CONTENT WARNING: This article discusses violence against women.
Men’s bad behaviour towards women doesn’t appear in a vacuum; it grows in the same culture that cheers full‑time at the footy and then shrugs at what happens behind closed doors afterwards. So when an AFL captain like Andy McGrath voluntarily walks into a room to talk about men’s violence and the manosphere, it forces a more uncomfortable question: whose job is it to fix this?
In the last few years, we’ve heard a lot about “lonely men” and “lost boys” as an explainer for online misogyny. Research from UN Women partner Equimundo found around two‑thirds of young men in the US feel “no one really knows me well”, a level of isolation that’s now being linked to higher rates of depressive symptoms and suicidal thoughts. That ache is real — but so are the people cashing in on it. Advocate Tarang Chawla, who began campaigning after his younger sister Nikita was murdered by her former partner in 2015, points out that a lot of manosphere content “starts with confidence but ends with entitlement”, pulling in boys as young as 13 who want purpose and instead get told that women owe them sex, attention and obedience.
The pipeline is rarely subtle. On podcasts like Diary of a CEO, host Steven Bartlett built a reputation as one of the “good guys” before leaning into episodes where men’s loneliness becomes a crisis women are expected to fix. In one widely shared interview, psychiatrist Alok Kanojia refers to men who can’t find partners and have children as a “mass extinction event”, a phenomenon he and Bartlett go on to compare to genocide and cancer. Bartlett then asks whether “society has a responsibility to intervene in some way, to course correct this” and if we should “put systems in place to make sure those men meet partners”. Framing women as a resource that needs to be redistributed to save men from extinction might sound extreme, but it sits on the same spectrum as the manosphere accounts telling boys they’re owed sex, connection and family life, rather than teaching them how to build equal relationships in the first place.
You can see the same logic play out in the more overtly cooked corners of the manosphere, where “mogging” aka outclassing another guy in looks, status or physical size, has basically become a personality type. In those spaces, the goal isn’t connection, it’s domination: gym influencers brag about “mogging” younger men, and looks‑maxxing creators tell boys their value lies in how thoroughly they can tower over someone else, not how they treat the women in their lives.
When PEDESTRIAN.TV asked McGrath why a 25‑year‑old star defender is choosing to sit in a room about men’s violence and gendered harm, he doesn’t reach for spin. “As AFL players we hold a really special responsibility in society to live in a way that role models the behaviour that we expect of our fellow men,” he said.
For him, “asking questions, being honest, being vulnerable, is a really important step forward in making the world a better place.”
He’s also clear about the online environment those young men are swimming in. “There’s a lot of mistruth online,” McGrath explained. “Our brains are operating in a way that negativity bias is present all the time. So we consume and it’s easier to consume the things that are negative around the world, but it’s a lot easier to skip past the good that’s happening.” That’s why he believes “raising awareness in this space, talking about the things that aren’t glamorous, that aren’t easy to talk about, that sort of make your stomach churn a little bit, make you uncomfortable is the best way forward”.
“I don’t think that all men are to blame for domestic violence or the things that are happening in this space, but we all play a big role in it.”
You see the consequences of that culture most clearly on game day. Ahead of the AFL Grand Final, Victoria Police prepare for a 20 per cent spike in violence against women, while domestic assaults in New South Wales jump by up to 40 per cent on State of Origin nights, per Our Watch. Those numbers map onto lived stories like *Sophie who told P.TV ahead of the AFL Grand Final last year her experience with the game.
“My mum used to make us stay in our rooms every footy final. We didn’t know what was going on when we were kids, but I could remember a lot of screaming and yelling from my dad,” she told P.TV.
“We’d come out the next day with shattered glasses everywhere, with my mum quite literally picking up the pieces. I started noticing she would get more bruises throughout each season as the years passed.
“I don’t have a relationship with my dad now, but I try to stay home with my cat and partner during finals weekend.”
National violence prevention body Our Watch is explicit that these spikes sit on “underlying gendered drivers of violence”, while groups like Berry Street and FARE link them to drinking, gambling stress and ideas about masculinity that glorify aggression and control.
That’s why Chawla doesn’t let institutions hide behind “a few bad apples”. He argues we need whole‑of‑system responses including governments, tech platforms and sporting codes, without pretending individual men are powerless passengers. He wants codes like the AFL to move beyond feel‑good campaigns and towards “clearer standards, more consistent sanctions” when players use sexist or homophobic slurs or are involved in abuse, so it doesn’t end with a PR‑massaged apology and business as usual. Because if a league can shrug off community backlash over booking someone like Snoop Dogg at a family‑friendly Grand Final, despite his long history of misogynistic lyrics, what message does that send about whose safety matters most?
Inside clubs, McGrath has watched that tension play out over his decade in the system. He describes the AFL environment he entered as “very male‑dominated” and “very much a boys’ club”, where “you can get caught in just casual sort of toxic masculinity at times”.
“This is my tenth year in the AFL, you hear things that just shouldn’t be said,” he shared.
“I think in my first couple years I was afraid to say anything. I knew it was the wrong thing, but now more and more often you’re getting players calling it out and telling your mates that it’s not acceptable, we don’t stand for that. And often it’s a passing comment, often no one’s heard it.”
The hardest bit, for many men, is that moment of actually saying something. Chawla spends a lot of time talking to guys who hear a sexist joke or see a mate’s behaviour drift into ugly territory and feel sick, but stay silent because they don’t want to be iced out of the group chat.
In Her Shoes, the Tomorrow Man workshop both he and McGrath are involved with, is deliberately built around that discomfort. It puts men in a room to hear directly from women about “the realities of life that [we] navigate” — from walking home at night to living with coercive control — and then asks them to workshop how you move from empathy to action. As Chawla puts it, the goal is helping men find “the middle ground” between staying silent and being ostracised, and to “shift the group along to a culture that is more pro‑social and actually is healthier for men as well as just women and girls”.
McGrath’s pitch to blokes who feel defensive about all of this is quiet but pointed. “I’d say to step into that zone of being uncomfortable, learn more,” he says. “It’s probably a fixed mindset to feel defensive about this stuff.” He pushes back on the idea that being a man means never backing down.
“As men we can often be stoic and stubborn and sit in this place of wanting to be what we feel is a man, which is in my opinion sometimes flawed,” he says.
“Vulnerability and emotional intelligence and being wrong is all part of being a man too.” That is why he wants men in rooms like this: to “understand first and foremost what life is like for our wives and our moms and our sisters” and then ask “what are the tangible things that we and our mates can do to make this space better?”
So whose responsibility is it to manage the manosphere and men’s violence? It’s men who click play on the podcasts, yes, but also the platforms that amplify them, the sports that profit from narrow ideas of manhood, the media that looks away until there’s a murder, and every bystander who decides whether to speak. McGrath and Chawla aren’t pretending they can fix all of that on their own. What they are doing is using their influence to make being a “good bloke” mean something harder: showing up, listening, and then actually changing how you move through the world.
We spoke to Andy and Tarang ahead of the upcoming In Her Shoes event this week. You can find more info and future sessions via Tomorrow Man’s website, or at itscooltocry.com.
Help is available.
If you require immediate assistance, please call 000.
If you’re in distress, please call Lifeline on 13 11 14 or chat online.
Under 25? You can reach the Kids Helpline at 1800 55 1800 or chat online.
To speak to someone about domestic violence, including for help in leaving a violent relationship, please call 1800 RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or chat online.
The post AFL’s Andrew McGrath Says Locker-Room Toxic Masculinity Pushed Him To Step Up For Women appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
