“I coach boys how to be fucking boys,” says streamer HsTikkyTokky when we first meet him in Louis Theroux’s latest Netflix documentary, Inside the Manosphere. “How to make money, how to be outside the system, how to not have a boss telling you what to do. I teach guys how to be proper guys, not these little soy boys, these gimps that walk around in the modern day.” He’s holding court in his white villa in Marbella, Spain, surrounded by a small team of employees, security, a contest winner-turned-member of his inner circle, and a beautiful young blonde woman he refers to as his “dishwasher” who spends most of her time giggling and looking at her phone.
It’s an ethos we see repeated throughout the documentary, but what does it really even mean? In the case of HsTikkyTokky, in practical terms, it means promoting his Telegram group, through which he promotes OnlyFans models (despite despising them) and shady “financial products” he positions as a cheat code to success in a world out to get men.
There is something surprisingly familiar about this dynamic. We’ve seen it all before, this idea that you have to hustle and make tons of money to escape the system, that you have to be your own boss. It’s precisely the attitude that the “girlbosses” of the 2010s taught women.
The girlboss, of course, is dead. She has been for a while. For a time, the girlboss seemed like a figure that could help elevate all women. She seemed like a quintessential example of “having it all.” But once the impossibility of this was revealed, when it became clear that all of this was really only about personal gain, we began calling for their heads. The culture successfully decapitated the high-strung, high-powered female figure willing to do anything to achieve what the corporate world called success, with women like Sophia Amoruso who popularized the term “girlboss” fading away from popularity. Such was the failure of girlboss feminism: it was fundamentally unachievable without hurting the people around you, and did little in the way of liberating women or improving their lives.
Still, the ideas that fueled this misguided era of feminism—that financial achievement is a fundamental marker of success, that hustle culture and individual empowerment are the goal, rather than collective liberation— persist. Only now it’s the Manosphere carrying that torch.
The documentary highlights the ways in which these men—influencers including Andrew Tate, Clavicular, and Myron Gaines—desire to be everything all at once. They want to be rich and successful but don’t want to hold a job. They want to have a woman at home to cook and clean and bear their children but still want to live a bachelor lifestyle and sleep around without consequences. Above all, though, they want to feel like an alpha male while playing the role of a misunderstood victim.
There are countless moments in the documentary that relay this attitude. There’s the scene where Justin Whaller protracts his clarification of how many children he has, as though he’s some international bachelor fathering unknown quantities of babies worldwide (When Theroux asks him if he knows how many kids he has, he responds vaguely “I think so, yeah…”) when in reality he has the normalcy of a quasi-wife and two children at home. Then there’s Gaines swearing up and down he lives a life of one-sided polyamory, on a path toward multiple wives, and folding entirely under the presence of his kind girlfriend. And of course, there’s HsTikkyTokky trying to explain away the inconsistencies of profiting off loathing the adult industry and still functionally participating in it.
Part of their “having it all” mentality instills that they can say whatever they want without either believing their words or even truly living by them. “So many people who take absolutely everything I’ve said in that documentary at face value and don’t have the brain cells to comprehend that maybe I say things and do things for a reaction because it makes me money and allows me to live this lifestyle,” HS said in response to the backlash around his appearance on the documentary, a move straight from the girlboss playbook. He wishes to live in a world where all actions are forgiven so long as they are in pursuit of the dollar. The girlboss could manipulate, lie, cheat, undermine and abuse, if she did so in order to level up in a male-dominated industry (hence the popularity of the phrase “gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss”).
The real failing of girlboss feminism, though, is that it encouraged women to participate wholly in a patriarchal, capitalistic system, rather than to dismantle it. This type of feminism argued (rightfully) that women deserved career and financial power, but (wrongly) seemed to agree that since men held that power, you had to act like the men who had it in order to get power yourself. HS and his peers see themselves similarly: all moral failings are actually necessary for their survival in what they see as a now female-dominated society, one in which they must subvert traditional ethics in order to “make it.”
Both ideologies hinge on an alignment with the status-quo presented as something radical, a way of circumnavigating a series of hurdles before you. They also both used aesthetics to sell their beliefs. For the girlboss, that was a sexily tailored pantsuit and the expensive-looking cream-and-millennial pink interiors of Audrey Gelman’s The Wing co-working spaces. For the Manosphere, it’s muscular forearms with a Rolex attached, driving a high-end sports car. Both promoted their ideology as some sort of alternative path to success, but success in each case looked entirely similar to what we probably imagined as a child, like the adult version of Richie Rich.
The obvious caveat to the comparison between the two is that the Manosphere explicitly encourages violence, hatred, and anger, often targeted at women and minorities. Its members discuss women as less-than-human, and some of its stars have violent charges against them. For all the critiques of girlboss feminism, at least this type of explicit antagonism wasn’t present. You don’t hear Sheryl Sandberg saying gay people should be put in concentration camps. Telling women to “lean in” in the workplace is not the equivalent of Myron Gaines saying the majority of women are “retarded.”
Here lies another tie: Sandberg got her platform by doing well in school, attending Harvard, earning a job at Google, building a reputation for herself in her industry and becoming Chief Operating Officer of Meta. Many would argue that the Manosphere emerged in response to more women in the workplace, specifically. Embedded in their “grind culture” is the idea that the sort of path Sandberg took has become unavailable to men because women like Sandberg take it. Men like Andrew Tate, who is not featured in the doc but is mentioned repeatedly as one of the patriarchs of the movement, believe that the only path to success for them now is to subvert all this and make a killing as a streamer shilling dubious trading advice. They present it like it’s a hack, a secret way forward that only the elite men will pursue, allowing them to feel like the real alpha males in a sea of sheep. But in order for any of this to work, for them to have anything to talk about on their podcasts, they must also tell men that they are like a lamb encircled by a pack of female wolves. In order to sell memberships into “masculinity” Discord servers and stock trading groups, they must first sell men on the idea that they are misunderstood victims that everyone is out to get.
This ideology remains widely attractive to young men, perhaps because they do face struggles unique to their gender and generation. The rates of suicide and deaths of despair, the reported loneliness and friendlessness, the declining education attainment and economic prospects—these are not problems to scoff at. The Manosphere isn’t wrong in highlighting these problems. They are wrong, however, in believing that their ideology is the solution.
Some argue that the Manosphere entices young men by being sympathetic to these issues; on the flip side, they call men who don’t ascribe to this specific brand of masculinity pussies—weak and stupid losers whose moms hate them and who will never amount to anything. For many young men, however, the Manosphere presents itself as a “way out” of the problems they face without doing any of the real, structural and emotional work required. It is attractive because it is easy.
Whether or not Inside the Manosphere aimed to dismantle this lie, that’s what it’s doing. Both in the documentary itself, where Theroux carefully allows its subjects to unravel their own fabrications simply by talking, and now in its response, where the subjects are devoting hours attempting to smear Theroux’s reputation and clear their own, it appears the jig is up. At the end of girlboss feminism was the revelation that many of these businesses were not nearly as successful or sustainable as they originally appeared to be. Elizabeth Holmes, founder of the company Theranos, was once a girlboss. Now she’s in federal prison for defrauding investors on bloodwork technology that never actually worked.
Ultimately girlboss feminism didn’t do a lot to help most women, like the Manosphere won’t uplift most men. Both offer a politically empty ethos, the equivalent of digging our heels in. One created a generation of pantssuit obsessed women hellbent on the corner office, while the other is fostering a face-hammering hierarchy of hate and digital alienation. What they share, though, is the belief that we can hustle to a place at the top, a place where we’ve escaped all the problems that plague our gender. The corporate ladder is now a Kick ranking.
