I see no hope for the future of our people if they are dependent on frivolous youth of today, for certainly all youth are reckless beyond words... When I was young, we were taught to be discreet and respectful of elders, but the present youth are exceedingly wise [disrespectful] and impatient of restraint.
~Hesiod, 8th century BC

Let's get one thing straight, right from the start. As long as there has been writing, cultural commentators have been asking, "Why are the young women suddenly promiscuous, and the young men suddenly violent (and so unlike us when we were young)?"

The basic answer has been, and always will be, twofold:

1. Bad memories
2. Hormones

However, beyond these basics, details vary. And the most crucial of these details is how we, the older generation, help young people mediate their hormonal surges through various cultural practices, norms, role models, opportunities, and so on.

As Neil Postman pointed out forty years ago, in Amusing Ourselves to Death, there are consequences to outsourcing cultural dissemination to entertainment-focused technologies, and some very specific dangers in allowing the education of the next generation to be carried out by attention-based economies. If TV tends to the condition of advertising (as Postman argues) then social media tends to the condition of toddlers throwing tantrums to get attention. And to an attention-seeker, whether that attention is good or bad really does not matter.

It is worth, at this point, briefly introducing a conceptual frame that will help make sense of what follows. In the 1970s, the anthropologists Beatrice and John Whiting drew attention to a spectrum along which human societies fall: the intimate and the aloof. In intimate societies, men and women get along—they can be friends, they share domestic work, and the men eat and sleep with the family. In aloof societies, men and women live largely separate lives, sex tends to be clandestine, coercive, or commercialised, and each sex develops elaborate myths about the other—typically with the opposite sex starring as the villain. We will return to this framework in detail later, because it turns out to be rather illuminating.

Spheres of Influencers

Which brings me to the Louis Theroux documentary Inside the Manosphere, which aired globally on Netflix on 11th March 2026. In it he aims to take us "with unparalleled access" inside the YouTubers, bloggers, and content creators who roughly form what some have termed the Red Pill community. These are male online influencers who use attention-seeking content on social media to sell things like cryptocurrency Ponzi schemes, lifestyle advice to young men, and (often) dubious fitness programmes.

At the same time, these content creators deliver themselves of everything from extreme views on gender roles, to totally wacky theories about satanic cults and Jewish conspiracies, to fairly humdrum dating advice. I say all this in preamble to remind people that, for all Louis Theroux's anxious head-tilting, lip-pursing, solemn music, and occasional anguished pleas to these men-children's better natures, much of their activities and aims are thoroughly mainstream. Alas. Theroux's conclusion that "we are all living in the manosphere" is true in a sense, but they did not make this world. The rest of us did, and it is high time we all grew up and took some responsibility for the next generation.

for all Louis Theroux's anxious head-tilting, lip-pursing, solemn music, and occasional anguished pleas to these men-children's better natures, much of their activities and aims are thoroughly mainstream.

For the uninitiated, "Red Pill" refers to a famous scene in the sci-fi film The Matrix, where the protagonist is offered the choice of remaining in blissful ignorance of the actual nature of the world, or taking a red pill and having his mind opened to the true nature of reality. The phrase tends to be used to signal a wake-up call—that whatever section of society you are appealing to has been hoodwinked, and is now being offered the chance to fight back. In the manosphere context it is loosely connected to beliefs ranging from ideas that the world is stacked against men, to some traditional views about masculine roles and ideals of stoicism, all the way to conspiracies involving (inevitably) aliens. And Jews. Always reliable, that one, left or right.

Theroux makes no distinctions between the various online male communities of incels (aka "involuntary celibates"), MGTOWs (aka "men going their own way"), pick-up artists (self-explanatory), and black-pillers (more extreme nihilistic red-pillers), which rather undermines his claims to be offering much insight, but we will return to these distinctions later.