They grow from the same place - a worldview organised around hierarchy, dominance, and a deep fear of being perceived as weak.

Some media researchers have also noted that the documentary’s visual style occasionally mirrors the aesthetic used by the influencers themselves: slow-motion sports cars, gym footage, synth-wave soundtracks. Those visual cues risk reproducing the same aspirational imagery that makes these figures appealing to their audience in the first place. When spectacle becomes part of the framing, it can inadvertently soften the critical distance the documentary is trying to create.

What We Offer Instead

So the question worth sitting with - for parents, educators, therapists, and anyone working with men - isn’t simply how we shut this ecosystem down. It’s what we are offering in its place.

The manosphere fills a vacuum. The answer isn’t simply more outrage about what fills it, but the slower work of building something better: connection without contempt, structure without rigidity, challenge without cruelty. Spaces where men can speak honestly about struggle without being told that doing so makes them weak.

I see glimpses of this when men gather in very ordinary ways - walking shoulder to shoulder in the hills; talking without the pressure to impress; discovering that honesty becomes possible when there is no performance required.

Boys don’t need another influencer telling them what a man should be. They need evidence - real, lived, embodied evidence - that there is another way. Not softer. Not harder. Just more honest. That evidence doesn’t come from a documentary. It comes from the men around them who are willing to live it out loud.

As a psychotherapist based in Cumbria, I offer therapy online as well as Walk & Talk Therapy in the Lake District and Yorkshire Dales. I work with men on mental fitness, trauma, and recovery through Stand Tall Therapy and Stand Tall Empower CIC.