Over the past few weeks, your parents have likely become enthralled by Netflix’s latest documentary, Inside the Manosphere by British journalist, Louis Theroux. A deep dive through the up-and-coming subculture amongst young men, the manosphere is a hyper-masculine, “grind” oriented trend which teaches children that the way to become successful is by buying business courses and hating women, LGBTQ+ people, minorities, and anyone else who doesn’t ascribe to their bigoted beliefs. If your parents were ones of the millions of people who have watched this documentary, they’ve likely talked to you about it, wondering if you’ve heard about this subculture or any of the prominent leaders that Theroux interviewed, and if you’re anything like me or are even remotely online, your answer was probably, “Duh.”

During his investigation into the Manosphere, Theroux highlights the influencers Harrison Sullivan, Sneako, Myron Gaines, and the Tate brothers. For a documentary like this focusing on the Tate brothers makes a lot of sense. Andrew Tate and Tristan Tate became massively popular online through a combination of controversy and a carefully cultivated image of wealth and dominance. For the majority of the late 2010s and early 2020s, these two were the gods of the Manosphere until recently when they’ve gone more under the radar following multiple criminal charges for human trafficking. The others, specifically Harry Sullivan, are both pretty small and pretty tame in the grand scheme of the Manosphere. Sullivan’s content mainly revolves around his wealth and the models that he spends his time with, his misogynistic and homophobic rhetoric only being the secondary draw for his audience, and not someone that I would consider to be the main character of a documentary of this deeply rotted movement. I think the decision to focus on Sullivan by Theroux only serves to create a more palatable and less critical of this world as a whole. It’s much easier to point and cringe at Harry talking about how he wants a “one-way monogamous relationship” than discuss how Clavicular will inject his partners with steroids on stream in front of thousands of impressionable children, or Nick Fuentes’s making up fake statistics about half of black men being murderers, both of which will be clipped and reposted to millions of views. It leaves the audience of parents with the impression that this is an issue that they can solve with their children by simply banning Kick, the streaming platform the majority of this content lives on, from their home internet, instead of a plague that is infecting the entire online world. 

By the end of this documentary Theroux makes no attempt to explain why these creators act this way, or why the millions of young men watch their content and ascribe to their ideologies, only lightly insinuating that they probably all have deep rooted daddy issues and an apathy towards women’s and LGBTQ+ struggles. While it’s probably true that figures like Sullivan are influenced by strained personal relationships, it feels intellectually lazy for the documentary to stop there. Reducing an entire movement to individual psychological flaws ignores the broader conditions that allow it to thrive. The rise of the manosphere is deeply tied to systemic issues like economic anxiety and social isolation. Many young men feel left behind by a changing economy, and online platform algorithms capitalize on this by pushing increasingly radical content that validates their frustrations. This struggle is what leads these men towards far-right creators who promise that if you just work like they do, you can be rich and successful, while also aligning more problematic ideas to them.

If you watched Inside the Manosphere and thought, “this situation is pretty bad,” it’s much worse than you know. What Theroux shows is only the most visible layer of a much deeper and more insidious culture. In 2026, the manosphere is no longer just a fringe corner of the internet; it has become embedded in mainstream online culture. Its language, ideas, and attitudes have seeped into everyday conversations, often disguised as “self-improvement” or a “grindset.” Ignoring that reality doesn’t just make for an incomplete documentary, it makes for a misleading one. By focusing on the most digestible figures and the most surface-level explanations, the film risks reassuring viewers that this is a contained problem with simple solutions, rather than a widespread cultural shift that demands serious attention. The manosphere cannot be understood through a handful of personalities or dismissed as the result of a few broken individuals; it is a system, one that is reaching more people every day. And until media like this is willing to confront that full picture, we will continue to underestimate both its scale and its impact.