There’s a bluesy frame of Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary that saddened me more than I expected. During one of several interviews with the ostensible subject of the work, Harrison (aka HSTikkyTokky), the streamer’s pouty affect careens into a crash-out moment as he decides whether to chase clout on Netflix or preserve his brand identity (and possibly, his dignity). As many young men do, he goes on a tirade, professing that he’s everything the documentary will expose him to be: a bigot, a scofflaw, a sexist, a fool. He looks like a colicky baby verging on tears.

It’s petty defiance, and seems like a direct contrast to his messaging. As many old men do, he projects strength but his vulnerability betrays him. As his pupils glisten, you can see him start to touch the edges of his mortality, lodged between hard and soft sells of masculinity dreams. Harrison is a boy pretending to be a man, his muscles are the trenchcoat toddlers stacked for a trick, and his smile is the charm offensive that enamors teen loners, his main audience. The more he lashes out during his streamed rant, the weaker he looks. Although he believes that weakness will crater him, he appears doe-eyed and hurt, like the world he’s worked so hard to deceive and manipulate has crossed him anyway, left him for dead. For a flash, I wanted to hug him ‘til he choked on his own acid tongue.

Louis Theroux engages the spectacle, too, though. He wants to position a voice of reason in the three-ring circus but his shots and edits show more chaos than calm. At one point, as his subject and crew jump a man, Theroux jogs off, avoiding liability. Then he weasels back into the shot, asking Harrison and crew about what they hoped to do by inviting the man to party and then attacking him instead. Theroux then becomes a reflection of the subject because: what does he hope to accomplish by platforming the manosphere heroes? Where is his retreat line? The TikTok and Kick streamers challenge that reality and its shaky moral support beam.

I went on a men’s retreat to South America a few years ago. My cohort was small, but there was a tender, doe-eyed Gen Xer from my city alongside during the group excursions. We hiked long trails in the Ecuadorian countryside, talking about everything under the tree sap moon. His marriage was choppy and the kids were grown. He had a dead-end job and a fitness pursuit he was converting into a career of training. But he was sweet and kind and familiar with his own tears. Age does that to you, especially as a Black man. We often feel lucky to have survived past 30. On one of the opening nights, the Gen X guy took some psychedelics and walked a maze meant to give symbolic value to each treacherous life. Lined with cacti from the ancient soil, the only way to get through it, heavily weighed down by psilocybin mushrooms and trauma, was to take your brother’s hand. He got stuck midway. He didn’t want to hold anyone’s hand. So we let him cry and replied to his request for cold water. Soon, we were dumping buckets over his nude body as he wept. The heaves from his tears were so intense, I could see each of his abdominals as they folded into his rib cage.

We’d read bell hooks’ The Will To Change during a course before the retreat and this passage stood out to me:

“It’s not true that men are unwilling to change. It’s true that many men are afraid to change. It’s true that masses of men haven’t even begun to look at the ways that patriarchy keeps them from knowing themselves, from being in touch with their feelings, from loving. To know love, men must be able to let go of the will to dominate. They must be able to choose life over death. They must be willing to change.”

The men and boys of Theroux’s documentary seem lost, broken, ill-tempered, and confused, including the filmmaker himself. When pressed on the concept of genocide at the end, in the edit he included, he gets flustered. He doesn’t trust his own principles enough to issue a clear answer. Which makes sense. No one under the influence of patriarchy gets to absolve themselves from how boys get sacrificed and men get destroyed. But we’d all like to think we’re not part of the problem.