The manosphere fakes can’t bear much reality

Illustration by David Foldvari

Have you ever had to endure someone reading to you from The Game? I have. I went to university in the 2010s, and during this time – and beforehand, at their schools – many men seemed deeply indebted to The Game, the Neil Strauss book about the mysterious art of seducing women. Strauss presented his book as a work of investigative journalism, uncovering and exposing the secret world of “pickup artists”, and passing their tricks and tips on to a generation of desperately horny suburban teenagers.

His instructions included: “selecting a target” (“a woman should be approached within three seconds of first seeing her. If you take longer, you’ll get nervous and she will think you’re a creep”), “never approach a woman from behind”, “recite a memorised opener”, “isolate the target” (“most women respond to routines involving tests, psychological games, fortune-telling, and cold-reading”) and “negging” (giving backhanded compliments to a woman in order to emotionally manipulate them into shagging you).

I’m sure all of these instructions seemed compelling to teenage boys when written down, but in real life, deployed by geography freshers with Roaccutane prescriptions, they were less convincing. A generation on, the same principle applies. This kind of primitive “manosphere” psychology might sound fine if it’s condensed into a bestselling book – The Game sold three million copies worldwide, 270,000 of which were in the UK – or edited into a YouTube video, or cut into Twitch clips, but reality is different. It’s almost sad, in a way.

This was what I kept thinking when I finally watched Louis Theroux’s recent manosphere doc, which focused on the natural end point of Strauss-enomics.

I had already seen videos of British boxer Ed Matthews berating his girlfriend, Big Brother contestant Elsa Rae, for being ugly and annoying. I had watched his mate HSTikkyTokky hyperventilate-laughing into his camera about OnlyFans girls being slags, and ranting about “accidentally” sleeping with transgender women in Thailand. Under the cleansing light of the Marbella sunshine, these things looked more revealing. Online these people are simply repugnant; in Theroux’s doc they were also pathetic, whining to their mums about juice bars and squirming in front of the cameras when pontificating about monogamy or boasting how many children they had or didn’t have in front of their girlfriends. Although online manosphere influencers can elicit cultish devotion from 12-year-old boys and horror from everyone else, seeing them outside of their gaming chairs only evokes secondhand embarrassment

Little wonder the Tate brothers, Andrew and Tristan, declined to appear in the documentary. Perhaps they feared that without the control of their own editing suite, they would be revealed as they truly are: camp and Versace-clad with chins so recessed I worry about their ability to fold sheets. Nonetheless, it’s a shame they didn’t partake: an exploration into the world of online misogyny doesn’t really work without its apex predator drag kings.

Although manosphere misogyny has real-world consequences – last summer new guidelines had to be introduced to British schools in an attempt to battle “incel” ideology infecting classrooms – it’s perhaps better to think of the laughable “stars” within that world in more reductive terms: as overgrown, slightly lost, amateur dramatic kids; SNL rejects who have retreated into the crevices of the internet. If the Theroux doc didn’t prove that, then consider a recent real-life holiday to Miami taken by some of the world’s most infamous incels. Last month “looksmaxxer” enfant terrible Clavicular, the far-right YouTuber Nick Fuentes, Andrew Tate and Sneako, whom Theroux also interviewed, took themselves to a nightclub just off the strip. Their clubbing videos make for difficult viewing.

It’s not just because they’re listening to Kanye West’s Heil Hitler and tentatively trying to rap along. It’s not just because they’re all in the shiniest suits known to man, flammable and incorrectly cut. It’s not just because Fuentes is strikingly diminutive when he comes out from behind his desk. It’s because they all seem so hopelessly awkward when confronted with the real, messy, drunk, hookup culture they claim dominion over. Despite their desperate attempts to cast themselves as conservative, traditionalist, masculine men, there’s a definite air of freshers’ week virgins about their journey via limo to the club. Fuentes seems thrown by the suggestion a girl might come over and speak to him. Sneako and Clavicular constantly glance over their shoulders in case bigger boys have a go at them.

Most of the fallout from Theroux’s documentary has focused – correctly to some degree – on the insidious influence such videos have on normalising misogyny and antisemitism. But not enough has focused on how silly it shows them all to be, and how that continues as their meltdowns beget more meltdowns. It might be worrying that your prepubescent son is learning about masculinity from these inadequates, but it’s also hard to take someone seriously when they’re saying women shouldn’t be able to vote while looking like they cried in senior year after not being cast as Kenickie in the school production of Grease.

The fakeness of manosphere machismo has even started to bleed through the confines of real, offline life and into the inner sanctum of their curated streaming schedules. Last week a friend of Clavicular’s, a man posting under the Marvel-esque name “Androgenic”, was brutally mocked on social media for wearing what appeared to be shoulder pads to make his frame look bulkier. It was the toxic masculinity equivalent of wellness “gurus” convincing you they lost weight with pilates and raw foods rather than an off-label GLP-1.

Because the manosphere men – Tate, HSTikkyTokky, Clavicular, the rest of the rogues gallery Therouxspent a Marbella summer with – are ultimately just tedious influencers. Whether they exist to sell us flat tummy teas and pickup artist manuals or to teach us that aliens built the pyramids and women are evil, influencers must be vaguely believable in order to do their job well. They have to be able to persuade us that we too can be cool, successful and popular if we simply follow the steps of the game, eat the protein bars, invest in their doomed cryptocurrency.

They have to be convincing enough in real life that they can make us believe that we can embody their values and do the same. Even with the greatest acting coaches in the world, however, the manosphere’s biggest stars will never seduce a live audience.