– Brave headmaster denounces shaming of boys
Reeling from news of the murder of Charlie Kirk, I found myself thinking back eight years to when I was out on campuses, trying to expose feminist lies about a rape crisis at our universities. It was daunting facing the wrath of the young ideologues as they screamed their hatred of me and my ideas. My campus tour led to new campus free speech codes, which our universities seem determined to ignore.
But Charlie Kirk spent over a decade using campus discussions to try to promote civilised discourse – invariably showing courtesy and good humour during hostile encounters with people who often violently disagreed with him.
And now he is gone. “They killed the guy whose mantra was, ‘let’s talk about it,’ writes Jeff Childers of C&C News, explaining if there were one thing Charlie Kirk was most famous for, it was his willingness to patiently and respectfully debate his ideas with anyone.
“They don’t want to debate. They want to end debate, with a bullet,” Childers concludes.
We can’t let that happen.
By chance, I happened to be writing this week about one ordinary bloke’s determination to be heard on a mighty contentious issue.
Drive five or six hours west of Sydney and you’ll find yourself in a little outback town called Trundle, population, 568, surrounded by cattle, sheep and wheat country.
Principal of Trundle Central school is John Southon, who’s worked at the school for 34 years. He’s a real fixture of the town, nominated in 2021 for Australian of the Year for his work on youth mental health in rural areas.
You’d have thought the man would have his heart in the right place when it comes to the boys and girls he’s looked after all these years. But not according to Australia’s media.
Last year he found himself in the news, with newspaper stories and The Today Show reporting on the controversy he had caused.
What had he done? Well, in his regular newsletter John happened to mention the stereotyping of young men in public discussions of domestic violence:
“The media labelling all men as violent is causing many beautiful, gentle young men problems with identity formation and maintaining positive mental health. If you saturate young people with the message that being male is being violent, eventually some will believe this and question their identity.”
Apparently, a young woman, a domestic violence victim, took offence at this and she spoke to the press. That was enough for the fanatics controlling our media to concoct a news story. Shock horror, someone was telling the truth about domestic violence. Shut them down!
They ignored the fact that John was right. It has widely been reported that boys are feeling “defensive and disenfranchised” by the way they are portrayed in the media (Supporting Young Men Online report, 2025). Prominent domestic violence campaigner Jess Hill in her Quarterly Essay entitled Losing it discussed how blame-heavy strategies alienate boys, making them feel demonized and “exacerbating shame and isolation”.
But still the media found John’s comment offensive, also finding fault in comments he made about coercive control laws which had just been introduced in NSW. Namely:
“From an educator’s perspective, it is not clear what behaviours and at what level constitute an offence under this law so we cannot accurately inform and educate children.”
Here too John is right. That’s exactly what happened. When coercive control laws were first proposed legal groups expressed concerns that the behaviour was too hard to define, making the laws unworkable. And sure enough, in the first nine months, only five people were charged, and one convicted in NSW.
Yet the media seized on the comments of one domestic violence survivor to claim John’s comments were outrageous. This led to quite a kerfuffle, including a reprimand from top dogs in the Education Department. But John is determined to keep speaking his mind:
“If I’m not allowed to open debate in my community for the fear of being ostracized and disciplined, it reduces my ability as an educator to inform young men and empower them. We need to have an open debate about these complex issues. We just can’t say that men are bad, women are victims. I’m passionate that we need to allow our young men to develop an identity without this stigmatization around violence.”
I’ve made a video with this brave man. Please help me circulate it.
John Southon’s story is revealing. That is how the feminists operate. Shutting down any challenge to their warped narrative and seeking to isolate and shame people who speak out. Fiona Girkin is the other example, who had to leave the University of Tasmania after activists recruited the ABC to protest about the video she made with me about her work at UTAS teaching police about the prevalence of two-way domestic violence.
The domestic violence narrative in this country is controlled by flat earthers – ideologues absolutely wedded to antiquated feminist ideology dating back nearly half a century. They refuse to give up their belief in the 1984 Duluth framework which claimed domestic violence was all about men asserting patriarchal power and control over women.
These dinosaurs are engaged in a mighty battle to deny 50 years of research findings showing most family violence is two-way, involving both male and female perpetrators. They work hard to keep a lid on the constant challenges to their orthodoxy, with new research studies regularly published confirming women’s role in family violence. Here are just a few recent Australian examples:
- The 2022 ANROWS study of Adolescent Violence in Australia which found a larger proportion of females (23%) than males (14%) reported using violence against a family member.
- The latest Personal Safety Survey (2023) from the ABS which showed 35.7% of Australians experiencing violence, emotional abuse, or economic abuse by a partner were male.
- The 2024 report from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research (BOCSAR) showing that the number of females charged with domestic violence by police increased by 40% over the 10 years to 2023, compared to 17% for males.
- A large study published in the Medical Journal of Australia in May 2025 which found 45.5% of the 6934 people reporting having experienced intimate partner violence were male.
(I hope you will keep details of these studies handy so you are well armed to join public discussions, helping break down the gatekeeping on this issue from mainstream media.)
But it is not just research studies which are undermining the public’s confidence in feminist domestic violence dogma. There’s a constant stream of criminal cases which challenge the assertion that only men are violent – or that only men use coercive control.
Back in 2023 a story broke about a former Tasmanian Beauty Queen, Labor MP Kathryn Hay who appeared in court charged with 46 offences of abuse of her male partner over the course of a decade.
Hay allegedly assaulted her partner on numerous occasions by throwing a bowl of cereal at him, pushing him, punching and slapping his face and punching his upper body.
She called him ‘worthless and useless’, a ‘c***’, a ‘piece of s***’, ‘lazy’, ‘pathetic’, ‘dumb’ and ‘unfit to be a husband or a father,’ and told him to kill himself because ‘the world would be better off without him.’
The case ticked all the boxes for coercive control. Yet mainstream media for two years reported on this case and the only time the term was used was in an ABC report of Hay being convicted of “emotional abuse” in March this year, which mentioned the prosecutor had labelled the behaviour as coercive control.
Talk about two tier justice. If a man had been convicted of this type of behaviour, the media and the courts would have revelled in showcasing this textbook case of control and intimidation.
Similarly, we have just seen our famous mushroom murderer, Erin Patterson locked up for the rest of her life for the murder of three people.
Hundreds of articles, news stories, podcasts have been published about this extraordinary case, yet it was only when she was finally sentenced this month that anyone publicly mentioned coercive control. Claire Harvey, writing in The Australian, called out the media’s hypocrisy: “Her patterns of behaviour – control, withholding of affection, isolating estranged husband Simon Patterson from his family, name-calling, disparagement, brainwashing the children – are signs of abuse we are used to diagnosing when men are the perpetrators. But because she’s a woman, for some reason our society struggles to see it.”
Harvey lists all Patterson’s efforts to use her dominance in the relationship (she was independently wealthy) to exclude and marginalize her ex-husband, mocking his faith and family, her subtle or overt manipulation to maintain power. The woman three times tried to poison her husband before the fatal lunch where she succeeded in murdering his relatives. Not a bad way of controlling a relationship through fear, eh?
People aren’t stupid. When they hear about the way these two women behaved, our community draws its own conclusions, namely, that this shocking behaviour is no different from that we are now being taught is men’s coercive control of women.
Common sense is winning through. A large survey in 2021 showed 41% of respondents believed that domestic violence is equally committed by both men and women. The survey – National Community Attitudes towards Violence against Women Survey (NCAS) – was conducted by the key feminist domestic violence organisation, ANROWS, and they clearly weren’t thrilled by the result. One suspects they are loath to repeat it because chances are even more people will show they have seen the light.
Most people now get their information on such subjects not from the discredited mainstream media but from the wild world of social and alternate media, where feminists are finding control is slipping through their fingers. There we see a very different conversation taking place about domestic violence, as normal people give voice to their own experiences.
A very good example is Hannah Pearl Davis, known online as “Pearl”. This young female influencer has over 2 million followers on YouTube precisely because she is so explicitly and outrageously anti-feminist.
She has built her reputation on challenging the narrative of male-perpetrated abuse. In a Pearl Daily episode in April 2025 – titled “Feminism is IMPLODING: Women Are Turning on Each Other” – Pearl argued that women often exaggerate DV claims for attention or to manipulate men, stating, “Women are not getting abused left, right, and center… [In] most abusive situations, the parties are abusing each other…It’s not a one-way street. Some women provoke or start fights, then cry victim when it backfires.”
Here she is on X:
This woman, who has been called a “female Andrew Tate,” does some great work, chatting to women about false allegations, interviewing men’s advocates like Janice Fiamengo and Mike Buchanan, and backing up her views with sound statistics. But she pushes the envelope and sometimes blurts out some really crazy, unhelpful stuff.
Yet having women out there starting proper conversations about these issues is changing our cultural dialogue, which usually results in feminist myths about domestic violence being blown out of the water. Pearl has spawned dozens of other young women seeking their moment in the sun by taking on similar issues.
In alternate media it is far harder for feminists to spout their usual hogwash.
Richard Reeves, is the author of Of Boys and Men, a book which covers many important issues, whilst working hard not to tread on feminist toes. He recently appeared on Chris Williams’s hugely popular podcast – Modern Wisdom, which also has over 2 million followers – where he was utterly dismissive about the notion of symmetrical two-way violence.
Last month I interviewed George, the UK based digital creator who posts under the label TheTinMen. George has also been on Chris Williams’ show discussing precisely this issue and has now taken Reeves on, with this highly informative post. Do read it through.
This is great stuff. Proper public discussion of the facts… real research, accurate statistics – exactly what should be happening in mainstream media but isn’t. The combined reach of these two podcasters/YouTubers exceeds our whole mainstream media audience many times over.
Charlie Kirk’s goal was to show the world that there are diverse ideas which we can and should debate openly. He lost his life doing just that. We all must have the courage to ensure, through his cherished promotion of civilised discourse, that diverse views flourish.