Source : the age
Walkley Award-winning journalist Marc Fennell is going all-in with his new documentary series about the manosphere.
“I mean, I get asked about my morning erections, which is pretty f—ing weird,” he says, with a laugh. “I am really chucked in the deep end. I put on the boxing gloves in a brawling pen. I get my testosterone tested. I’m knee-deep in the Enhanced Games [a controversial sporting event that allows athletes to take performance-enhancing drugs]. I fire a gun with a millionaire influencer. It’s action packed.”
Fennell is an almost-omnipresent face and voice in the media landscape these days. He’s familiar to many as the host of the Australian version of quiz show Mastermind and from his stint presenting SBS current affairs show The Feed, as well as his popular podcasts No One Saw it Coming, It Burns, Nut Jobs and Stuff the British Stole – the latter of which spawned a whole TV show.
His latest work, The State of Man, sees him travelling far and wide across three episodes to dive into the manosphere – the deceptively catchy name for the amorphous and destructive network of online channels and creators that promote male dominance and denigrate feminism.
“I’d been looking at it for a while, for a couple of years in fact, and I noticed that in conversations about men and masculinity online something had gotten quite darker,” Fennell says. “Everything started to metastasise around money or dominating women in relationships, and the acceptable standard of what a body was seemed to be changing.”
He was also disturbed to see the role technology was playing in disseminating these ideas, a notion hammered home one evening when the father of two was cooking dinner for his family with YouTube on in the living room playing Minecraft and Pokemon videos.
When he looked over 20 minutes later he was shocked to see the screen was now autoplaying a clip of Joe Rogan.
One of the key threads throughout The State of Man is how young men are funnelled into being exposed to misogynistic concepts. In a truly frightening experiment, Fennell sets up a phone with a “Young Marc” social media profile to see how long it takes the algorithm to start feeding him manosphere content.
“The first week it was basically showing bicep tips. The second week, it started to get into some fairly full-on ‘you must dominate, you must pay for all your dates’ relationship stuff. Then after that, it was full-blown racist AI slop. The rules were I wasn’t allowed to click on anything, I just scrolled. The way [the algorithm] is pulling, particularly young men, in a certain direction is really horrific.”
The manosphere has been having a moment in the spotlight this year. The Netflix series Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere saw the superstar documentarian delve into the issue, and a viral 60 Minutes interview with the looksmaxxing influencer known as Clavicular also ignited water-cooler conversation. Coming on the heels of so much coverage, Fennell feels his documentary provides a different perspective.
“Look, I think what we’ve done is a much better holistic picture of the manosphere if you actually want to work out where this thing came from, who it really affects, how it can be solved – not just a bunch of cooked content creators saying and doing dumb things. If you actually want a proper picture of the manosphere, no shade on any other documentary, but I do feel like this is the best and clearest picture of the manosphere I’ve ever seen.”
Notably, Fennell speaks with not only those who have been caught up in its clutches, but also with academics who have studied it, an ex-CEO of Facebook, and even former prime minister Julia Gillard.
So after all that, what was his biggest takeaway?
“We can go down a different path if we want,” Fennell says.
“We can change the way we raise boys, we can change the way we do adolescence, we can change the algorithm. And men in particular have to decide: are you going to be one of those guys who think the world’s out to get you and women are the enemy, or do you want to build something better?
“That’s the opportunity that sits in front of us. We can build a better generation of men. We absolutely can.”
The State of Man premieres 8pm Tuesday on the ABC and ABC iview.
