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Superyachts are a common sight, as well as designer boutiques and VIP beaches.
A new toxic export is growing under the glamor of the Costa del Sol. The target market is? The minds of young men.
Louis Theroux, Inside the Manosphere is the latest Netflix documentary by the veteran broadcaster. Theroux turns his trademark uneasy gaze to the dark world hyper-masculine internet influencers.
What is their favourite playground? Andalucia’s most famous resort.
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Enter 24-year-old Harrison Sullivan, better known to his army of teenage followers as ‘HS’ or @hstikkytokky.
Theroux tracks the British TikToker down to a sprawling €2,000-a-night Marbella villa, where Sullivan charmingly introduces his girlfriend, Kacey May, to the cameras as a ‘dishwasher’.
But Sullivan was not just in Spain to enjoy the sun.
The influencer, who crashed a McLaren Supercar in Surrey before fleeing from the scene, was hiding on the Costa del Sol at the time the filming took place.
He had evaded British Justice for an entire year before police hired a private jet to bring him back to Britain in November last year amid suspicions he was involved in a violent event in Puerto Banus.
He pleaded guilty in his home country to driving dangerously and not having insurance.
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It was only after Theroux sat with him to film a documentary which was likely to portray him in a negative light.
So the unlikely pair hung around in Marbella to talk about life, Sullivan’s views and his position as a model for young males.
When pressed by Theroux on what he actually does for a living, Sullivan claimed he coaches ‘boys how to be outside the system, how to be proper boys’.
It is a system heavily inspired by disgraced influencer Andrew Tate and the ‘red pill’ movement, built on the belief that society is rigged against men and women cannot be trusted.
Sullivan’s misogyny is rampant, but he still makes a lot of money off women.
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While he boasts he would ‘disown his daughter’ if she started an OnlyFans account – and disown his son if he were gay – he happily profits from the adult platform.
He runs a Marbella content mansion dubbed the ‘House of Heat’, where a rotating cast of 15 OnlyFans models cross-promote their explicit content to his 500,000 Telegram subscribers in exchange for a hefty cut of the profits.
But this ‘manosphere’ ideology quickly spills over into real-world violence on the streets of the Costa del Sol.
In the documentary’s most shocking sequence, Theroux films Sullivan and his associates orchestrating a so-called ‘predator sting’.
They lure an older man to a fake date in broad daylight in Marbella before subjecting him to a savage, livestreamed beating to ‘expose’ him as a paedophile.
As his ‘minions’ kick the man on the pavement, Sullivan nonchalantly tells a stunned Theroux: “He’s going to jail… but I didn’t touch him.”
The documentary also shadows Ed Matthews, a disciple of the controversial ‘pick-up artist’ community.
Theroux follows Matthews as he prowls the streets of central Marbella, using scripted psychological tactics and ‘game’ to hit on local women for content.
Matthews, a young influencer from the United States, is mobbed as he walks through the city by male fans who are adoring.
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It is a trend which is spreading into the real-world.
A recent University of York study found that 75% of British teachers are now terrified by the rise of online misogyny in the classroom, with schoolboys increasingly parroting rhetoric that women ‘belong in the kitchen’ and that violence against them is acceptable.
Marbella is a magnet that attracts celebrities, gangsters and billionaires.
Now, it has become the spiritual home for a new breed of digital hustler – where the currency is misogyny, and the cameras are always rolling.
The Olive Press has more Costa Del Sol News. Click here to read it.
