What Is Wrong With Men?

An examination of our relationship with government, business, NGOs and media. Part one of a three part series.

“POPULISM is, in effect, an empty shell devoid of belief. One could go so far as to label populism as a form of political nihilism centred on destruction”.
p26 The New Demagogues: Religion, Masculinity and the Populist Epoch

“[I]t is important to understand that DEMAGOGUERY and populism go hand in hand. The concept of the demagogue, despite its origins in the classic Greek word ‘Demos’, from which we derive ‘democracy’, has long been framed in a pejorative sense, referring to the ‘leader of the mob’ or those who ‘rouse the rabble’.
p27 The New Demagogues: Religion, Masculinity and the Populist Epoch

Do you remember the 1960s and 1970s when technological progress promised us a life of ease but more importantly security? This security was to be an economic gift. We were yet to face the insecurity of terrorism and home grown violence. In Australia, that was unthinkable.

Insecurity is now part of our daily lives and it takes as many forms as there are government ministerial offices. Who is responsible for this? What went wrong? Careful where you step for fear of being trampled by the phalanx of university and media experts paid to answer these questions for us.

I find the answers they give are often less than plausible. Generally, they seem crafted to explain away a situation rather than address it. Can someone like Donald Trump in the USA, Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom or aspiring populists like Craig Kelly in Australia really be blamed for years of mismanagement and the many problems we now face?

Or maybe like me, you have completely misjudged events and everything is going beautifully. Our problems might be easily fixed by slipping a valium to the troublesome vaccine hesitant and their neo-Nazi supporters.

In the race to provide answers, it will be hard to beat Dr Josh Roose to microphone or camera. He is part of the Addressing Violent Extremism and Radicalisation to Terrorism (AVERT) Research Network. This is a multidisciplinary, multi-institutional research initiative based in Melbourne, Australia, supported by Deakin University’s Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation (ADI). Just down the hall from Catherine Bennett who featured in our last article.

From his website, we also learn Josh has, with colleagues, received Australian Research Council Discovery project funding to explore the Australian far right (2021-2024) and anti-women online actors (2022-2025). He has previously completed projects for the Victorian Government Department of Justice and Community Safety on masculinities and recruitment to violent extremism and Victoria Police on alternative narratives and provides expert insights for local, state and federal governments and national and international media.

He then finds time to be Chief Investigator at the International Centre for Counter Terrorism, an executive Member of the Australian Association for Islamic and Muslim Studies (AAIMS) and Research Fellow at the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism (IRMS) in the United States.

Threats come from the most unlikely places

This is a very busy man but when a Melbourne council needs someone to stand up against threats to Drag Queen Story Time, who do they call? Josh is there to expose the great crime of denying pre-schoolers an essential transvestite experience.

Despite the parental threat that Josh has identified here, the real dangers to society come from men. Which men? It seems, just about all of us.

I have just finished reading his book published in 2020: “The New Demagogues: Religion, Masculinity and the Populist Epoch”. Most of what I have gleaned of Josh’s perspective comes from this reading and more recent video presentations including a discussion of a 2022 book collaboration with four other academics titled: “Masculinity and Violent Extremism”.

The other two authors who featured in this video discussion were Professor Michael Flood and Associate Professor Mark Alfano. Flood is an advocate of Queer Theory. A quick scan of his Twitter page reveals the innovative nature of his research:

“‘Gay guys can do missionary?”, “Gay male toxicity contributes to the oppression of queer men” and the fascinating “How To Raise A Boy In A Patriarchal World – According To Queer Parents”.

The third author, Assoc. Prof Alfano, made a significant contribution to the Covid debate and more importantly to Australian culture through an article that celebrated dobbing as a virtue. Alfano explains:

“Australia’s cultural reticence around ‘dobbing’ hasn’t stopped more than 45,000 people in NSW who have reported pandemic rule-breakers to the NSW Police Crime Stoppers hotline since March 2020 – including more than 5500 who contacted the hotline after an anti-lockdown protest over the weekend”.

Returning to Roose’s 2020 book, he argues:

“[T[he decline of citizenship, the welfare state, and key social institutions has created an intellectual and social vacuum that can be exploited by those using populist tactics”.
P243 The New Demagogues

Writing at the height of Trumpmania, the author described Donald making a nostalgic appeal to working men’s sense of loss while promising renewed local industry and local jobs. This is in contrast to what Roose saw as Trump’s attempts to undermine fine, international organisations like the United Nations, NATO, European Union, and World Health Organisation.

We’re told Trump entranced the American public with populist promises of renewed prestige and purpose. Farage performed a similar conjuring trick with his Brexit spell in the UK. Roose seemed unable to find a demagogue to fit the bill in Australia so the credit for this populist surge was spread more broadly. Yet, in a 2023 interview, he did describe Craig Kelly as fitting the demagogue mould so Craig can stand till the real thing turns up.

Who are the people these demagogues are appealing to?

Men.

There are men who define themselves as INCELS (involuntarily celibate), MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), Proud Boys, Boogaloo Boys, Oath Keepers, men who identify with Elliot Rodger and others with Brendan Tarrant, the Christchurch shooter, current and former members of Islamic State, neo-Nazis, Manosphere bloggers, Catholicist transgender haters, textualists, January 6 sympathisers, freedom convoy truckers (Canberra), My Placers, anti-semites and people who turn up threatening menace when they hear the word conspiracy.

We’re told these groups have strong international links.

I was drawn to the author’s work as he kept turning up in articles and media interviews pointing to male aggression and the rising threat from ideologically driven right wing groups. As an unvaxxed person, he occasionally put me in one.

He explained that many men are finding life difficult and a discomfiting number of them, especially young men, hate women and blame them for much of their troubles. All of this presages a coming dark age where government’s inexhaustible compassion will identify the need to restrict the way we communicate, particularly online.

Of these players let me highlight a couple beginning with the neo-Nazis. These are the blokes who broke into the Melbourne women’s rights rally in March last year and caused Moira Deeming to separate from the Liberal Party. Strangely, the big fellow in the centre looks like he stepped away from a Men’s Style magazine shoot.

Where are the tattoos? Was NIDA in recess? Some who live in a world of constant conspiracies have suggested this little psyop was organised out of Dan Andrews’ back office to embarrass the rally’s organisers. Who would think such a thing?

Once again, Josh was on hand to offer counsel.

The ever helpful Guardian also explained:
“On Tuesday the premier vowed to enact legislation to ban the salute after neo-Nazis performed the gesture while attending a rally organised by the British anti-transgender campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen on Saturday”.

Is that what she is? Learn more.

Another member of the target group above was profiled in Josh’s book:

“Elliot Rodger claimed he was seeking a day of retribution against men who have ‘pleasurable sex lives’ and a ‘war on women’, which would ‘punish all females for the crime of depriving me of sex’, in order to ‘deliver a devastating blow that will shake all of them to the core of their wicked hearts’.”
P134 The New Demagogues

In his manifesto, Rodger disclosed that he was seeing both a psychiatrist and a counsellor. Roose explains:

“Speculation remains strong about whether he suffered from a mental illness. [I reckon Josh is onto something]. In the attack Rodger killed six people and injured fourteen others before killing himself”.
P134 The New Demagogues

So we have a problem with men and the author is happy to use the most extreme examples to help make his case.

Some Mansplaining

Where does this anger come from and why is it directed against women? In the 3 countries under examination we note the following:

• 3 out of 4 suicides are carried out by men and boys;¹

• The bottom 25% of males are unlikely to marry ²;

• The average age of a home buyer is now 47. In 1980, it was 29. ³

• An increasing number of young men have no friends;⁴

• Young women, increasingly, are outcompeting young men in the workplace;⁵

• Close to 50% of men in the countries under examination feel their employment is insecure if not precarious;⁶

• Press releases warn us daily of AI’s plan to take our jobs;⁷

• Australia’s fertility rate has collapsed.⁸

A real danger in raising these challenges faced by young men is that they will be immediately perceived as anti-women. Yet, if the suicide rate for women were three times that of men, could we ignore it so easily? It would certainly be identified as a societal problem.

Roose pointed to growing evidence of a victimhood mentality in some parts of the men’s “movement”. He blamed populists like Trump and Farage for much of this, while acknowledging there are real problems. He argued strongly that these populists don’t really have any solutions. He was probably right but neither do their woke, left lurching adversaries.

Men are the unacceptable face of grievance politics. A higher bar is set for their entry into the club of disadvantage. How can a male be a victim? Impossible!!!!! Meanwhile, a loving acadaemia and media place a sympathetic and sturdy supporting frame around the grievances of other groups such as women, non-white men or the gay community et al.

One of the difficulties of this Marxist framing, essential to identity politics, is that it insists that no exceptions be made for the individual or sub-group. Unshakable absolutes make the appropriate apportionment of blame and care so much easier. A homeless and impoverished man is still of that privileged class male. As is the rough sleeping unemployed white male who will forever remain the beneficiary of colonisation. Anyone up for pulling down a statue?

The Housing Example

We have to recognise that the difficulties people face often cross these unhelpful artificial categories. Take housing as an example. The best recent piece of news I and Australia’s critical housing debate have received is the cancellation of ABC’s The Drum.

This program ran for 13 years and every week would present a number of segments on housing and homelessness. One night they would discuss housing as an older woman’s issue. Two days later it would be housing as a gay person’s concern. Homelessness among young people followed handwringing over the housing difficulties faced by the disabled. You must not forget immigrants or Aboriginal people and their desperate housing needs.

Experts from the various sectors were invited to offer their ineffective solutions. And so the farce rolled on.

The one thing you must not do is discuss housing as a systemic problem. To do so would point to mismanagement. Despite exactly 20 years each of Labor and Liberal in office in Australia, since neoliberal economics took over, neither party seems to having a solution to what is very clearly a crisis

Yet, our Ponzi housing market is vitally important as one of the key growth sectors in our economy. Prices spiral up at great cost to many Australians under 40. The government’s ambitious immigration plans do not appear to be designed to help.

Let’s talk about neoliberalism.

As though directed by an invisible hand, decades ago western governments successively embraced a neoliberal policy framing: Thatcher (1979), Reagan (1980) and “left-wing” Australian Labor under Hawke and Keating (1983).

The author blames neoliberalism for the destruction of the social compact on which social relations and trust were built. So what is it?

Neoliberalism is not merely a pejorative term to be thrown at politicians you don’t like. It has an underpinning philosophy. It teaches that the market is the best information processor known to mankind and it operates on price signals. To interfere with those price signals is a capital crime. They must be left to shape society.

Often price trumps all other considerations robbing nations of industry and jobs in key areas, that were largely the domain of men, to replace them with service industry employment more typically the domain of women. Under neoliberalism, there are no system problems. All success or failure is personal. Read the price signals well and you are rewarded.

Government’s role is to support the market under neoliberalism. That does NOT mean small government. It means government being as big as it needs to be to support that market. That is where we are now. Despite governments retreating from their responsibility to Australians and hiding behind websites with well concealed contact numbers, there is no sign government is getting smaller.

Further support for this view comes from the growing push for big investment based on Environment Social Governance (ESG). Greenhouse gas and Diversity/Equity/Inclusion investment indexes, controlled by the world’s largest investment houses, will direct spending to organisations who bring their businesses into alignment with this indexing.

Our Federal Government looks to join this game legislating by July 2024 that companies must report on their “risk exposure” aligned to the same indexing (see Treasury releases draft on climate reporting). The redefining of natural capital in the creation of tradeable natural capital assets (our national forests, rivers) is another example of this growing and accelerating trend.

What happened to our institutions?

Here is where’s Josh’s research gets interesting. He argued one of the effects of neoliberalism had been to give populists like Trump a grievance they could use to whip up and mobilise men’s groups for his own purposes. Roose lamented the loss of guidance from key institutions that gave people’s lives purpose such as religion and unions.

Unions are no longer policy driven and their leaders have largely abandoned workers to embrace the pragmatism higher political aspirations require. The modern legal demand in Australia that workers seek permission to strike is a strong testament to union leadership failure. More recently, unions betrayed workers across the country by supporting state government Covid-19 mandates.

While churches retain a significant place in the United States, attendance has contracted there. The church today is far less important to people in the UK and Australia than it was 30 years ago. According to Roose, Trump’s appeal to what the country lost with “Make America Great Again” still resonated with a militant evangelical Christianity. He tells us this is the culmination of a decade long embrace of militant masculinity seeking to enshrine a warrior culture for men and passivity for women.

Another problem he acknowledges in the rise of populist Islam. He notes that second and third generation Australians contributed disproportionately to the numbers joining the Islamic State Caliphate. This group experiences its own peculiar sense of alienation in addition to that experienced by other young Australians.

The period since 9/11 and the “War on Terror” has seen entire communities targeted as security risks. It is hard to imagine this has aided their integration and a sense of belonging. A less cautious person might also suggest that the militant leadership of western countries might give more thought to who they bomb.

This is especially important when their victims’ family members subsequently become candidates for local immigration and our neighbours. Is this madness or replacement migration planning with a twist?

What’s to be done?

Four years on from Dr Roose’s expansive work, what were his original solutions and can they be implemented today? Central to correcting the alienation of the male population was the notion of citizenship. In discussing this the author lamented the retreat of the welfare state in the face of the neoliberal assault.

As an example, he referenced a Sydney Morning Herald article from 2018 reported 33 million calls failed to be answered in the last half of 2017. Centrelink users fume as service 'refuses to answer calls' from this month suggests things aren’t much better.

In 2020, he called for government to step back into the economy to resurrect the idea of a citizenship based on rights and responsibilities. He argued corporations had been allowed to evade key responsibilities as corporate citizens and government must insist they play a more responsible role in the future in creating jobs. Precarious employment can be a spur to extremist activism.

He also called for us to:

“re-engage with citizenship as both a nurturing and rehabilitative concept for addressing the social injury of those drawn to populist narratives This requires moving beyond binaries shaping political discourse around citizenship, prevalent amongst the political left (pro welfare state) and right (restrictive citizenship), and beyond the identity-rights-based approach that has come to dominate contemporary politics and that has, arguably, imploded ”.
P37 The New Demagogues …

and

”It requires a reinvigorated and redefined conception of citizenship that offers a sense of belonging, dignity, and, indeed, honour.
P38 The New Demagogues …

Is this what our government has been positioning itself to achieve in recent times, “ a reinvigorated and redefined conception of citizenship”?

This article began with a discussion of what happened to the promise of the
1960s and 1970s. Today, as we celebrate the success of multicultural Australia, where is that promise? Are demagogues trying to steal it? Have loud voices beguiled many of us as frustrated government waits for misdirected malcontents to return to its loving embrace?

I will have more to say on this in Part 2 of this series.

1. These are 2020 figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. but a check of World in data figures for UK and USA brought a similar result. Suicide rate is also up for young girls, probably to social media)
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/health/causes-death/causes-death-australia/2020

2. The Marriage Divide: How and why working class families are more fragile today.
W. Bradford Wilcox and Wendy Wang (2017)

Scott Galloway link: “”

3. Middle aged first home buyers on the rise:
https://www.afr.com/policy/economy/middle-aged-first-home-buyers-on-the-rise-20211222-p59jguhttps://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-04/australian-jobs-being-lost-to-ai/103123682
Also see Scott Galloway on US trends:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRxhnSkgxtk&t=476

4. Young men and friends

5. Young women outcompeting young men in workplace

6. Less than half of all men in Great Britain (47.92%) felt their employment and income were stable and secure.
p170 Demagoguery… Josh Roose.

7. Job losses to AI under the radar.

8. Australia’s fertility rate has collapsed.