The Manosphere and Looksmaxxing
The Emma Guns Show
Emma Gunavardhana
4.8 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2026
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This weekend was all about the Manosphere after I watched Louis Theroux's documentary Inside the Manosphere and read Jack Burke's piece in The Times on Looksmaxxing. Both of these phenomena focus on male-dominated online spaces that veer to the far right with extreme misogynistic and anti-feminist sentiments. They are two pieces of media that really made me think and I've unpicked, in part, why in my latest Substack, which you can subscribe to and read here.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, hi, welcome to another episode of The Emma Gunn Show. What an absolute pleasure to be |
| 0:13.3 | spending this time with you. Thanks for tuning in. You know how much I appreciate it. So in this |
| 0:18.2 | episode, it is just me. We're back to just me. But I wanted to talk about |
| 0:23.2 | a couple of things that I have seen over the weekend. And that is the Louis Theroux documentary |
| 0:32.8 | called Inside the Manosphere. And then subsequently something that I think I'd heard about but hadn't |
| 0:39.0 | really tuned into a lot, which is looks maxing, which was an article and a podcast published by |
| 0:45.3 | the Times over the weekend that talks about men and this thing called looks maxing. You can either |
| 0:52.4 | soft max or you can half max, and we'll talk about that in a second. |
| 0:56.2 | But I was quite late to the inside the Manosphere game, if you like, |
| 1:01.7 | because I had been seeing lots of friends sharing, |
| 1:05.7 | they had watched it on Instagram stories, |
| 1:07.9 | just sort of almost aghast at what they had witnessed |
| 1:10.5 | and quite shocked by what they had witnessed and quite shocked |
| 1:12.4 | by what they had seen and how these men are conducting themselves online. And I suppose I |
| 1:21.4 | didn't have the same reaction because I wasn't shocked because I kind of knew it was happening and I think it is brilliant |
| 1:30.1 | that so many people are now aware of how this is showing up online so the manosphere the documentary |
| 1:37.8 | louis the roo was going and interviewing um these these men who occupy the manosphere. |
| 1:47.3 | And actually, the one who seemed to enjoy the attention the most was, |
| 1:51.6 | I actually don't even want to say the name. |
| 1:53.3 | Oh, but anyway, some way they called HS Tiki-Toki, |
| 1:57.1 | which just sort of for me says everything. |
| 1:59.5 | But anyway, but Louis Theru had said that he described |
... |
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