Welcome to XY online

What Kind of Man Do You Want to Be? is a new campaign designed to engage men across Victoria (Australia) in conversations about masculinity, respect and prevention. The campaign was launched in Melbourne/Naarm in June 2025.

In recent years, there has been a significant rise in the number of young people engaging with online influencers, including those who post motivational health and fitness videos on social media. Online influencers can have a positive impact on their followers by providing them with information (albeit of varying degrees of accuracy), entertainment and opportunities for learning and skill development.

These notes were prepared by Professor Michael Flood in September 2021, to guide a largescale organisation in Australia in its development of bystander education to prevent and reduce workplace sexual harassment.

General principles for effective education

There are some general principles for effective education that can be applied to education and training strategies focused on bystander intervention in sexual harassment. Such strategies are more likely to generate change if they:

Over the past couple of years, Andrew Tate, a kickboxer from Britain, has emerged as an online star for disaffected, often highly misogynist young men. Starting as a professional kickboxer, he became an online celebrity after making repeated highly misogynistic statements. By 2022 Tate was the most Google searched figure in the world, promoting misogynist, pro- traditional masculinity, ideas to millions of young men.

Neoconservative social scientists have claimed that fathers are essential to positive child development, and that responsible fathering is most likely to occur within the context of heterosexual marriage. This perspective is generating a range of governmental initiatives designed to provide social support preferences to fathers over mothers; and to heterosexual married couples, rather than to alternative family forms. 

To what extent do people in Australia have anti-feminist attitudes? A number of Australian surveys support the point that significant proportions of the population endorse anti-feminist beliefs that men are treated unfairly or discriminated against.

There is consistent evidence that stereotypical masculine attitudes and norms shape men’s and boys’ behaviour in harmful ways. 

• Men who endorse traditional definitions of manhood are more likely to suffer harm to themselves.
• Men who endorse traditional definitions of manhood are more likely to do harm to others.

The following notes summarise the evidence of associations between men’s conformity to stereotypical masculine norms and a range of outcomes, including: