Little Big Men : Louis Theroux's Inside the Manosphere

Louis Theroux's Inside the Manosphere, is a 90 minute documentary in which Theroux enters the online world of the "manosphere", a network of influencers, content creators, and online communities organized around ideas of masculinity, power, and gender. Through a series of interviews and observations, he follows some of the movement's most visible figures and explores how social media has become a powerful way of reaching young men who are searching for meaning, belonging, and direction. ( netflix.com)

The Manosphere presents itself as a community. It offers guidance, brotherhood, and a sense of purpose to men and boys who feel lost or overlooked. Feminism and gender equality are often portrayed as having weakened men and stripped them of status, authority, and purpose. The ideal man is imagined as emotionally controlled, financially successful, physically desirable, and always in charge. The ideals create a dangerous animosity towards women reducing women to objects men have to win over by asserting their dominance and using control. (canada.ca)

What struck me most was the way these young men use social media to reach others with what they believe is a fight for the truth. They see themselves as trying to reclaim something that has been lost. They speak of a masculinity that has been made impotent. They feel that gender equality has removed what they imagine to be a man's place in the world. As I listened, the painful sense of loss beneath their certainty was palpable. Behind the confidence and declarations of strength, there often seemed to be men who felt vulnerable, and exposed. It was as though they were searching for protection in an idealised version of masculinity.

Again and again, stories emerged of broken families, absent paternal figures, and experiences of abandonment. I found myself wondering whether the contempt directed toward vulnerability was also directed toward parts of the self. The longing, neediness, helplessness, and dependency that could not be tolerated seemed to become qualities that were attacked in others. The hatred appeared directed not only outward but also toward disowned aspects of themselves.

The maternal relationship also seemed important. What happens when the relationship with the mother develops without the presence of a third. Without a paternal function, the maternal relationship becoming suffocating, erotic, guilt ridden. From this perspective, the fear of feminism may represent something more than a political position. The attack on feminism may be understood as an attack on what is experienced as threatening in the feminine. The anxiety often seemed less about women themselves and more about what the feminine had come to represent. At times, it felt as though the feminine was imagined as something so powerful that it could swallow up any sense of separateness; that the masculine itself might disappear.

Perhaps this is what gives the Manosphere its appeal, the offer to both 14 year old boys and grown men, a seductive way of making sense of confusion, shame, disappointment, and vulnerability. Most importantly, it offers a skewed and dangerous sense of belonging to those who have never received the anchoring of an invested father figure.

In his beautiful paper on paternal presence, Heribert Blass draws on James Herzog's notion of "father hunger" and Meltzer's descriptions of paternal qualities that foster “goodness, creativity, usefulness, and courage”. While we as psychoanalysis have often focused on the oedipal father, the father who sets limits and can be experienced as castrating/threatening, Blass also emphasises the father's protective function. He writes of the "committed father", a father actively involved in the care of his child, who offers not only authority but protection, engagement, and emotional presence.

Listening to these young men, it was clear, this was not simply a search for power, status, or dominance, but a longing for protection, guidance, and recognition. A longing for a father who could help them bear vulnerability rather than despise it.