Engaging with sexist male influencers gives them exactly what they want: attention

Women’s anger is justified, but responding to misogynistic rage bait ultimately leaves us feeling hopeless, exhausted, burnt out, and powerless, writes Abbir Dib.

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Picture this: you’re a young male influencer with abs, a grating voice, and the ability to convince thousands of people to buy your fitness plan. Life is good.

Your days are spent posting videos, occasionally dropping “truth bombs” for your impressionable followers about things boys care about: getting big, growing wealth, and becoming a man. Your worth is tied to a set of social media metrics that need to keep trending upwards to fund a creeping lifestyle. But eventually, they dip.

So, from the most primitive recesses of your mind, you take the most reliable attention grab available: talking about women.

Is domestic labour real work? Are “females” a distraction? What is their role? It’s generous to call this attempt at firing a brain synapse “discourse”. It’s rage bait.

And yet, we engage. Why?

It’s easy to say we should simply ignore sexist content online. It’s much harder when it appears in your feed, surrounded by thousands of approving comments. For many women, this content doesn’t feel theoretical; it feels personal, and silence can feel like complicity.

Some engage because they believe they are correcting a harmful narrative, supporting other women in the comments, or holding someone to account. Others have lost patience after years of online harassment from these men, their followers, and media outlets that profit from misconstruing their views.

Regardless of who you are, responding can feel righteous, immediate and communal. Often, it feels safer than addressing these ideas in real life, especially when we are constantly reminded how unsafe the world already is.

After all, Australia is in the grip of a worsening domestic violence crisis. Only last week, police granted bail to a man facing domestic violence charges weeks before he allegedly murdered three people, including his pregnant former partner. It feels like we’re reading a story like this every other day.

That fear is real. The anger is justified. But responding to rage bait ultimately makes us worse off. It leaves us feeling hopeless, exhausted, burnt out and in a state of powerlessness.

Social media is a marketplace, and our attention is the currency. Online gender wars ultimately reward the very people provoking them.

The uncomfortable reality is that engaging with sexist male influencers rarely produces long-term consequences for them. At worst, they weather a brief media storm, lose a brand deal or issue a half-baked apology, only to emerge with a larger audience and boosted engagement.

Outrage exposes their content to new users, normalises their talking points and cements their relevance. Critically, these men understand this dynamic. They are not interested in being persuaded, corrected or held to account. Rage is not a side effect of their content; it is the business model.

Elon Musk understands this dynamic better than most, which is why he has stripped back safeguards on hateful content. And I thought we learnt this lesson in the 2010s, arguably the birth of the modern manosphere, when social media was flooded with “blue-haired woke feminists destroyed” compilations. Platforms like Jubilee ran formats such as “100 feminists versus one misogynist”, turning gender politics into entertainment.

It didn’t dismantle sexism. It entrenched it. Debate became divisive theatre, and it was enormously profitable.

I’m not saying this to victim-blame or to deny that misogynistic content has real-world consequences. It does. I’m angry that some of the least informed men are shaping how young boys understand gender. I’m angry that women are still expected to absorb unpaid domestic labour at the expense of our careers and financial security. I’m angry that women are framed as “distracting” regardless of what we wear or do.

And not everything that makes us angry online is rage bait. Posting about Gaza, Indigenous rights or Ukraine matters. Sharing domestic violence statistics matters. Amplifying lived experience matters.

But whether we like it or not, the onus is on us to pause and ask whether we’re being bamboozled, and to opt out when we are. This media literacy is not exclusive to gender; it applies to race, class and religious commentary.

You ultimately have control over what you consume and amplify online. Refusing to engage with monetised misogyny isn’t complacency. It’s a refusal to feed a system that thrives on outrage.

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About the author

Abbir Dib

Abbir Dib is a Melbourne-based journalist and content creator covering politics, pop culture and breaking news, with bylines at The Telegraph, ABC, SBS, The Age, and The Sydney Morning Herald. Her website is abbirdib.com, and you can find her on Instagram at @ab.dib.