Episode 560 Promo - Inside The Manosphere (w/ Magdalene J. Taylor)

0:00I think at one point, he compares one of the men to Bonnie Blue, who is an adult film actor or only fans, I guess you would say, more model person, who is famous for having sex with mini, mini, mini, like hundreds of men on camera at once. And the guy bulks. Like he's like, what we're doing is not the same. Don't compare me to Bonnie Blue. She's horrible. And he's like, well, I'm not saying you're literally doing the same thing, but isn't there something performative and you're selling yourself, you're selling your body, you're selling your image, and the men absolutely reject that idea. Completely. I very much see, you know, Bonnie Blue as as a parallel to these figures. And I've written before that Bonnie Blue is like the Mr. Beast of the adult industry in that she is always, she's monetizing these stunts basically. They're all sexual stunts that she's doing. And the headlines of those stunts are really what is driving attention to her. But the cognitive dissonance of these men and the documentary,

1:05I think, is really part and parcel of their overall thing. They really have this mentality of having it all that they can, you know, be the alpha male, but they can still be a victim in society that, you know, they can say whatever they want without having to actually face consequences for it. And basically that they get to live in a world, you know, free of any of the confines or boundaries of ethics or logic, really. Yeah. Do you think this documentary was fundamentally successful? I do. I think that the response that it's generated from the people involved in the documentary since has made it a big success. And I don't think that anybody has come out of, you know, watching the documentary and then seeing the way that people have reacted to it,

2:07following its release, you know, the people involved have looked at any of this and thought that these guys look good. I would say that I'd love to hear a story of, you know, like, oh, I'm, you know, I'm a 15 year old man and I watched this documentary and now I don't think this is cool anymore. I don't know if that's happening. I don't know if, you know, it's been a success in achieving, I think it's aims of highlighting the inconsistencies of this culture and the harms of this culture. And it's been a success in upsetting its subjects in a way that I think further has further kind of taken them down a notch. They don't look to be the, you know, the cool calm collected alpha male that they want to be anymore. But it's totally possible that all of this is just occurring within a bubble and that the people who love these men will continue to love these men, defend these men and think that, you know, thorough is some kind of deep state

3:13trying to make them look bad type of, you know, whatever they say so many bad things about him within the documentary. They say that he's a pedophile and things that are just fundamentally untrue. He does kind of just fit him against a pedophile charge because the irony, so the reason that happens is that they, they apparently do like stings on pedophiles. They have their own little version of Chris Hanson's to catch the predator. And so when Thoreau, who's, you know, and his, I don't know, late 40s, early 50s or something, salt and pepper guy, is seen standing on the street filming with one of these characters, random onlookers are like, oh, a pet, a pet out, you know, and, and the guy's like, no, no, no, chill like, you know, he's, yeah, this is Louis Thoreau. He pronounces it, you know, but he's no pet out and then Lewis is like, thank you. Thank you. I'm sorry, I'm having my bad, but that's part of the dynamic. So there is this meta thing that emerges where various characters in the documentary will submit to being interviewed by Thoreau,

4:14and then they, after the fact, are clearly anxious about how they're coming off. So because a documentary is delayed, right, post-production, and their means of interacting with the world is by livestream, they're constantly doing real time efforts to PR manage, whatever fallout from Thoreau's framing and the documentary is going to be. And then Thoreau, as he's putting together the documentary, is seeing them respond to parts that will be in the documentary later, and then we'll include that in his film, and it's this weird sort of generative portrait of what frankly is their deep insecurity about how they're viewed. And there's a weird irony to how frantic they get about the lack of control over the final product. When frankly, there is not a tonic control, I mean, they do have some control in the streaming realm, but there's a lot of vulnerability in doing a live show and streaming live. And I think that the control that they have is

5:16who comes on their stream. And again, like I was leading to before, the uniformity of sort of perspective that happens in these spaces, but they panic when it's a produced thing that happens in an environment that they have to know exists where their opinions are in no way mainstream, and they can get, they can get skewered, as they think they did. Yeah. They seem to be unaware of what a documentary is and how the fact that Thoreau is not going to detail an hour and a half long conversation with Myron Gaines and make that, you know, an uncut part of the documentary, it's interesting in particular how they, you know, accuse him of being overly selective and building a false narrative based on the way that he's cut the documentary when that is also fundamentally what they do in their streams by clipping viral moments. And there's no context to that, but that's essentially their bread and butter is these

6:23completely contextless viral clips from their several hour long streams. So it's, you know, another sweet little inconsistency that they live. I will say to this question of whether was successful, I did find myself, I had two competing thoughts. One was only Thoreau could do this. Only someone demographically like Thoreau could do this. You or I, if we were to enter those spaces with a professional camera studio set up and sit down to interview these men, I do wonder if they would have engaged with us with a level of respect and frankly deference that they often met through it. And this seems to me to be part and parcel of a trend, which is a absence of male authority figures in their lives. All, if not most of not all of the men featured in this documentary had their fathers were in their lives. The young kids that they interviewed were fans

7:31of the show, and particularly these two young men that they encountered, I think, in the streets of Miami, who throw interviewed at length about why it was that they found some of these guys so appealing. All spoke to a lot of childhood trauma, financial precarity, one young man's brother had committed suicide relatively recently. And in that context, what begins to emerge is a portrait of people who, even as Thoreau is coming in as sort of an obvious critic of their lifestyle. They're solicitous of his approval. It felt like they wanted him to validate on some level how they were living their lives. If you'd like to hear more, remember you can subscribe at patreon.com slash bad faith podcast for five dollars a month to get our full back catalog of episodes with some sweet sweet stuff. Keep the faith.