I watched Louis Theroux's manosphere documentary. Here's what stayed with me.

And why I put together a cheat sheet for the dads in my life.

There's a scene early in Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere — now streaming on Netflix — where a group of young men stop in the street to tell one of these influencers that he's their role model. Their inspiration. They mean it. They're not performing for the camera.

That's the moment that got me.

Not the misogyny, though that's present and it's ugly. Not the posturing or the Bugattis or the Dubai hotel suites. It was those young men on the pavement — earnest, searching, lost — handing their sense of themselves over to someone who is, at base, a salesman.

I've been thinking about that scene ever since.

What the documentary is actually about

Louis Theroux does what he does — quiet, gently relentless, allowing people enough rope — as he moves through the world of online male influencers: the Harrison Gaines and the Sneakos and the Myrons, the Andrew Tate wannabes with their courses and their "alpha" philosophies and their armies of lonely young men paying for the promise that the world finally makes sense.

It's uncomfortable viewing. In some ways it's chilling. The critics are right that Theroux doesn't go deep enough — that it raises more questions than it answers, that women's voices are largely absent, that 90 minutes can't really hold a phenomenon this large.

But I didn't need it to be a comprehensive sociological study. What it did — and did well — was put a face to something I talk about with clients almost every week.

These men and boys are not stupid. They're not broken beyond repair. They are lonely. They are rudderless. And in the absence of anyone showing them what healthy, grounded, emotionally alive manhood looks like, they found someone who filled the gap. Even if what he was selling was a fantasy. Even if the cost was their dignity, their relationships, and in some cases their money.

Young men are lost. They are in desperate need of role models that they can look up to. Men like Andrew Tate filled up this void because no one else has stepped up. That's from an IMDB review, and I'm not going to argue with it.

How did we get here?

This is the question I keep sitting with. And it doesn't have a single answer — but some threads are clearer than others.

Boys are growing up in a world that has, rightly, done a lot of work to expand what girlhood can look like. We've poured energy into telling girls they can be anything, that strength is theirs, that ambition is theirs. We've largely done the right thing there.

But we haven't done the same work for boys. We've mostly left the story of boyhood — what it means, what it looks like to become a good man — to chance. Or to the algorithm.

Boys receive far less emotional language from their parents than girls do, almost from birth. They grow up in a narrative universe of combat and winners and losers, with almost no stories modelling how to be a person in relationship with other people. They're taught, by a thousand small signals, that needing help is shameful. That vulnerability is weakness. That the only emotion with any social permission is anger.

And then we wonder why, when someone comes along and gives them a simple, certain story — this is what a man is, this is what you're owed, this is why you're struggling and who to blame — they lean in.

Many followers drawn into the manosphere share similar developmental wounds: chaotic or absent fathers, emotionally unavailable parents, and a deep uncertainty about what healthy masculinity actually looks like.

That's not an excuse. But it is an explanation. And explanations matter if you want to change something.

What I believe

I work with adults — often fathers — who are trying to figure out who they are and how to show up differently. And the conversation almost always, eventually, comes back to early life. To what they were given, or weren't. To the moments of connection or absence that shaped them.

The good news — and there is good news — is that the pattern isn't fixed. You can interrupt it. And the place to interrupt it is early. At home. In the ordinary, unremarkable, daily moments that don't feel like they count.

Here's what I keep coming back to: the men most susceptible to the manosphere's appeal are men who grew up without emotional language. Without permission to be uncertain. Without an adult in their life who modelled that asking for help is strength, not failure. Without a story that showed them a version of manhood worth aspiring to.

You can give boys that story. It doesn't require grand gestures. It requires presence.

What you can actually do

A few days ago I put together a cheat sheet for the fathers in my client community — a simple, printable guide called What Your Boy Needs From You. Not a parenting manual. Not a lecture. Just the things the research keeps coming back to, translated into plain language for real people in real life.

Some of what it says:

Presence is the whole point. Not quality time versus quantity time. Just time. Being in the room. Being interested. Putting the phone down. Boys don't need grand gestures — they need a father who keeps showing up for the small things, because the small things are how they learn they matter.

Name what he's feeling — and what you're feeling. Boys get far less emotional language from their parents than girls do, almost from birth. You can change that. "You look really frustrated." "That felt scary, didn't it?" And say it about yourself too: "I felt sad when that happened." A father doing that is one of the most powerful things a young boy ever hears.

How you repair matters more than whether you get it right. You will lose your temper. You will be too tired. You will get it wrong. That's not the failure — the failure is not repairing it. When you go back and say I got angry and I shouldn't have — I'm sorry, you teach him that relationships can hold difficulty, that men can admit fault, and that rupture isn't the end. That is a profound, life-shaping lesson.

Your home is his reference point. No matter what messages arrive from the world — from peers, from screens, from men promising certainty on the internet — what your son comes back to is the story your home tells him about what men are. Make that story one of warmth, presence, and the courage to be honest about what you feel. You don't need to fix the world. You need to build something in him that's sturdy enough to meet it.

It doesn't matter what's happening out there. What matters is what you give him in here.

Download the cheat sheet

I'm making What Your Boy Needs From You available as a free download. It's two pages, printable, and written for fathers — though honestly, it's useful for anyone who has a boy in their life they care about.

Download the cheat sheet — What Your Boy Needs From You

If you watch the Theroux documentary and feel that unsettled, what-do-we-do feeling — this is one answer. Not the whole answer. But a real one, starting where it matters most.

Adrian Melrose works with individuals and groups through Plain Talk Matters and 8Notes. If this post landed, share it with someone who needs it.