Welcome! I’m Ash BG, a toddler mum, publicist, writer, and founder of You Wanted This, a publication about modern motherhood, the mental load, and what relationships really look like after kids. I’m also the founder of Tether: The Mental Load App, a couples app that makes the invisible labour in your household visible. If you’re new here, I’m so glad you could join us. Pull up a chair. You don’t have to pretend you’re fine.
There has been a lot of horrendous news in Australia this past week.
Not one, but two groups of teenage boys gang raped teenage girls. Five AFL players have been stood down amid allegations of sexual assault. A 46th woman has been killed by her current or former partner — that’s four women murdered in August alone.
Then there was the new research released from the University of Melbourne that found hostile attitudes towards women are the single strongest predictor of violent extremism in young people. The same research showed that 31.8% of young people believe giving women equal opportunities has gone too far, 17% of Australians believe feminism should be resisted with violence, and 40% of teenage boys believe women lie about domestic and sexual violence.
Terrified is an understatement.
I’d be lying if I said reading the news didn’t suck the life out of me this week.
Tempted to avoid it altogether, I set about closing tabs when one last ABC headline caught my eye.
It was the story of Flynn Martin and how he, and other young men, were radicalised by the manosphere but clawed their way out of it.
Flynn was 20 years old, a university student, a hobby content creator and a self-described doomscroller. He wasn’t searching for the manosphere. He was just doing what he always did — watching gaming content, scrolling through his feed and sending content to his mates. But then the anti-women content started appearing and he did not click away. He engaged and, of course, the algorithm noted the engagement and served him more.
Within months, Flynn had become what he now describes as another online prophet of misogyny. He posted a video about being a straight white male that went viral for all the wrong reasons.
“What’s wrong with being fit, healthy [and] not gay?” Martin asked in the video, which no longer exists. “Without people like me, you don’t reproduce.”
He then started talking about women: “It’s all pretty convenient when they say men are only good for ‘that, that and that’ … but as soon as they open their little f***ing useless mouths, I don’t want to f***ing hear it.”
The backlash came quick, but by that point Flynn didn’t even care. "When you become so intoxicated by the idea of garnering as much attention as possible … you don't have a regard for what you're saying," he says.
He had been radicalised so completely that he didn’t even notice it happening.
“You just become so insecure that it becomes a lot of internalised self-hatred … and that can very easily spew out into misogyny, taking that self-insecurity and self-hatred and taking it out on other people,” he says.
Flynn felt his frustration boiling over into anger because he did not know what he was meant to do, or where he was going in life.
“That was when all this manosphere content just started flooding my algorithm,” he says.
“Once it started showing up it didn’t stop. It was just there, just always there. And then that trickled into real life conversations and just so many different avenues of my life.”
The online content he encountered said things like:
“Men are better than women at almost everything.”
“Women aren’t able to come to logical conclusions.”
“Isn’t it ironic — since we’ve given women rights they’ve made themselves less valuable.”
The terrifying part is that Flynn is not alone. The ABC also spoke to Brandon, who was in his World of Warcraft guild when a friend mentioned some content. He said: “Oh, f*** it, alright, I’ll have a look.” That was the entry point. Simple as that. Not a recruitment drive or a manifesto. A guild chat and a curious click.
And Frankie, 18, who noticed something in the gaming and fandom spaces he had always loved. “There are people who just flat out say, ‘oh no, I didn’t like it because it was progressive and a woman was the character.’”
This is not just a mild opinion about a TV show.
It shows that these boys believe a woman’s existence as a protagonist is an imposition rather than a norm. It shows how they see women in the real world. That they are intrusions. That their stories do not belong to them. That spaces where they lead are spaces that have been unfairly taken from men.
From there, the distance to “women don’t belong in the workplace” or “women lie about assault” is not as far as we want it to be.
These are not the boys the conversation about the manosphere usually centres. We’ve become obsessed with tearing down Andrew Tate and his crony of influencers. We love to hate the podcasters who spew misogynistic dribble and we bond over the idea of banning them from buying microphones.
But what if the boys sitting in their rooms playing video games are the real concern?
What if the problem isn’t actually a culture war? What if it’s not about men vs women?
What if the real issue is child exploitation?
Andrew Tate’s online membership platform, which he calls Real World (vomit emoji) makes an estimated $184 million annually. That’s 155,000 students paying $99 per month. His premium tier, The War Room, costs $1,600 to enter.
Top tier influencers in this space earn $200,000 or more per speaking appearance. Mid-level creators make between $1 million and $10 million annually across courses, memberships, supplements, and what researchers are now calling conflict content — content specifically designed to generate outrage, which drives engagement, which drives revenue.
What we have realised is that the manosphere is not just a community of angry men on the internet. It’s more fucked up than that. It’s essentially big boys preying on little boys.
We’re talking about a mature commercial industry with a documented three-stage pipeline: find a vulnerable boy, inject him with a grievance narrative, then sell him the cure. But the crucial part is this: at every stage, he pays. At every stage the platform profits from his attention. At every stage the content gets more extreme.
Equimundo and Reset Tech spent 18 months investigating this ecosystem for their August 2026 report The Grift Economy.
Their conclusion: the manosphere is better understood as a commercial operation than an ideological one. The ideology is not the point. It’s all a scam. They don’t even care about the message they're pushing, because the ideology is just the product. But the product is being sold to boys who did not know they were buying it.
How the algorithm works
Researchers at Dublin City University set up ten fake accounts posing as 16-year-old boys on TikTok and YouTube. They didn’t search for manosphere content, they just searched for what 16-year-old boys actually search for.
Within hours, the algorithm was serving them misogynistic content.
They had not gone looking for it. The pipeline came to them.
A separate study analysed the actual TikTok histories of 142 young men. The journey starts somewhere ordinary like gym content, sports clips, fashion advice or dating tips. I’ve read about young men who were just looking for girl advice that they weren’t getting from their fathers.
The researchers called this the cultural touchpoints tier — content that on the surface raises no alarm but quietly establishes a norm. One type of male body, one set of male interests and one single way of moving through the world.
From there the algorithm escalates. Motivational content quickly becomes about discipline and dominance. Dating advice starts to frame women as obstacles to male success. Then next minute you’re served the full ideological framework of the manosphere.
Professor Michael Flood at QUT says: “As a person who held certain geeky interests, you must be wary of the kind of content you consumed, as you would inevitably be directed towards manosphere content in the process of consuming it.”
This is when we realise that our sons do not join the manosphere. The manosphere joins them.
What they are selling and who it costs
The manosphere finds boys who were lonely, uncertain, and looking for answers about who they are supposed to be. What they really want is community.
Professor Flood describes what that promise actually delivers. “It holds out a false promise of support, of community, of powerful masculine identity. Ultimately a promise that’s hollow and that leaves men feeling even more embittered and angrier.”
The boys who are sold this promise do not stay lonely, but along the road to building a community they become angry in a specific and directed way. Angry at women. Angry at feminism. Angry at any suggestion that their entitlement is not deserved.
And in Australia in 2026, that anger has very specific consequences.
Males aged 15 to 19 now have the highest sexual offending rates of any age group in Australia — higher than any adult cohort. Sexual assault in NSW has increased by an average of 10% every year for a decade.
The three private school boys charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in a Sydney alleyway. The three 17-year-old boys charged with the group sexual assault of a 17-year-old girl in south-west Sydney. A ranking list of 100 female students at a Canberra private school, scored, colour-coded and ranked from “fuckable” to “not rape-able”.
These beliefs did not arrive from nowhere.
They were packaged, algorithmically amplified, and sold.
This is a child protection issue
Research published in the Global Humanities Review in June 2026 makes an argument that I don’t think is being talked about enough: the manosphere’s targeting of boys under 18 is a children’s rights issue under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
The Convention guarantees children’s rights to equality, development, participation, and protection from mental and moral harm.
Algorithmically amplified digital masculinities pose systemic risks to boys’ rights to equality, development, participation, and protection from mental and moral harm.
When an industry deliberately targets children — using psychological techniques refined over years, optimised by algorithms, disguised as entertainment — and radicalises them into a worldview that produces documented harm to themselves and to the women and girls around them, that is child exploitation.
It’s currently being treated as a culture war debate.
It should be treated as a child protection emergency.
Where are those boys now?
Flynn Martin left the manosphere and is sharing his story to help other boys avoid what happened to him.
“All the answers that you’re looking for aren’t there,” he says.
But he is honest about how hard it is to reach boys who are already deep inside it.
“If you’re kind of in those early stages and starting to form those things — that’s when we can help. But if you’re already deep within it, maybe you’re going to have to learn the hard way like I did.”
The window is not open indefinitely.
Are we making it worse by worrying excessively about our boys?
Some of the criticism I receive (like on this piece in particular) takes this form: by writing about what boys are doing and what boys might become, I am contributing to a harmful narrative. That perhaps expecting harm from boys is itself damaging. That writing about teenage perpetrators and manosphere radicalisation treats boys as suspects rather than children.
I get that.
But what is the alternative? Not talking about it? Not reading and researching and learning? Not looking for the warning signs?
When I look at my little boy, I am not afraid of him.
I am afraid for him.
Afraid of what the algorithm will inevitably show him when I’m not in the room. Afraid of the guild chat and the curious click that found Flynn Martin and Brandon and thousands of boys like them. Afraid of a content ecosystem worth $184 million a year that is specifically designed to find boys like my son at exactly the moment they are most uncertain about who they are.
And I’m terrified of what the world will look like for the girls around him if we do not talk about this enough. If we bury our heads in the sand and pretend that it doesn’t exist.
Surely writing about the manosphere and what it is doing to boys is not an accusation against boys. In fact, isn’t it the most pro-boy thing we can do?
The boys the manosphere finds are not bad boys. They are lonely boys. Uncertain boys. Boys looking for community and purpose and answers in a world that has not given them enough of either. They deserve to be protected from an industry that is exploiting that loneliness for profit.
And the girls around them deserve to be protected from the consequences when that protection fails.
What else can we do?
Learning about the manosphere is the first step to dismantling it.
It’s not awareness alone that is going to change the world, but the reality is this: you cannot interrupt a pipeline you cannot see. And right now, millions of parents are watching their sons play video games and scroll their feeds and assuming the content is neutral. It is not neutral. It has never been neutral. And the first thing we can do is stop pretending otherwise.
I am not pretending to be an academic here nor am I a child psychologist.
But I am a mother of a little boy who has spent a significant amount of time reading, researching, and sitting with the discomfort of everything this essay contains. And if that qualifies me to say anything, here it is:
Talk to your son about what he is watching, not to police it, but to understand it. Ask him who his favourite YouTubers are. Watch something with him. Get curious. Ask questions. The research is crystal fucking clear about this: boys who have someone to talk to about what they encounter online are significantly less likely to absorb it uncritically. The conversation is the intervention.
Then understand the profit model and explain it to him. Young people are usually unaware that the manosphere needs them to remain unaware so the profit model continues. When your son understands that Andrew Tate is not a life coach but a businessman making $184 million from his loneliness, that changes his relationship to the content.
Teach your son consent before it feels necessary. Not as a scary talk about assault, but an ongoing conversation about bodies and boundaries and the simple, foundational truth that other people’s autonomy matters as much as his own. Teach him that no means no. That silence means no. That anything less than a clear and enthusiastic yes means no.
Show him what a healthy relationship looks like. Let him see adults disagree and repair. Let him see love as something warm and mutual and safe, not as something transactional, not something where one person holds power over another.
Hold him accountable in small moments. When he is unkind, name it. When he crosses a line, there are consequences. Boys who are held accountable in small moments learn that their behaviour has an impact on other people, on relationships, on the world.
Raise him to see women as fully human. Not as a service. Not as a reward. Not as the thing the algorithm will eventually tell him exists for his use. As people. Complete and complex and deserving of the same dignity he is.
The manosphere will try to teach him otherwise. It will find him in a gaming forum or a guild chat or a YouTube rabbit hole and it will sell him a framework in which women are the problem and he is the hero of his own aggrieved story.
Our job — as parents, as a culture, as a society — is to get there first.
It starts at home.
It starts now.
It starts with us.
Sources: ABC News August 20 2026 — The manosphere continues to suck young men in as study reveals troubling findings. Equimundo and Reset Tech — The Grift Economy, August 2026. Global Humanities Review — Digital Masculinities and the Rights of the Child, June 2026. Over, Bunce, Konu and Zendle — Child and Adolescent Mental Health, January 2025. The Conversation — How Boys Get Sucked Into the Manosphere, December 2025. University of Melbourne — Dr Sara Meger, August 2026. AIHW Sexual Violence Data. BOCSAR NSW Sexual Assault Data March 2026.
I share your horror and concern and desire to protect our sons. This was still shocking
If the advice actually worked, eventually you’d graduate. But you’re not supposed to graduate. You’re supposed to stay pissed off, confused about women, and just insecure enough to keep watching.