Published in the Saturday Paper, 4 July 2026
My brothers helped raise me.
Ray, the eldest, is warm and protective. He still tries to hold my hand sometimes when we cross the road.
Phillip was wilder, more rebellious.
He took risks, believed in self-reliance, and was prone to running the kind of physical and psychological experiments that made for the best stories.
Both taught me to defend myself, endure hours of motorsports and ask pointed questions – like why girls weren’t allowed to play soccer in the boys’ playground at my school.
They took me surfing and camping, to record stores and eventually to the pub.
Their fiery dinner table debates shaped my politics, while the unconditional love and support they showed formed me as a person and parent.
The world Ray, Phillip and I grew up in, and the one my children, Anna, Joe and Louis inherited, of course, share similarities.
Plenty of families still have a protector, a firebrand or an outspoken little sister. Just as adolescence remains a time of confusion and self-discovery.
The structural differences, though, are hard to ignore. Inequality has widened. Home ownership has felt increasingly out of reach. Young people are coming of age on platforms run by algorithms that distort reality and fuel insecurity.
Nearly 39 per cent of Australians aged 16 to 24 experience a mental illness every year, according to Australian Bureau of Statistics data – a sharp increase from the pre-smartphone era.
These challenges are all shared, but the targeting of men and boys online is increasingly pervasive and personal.
A recent audit found it takes 23 minutes for a social media account mimicking a 16- to 18-year-old boy to be fed misogynistic content. These posts reframe everyday frustrations – rejection, loneliness, personal setbacks – as evidence of a system stacked against boys and men.
Algorithms can then funnel some users into a grievance economy, which monetises their anxieties and locks them into rigid coping strategies that limit self-expression.
The “manosphere” is not a monolith. It’s a landscape housing everything from gym advice, pseudoscience and looksmaxxing to sermons calling for women to be stripped of their voting rights.
Many men and boys will never be drawn in by it, and plenty are actively fighting against it. But research from the men’s health charity Movember shows the ideologies underpinning it, which were once confined to “radicalised” corners of the internet, now organically show up in young men’s feeds. Often embedded within topics they care about, such as sport, fashion, gaming or music.
In short, young men aren’t looking for harmful content. They’re being stalked by it.
The real-world impacts of that relentless hunt affect us all.
That same Movember study found that young men regularly engaging with masculinity influencers report higher levels of psychological distress – with more than a quarter saying it leaves them feeling worthless.
Moreover, a growing body of evidence suggests restrictive ideas of masculinity are associated with a culture of entitlement and anger that makes gendered violence more permissible and views women’s rights as negotiable.
A recent Ipsos poll found 57 per cent – a clear majority – of Gen Z men across 29 countries now believe women’s equality “discriminates against them”.
To understand how and why ideas like this are shifting from the fringes to the mainstream we have to look at our politics.
The belief that male primacy needs to be reasserted, and that feminism has gone too far, is being promoted by right-wing populists globally.
Across Europe, North America and now Australia, the language and beliefs of the manosphere are casually bleeding into policy platforms.
As I write this, current and former Australian politicians – including One Nation MP Barnaby Joyce and former prime minister Tony Abbott – are in London attending a conservative conference co-founded by Jordan Peterson and attended by the Alliance Defending Freedom – the advocacy group that played a leading role in overturning Roe v Wade.
Pauline Hanson is using her platform to try to restrict abortion access and question everything from the veracity of domestic violence claims to the existence of a gender pay gap.
The convergence of these two worlds is not accidental. The result is an international movement spreading the belief that social progress has come at the expense of men.
If progressive politicians are serious about defending gender equality and competing with these narratives, then we have to understand their appeal.
Dr Krista Fisher, a researcher who has spent years studying young men’s experiences on platforms such as TikTok and Discord, has observed how “compelling” the promises of the manosphere must seem to users “growing up in a world offering very few certainties”.
This is the reality that underpins the content. That when you strip back the ideology, what you get are engaging videos offering simple answers to complex problems – as well as motivation, aspiration and belonging.
Of course, the answers aren’t free, and the promises of self-improvement all come with a hefty price tag. That doesn’t make the lessons of the manosphere any less consequential.
The frustrations men and boys are feeling are real – and if they’re not offered better solutions and compelling counter-narratives, gender equality will continue to be seen as a zero-sum game.
So how do we take those lessons and turn this around?
As a government, we have to keep addressing the structural inequalities that feed uncertainty and erode wellbeing. We know that people are less drawn to the politics of outrage when they can see a future for themselves.
That means building more affordable homes, making our tax system fairer, strengthening Medicare and creating secure jobs with decent pay, while continuing to regulate online environments for children and cracking down on harmful new technologies – as we’ve done with the so-called “nudify” apps.
We also have a role to play in encouraging a far broader and deeper public understanding of the importance of everyday role models. Research consistently shows that while social media can feel relentless and omnipresent, influencers can’t compete with real-world relationships.
A national study by Jesuit Social Services last year found 60 per cent of boys aged 14 to 18 still look to their father or other male parental figures to shape their behaviour. Nearly half said the same about their mother.
The Australian Institute of Family Studies found that fostering affectionate relationships between fathers and sons could almost halve the risk of future intimate partner violence.
The upshot from both findings is that we each hold more power than we think – and we should use it.
That said, none of these steps will work unless, at the same time, we work tirelessly to secure every child’s right to grow up safely, which requires sustained investment in early intervention and prevention and comprehensive support to help children exposed to violence recover, so that we’re breaking cycles of abuse.
Aside from these policy levers, it’s equally essential that we stop talking past young men and start listening to them. This is what my colleagues Dan Repacholi, the special envoy for men’s health, and Ged Kearney, the assistant minister for the prevention of family violence, are working towards, in a series of community conversations with men across the country.
That means focusing less on “toxic masculinity” and more on creating space for men and boys to talk about the complexity of their lives, in their own words.
The manosphere may be adept in peddling outrage for profit, but its voices have no interest in the health or wellbeing of young men here or anywhere else.
If governments want to evict this ecosystem of outrage from our societies, we have to push back on the algorithms that amplify it and offer young men the purpose, connection and community we all crave.
Crucially, we need to honour the shared benefits, freedoms and choices that gender equality has won for us all – and speak openly about what we stand to lose as a nation if we allow any of that progress to be reversed.