The manosphere is carrying a lot of blame these days. It’s responsible for porn addiction, poor treatment of women by men, and now, if the Prime Minister is to be believed, the violence that saw the terrible assault on MP Helen Haines that resulted in her losing both of her legs.
Now, while I can see the heavy hand of the online world being either responsible, or an accelerant for porn and misogyny, it smacks of sheer opportunism by Anthony Albanese to blame the assault on Haines on the same dreaded manosphere.
In fact the term itself has become a catch-all for any act of violence in the Western world these days. Bored young men being turned into angry or sexist young men by influencers on social media.
And suddenly, with that attack, the Prime Minister has been given a lifeline, or at least a distraction from his own domestic woes around suspect grants to golf clubs that he happens to frequent.
Not that he does not feel revulsion towards this dreadful act, but he has little, if any, philosophical or intellectual foundation upon which to pin it, if not the bogeyman of the hard-right digital world.
The already vague Digital Duty of Care bill is set to become an ever-more vague octopus, with tentacles that reach into freedom of speech, identity matters around gender, and now, the bogeyman of far-right politics.
Yet what is being conveniently forgotten, or at least overlooked, in the matter, an overlooking that only applies to the left of the political spectrum, is that the perpetrator in the Haines attack displayed an online presence that was a heady cocktail of deep green and pro-Palestinian far-left ideologies.
