“I wouldn’t say that around my mum,” the social media influencer HS TikkyTokky admits to Louis Theroux, after he has introduced a female friend at his Marbella pad as “the dishwasher, the cleaner”. “I’d get a slap.”
He has just said it in front of an audience of millions on Theroux’s Netflix documentary, Manosphere. But HS is right: when his mum turns up at the end of the programme, she does indeed disapprove of both his dirty floor and the way he talks about women.
“Most women in the world are not like my mum. Most are thick,” he explains. She raises her eyebrows, sighs, then turns on Theroux: “If you don’t agree with what Harrison’s doing, then why are you making money off of it on a programme by publicising it?” Touché. Leave my boy alone.
Manosphere is about men, yet they are the least interesting things about it. We know why HS – real name Harrison Sullivan, a Birmingham University dropout and convicted criminal – livestreams a woman giving him a blowjob, beats up a gay man and rants “[Jimmy] Savile’s your daddy, the Jews are your daddy” to Theroux. He does it because the attention economy rewards him for it, and teenagers mob him in the street.
Sullivan was recently banned from driving after crashing his McLaren in Surrey and fleeing abroad to evade justice. The police flew him home in a private jet because they were worried the public would recognise him. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor could only dream of this kind of treatment.
It gets much worse. Myron Gaines, the host of the Fresh & Fit podcast, yells “I dictate when I want to put dick in you, bitch! And women love guys like this!” Sneako, a recent convert to Islam, complains about women wearing too little and declares that Satanists are running the world, led by the non-binary singer Sam Smith. Gaines rants “Who pushed feminism? It was the fucking Jews. Who pushed homosexuality? The Jews.”
The Jews-gave-us-feminism conspiracy theory is a favourite of the far right US commentator Candace Owens, who claims that feminist Gloria Steinem was paid by the CIA as part of a communist-inspired psy-op. (I know what you’re thinking. Stay with me.) The aim was to persuade women to go out to work so as to tax households twice and subject children to government indoctrination while they were in daycare.
So far, so much American craziness. Except that Owens is married to George Farmer, an Oxford theology graduate who is on the board of GB News. Apple Podcasts makes Fresh & Fit freely available in the UK.
At the time of writing, HS TikkyTokky has gone on holiday to the Dominican Republic to find “tarts”, whom he streams with impunity on YouTube and Kick. The madness is closer than you think.
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Another of Theroux’s subjects, Justin Waller, is a self-improvement guru from Louisiana with a sideline in pushing crypto. He believes in “one-way monogamy” (translation: she’s faithful because she loves me, I sleep with whomever I like) and, as a former steel worker, likes to channel a Wild West vibe, straddling a Lamborghini like a horse. His suits bulge, the trappings of urban civilisation struggling to contain the biceps within. “Men invent, build, maintain society,” he tells Theroux, gesturing to the Miami skyline. “Nothing you can see here was built by a woman.”
Waller’s partner is pregnant with their third child. Gaines has a girlfriend. Both would like to have several wives one day. Both are too busy influencing to keep more than one on the hob right now. Theroux probes the women gently about whether they are happy with that idea.
Neither can quite bring themselves to object, but are visibly uncomfortable at the harem fantasy. Although it is nice, says Waller’s partner, not to have to get out of bed and go to work every morning: she feels “so good in my femininity because of how masculine Justin is” and likes the thought that other women find him attractive.
Does it bother one of the women who appears in HS’s livestreams that he disapproves of her OnlyFans jobs? No, she doesn’t care what other people think of her choices.
Theroux is right to keep asking these questions, because Manosphere is not really about how far these men have gone down the rabbit hole. Most of them already believe they are living in The Matrix. It is whether the women in their lives will push back against them, or roll over and make what money and sexual capital they can from it.
The men know this. When they look insecure, it is because they suspect they have not fully convinced women of their proper place in the world.
“He seemed to brood on our encounter,” Theroux observes, as HS rants to his followers that no old man from the MSM is going to fit him up. Owens, who says things like “You attacked natural masculinity”, is a heroine in this world because she is a beautiful, fertile woman who explains why feminists got it so wrong.
Would any of these delusions exist without Trump? Perhaps someone else would have articulated the rage these men feel at the way society has tried to contain their violence, their sexuality and the Ayn Randian ability to acquire and flaunt property.
But surely only Trump has pioneered a culture where they can say whatever the hell they want whenever the hell they want. If parts of the left have developed a troubling obsession with policing language on social media, these men have torn words and meaning completely asunder.
“Have I said in a clip fuck the Jews? Yes,” fulminates Sullivan. “Does that mean I’m antisemitic? No.”
The question is not whether these men have lost their minds. The question is whether women – and other men – will let them rebuild society in their image. “We are all increasingly in the manosphere, and it’s up to us how we get out,” says Theroux.
This is not quite true. Plenty of us are still looking on appalled. But there is no doubt that one side is up for the fight. Right now, the other is too aghast to know what to do.
Manosphere is on Netflix. Ros Taylor hosts the More Jam Tomorrow and Oh God, What Now? podcasts
