Mocking the Manosphere is Mocking Myself
Is the thoughtful compassionate contemplative brand really any different?
This week I watched Louis Theroux’s recent Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere. It drops us into a world where masculinity is an entirely curated performance, optimized for social media clicks, and sold to other desperate young men as the holy grail they’ve always been looking for. Theroux walks among men who have learned to shape their identity into a marketplace where dominance becomes the primary product, intimacy is nothing more than leverage, and attention is the currency.
The logic is brutally sad but simple: if you can sell, you can win.
Out of all the wild absurdities, there’s one statement by influencer Harrison Sullivan that was a splinter I couldn’t remove:
“Sales is the most important skill you can have. You’re never gonna be ultra successful if you can’t sell.”
As best I can tell, that’s the foundation of the entire manosphere philosophy—its anthropology.
Nothing is inherently meaningful. It only matters if it can be converted into clicks, subscriptions… sales.
In that world, women are part of the metric system—objects to conquer. Sex becomes clout, proof of one’s legitimacy. Then there’s the strategically placed outrage, fights, and muscle-building.
Just like many of us in the world of spirituality, they use the language of awakening. The “red pill,” borrowed from The Matrix—gets hollowed out and repurposed. It’s not about liberation of the soul, but a safe rebrand for the lonely, emasculated dude. It doesn’t matter if it’s true. It only matters if it’s compelling enough to sell
I’ll be honest, I got a little bored watching this documentary.
Not because it isn’t disturbing, but because it’s almost too easy to point out the ridiculousness. These guys are cartoonish caricatures—the Lamborghinis and lifted trucks, the shirtless gym bros, the loud and extreme misogyny. It’s all so television-ready and easy to critique from a safe distance.
What the documentary doesn’t seem to grasp is that this machinery isn’t some new phenomenon, and it isn’t contained within that weird, square-jawed world of celebrated a-holes.
It hums just as strongly in quieter, more respectable environments… like ours.
Not the obvious performers, but the seemingly compassionate and reflective ones. Like me. The ones who would never identify as “alpha male,” but still feel the subtle pull to curate a self that is admirable, wise, and grounded. My temptation is to be seen as the kind of man who has transcended needing to be seen.
Aaaand… it’s all just another form of performative salesmanship.
Go ahead and examine some of my spiritual influences like Jean Vanier in the Catholic service world, or the evangelical author Philip Yancey, or newly complicated social justice icon Cesar Chavez—men I once emulated who now give me serious pause with a sour stomach. These are my mirrors, reminding me that moral goodness, justice work, and compassion can be quietly recruited into the same self-constructed projects of image, power, and capital.
The sobering reality…
A more thoughtful, benevolent brand… is still a brand for show and tell.
A more palatable identity… is still a construct for the sake of subscribers.
A holier performance… is still just a performance—another song and dance in hopes of upgrading the home appliances.
Maybe that all starts to sound a little too Ecclesiastes.
The disturbing question to be wrestled with here is this one:
What is a man outside of sex, conquest, and achievement?
For real.
What is a man who earns no paycheck? Or one who remains single, celibate, and unimpressive? Who is culturally unmarketable?
What would happen if we actually allow those questions to fully destabilize us?
It’s questions like those that expose just how much of masculinity—across the spectrum—is built on productivity and output. What of the man who isn’t able-bodied? Who doesn’t have the IQ or charisma to compete?
And we wonder about the rise in male loneliness, tribal extremism, and suicide?
The entire consumer oriented framework we’ve been force fed is a dead end.
When the scoreboard goes dark and there’s no more comparison, no applause, no metrics, no money—something primal starts screaming from the gut…
Do I even matter?!?
If I’m not making an impression—a significant dent in this world—do I even exist?
Strip it all away. The performance. The platform. The carefully curated LinkedIn profile.
What remains then?
If I’m honest, there remains part of me that still answers: meh not much.
This is the ache I recognize—not just in the loud, distorted corners of the manosphere, but in myself. In the subtle ways I still try to earn my place and justify my existence as someone who matters.
Maybe those men in the documentary aren’t just outliers to point at and dismiss.
Maybe they’re carrying, in exaggerated form, the same insecurities and existential questions the rest of us suppress and pretend don’t exist.
And if that’s true, then mocking Pete Hegseth will only deflect and delay our own distinct walk toward wholeness. Outperforming our younger selves won’t heal us. I don’t believe we simply outgrow this.
There’s a truth so few of us trust:
That you are seen and loved so fully and wholly in the very ordinary, unimpressive now of right now. Your income, your insight, and even your integrity—none of it hinges on the reality of your unexplained and unconditional state of belovedness.
Out beyond conceptions of sex, conquest, and achievement, a man is someone who learns to recognize that he is already held. Out beyond all the proving, performing, and producing, he belongs. Held there in all the terrible not-yet, and incomplete, and unfinished—with no need for recognition or demand to become someone better.
Just…held. I can hear the manosphere pointing and sneering at me now, just like I tend to point and laugh at the shallow lives of those dudes in the documentary.
Our heart knows. Beneath the laughter and judgment is a deeper soul knowledge that our foundational belovedness is true—and that we don’t know what to do with that truth.
Being a man isn’t about finally believing it. It’s about being willing to live it as if it were true regardless.
Yes, it is a consumer-oriented view and it functions inside the profit-oriented system that shapes our lives. We have been conditioned to equate wealth with success, winning with truth, performance with "what it takes" and progress with increased control over others. In such a world -- as you suggest -- the poor, the sick, the mentally ill, the visible addicts and those who are variously disabled are, quite simply, the Losers. I have rarely encountered anyone, male or female, who has successfully pried themselves lose from profit-oriented logic who has not experienced a significant crisis -- a diagnosis, death, divorce, professional failure, critical injury, natural disaster, bankruptcy, violent attack, unveiling of secret obsessions -- any of these can (but doesn't always do) lead to a reassessment of what success, truth and integrity are really about. And what does that tell us about values we swim around in?
Lovely. Your point reminds me of Eckhart Tolle's premise in "A New Earth," with regards to needing to strip away layers of ego. We are worthy of life because we are alive. Being is enough. Nice work!