Coming for the boys

Worried about the boys in your life? Be warned. Our government is out to get them.

In early January, when our country was still reeling from the Bondi Massacre, all the talk was about violent extremism. We watched the disgraceful Albanese government ducking and weaving to avoid naming Islamic extremism as the ideology which inspired this appalling event.

How convenient that on January 7, the day before our Prime Minister finally caved and agreed to a Royal Commission, our media was diverted by a news story reporting on a Melbourne University study into what they claimed was another driver of violent extremism. You guessed it – misogyny.

"Almost 40 per cent of Australian boys support violent extremist ideologies while more than a third have misogynistic attitudes towards women," spluttered outraged media reports. Newspapers quoted Dr Sara Meger, the lead researcher, who said her findings revealed strong and significant correlations between misogynist attitudes and support for violent extremism. Apparently "disturbingly high" anti-feminist views were held by the boys aged 13 to 17 included in the study. And that's the real point – they say "misogyny," but they mean disagreeing with feminist beliefs.

The timely release of this unpublished research comes as no surprise. Sara Meger has been targeting boys for many years now and this was an ideal moment to attract international attention. The feminist scholar is a lecturer in feminist international relations and international security, and this new research is simply the latest round of her ongoing project on "Misogyny and Youth Radicalisation Leading to Violent Extremism."

More about this deeply flawed, nonsensical research later. What's important to understand is that the feminist mafia controlling our universities have been linking misogyny to extremism for nearly a decade.

Check out the Australian Institute of International Affairs, a respected thinktank precluded under its charter from promoting ideology. Yet from 2018 onwards this organisation has been publishing articles identifying misogyny as a form of violent extremism. The most recent example, by Deakin University lecturer Dr Shannon Zimmerman, quotes the UN Security Council Resolution 1325 which ludicrously claims "conflict and war have a disproportionate impact on women and girls." Hmmm, apart from all those dead soldiers, who are almost all men.

Zimmerman argues that it follows that "special effort is needed to be taken to ensure the protection of women and girls from violence" and this requires addressing gender-based responses to extremism – which is her claimed expertise.

There are dozens of similar examples of feminist academics across Australia pushing this line, publishing articles, speaking at conferences, and making submissions to national security inquiries arguing that misogyny is a cause, sometimes even the cause of right-wing extremism. And they are packing a punch.

Our key intelligence organisation, ASIO (Australian Security Intelligence Organisation) has fallen into line, acknowledging links between misogyny (particularly "violent misogyny") and violent extremism, especially in the context of radicalisation among young people. Mike Burgess, Director-General of ASIO, has referenced "violent misogynists" as part of the evolving threat landscape.

This is simply the latest product of the endlessly inventive domestic violence industry. The violent extremism they are talking about is rebadged violence against women – a remake of the relentless campaign which has dominated public dialogue for the last half century, morphing from protecting women from genuinely dangerous men to claiming victimhood for women confronted with a raised voice or refusal to pay a credit card bill.

The industry's inspired new move is to repackage violence against women as the very latest, sexiest of bogeymen – terrorist extremism. Not bad, eh? Once again, I sit back and marvel at the feminists' incredible chutzpah and inventiveness.

Now, after nearly a decade of propaganda carefully preparing the ground for their next move, the scene is set. They are ready to come for the boys. The feminists now say the time has come for prevention, which means targeting boys in schools.

We've already had the first announcement. At the National Men's Health Gathering in Brisbane last October, Ged Kearney, the Assistant Minister for the Prevention of Family Violence, introduced herself as a "proud feminist," and announced to the assembled group of hard-working health professionals and men's support workers that "we're going to take you on a journey away from your destructiveness and domination," before slipping in the news that classroom anti-misogyny training for boys would soon be introduced into both junior and senior schools. Kapow!

So here we go. Australia is scrambling to catch up with feminists elsewhere who've been going great guns pursuing this new agenda. In Canada, New Zealand and some American states there are moves to follow the UK and Scotland which recently announced anti-misogyny classes for boys in schools with a £20 million investment to empower teachers, families, and pupils to tackle these issues. Children as young as 11 exhibiting "misogynistic behaviours" are to receive targeted interventions. And what is misogynistic behaviour? You guessed it; whatever the feminists say it is!

Jess Phillips, who bears the ominous title "Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls", has repeatedly described misogyny as needing to be treated like "any other extremist ideology."

Sure enough, her safeguarding has already begun. In early January, Laurelhill Community College in County Antrim, Northern Ireland suspended 19 male teenage pupils after the principal raised concerns about "toxic masculinity" on display during a school assembly. The parents of the 19 boys, along with children at the school, have spoken out against the suspensions believing them to be unfair, saying they have damaged the boys' mental wellbeing after being made out to "be villains". There were claims that the girls' behaviour was just as bad, yet none were suspended, naturally.

This is obviously just the start of those targeted interventions in a population primed by the hugely successful Netflix drama Adolescence which involved a 13-year-old boy who brutally stabs and murders a female schoolmate. Prime Minister Starmer used the series to justify the intervention in schools: "Every parent should be able to trust that their daughter is safe at school…This is about protecting girls," he said.

Never mind that the Netflix drama was fiction based on numerous flawed assumptions. Rick Bradford, who writes the excellent blog, The Illustrated Empathy Gap, points out white teenage girls are in fact the least likely group to be victims of knife crime in the UK, as he shows here:

Equally dubious is the Netflix drama's beat-up of the risks to boys of exposure to dangerous influences online. The truth is far more complex with boys often victims of online abuse by girls, who are very actively using the internet to bully and abuse others.

• A 2021 UNICEF review of global studies found that boys often face equal or greater exposure to certain online harms compared to girls, including being more likely to be victims of sextortion.

• A 2024 Thorn survey of over 10,000 minors reported a sharp rise in younger boys being targeted for sexual messages or requests for explicit images.

• A Youth Endowment Fund 2025 Vulnerability Report, based on a survey of 10,000 teens aged 13-17 in England and Wales found minimal gender differences in participation in online discussions about harming specific groups, with 38% of boys and 34% of girls reporting involvement.

• A YouGov survey found there has been no increase in misogynist attitudes amongst young men, as compared to older generations.

But none of this fits the new narrative of vile boys being groomed online to become misogynist terrorists – a theme which has been embraced by our own eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant.

Naturally our compliant media dutifully trots out the latest feminist talking points rather than asking the hard questions. Like are these claims credible? Are they arguments based on research or advocacy founded in ideology?

Let's return briefly to the Meger research used to support the latest claims about misogyny and violent extremism. What we didn't hear about is the fact that this study also found more than a quarter of the teenage girls surveyed expressed misogynist views about women and girls – "minimising violence, excusing perpetrators and mistrusting their own gender." That's according to the Victorian Commissioner for Gender Equality the Public Sector, Dr Niki Vincent, who wrote about the unpublished study on her LinkedIn page. As I mentioned, this latest round of the Meger research is not yet published but presumably Vincent had access to the data as part of the DV elite.

So how is it possible that so many girls were lured to the dark side? Well, look at the inane questions included in the Megel project:

Sometimes a woman can make a man so angry that he hits her when he didn't mean to.

Women often make sexual assault accusations as a way of getting back at men.

Women going through custody battles often make up or exaggerate claims of domestic violence.

It is easy to see why so many girls as well as boys would agree with these often factual statements.

Funnily enough the survey also includes questions clearly targeting the Muslim community:

A man should be able to have more than one wife but a woman should not have more than one husband.

Unsurprisingly there's been no mention of the response of different ethnic groups to this survey. That's the great irony. The ethnic groups most likely to score highly on these misogyny scales are precisely the same Islamic groups which have produced individuals who do pose a terrorist threat. But no one is talking about that.

There's a New Zealand psychologist blogging on Substack as Backcountry Psychology who is doing a great job meticulously exposing this mountain of feminist "scholarship" denigrating men. Research he describes as "full of unjustified assumptions and invalid measurement, weak manipulations, or suspicious analysis" - all being used to support "all sorts of theories and claims about masculinity, patriarchy, aggression, gender norms."

Backcountry Psychology is very concerned that these deceptive studies are being used to justify re-education of children:

The problem is that certain progressive people read shallow articles like this and then actually call for (and vote for) unnecessary interventions in schools and broad societal restructuring-all based on pretty shoddy research.

Almost the entire field is run by ideologues with clear bias. It's a house of cards. A progressive propaganda machine designed only to advance a certain orthodox worldview.

And right now, boys are in the crosshairs – a very convenient distraction from the real threat of violent extremism, and clever means of avoiding proper discussion about Islamic extremists who pose such a danger to this country.