#8 - This Is a Men’s Problem

The signs are too obvious now to keep pretending the problem sits somewhere else. But we’d have to be blind to ignore how the manosphere is out in the open.

The online material around sexual exploitation is no longer hidden away on the dark web. Domestic violence deaths don’t even have time to shock us before the next one appears. And what shows up online never really stays there.

Respect.gov.au calls it the “algorithm of disrespect”. It feeds this material to boys, sons, nephews, and anyone online long enough for contempt to start looking normal. It spills into our social circles, and before long starts sounding ordinary, which should worry us.

Violence against women, be it through domestic violence or sexual abuse, doesn’t start at the act itself. It starts earlier. In disrespect, contempt, and control. In the things we often disregard, excuse, minimise, or just let slide because saying something feels awkward and keeping quiet is easier.

That’s where it becomes our problem, for men, not something we hand over to government as if a new law or a tougher sentence fixes what we males still allow to sit in the room. Government still has a role, and so do laws and police. None of that gets into homes, friendships, group chats, work sites, footy clubs, or family tables before the damage becomes visible. Culture gets built much closer to the ground than that.

Men shape male spaces. We set the tone more than we like to admit, and most men will say they want it to stop. According to recent surveys, four in five men do. Wanting it to stop and stopping it, however, aren’t the same thing. Silence is part of how this keeps going. When the joke lands and we say nothing, we’ve helped, whether we admit it or not. The same goes for the slur we shrug off, for controlling behaviour dressed up as banter or being protective, for the rubbish that turns up on our feed and stays there because we left it there.

It has to stop early, in the room, in the workplace, in our social circles, in our conversations, around our dinner table, before the damage is already done.

Too many of us men still comfort ourselves with the idea that the real problem is with other men, men unlike us, men we’d never know or relate to. But that’s an escape hatch. It lets us keep our distance while the culture around us stays unchallenged.

If James Brown was right that this is indeed a man’s world, then we men need to collectively make it safer for mothers, daughters, sisters, partners, friends, colleagues, neighbours, strangers. It starts with us.

We don’t need more silence. We need more men who are willing to interrupt this before the real damage cements. Standing back and pretending we don’t see it around us is just another way of allowing it to continue. If not us, who?