The views expressed in this article are those of the author.

When Louis Theroux makes a documentary, the world tunes in. Not just because of his unique ability to infiltrate polarising spaces and connect with subcommunities that are notoriously hard to reach, but also because his documentaries tend to bring the most pressing issues of our time into widespread discourse.

In his most recent documentary, Inside the Manosphere, he does just that. Theroux's highly-anticipated Netflix special follows some of the most prominent figures in the manosphere, and puts them on the world stage in a call for accountability. But who are we holding to account?

The "manosphere" describes the online spaces where concepts of masculinity and increasingly extreme misogynistic ideas are espoused. There, feminist values — like support for equal rights — are commonly opposed with fervour. What may seem like another unintended consequence of social media, is actually far more sinister.

Watch: The hosts of Mamamia Out Loud talk about Louis Theroux's Inside the Manosphere. Post continues below.

The pattern emerging.

Theroux's film shows a pattern, where manosphere content is consumed by young men and boys who are often disillusioned and seeking community, guidance and support. To grab the attention of these young men, manosphere content is often framed as motivational content, focused on fitness, making money, and having relationship success.

This approach is evidently working for manosphere creators.

In 2025, Movember research found that 43 per cent of young men who watch masculinity influencers found them motivating, entertaining and inspiring, and many young men reported acting upon influencers' advice.

But laced within much of this 'inspiring' content is harmful, misogynistic messaging that points to women and girls as the reason why men are experiencing hardship.

While sporting luxury cars and gloating about dominating women, many young men and boys are told that we, women and girls, are to blame for their struggles.

Like most communities, online or otherwise, the manosphere is not uniform or homogenous. It consists of a number of subcommunities, such as the Men's Rights Activists (MRA), Involuntary Celibates (Incels), Pick Up Artists (PUA) and Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) — which are often associated with presenting and promoting their own form of extreme opposition to gender equity.

These groups may seem niche and specific to a small subset of the internet, but — likely why Theroux chose this topic for his documentary — the manosphere and misogyny has become more mainstream.

Nearly two-thirds of the young men in the 2025 Movember study said they regularly engage with men and masculinity influencers.

Ideas that were once taboo and highly controversial, are now familiar, even common, parts of our online experiences.

Misogyny on the rise.

According to Amnesty International's 2025 Report, Toxic Tech: How Misogyny is Shaping Gen Z's Online Experience, 73 per cent of Gen Z social media users have seen misogynistic content online, and 70 per cent say they believe misogynistic language and content is increasing.

Language that used to exist only in fringe chat forums such as 'mid' (a physically unimpressive woman), 'foid' (short for female humanoid and used to dehumanise), 'maxxing' (gamified 'self improvement') and 'red pill' (awakening to the 'reality' that the world is biased against men), are now becoming increasingly common lexicon amongst youth and easily found in any given comment section.

Ironically, in order to present the manosphere to new audiences and bring awareness of it further into the mainstream, Theroux's documentary mirrors a similar tactic to that written in the Manosphere playbook — shock deeply and create fear to make an impact.

The manosphere figures made it easy to do this; they did not mince their words when describing their visceral hatred and inveterated disrespect for women.

A number of them brag about their relationships with women in the documentary, and commonly expect their girlfriend or wives to be completely monogamous while being non-monogamous themselves.

In the documentary, one participant says: "I do whatever the f**k I want to do, and she's loyal to me. It's monogamous on her end, open on my end," one of them said. 

Another manosphere figure said, simply, "f**k women."

Theroux used this documentary as a way to find sense and reason for the manosphere phenomenon.

Why are these men like this? What happened to them in their lives to make them this way?

Through various discussions, he inquires about the childhoods and formative life experiences of manosphere content creators, often identifying a pattern of trauma among the men and boys who create and ingest manosphere content.

The more Theroux — and therefore, we — got to know these men, the more their constructed alpha-male personas seemed to unravel.

In my view, these men were hypocrites, and what appears to be their strategy became painfully transparent.

Theroux used his platform to hold these men accountable for what they preach, and to expose the inconsistencies about what they practice.

The need for accountability.

But in focusing on these men, we don't hold accountable the ones that really matter — the 'tech bros', or more realistically, the men who are the majority shareholders of the biggest companies in the world and who have significant control over what media most of the world consumes for hours each day.

It's undoubtedly crucial that individual creators of harmful content should be held accountable. However, the very existence and success of the manosphere reflects a systemic failure, and requires more sophisticated systems of accountability to prevent the very real harm that manosphere content promotes.

The social media infrastructure most of us access several times a day utilises algorithms that make social media companies an incomprehensible amount of profit.

These platforms optimise every single piece of data they have about us and people like us, to ensure tailored content is delivered to us repeatedly, keeping us online to view ads and hand over more data for hyper-optimised personalisation, so the platforms can cash in.

They can use our data to determine our age, gender, viewing patterns, location, political views, hobbies and other personal information to deliver highly specific content that elicits strong emotions and keeps us scrolling.

For women and girls, we are often the target of seemingly omnipresent content that promotes disordered eating, self-harm, or what a 'high value' woman is.

According to a study by University of Dublin study in 2024, for men and boys it takes an average time of 23 minutes for them to be served harmful misogynistic content disguised as self-improvement content.

The evidence paints a disturbing picture that shows young people are learning behaviours from the online spaces they spend so much of their time in.

Teachers are being faced with more hostility in the classroom and young men are experiencing worse mental health outcomes.

Experts such as Professor Ben Mathews from the Queensland University of Technology have released research that shows an adolescent boy is now the most likely perpetrator of sexual violence against another adolescent, a devastating title traditionally held by adult men, according to a 2023 ACM Study.

The gender-based violence prevention and response sector in Australia understands this problem deeply. There is growing concern that this rhetoric is bleeding into culture and may contribute to environments where sexual violence can not only exist, but thrive.

From the Women and Girls Emergency Centre in Sydney, which provides emergency care for women escaping family and domestic violence, to men's health organisation Movember, our sector is urging the Federal Government to stop playing whack-a-mole with masculinity influencers, and regulate Big Tech to stop their systemic, pervasive influence through social media for good.

Because of this, Teach Us Consent has launched a campaign called #FixOurFeeds, asking the Government to make it so platforms have to give us a switch to turn algorithmic recommender systems on and off at will, and change the default — so social media platforms can't just serve us emotive and addictive content upon sign up, but instead they need to ask us whether we'd like our data mined to curate a personalised feed.

This would bring, for the first time in this way, affirmative and informed consent to our screens.

In addition to this being beneficial for any individual who wants to use the feature, we also believe it would be an effective parental tool for teens as they begin to use social media, or if they have gotten around the social media delay.

Together, we can Fix Our Feeds and address the systematic issues emerging from the manosphere in a nationally consistent way.

You can find out more about Fix Our Feed here .

Chanel Contos is the CEO and Founder of Teach Us Consent . She was the recipient of the Australian Human Rights Commission Young People's Medal in 2021, listed as one of the BBC's 100 inspiring and influential women worldwide in 2022, and named NSW Young Woman of the Year in 2023 for her persistent efforts towards eradicating rape culture.

Feature Image: Supplied.