Former Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau is increasingly worried about the rise of the manosphere, warning of its growing influence on young men.
Perched on a bright red couch shaped like a giant pair of lips in Mecca’s Bourke Street store in Melbourne’s CBD, Trudeau was discussing leadership, power and gender equality with journalist Leigh Sales and his former chief of staff Katie Telford on Friday night, but it was on the topic of men that he really fired up.
“These losers who are pushing the manosphere mindset are just such douche bags, just so evil and so insecure,” he said. “It is something that so frustrates me because this idea that they are saying that there’s some sort of code that men have to become the top type of man.”
In his 10 years as prime minister, Trudeau established Canada’s first gender-balanced cabinet and introduced childcare for $10 a day, but his feminist and progressive policies also made him a target on the extreme edges of online masculinity culture.
Proponents of the manosphere, a loose collection of male podcasters and social media stars who push misogynistic and ultra-conservative views, have mocked Trudeau’s feminism as performative and accused his government of fostering a “feminist hellscape” that alienated young men.
However, at Friday’s event, Trudeau warned the ideas being paraded by the manosphere were toxic and more people needed to stand up against them.
Trudeau spoke out in response to a question from Ben Vasiliou, chief executive of The Man Cave, a Melbourne-based mental health charity for men and boys, about what male leaders could do about the emergence of a “strong man archetype” dragging men and boys to the right.
“We all know how much damage the patriarchy has done to women over the past generations,” Trudeau said. “It is now as astonishingly clear how much damage the patriarchy is doing to young men.”
Trudeau said teenagers and young men were not driving the patriarchy – instead, they were victims of the system.
It’s a system epitomised by men such as Andrew Tate, and HStikkyTokky and Sneako, who are profiled in Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere.
“It’s so scary,” Trudeau said. “I have two sons and I watch them exposed to that stuff, and I’m trying to run as fast as I can. We have very good conversations. But it’s just so easy to fall into these tropes that are so fragilising.”
Trudeau, who was a school teacher before entering politics, is concerned about the way the manosphere is increasingly trying to turn young men’s mobile phones into an indoctrination tool and using increasingly extreme views to extract money.
“There is this money-making, polarising, attention-grabbing machine that has taken advantage of the algorithms that are designed to divide and polarise and anger,” he said. “It is something that good people are increasingly being effective at pushing back at.”
The solution, Trudeau said, was for men to be “kind and thoughtful and emotionally available and helpful and full and complete human beings”, while also recognising that women are also full and complete human beings.
Trudeau is used to criticism. When he implemented Canada’s first gender-balanced cabinet, he said there was “a lot of pearl clutching” by right-wing media saying the cabinet must be a meritocracy.
“No, f— off,” Trudeau said. “It was really the average man who lost out, the great men were going to do just fine [and remain in cabinet] but the middle of the pack, who would have been in if it hadn’t been for gender balance, dropped out, and I was OK with that.”
Speaking to The Age after the event, Trudeau said the main purpose of his visit to Melbourne was the Women Deliver summit this week, but he was also planning to attend the Collingwood versus Essendon Anzac Day blockbuster at the MCG.
Trudeau said his pop star girlfriend Katy Perry had given him “a little bit” of insight into what to expect at his first Australian rules match after she performed at the AFL grand final in 2024.
From attending the World Economic Forum to music festival Coachella, Trudeau said he was still unclear on what life post-politics holds for him.
“I’ve still got lots more to do,” he said.
There’s no political memoir on the horizon at this stage, instead Trudeau is focused on appearing at events like those on his schedule in Melbourne.
“People read but not political books,” he said. “They use them as backdrops on shelves. Every politician has to write a book as a legacy – fine, whatever – but nobody’s going to read it. There are more powerful ways of shaping conversations and impacting people.”
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