Louis Theroux on toxic masculinity: 5 Stars

This Louis Theroux toxic masculinity documentary review lands right in the middle of one of the ugliest cultural battlegrounds online — and instead of preaching, it quietly exposes the ecosystem feeding it.

★★★★★ (5/5)

Into the swamp of culture Louis Theroux once again plunges.

This time the world of toxic masculinity.

It’s a great Netflix doco and I’ve always had an enormous amount of respect for his Gonzo style of stepping directly into personal space to observe and connect with people on their terms.

It’s gloriously awkward, highly entertaining and as insightful as you can get in 90 minutes.

The algorithm is raising a generation of lost boys

The male Influencers themselves and the new social media gig capitalism that drives them for ever more extreme content vs the reality of the women in their own lives who balk at the naked misogyny their son/partner have commercialised vs the admiration of many young men living in an online environment that hates them and any sense of masculinity.

It’s a self-feeding parasitic parasocial capitalism that rots away at male self esteem while promising masculinity.

I’ve been highly critical of Identity Politics since about 2016 when I saw first hand the rise of it. I initially called these middle class activists ‘Emerald Storm Troopers’ because many were Green staff members. It was apparent to me that Intersectional feminism and the hashtag outrage olympics that punished crimes against dogma would create be a terrible cultural backlash because no family in poverty were sitting around the kitchen table cancelling each other for misusing pronouns.

The working classes turned to the Left for answers to their economic pain and all we gave them was a lecture on pronouns.

The real danger of identity politics was what would happen if men started draping themselves in the same level of victimhood?

What if they stopped seeing themselves as citizens or as a class, and actually started seeing them in the strict terms of being a heteronormative white cis male?

Middle class woke activists made it clear they were now outside the tent and they ran straight into the broken masculinity on offer from online.

The synthetic confidence these influencers radiate is exactly what so many lost boys are starving for.

For many young men, looks-maxxing is exactly what they need to do in a generation of the selfie.

Lower education outcomes, more mental health issues, more violence, more incarceration, more replacement of jobs from AI, these are all rushing together to create a lost generation of citizens while producing shallow consumers.

We are culturally reaping what we have sown.

This didn’t come from nowhere — we built it

Remove baseline subsistence economic anxiety and watch young boys flourish into good men.

5 stars