In the Rubbish Bin of the Weekly Roundup on July 27, 2025, I included a paper published in the journal Men and Masculinities titled, “Mapping of the Neo-Manosphere(s): New Directions for Research.” This paper was authored by Vivian Gerrand, Debbie Ging, Joshua Roose, and Michael Flood. The paper and its authors were supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC). ARC is one of Australia’s main funders of academic research, and its staff are 60-70% female.
Joshua Roose is also an investigator on an ARC-funded project titled, “The Far Right: Intellectuals, Masculinity and Citizenship,” while both Roose and Flood are authors of the book, “Masculinity and Violent Extremism,” and they are co-investigators on a second ARC-funded project titled, “Anti-Women Online Movements; Pathways and Patterns of Participation.” This latter four-year project, which is scheduled to end in December of this year, was funded by Australian taxpayers at a level of $400,000. The stated aim of the project is to “understand the influences shaping men’s attraction to anti-women online movements and patterns of participation within them.” Here, my purpose is to briefly highlight the in-built bias in this project (and others like it) and briefly explain where research on such topics is going.
First, the project disregards results from polls conducted in Australia and the United States on online abuse and harassment. These polls, several of which were published prior to the project’s start date in December 2022, clearly show that the proportion of women who experience online abuse and harassment is no greater than the proportion of men who experience online abuse and harassment. In fact, results from these polls typically show that men are more likely to report being victims of online abuse and harassment.
Second, the project only intends to explore the male perpetrator – female victim paradigm. Data on the female perpetrator – male victim paradigm, the male perpetrator – male victim paradigm, and the female perpetrator – female victim paradigm will presumably not be captured. This means that topics like online misandry and expressed hate toward men will not be examined. Women’s political radicalization on the left will also not be examined, presumably because this political identity matches that of the researchers and the current federal government in Australia. Evidence of this radicalization exists in the form of polling data showing more women moving further to the Left in their political ideology, while men’s political beliefs have remained relatively stable. Also, one recent U.S. survey found that a greater proportion of women than men endorse political violence in the form of targeted murders of President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. But apparently it is the boys and men who are the political extremists in need of re-education!
Also, there is no need to speculate on where this academic work is heading, because the activist academics are already telling us. In their 2025 paper in Men and Masculinities, the activist academics wrote:
“…the regulation of online platforms must be brought to the fore. Social media ecosystems remain largely unregulated in their amplification of misogynistic content through opaque algorithmic recommendation systems. Government efforts to regulate them have met with fierce resistance and resulted in court cases – and not always successful ones (eSafety Commissioner 2024). Structural interventions must therefore include policy reforms that address not just content moderation, but also the architecture of virality, algorithmic bias, and platform accountability. Such approaches should complement rather than replace educational strategies, recognising that upstream regulation of the digital environment is as crucial to long-term prevention.”
“As the manosphere becomes more diverse, politically incoherent, and ideologically unstable - driven predominantly by the whims of algorithmic capitalism - there is an increasingly urgent need to educate boys and men about gendered disinformation, mental health, gender-based abuse and the political economies of social media and influencer culture. This challenge is further complicated by the recent incursion of analyses from the field of evolutionary psychology into this space, as well as some psychotherapists working with boys, who eschew structural analyses of power, insist on immutable sex differences and claim that encouraging boys to express emotion is treating them as ‘defective girls’.”
Importantly, the funded projects that I have mentioned are not one-offs. The Australian Communications and Media Authority is now pouring millions more dollars into a program called the eSafety Commissioner’s Preventing Tech-based Abuse of Women Grants Program. The funded projects will, as usual, be biased from the start. They will not acknowledge the lack of sex difference in online abuse victimization, and they will presumably only explore the male perpetration - female victimization paradigm. They will not be open to hearing about boys’ and men’s experiences or life challenges. In essence, the funding will be given to activist academics who will then use to generate one-sided information that the government will then use as rationale for creating sex-biased polices and increasing controls of freedom of expression online.
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