Andrew Tate’s not the only man missing from Theroux’s manosphere doco

April 12, 2026 — 5:00am

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There’s a character missing from Louis Theroux’s Inside The Manosphere documentary, and it’s not Andrew Tate.

Much has been written about Theroux’s probe into the world of the content creators who sell manhood to a generation of dislocated boys. Whether these meditations centre on the missing character or glide over him tells you a lot about the author – and even more about their cultural politics.

Because the missing man is the father. The fathers of each of the interviewees. The fathers of their audiences. The absence forces viewers to grapple with the idea of the father as a key contributor to the development of a child.

Theroux’s documentary is a patchy experience. The filmmaker becomes a character to a degree that even celebrity documentarians try to avoid. He is not sure how to be on the sidelines of this world of misogyny, antisemitism and “paedophile hunting”, which turns into a gay bashing.

His subjects, used to controlling the image they put into the world, are not sure how to handle an outside camera usurping their ability to edit and shape it. They joke about the situation uncomfortably. They turn their cameras on him. They vacillate between hamming it up for the documentarian and seemingly genuinely wanting to be understood.

Nonetheless, valuable insights emerge. First, regarding the content creators’ relationships to women. For all the men boast........

© Brisbane Times