Actor and activist Jameela Jamil recently appeared in a podcast, where she talked about the central premise driving much of today’s online male identity content. Rather than accepting the idea that women are naturally resistant to authority and men are naturally in charge, she argued the opposite is closer to the truth.
“If women were naturally submissive they would have been submitted by now,” she said in a recent clip from the podcast. “God knows we have taken every measure to make women just obey and they just keep like the terminator getting back up and fighting again and again and again.”
From there, she pivoted to what she considers the underexamined side of that same history.
“If anything patriarchy has conditioned men to be more submissive because men will fall in line,” she said. “Men do exhibit discipline much more so than women.”
This is not a flattering portrait, and it is not meant to be. Jamil is not praising male compliance. She is using it to dismantle a narrative that has gained significant traction across social media platforms and podcast circuits, one that frames men as natural leaders held back by a feminized culture.
She pointed to military enlistment as her clearest example. “Men will sign up into armies more willingly than women when they’re not conscripted,” she said. “They will sign up to be part of ICE whereas it takes so much violence, both emotional, physical and psychological, upon women to even try to get them to submit and these keep getting back up.”
Men, she suggests, have been socialized to accept institutional authority with relatively little resistance, while women have historically required far more systemic coercion to fall into line, and even then, have often found ways around it.
Jamil also acknowledged the manosphere directly, noting that she has watched enough of its content to recognize a recurring frustration at the center of it.
“I’ve seen countless manosphere podcasts talking about how we just cannot train these h*es,” she said.
That frustration, she implies, actually supports her argument. If female submission were natural or easy, there would be nothing to complain about. The complaint itself is evidence that it is neither.
Documentary filmmaker Louis Theroux arrived at some related conclusions. Speaking on the podcast On with Kara Swisher, Theroux reflected on years spent studying the manosphere and the young men drawn into it.
“I’m not a fan of the casual disparagement of men,” he said. “I think men do struggle.” He pointed especially to the social dimension, a challenge he sees as underappreciated. “One has to be wary of generalizing about gender, but I think there’s real truth in the idea that men struggle with the social aspect of life, making social arrangements, going out and seeing friends, being connected, catching up with people.”
He described a tendency toward withdrawal that he views with some recognition.
“There’s some truth in the cliché that we want to go into the garage and reorganize our collection of screws and bolts and not necessarily feed our souls in the way that we need to,” he said. “I’m all in favor of the caretaking of men. That absolutely should be a priority for the culture.”
But Theroux drew a firm line between recognizing those struggles and endorsing what the manosphere offers as a solution. “At the same time, it’s no excuse for what they’re saying,” he said. “But they’re filling in a gap. They’re saying here’s the answer to that.” The answer, as he sees it, tends to be hollow. “They’re filling the void with cigars and cars and this and that.”
“These are very young,” he said of the audience most drawn in. “They tend to be 15 or 16-year-old boys.” That demographic detail shapes his reading of the entire phenomenon. “We call it the manosphere,” he said, “but you could probably more accurately call it the boyosphere.”
