Marc Fennell takes on the manosphere in The State of Man

Marc Fennell hasn’t exactly grown up on our television screens, but he has come a long way since he first appeared reviewing DVDs on SBS in 2004. Seeing today’s much more buff Fennell turn up on the doorstep of a shirtless, musclebound influencer at the opening of The State of Man feels like the culmination of a journey; Fennell keeps his shirt on, but those arms of his are holding their own.

The State of Man is Fennell’s three-part deep dive into the manosphere. ‘If you’re a young guy going online trying to work out how to be a man, you’re going to get a lot of this,’ he says early on, holding up his phone. What follows on his phone is a lot of content designed to make young men feel bad about themselves. And these days, a lot of people see the world through their phone.

Down the rabbit hole

The manosphere sales pitch online is simple: make money, work out (‘you’ve got to be ripped, you’ve got to be rich’) and become a real man. For young men looking for guidance, or even just existing online, it’s a message that’s hard to avoid.

One of the ongoing threads here is a burner phone set up as ‘Young Marc’, designed to be a passive window into what kind of content is pushed onto young men’s social media. Things start out random, then get increasingly darker; eventually he can’t show his social media feed on camera for fear of breaching hate speech laws.

In talking to a few young men who’ve come out the other side of the manosphere, Fennell uncovers some basic facts. These are guys who are lonely or isolated; manosphere influencers project confidence. It becomes a way to find a direction in life when there doesn’t seem to be a lot of other options out there.

From there we learn about how the internet enables content designed to target the interests (or weaknesses) in specific groups. Which for young men involves a lot of body building and muscle gain. Before you know it, Fennell’s visiting a testosterone replacement clinic, where we discover that the number of his morning erections has ‘remained pretty constant’ throughout his life.

Surveying the state of man

The manosphere has been in the spotlight lately, with a recent Louis Theroux series and Jon Ronson’s latest book The Castle both lifting the rock to see what crawls out. Fennell takes a slightly different approach, being less interested in the freak show side of things (discussion of morning erections aside) and more about the corrosive social aspects in general.

So some of the guests across the three episodes include former PM Julia Gillard, a professor of economics at the University of New South Wales, Australian Federal Police Commissioner Krissy Barrett, former father of the Year Hamish Blake, and a number of people working on various programs designed to prevent radicalisation and create rites of passage.

There are also fitness coaches, sex workers, former incels, trad wives, participants in the Enhanced Games (that’s the competition where everyone’s on something), various extremists, plus a bunch of school kids who are struggling to deal with everything coming at them. And if you’ve ever wondered what tradies are talking about on a building site, bad news: it’s social media like everyone else – though seeing a 15-year-old apprentice being dressed down by his boss for obviously acting in front of the camera is a good laugh.

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Facing the future

The sections on radicalisation end up being the most interesting, in part because they take it all seriously. Alex Eubank, the influencer Fennell meets at the start of this series, looks like a cartoon character or a comic-book superhero, but he inhabits a world that is shaping the lives of millions of people – and as the interviews here reveal, even if Eubank personally means well, his world is not a healthy one for those on the outside looking in.

This isn’t a one-note parade of doom and social collapse, and it does present a number of plausible remedies to the manosphere, ranging from increasing childhood socialisation to making social media feeds opt-in. Nothing on offer seems like an easy answer, which at least seems refreshingly realistic.

As always, Fennell has a personal interest in all this, as it’s the world his son is growing up into. And he does get into his own situation at various points. (If you ever wanted to see Hamish Blake play the role of family therapist, here’s your chance.) But that does mean this comes across as more of an attempt to understand what’s going on than the more typical parade of freaks and tragic victims.

The manosphere might be a collection of creeps and worse peddling lies for cash, but that doesn’t mean they’re a joke. The State of Man might have been more fun if they were.

The State of Man premieres on ABC TV on 13 October, with all three episodes available to stream on iView

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