Felix Hardinge

Louis Theroux, the Lib Dem Alan Whicker, has now had his turn at the manosphere. His new Netflix film Inside the Manosphere has gone down more or less as you would expect: clippable footage of insecure men, prompted along by Theroux’s trademark awkward questioning. But none of this is especially difficult. The men he films are not master manipulators or especially complex abusers. For the most part, they are self-evidently ludicrous. Their appeal lies less in intellectual depth than in the escapism they offer: flash cars, rented glamour, semi-professional girlfriends, and the chance for losers to live vicariously through a fantasy of sexual and social dominance. It is a show-don’t-tell medium.

In recent years a popular assumption has arisen in Britain that we are a nation of ‘curtain twitchers’ with an affinity for petty authoritarianism. This claim is usually supported by issue-specific polling: historic support for ID cards, contemporary backing for lockdowns, public health interventions such as smoking restrictions, or proposals to ‘Keep Children safe online’. I suspect that it is partly because of this narrative that Keir Starmer and the people around him believe that he can even entertain the banning social media platforms like X, breaking from liberal democracies like Canada (who ruled it out) and joining a club with Iran, Russia and China.