Our reporting from the Manosphere to Tehran — Two Very Different Frontlines

The Manosphere’s Hope Crisis & Exclusive Access Inside Iran

If you only started paying attention to the manosphere recently, you’d be forgiven for thinking it had appeared out of nowhere. Suddenly it’s everywhere.

Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary has made a major splash. The press is now talking about it more seriously. Online male loneliness, dating nihilism, looksmaxxing, rented intimacy, porn-addled subcultures and algorithmically accelerated misogyny are no longer fringe internet oddities. They are increasingly part of mainstream culture.

But the obvious reality is that this has been building for years. And at Zandland, we’ve been inside it for a long time. Our work has focused on spending time with the men inside these worlds. The influenced, as opposed to the influencers. Hearing how they think, what they fear, what they want, and what kind of story they have been sold about themselves and the world.

And as a consequence, we’ve got a unique perspective on this world. The manosphere is misogynistic. It is warped. It is often manipulative, self-pitying and at times dangerous.

But if you stop there, you miss something important. Underneath a lot of it is not just hatred.

It is a hope crisis.

What I’ve seen inside it

A few years ago, while making The Secret World of Incels, I met young men who had become convinced they were too ugly to ever be loved, that women were fundamentally dangerous, and that life was effectively over unless they won some brutal genetic lottery. In my Guardian piece at the time, I described a world of loneliness, isolation and extreme misogyny, where some men had become so radicalised they were frightened even to be in the same room as a woman.

That world has not disappeared. If anything, it has evolved.

Now the language is slicker, the aesthetics are better, the communities are bigger, and the pipelines into them are more efficient. Looksmaxxing gives men the fantasy that attraction is an equation. Another topic we explored in our documentary, The Secret World of Looksmaxxing.

Red-pill culture tells them relationships are power games. Certain corners of podcast culture teach them that empathy is weakness. And increasingly, the internet offers not just ideology, but simulation.

That is where our recent film Inside the Incels Who Rent Girlfriends came from.

The man at the centre of it, “T”, had spent £50,000 renting girlfriends. On the face of it, that sounds absurd. Maybe even funny. But the deeper we went, the darker it became. As Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian’s recent feature on our film, what emerged was not just loneliness, but a desire for a partner with no autonomy at all - someone who would never say no.

That, to me, is where this stops being a quirky internet story. Because what these spaces often produce is not simply men who feel rejected. It is men who have been taught that if they hit the right metrics, height, jawline, money, status, then intimacy is something they should be able to unlock. That they are entitled to.

And when real life refuses to behave like an app, a game or a fantasy, they don’t question the script.

They retreat further into it.

The simulation problem

The manosphere is not just a set of bad opinions.

It is a system for turning pain into ideology and then packaging that ideology as identity. It gives disoriented men a rulebook. A bad one, but a rulebook nonetheless. It tells them why they feel alienated. It tells them who to blame. It tells them how to interpret every rejection, every humiliation, every social failure.

And in a world where a lot of people feel adrift, that kind of structure is powerful. Even if it is poison. The internet is very good at this. It is very good at giving people a fake sense of mastery over things that are actually messy and human. Dating becomes “sexual market value”. Connection becomes “status”. Personality becomes “game”. Women become abstractions. And eventually even intimacy itself becomes transactional.

That is why renting a girlfriend, or building a relationship with an AI companion, is not some weird side-story. It is the logical endpoint of a culture that increasingly encourages people to replace the real with the manageable.

The girlfriend who never argues. The relationship that can be paused. The woman who only exists inside your preferred terms. The fantasy that never pushes back. And the more time people spend in those simulations, the less able they become to deal with real human complexity.

It’s also why our films on YouTube and across social platforms are reaching millions — and why more people are choosing to join the Zandland membership we’ve recently launched. Identifying these stories early, and engaging with the ideas behind them before they become mainstream, has real value.

Why we brought T back

One thing I’ve been thinking about recently is that documentaries are often quite good at diagnosing a problem, but much worse at staying with it long enough to ask what happens next.

So with our latest episode of The Zandland Show, we tried to do something slightly different.

After people watched the Rent a Girlfriend documentary, we brought T back to answer the audience’s questions directly. Not because I think one episode can solve something this big.

But because I wanted to see what happens when someone who has been shaped by these online worlds is forced into a more honest, uncomfortable, public conversation. And I think that matters.

Because if the manosphere is partly built on echo chambers, performance, and rehearsed scripts, then one possible way out is dialogue that breaks the script. Not all of it, magically. But enough to create friction.

Enough to make someone hear themselves differently. Enough to remind them that the internet is not the whole world. I’ve said this before, but I genuinely think very few people are irredeemable.

Some are dangerous. Some are deeply unpleasant. Some are too far gone. But a lot are adrift, ashamed, isolated, radicalised by repetition, and desperate for a story that explains their pain.

If better stories don’t reach them, worse ones will.

Why this is now massive news

Part of the reason this subject feels more urgent now is that the manosphere no longer sits neatly in one corner of the internet. Its ideas leak. They move from private forums into podcasts, group chats, dating culture, school playgrounds, everyday jokes and mainstream political language.

What was once fringe now shapes how a lot of young men think about women, power, masculinity and themselves. That is part of why our recent film has resonated so strongly.

It was covered by The Guardian this month, and it seems to have hit a nerve because people can feel that this is no longer some niche subculture for internet obsessives. It is part of the emotional weather now.

And at the same time, our Gooning documentary was unexpectedly picked up by The Daily Show, with the segment drawing millions of views and hundreds of thousands of likes across social platforms. Strange as that is, it also proves something useful: what once looked niche is now plainly mainstream.

The internet’s strangest corners do not stay in the corners anymore. They become culture.

Meanwhile, the physical world is still on fire

One thing I’m very conscious of at Zandland is not letting internet culture coverage become the whole picture. Yes, we are interested in the digital underground.

But we are also interested in the physical world, the places where politics, violence and power are felt in brutally concrete ways.

That is why I’m proud that Zandland has recently partnered with ITV News on a piece from inside Tehran, built around the testimony and footage of an Iranian filmmaker documenting life during the war at enormous personal risk. It’s a first-person account from the first ten days of the conflict, the filmmaker’s identity is protected and voice altered using AI because, if caught, there would be serious consequences.

To me, these things are not unrelated. Whether we are talking to a man who has disappeared into synthetic intimacy, or working with people documenting life under bombardment and repression, the underlying question is often the same:

what happens to human beings when the systems around them become distorted, violent, alienating or unreal?

That question is broad enough to include the manosphere.

And it is also broad enough to include war.

This report was a first for us, a news collaboration that lives on the Zandland YouTube internationally, and on the ITV channel in the UK.

A quick note on this newsletter

You may have noticed there was a gap last week.

We’re currently rethinking the strategy behind this newsletter a bit, because I want it to become sharper, more useful and more distinctive, less of a recap machine, and more of a place where I can properly unpack ideas, patterns and the thinking behind what we’re making.

So consider this issue a bit of a bridge.

A dispatch from the middle of that rethink.

And also a reminder of what Zandland’s role is:

not just making documentaries, but trying to map the strange overlap between the internet, power, culture, conflict and the stories people are using to survive.

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Ben Zand