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TRIGGER WARNING: This essay discusses domestic violence.

In October 2022, Keshia Golden was eight months pregnant and had just celebrated her baby shower when her then boyfriend, Calvin Sidney, viciously attacked her in the kitchen.

It was not the first time.

I vividly remember being eight months pregnant. Stroking my belly subconsciously, turning sideways any time I saw my reflection to see how big my bump had gotten. That final month of pregnancy is supposed to be a time of rest, nesting and excitement to finally hold your new baby in your arms, to celebrate life and to inhale their delicious baby scent. Instead, Keshia was having her head slammed into a counter.

Over the course of Keshia and Clavin’s relationship, more than 50 domestic violence calls had been made. Golden had obtained an order of protection against Sidney in July 2022 after he punched her in the face. In September 2022, when she was six months pregnant, he pushed her down a flight of stairs.

Then, on the night after her baby shower, with her head against the counter and her eight-month pregnant belly between her and the door, Golden grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed Sidney in the leg.

The blade happened to hit his femoral artery and he later died in hospital.

Golden was charged with first-degree murder.

This week she accepted a plea deal for involuntary manslaughter, resulting in 24 months probation and no prison time.

She leaves court with a felony conviction that will prevent her from ever becoming a nursing assistant and will affect her housing opportunities for the rest of her life.

“I took this deal because I want to be able to raise my daughter,” she said. “All she have is me.”

She felt she had no choice.

As her attorney said: “You bullied an innocent mother into taking a plea deal that will haunt her for the rest of her life.”

The same system that watched 50 domestic violence calls go unanswered, that issued an order of protection and then watched him push her down the stairs while pregnant, somehow found the full force of its attention and resources the moment she survived.

While he was hurting her, the system looked away.

The moment she survived, all of a sudden, it looked very closely.

This is what journalist and author Justine van der Leun calls criminalised survival.

Van der Leun spent eight years researching her book, Unreasonable Women, mailing surveys to more than ten thousand incarcerated women across America, reading their responses, travelling to meet them, sitting with what they told her. These responses are the images scattered throughout this essay.

What she found is that jails and prisons are full of women like Keshia Golden. Women who were abused. Women who called for help and were not protected. Women who, at the moment of greatest danger, made the only decision available to them, and who then watched the system that failed to protect them work overtime to punish them for surviving.

Upwards of 70% of women in American jails and prisons experienced intimate partner violence before they were incarcerated.

Many of them are not there because they are “criminals” in the typical sense of the word. They are there simply because they survived.

The reasonable man problem

Self-defence law was built around a very specific scenario.

Picture this: Two men of roughly equal size and strength face each other in a moment of immediate, visible, physical threat. One of them acts. Then the question is whether that action was reasonable under the circumstances.

The standard is called the reasonable man standard, but it fails women systematically and consistently.

Because the reality of domestic violence does not look like two people of equal size facing each other in a single moment of threat, does it? No. It looks like years of calculated terror. It looks like a woman who has called the police 50 times and knows the danger is real even when it is not immediately visible. She has tried every other option available to her. She knows de-escalation does not work. She knows that leaving is not the best way to stay alive.

She knows all of this from brutal and painful and repeated experience.

That knowledge and that threat assessment built from years of survival does not fit the reasonable man standard.

So the law calls her unreasonable, even when she is the most reasonable person in the damn room.

The numbers

Did you know that women who kill in self-defence serve an average of 15 years in prison?

While men who kill their female partners serve a measly 2 to 6 years.

Only 6% of women who kill in self-defence are acquitted on those grounds.

Keshia Golden is a Black woman who was eight months pregnant. Research shows that Black women who are pregnant or recently postpartum are at elevated risk of homicide from intimate partners. This means she was in the highest risk category that exists for intimate partner homicide.

And she was charged with first-degree murder for not dying.

Why do we punish women who call for help?

I can’t stop thinking about Lindsay Clancy while writing this, because when I think about a woman who called for help and was ignored, her story immediately comes to mind.

I am not here to debate whether or not she did it, and there have already been enough essays written about her case. What I want to talk about is the way that men have responded to women talking about how they see themselves in Lindsay.

I have spoken about Lindsay Clancy online a couple of times before, and every time I do, men come into my comments and call for the repeal of the 19th Amendment.

I’m not American so I had to Google this one. It turns out the 19th Amendment is the right of women to vote.

So let me get this straight. A woman in the grip of a postpartum psychiatric emergency (an actual medical crisis, documented, diagnosable, treatable, produced in significant part by the concoction of medications prescribed by her own doctors) becomes the reason, in these men’s minds, to strip all women of democratic participation altogether.

Huh?

And then I think about Rowan Baxter, who killed his entire family while not experiencing psychosis.

Nobody called for men to lose the right to vote.

Nobody suggested that Baxter’s actions were evidence that men could not be trusted with democratic participation.

Nobody proposed that his capacity for violence should have consequences for the civil rights of his entire fucking gender.

Where does this asymmetry come from?

It comes from the insane logic of a culture that pathologises women’s pain and, in the same breath, excuses men’s violence.

What the research actually shows

Do you ever wonder why we so often hear of men killing their entire families, much more than women?

You’re not imagining it. Familicide — in which both a partner and children are killed — is committed almost exclusively by men.

It would appear that a loss of control over masculine domains is at the heart of familicides, even where there is no clear history of domestic abuse. These acts are almost always premeditated and they tend to be acts of ownership. If he cannot have them, nobody can.

In a domestic and family violence context, 68% of filicide cases are committed by the child’s father compared with 32% by the child’s mother.

But the motivation tells the real story.

Fathers who commit filicide were almost always perpetrators of family violence.

Mothers who went on to harm their children were almost always victims of family violence.

Lindsay Clancy was a victim of a system that failed her.

Rowan Baxter was a perpetrator who was coached by that system on how to avoid accountability.

Both outcomes are catastrophic. Both involve dead children. And the public response to both involves scrutinising the woman and contextualising the man.

It was only recently that I was scrolling Facebook and I saw a video that will haunt me forever.

It was bodycam footage from when Queensland Police attended Rowan Baxter’s home after he had kidnapped his daughter Laianah during a scheduled custody visit and driven her interstate. They were there to serve him a Domestic Violence Order.

In the footage, Laianah is sitting on her father’s lap, wrapped around him.

At first, it took me a little while to figure out what the police officers were saying. And then I realised that they were telling him how to challenge the order.

“Talk to your friends about, you know, someone who might be willing to provide a reference,” one officer says.

They then ended the recording.

Two months later, Rowan Baxter intercepted Hannah Clarke’s car as she was driving their three children to school. He climbed into the passenger seat with a knife and a can of petrol. He ordered her to drive. He poured petrol over her and through the car.

She made it 200 metres before she pulled into a driveway and begged the man washing his car to call the police.

Then the car exploded.

Hannah Clarke freed herself from the burning car. She was completely engulfed in flames. She fought through injuries so severe they could not be treated to give a statement to police and beg for her babies to be saved.

She died that afternoon.

Aaliyah was six. Laianah was four. Trey was three.

The coroner later found the children likely died almost instantly when their father lit them on fire as they sat in the back seat.

And then a Queensland detective stood at a press conference and asked the watching public whether Baxter might have been driven too far by his circumstances.

He was removed from the case after public outrage.

Hannah Clarke was afraid to go to the police because she knew it might make him angrier.

She was right.

Now she and her three babies are dead.

How perpetrators talk about the women they killed

The research on how men convicted of killing female partners speak about their victims is a study in the persistence of blame.

Researchers who have interviewed convicted perpetrators of intimate partner homicide consistently document what criminologists call victim-blaming narratives. The man positions himself as the aggrieved party. The woman as the provocateur. The killing as an understandable, if regrettable, response to her behaviour.

She pushed him too far. She would not stop. She knew what she was doing. She made him do it. It’s her fault.

These narratives are not confined to the men themselves.

They also appear in court documents. They pop up in sentencing remarks. They are featured in media coverage, like the Daily Mail headlines that make me want to throw my phone out a window.

And even worse, they exist in the statements of the police officers and investigators who are supposed to be delivering justice.

He was driven too far.

The double standard is more obvious than the huge pimple that rears its ugly head when you’re getting ready for a date. It’s on camera. On the record. In the bodycam footage of police coaching Rowan Baxter on how to challenge the order designed to protect his family. And then it pops up in the comments of every man who reads about Lindsay Clancy and concludes that women should lose the right to vote.

What needs to change

How about we start with self-defence law reform that explicitly accounts for the reality of intimate partner violence? The reasonable man standard must become a reasonable person standard that recognises the accumulated threat assessment of a woman living inside sustained and ongoing terror.

How about maternal mental health systems that provide genuine support, not just handing out seventeen medications and a pamphlet to women in the most vulnerable period of their lives?

How about a national data framework that tracks how many women are incarcerated for acts connected to their experience of intimate partner violence?

Visa protections for migrant women that decouple their immigration status from their abuser’s power.

Self-determination for Aboriginal communities in designing and delivering family violence responses.

Police training that specifically addresses the documented tendency to contextualise male violence and scrutinise female survival.

And a cultural conversation that stops treating the survival of abuse as a crime while treating the abuse itself as a private matter.

Keshia Golden called the police 50 times.

Hannah Clarke called the police, only for them to turn around and protect the man that would ultimately kill her.

Lindsay Clancy was turned away every time she asked for help.

The system failed all of them.

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If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, contact 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732, available 24 hours a day. If you are in immediate danger, call 000.

Sources: ABC7 Chicago August 2026. Chicago Sun-Times August 2026. van der Leun, J. — Unreasonable Women, Ecco/HarperCollins June 2026. Guardian Australia — Rowan Baxter bodycam footage November 2025. Queensland Coroner’s Court findings 2022. AIHW — Domestic Homicide Report 2024. ABC News — Filicide overwhelmingly linked to male perpetrators July 2024. The Conversation — Why do men kill their families? January 2026. AIHW Family Domestic and Sexual Violence — Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People 2025. AIC — National Homicide Monitoring Program. ANROWS — Migrant Women and Family Violence research.

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There has been a lot of horrendous news in Australia this past week.

Not one, but two groups of teenage boys gang raped teenage girls. Five AFL players have been stood down amid allegations of sexual assault. A 46th woman has been killed by her current or former partner — that’s four women murdered in August alone.

Then there was the new research released from the University of Melbourne that found hostile attitudes towards women are the single strongest predictor of violent extremism in young people. The same research showed that 31.8% of young people believe giving women equal opportunities has gone too far, 17% of Australians believe feminism should be resisted with violence, and 40% of teenage boys believe women lie about domestic and sexual violence.

Terrified is an understatement.

I’d be lying if I said reading the news didn’t suck the life out of me this week.

Tempted to avoid it altogether, I set about closing tabs when one last ABC headline caught my eye.

It was the story of Flynn Martin and how he, and other young men, were radicalised by the manosphere but clawed their way out of it.

Flynn was 20 years old, a university student, a hobby content creator and a self-described doomscroller. He wasn’t searching for the manosphere. He was just doing what he always did — watching gaming content, scrolling through his feed and sending content to his mates. But then the anti-women content started appearing and he did not click away. He engaged and, of course, the algorithm noted the engagement and served him more.

Within months, Flynn had become what he now describes as another online prophet of misogyny. He posted a video about being a straight white male that went viral for all the wrong reasons.

“What’s wrong with being fit, healthy [and] not gay?” Martin asked in the video, which no longer exists. “Without people like me, you don’t reproduce.”

He then started talking about women: “It’s all pretty convenient when they say men are only good for ‘that, that and that’ … but as soon as they open their little f***ing useless mouths, I don’t want to f***ing hear it.”

The backlash came quick, but by that point Flynn didn’t even care. "When you become so intoxicated by the idea of garnering as much attention as possible … you don't have a regard for what you're saying," he says.

He had been radicalised so completely that he didn’t even notice it happening.

“You just become so insecure that it becomes a lot of internalised self-hatred … and that can very easily spew out into misogyny, taking that self-insecurity and self-hatred and taking it out on other people,” he says.

Flynn felt his frustration boiling over into anger because he did not know what he was meant to do, or where he was going in life.

“That was when all this manosphere content just started flooding my algorithm,” he says.

“Once it started showing up it didn’t stop. It was just there, just always there. And then that trickled into real life conversations and just so many different avenues of my life.”

The online content he encountered said things like:

“Men are better than women at almost everything.”

“Women aren’t able to come to logical conclusions.”

“Isn’t it ironic — since we’ve given women rights they’ve made themselves less valuable.”

The terrifying part is that Flynn is not alone. The ABC also spoke to Brandon, who was in his World of Warcraft guild when a friend mentioned some content. He said: “Oh, f*** it, alright, I’ll have a look.” That was the entry point. Simple as that. Not a recruitment drive or a manifesto. A guild chat and a curious click.

And Frankie, 18, who noticed something in the gaming and fandom spaces he had always loved. “There are people who just flat out say, ‘oh no, I didn’t like it because it was progressive and a woman was the character.’”

This is not just a mild opinion about a TV show.

It shows that these boys believe a woman’s existence as a protagonist is an imposition rather than a norm. It shows how they see women in the real world. That they are intrusions. That their stories do not belong to them. That spaces where they lead are spaces that have been unfairly taken from men.

From there, the distance to “women don’t belong in the workplace” or “women lie about assault” is not as far as we want it to be.

These are not the boys the conversation about the manosphere usually centres. We’ve become obsessed with tearing down Andrew Tate and his crony of influencers. We love to hate the podcasters who spew misogynistic dribble and we bond over the idea of banning them from buying microphones.

But what if the boys sitting in their rooms playing video games are the real concern?

What if the problem isn’t actually a culture war? What if it’s not about men vs women?

What if the real issue is child exploitation?

Andrew Tate’s online membership platform, which he calls Real World (vomit emoji) makes an estimated $184 million annually. That’s 155,000 students paying $99 per month. His premium tier, The War Room, costs $1,600 to enter.

Top tier influencers in this space earn $200,000 or more per speaking appearance. Mid-level creators make between $1 million and $10 million annually across courses, memberships, supplements, and what researchers are now calling conflict content — content specifically designed to generate outrage, which drives engagement, which drives revenue.

What we have realised is that the manosphere is not just a community of angry men on the internet. It’s more fucked up than that. It’s essentially big boys preying on little boys.

We’re talking about a mature commercial industry with a documented three-stage pipeline: find a vulnerable boy, inject him with a grievance narrative, then sell him the cure. But the crucial part is this: at every stage, he pays. At every stage the platform profits from his attention. At every stage the content gets more extreme.

Equimundo and Reset Tech spent 18 months investigating this ecosystem for their August 2026 report The Grift Economy.

Their conclusion: the manosphere is better understood as a commercial operation than an ideological one. The ideology is not the point. It’s all a scam. They don’t even care about the message they're pushing, because the ideology is just the product. But the product is being sold to boys who did not know they were buying it.

How the algorithm works

Researchers at Dublin City University set up ten fake accounts posing as 16-year-old boys on TikTok and YouTube. They didn’t search for manosphere content, they just searched for what 16-year-old boys actually search for.

Within hours, the algorithm was serving them misogynistic content.

They had not gone looking for it. The pipeline came to them.

A separate study analysed the actual TikTok histories of 142 young men. The journey starts somewhere ordinary like gym content, sports clips, fashion advice or dating tips. I’ve read about young men who were just looking for girl advice that they weren’t getting from their fathers.

The researchers called this the cultural touchpoints tier — content that on the surface raises no alarm but quietly establishes a norm. One type of male body, one set of male interests and one single way of moving through the world.

From there the algorithm escalates. Motivational content quickly becomes about discipline and dominance. Dating advice starts to frame women as obstacles to male success. Then next minute you’re served the full ideological framework of the manosphere.

Professor Michael Flood at QUT says: “As a person who held certain geeky interests, you must be wary of the kind of content you consumed, as you would inevitably be directed towards manosphere content in the process of consuming it.”

This is when we realise that our sons do not join the manosphere. The manosphere joins them.

What they are selling and who it costs

The manosphere finds boys who were lonely, uncertain, and looking for answers about who they are supposed to be. What they really want is community.

Professor Flood describes what that promise actually delivers. “It holds out a false promise of support, of community, of powerful masculine identity. Ultimately a promise that’s hollow and that leaves men feeling even more embittered and angrier.”

The boys who are sold this promise do not stay lonely, but along the road to building a community they become angry in a specific and directed way. Angry at women. Angry at feminism. Angry at any suggestion that their entitlement is not deserved.

And in Australia in 2026, that anger has very specific consequences.

Males aged 15 to 19 now have the highest sexual offending rates of any age group in Australia — higher than any adult cohort. Sexual assault in NSW has increased by an average of 10% every year for a decade.

The three private school boys charged with sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in a Sydney alleyway. The three 17-year-old boys charged with the group sexual assault of a 17-year-old girl in south-west Sydney. A ranking list of 100 female students at a Canberra private school, scored, colour-coded and ranked from “fuckable” to “not rape-able”.

These beliefs did not arrive from nowhere.

They were packaged, algorithmically amplified, and sold.

This is a child protection issue

Research published in the Global Humanities Review in June 2026 makes an argument that I don’t think is being talked about enough: the manosphere’s targeting of boys under 18 is a children’s rights issue under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The Convention guarantees children’s rights to equality, development, participation, and protection from mental and moral harm.

Algorithmically amplified digital masculinities pose systemic risks to boys’ rights to equality, development, participation, and protection from mental and moral harm.

When an industry deliberately targets children — using psychological techniques refined over years, optimised by algorithms, disguised as entertainment — and radicalises them into a worldview that produces documented harm to themselves and to the women and girls around them, that is child exploitation.

It’s currently being treated as a culture war debate.

It should be treated as a child protection emergency.

Where are those boys now?

Flynn Martin left the manosphere and is sharing his story to help other boys avoid what happened to him.

“All the answers that you’re looking for aren’t there,” he says.

But he is honest about how hard it is to reach boys who are already deep inside it.

“If you’re kind of in those early stages and starting to form those things — that’s when we can help. But if you’re already deep within it, maybe you’re going to have to learn the hard way like I did.”

The window is not open indefinitely.

Are we making it worse by worrying excessively about our boys?

Some of the criticism I receive (like on this piece in particular) takes this form: by writing about what boys are doing and what boys might become, I am contributing to a harmful narrative. That perhaps expecting harm from boys is itself damaging. That writing about teenage perpetrators and manosphere radicalisation treats boys as suspects rather than children.

I get that.

But what is the alternative? Not talking about it? Not reading and researching and learning? Not looking for the warning signs?

When I look at my little boy, I am not afraid of him.

I am afraid for him.

Afraid of what the algorithm will inevitably show him when I’m not in the room. Afraid of the guild chat and the curious click that found Flynn Martin and Brandon and thousands of boys like them. Afraid of a content ecosystem worth $184 million a year that is specifically designed to find boys like my son at exactly the moment they are most uncertain about who they are.

And I’m terrified of what the world will look like for the girls around him if we do not talk about this enough. If we bury our heads in the sand and pretend that it doesn’t exist.

Surely writing about the manosphere and what it is doing to boys is not an accusation against boys. In fact, isn’t it the most pro-boy thing we can do?

The boys the manosphere finds are not bad boys. They are lonely boys. Uncertain boys. Boys looking for community and purpose and answers in a world that has not given them enough of either. They deserve to be protected from an industry that is exploiting that loneliness for profit.

And the girls around them deserve to be protected from the consequences when that protection fails.

What else can we do?

Learning about the manosphere is the first step to dismantling it.

It’s not awareness alone that is going to change the world, but the reality is this: you cannot interrupt a pipeline you cannot see. And right now, millions of parents are watching their sons play video games and scroll their feeds and assuming the content is neutral. It is not neutral. It has never been neutral. And the first thing we can do is stop pretending otherwise.

I am not pretending to be an academic here nor am I a child psychologist.

But I am a mother of a little boy who has spent a significant amount of time reading, researching, and sitting with the discomfort of everything this essay contains. And if that qualifies me to say anything, here it is:

• Talk to your son about what he is watching, not to police it, but to understand it. Ask him who his favourite YouTubers are. Watch something with him. Get curious. Ask questions. The research is crystal fucking clear about this: boys who have someone to talk to about what they encounter online are significantly less likely to absorb it uncritically. The conversation is the intervention.

• Then understand the profit model and explain it to him. Young people are usually unaware that the manosphere needs them to remain unaware so the profit model continues. When your son understands that Andrew Tate is not a life coach but a businessman making $184 million from his loneliness, that changes his relationship to the content.

• Teach your son consent before it feels necessary. Not as a scary talk about assault, but an ongoing conversation about bodies and boundaries and the simple, foundational truth that other people’s autonomy matters as much as his own. Teach him that no means no. That silence means no. That anything less than a clear and enthusiastic yes means no.

• Show him what a healthy relationship looks like. Let him see adults disagree and repair. Let him see love as something warm and mutual and safe, not as something transactional, not something where one person holds power over another.

• Hold him accountable in small moments. When he is unkind, name it. When he crosses a line, there are consequences. Boys who are held accountable in small moments learn that their behaviour has an impact on other people, on relationships, on the world.

• Raise him to see women as fully human. Not as a service. Not as a reward. Not as the thing the algorithm will eventually tell him exists for his use. As people. Complete and complex and deserving of the same dignity he is.

The manosphere will try to teach him otherwise. It will find him in a gaming forum or a guild chat or a YouTube rabbit hole and it will sell him a framework in which women are the problem and he is the hero of his own aggrieved story.

Our job — as parents, as a culture, as a society — is to get there first.

It starts at home.

It starts now.

It starts with us.

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Sources: ABC News August 20 2026 — The manosphere continues to suck young men in as study reveals troubling findings. Equimundo and Reset Tech — The Grift Economy, August 2026. Global Humanities Review — Digital Masculinities and the Rights of the Child, June 2026. Over, Bunce, Konu and Zendle — Child and Adolescent Mental Health, January 2025. The Conversation — How Boys Get Sucked Into the Manosphere, December 2025. University of Melbourne — Dr Sara Meger, August 2026. AIHW Sexual Violence Data. BOCSAR NSW Sexual Assault Data March 2026.

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I was chatting with a girlfriend recently over a glorious child-free lunch that involved delicious share plates and cold Chardonnay without anyone screaming at us, or demanding to held.

While we were chatting, I mentioned I’ve been blown away by my husband recently and the initiative he is taking at home. The man hardly sits down, even after working 70 hour weeks. He is either looking after our toddler, or putting on the washing, mowing the lawn, doing the grocery shopping, cleaning the kitchen... He doesn’t stop.

I said to her, “I’m so impressed, but there’s just one thing we’re still working on that we can’t quite seem to crack. It’s closing loops.”

I explained that in our house “closing loops” is finishing a task to completion. So, for example, my husband will take all the rubbish out in the house, but the bins won’t quite make it back to their homes in the bathrooms. Or he’ll unpack all the groceries, but the empty grocery bags will stay on the counter.

“It’s really fucking annoying”, I told my friend. “But I also don’t want to get upset about something so little because he’s doing so much. I really shouldn’t complain.”

My friend told me she has the exact same issue with her husband, but there was only one difference.

She reminded me her husband has ADHD, and not closing loops is a symptom of his ADHD.

I remembered a secret my mother-in-law had told me years ago, about how my husband was medicated for ADHD when he was a child, but he never knew about it.

She told me that she never told him about it because she didn’t want it to hold him back.

I wondered out loud, “Maybe he has ADHD? He did have it as a child.”

My sweet friend then took my hand, looked me in the eyes and said, “Ash, you don’t grow out of ADHD. You either have it, or you don’t.”

My mind was BLOWN.

All of these conversations about the mental load… All of the struggle over why my husband could not do basic tasks to completion. About how he had no concept of time. About how he struggled to remember things. Was it all because he has ADHD?

My mind was racing. Where does neurodivergence begin and weaponised incompetence end? How much of it can be put down to his ADHD? Have I been expecting too much of him all this time? And what does this mean for me as his wife? Will I always have to pick up the slack? Am I destined to be exhausted and resentful forever?

To get to the bottom of it, I researched everything I could about ADHD, I interviewed experts on how ADHD impacts relationships (psychologists and counsellors) as well as speaking to another friend of mine, Nina, whose husband has ADHD, to find out about her personal experience.

This is what I found…

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The first is that Tether: The Mental Load App that I’ve been building for months, is now live on the App Store. I’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time and announcing it feels surreal! But more on that later.

The second is that I’m actually a Chinese bot created to stop Americans from reproducin…

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I mean it when I say I don’t judge other mothers.

If you’ve been reading my work for a while now you know I’ll happily judge a dad all day long, until the fucking cows come home. But never a mum. I wholeheartedly trust that she is doing what she needs to do to survive.

I’m a mum’s mum.

I don’t care if you exclusively breastfeed or introduce formula on da…

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I have a pet peeve.

It’s when women admit they are struggling with a fair division of domestic labour in their relationship, and other women respond with: “I would never put up with that.”

And just like that, a woman who was brave enough to share her struggle has been handed two things she did not ask for: shame about her situation and shame about her partner.

It is one of the most insidious ways we silence each other and I genuinely believe it does more harm than good.

Because what “I wouldn’t put up with that” really communicates is this: it is your fault for tolerating it, you chose this, you could leave, you could fix it if you tried hard enough... It insinuates that the fact that you are “putting up with it” means something is wrong with you.

Not to mention that it ignores the complexity of real relationships. It ignores the children, the financial (im)balance, the shared history and the love that exists alongside the frustration. It ignores the fact that many women are not looking for permission to leave, but they are looking for someone to sit with them in the difficulty without making it their fault.

I once heard someone say that “we do not help each other by raising the drawbridge once we are safely across” and I think that applies perfectly here. We help each other by telling the truth. By saying: this is hard, it is not your fault, and here is what helped me.

That is what Fair Play does really well. And I want to start there, because Fair Play is, in my opinion, one of the most influential books of our time. For many couples it has been genuinely life changing. A lot of that is because of the way it helps women feel like they are not alone, not at fault, and that this is not a personal failure but a systemic one. As a couple, they are both part of a broken system, having stumbled into unhealthy patterns because those patterns were the only blueprint for living they had ever been given.

Fair Play, similarly to my own Substack, exists for the women who love their partners but cannot carry on carrying everything. Women who love their families but know that the way they are living is unsustainable. Who recognise that something needs to change but are not willing to walk away.

I want to be clear about that before I say anything critical, because this essay is by no means a takedown of Fair Play. It is a resource for the women who tried it, found it did not work, and are now wondering what that means about them and their relationship.

My own Fair Play story

When my husband and I first started having these conversations, Fair Play was everywhere. People were talking about it, recommending it, swearing by it. And I read about it, understood the concept, and I remember looking at my husband and thinking: there is no version of this where we sit down and deal cards together.

Not because the idea was wrong, but because the card system felt like a frivolous response to something that felt very serious in our relationship. We were not in a place where a game felt appropriate. We were in a place where I was exhausted and resentful and needed something real, not something that could be laughed off or treated lightly.

So we did something different. Inspired by the core idea of Fair Play but unwilling to use the cards, we tracked what we were actually doing for three days. We did it separately and honestly, without comparing notes until the end. No framework, no card deck, no facilitated conversation. Just a realistic and accurate picture of what each of us was actually contributing over three full days.

Why three days? Because I know that neither of us would have been willing to commit to longer, and one day wasn’t enough to get an accurate picture of what was happening.

At the end of the three days, what we found surprised us. Not because the imbalance was hidden, but because looking at it clearly forced us to confront something we had been dancing around.

My husband works a lot. His hours are long and completely inflexible. He has a one hour commute to an from work, so spends two hours a day driving. He is physically not home for the majority of the time that the household needs to be managed and our son needs to be cared for. And when we looked at our three days of data honestly, the picture that emerged was not simply one of him not pulling his weight. It was one of a household where the structural reality made an even split impossible.

He cannot do as much as me at home because he is not there enough to do it.

This is where the concept of value, which I wrote about last week, became the most important conversation we had.

Because if my husband is not able to do as much as me in terms of raw hours or task volume, then what he does do needs to add enormous value to our relationship and our household. Not equal quantity. Equal value. The things he owns need to genuinely count and need to add something irreplaceable that I could not easily absorb myself.

This reframe changed everything for us. It moved us away from scorekeeping and toward a more honest conversation about contribution. About what each of us actually brings to the table and whether what we bring is genuinely sustaining the life we are trying to build together.

The biggest problem with Fair Play?

I worry that Fair Play may set couples up to fail. If your marriage is in a rut, if you need something to change, and then you try Fair Play and it does not work, you feel disheartened. Potentially doomed. “It worked for so many other couples. Why did it not work for me? Is there something wrong with my relationship? Is my husband worse than most? Have I left it too long?”

It is not a one size fits all. The fact that it didn’t work for you does not mean you are doomed. It does not mean your relationship is beyond repair. It means the system was not the right fit for where you are right now. And understanding why it did not work is the first step toward finding something that will.

The three main flaws in the Fair Play system

Flaw one: it assumes a neutral starting point that almost never exists.

A man will not meaningfully engage with a system designed to redistribute something he does not yet believe is unfairly distributed. Before the card deal can work, he has to first acknowledge that the current arrangement benefits him and then actually be willing to change it. For many couples, getting to that point is the entire battle. And Fair Play does not give you a way to fight it.

Flaw two: it puts the entire onus of change on the woman.

Eve Rodsky has spoken honestly about this herself. She says: “I write to women when men are the problem. Because historically, change starts with those who are oppressed under systems that don’t work for them. Women have to be the game changers. Why? Because what is the alternative? Living with resentment, mental and physical burnout.”

I understand that argument, but I also refuse to accept it entirely. I should not be sitting here writing essay after essay about the fact that a man who can build a career as a lawyer or a doctor somehow cannot figure out how to put on a load of washing. I should not have to be doing this. And yet here we are. The difference is that I am not willing to put the entire burden of change on the woman who is already carrying everything. She should not also have to carry the project management of her own liberation.

Flaw three: the card deal can be weaponised against you.

What if you deal the cards and the outcome is not as unequal as it felt? Suddenly, it can be thrown back at you. “See, it is not that bad. I do contribute a lot.” And if you are carrying more of the cognitive labour, that work may not show up clearly in a card-based system that does not account for the time and mental energy each task actually requires. Doing the laundry for a family of five is categorically different from doing it for a family of two. Managing the school calendar for three children is not the same as managing it for one. The Fair Play system does not easily capture those variables, which means the woman who is actually carrying the most invisible work can walk away from the card deal feeling like she has lost an argument she was winning in reality.

And what if it works initially and then stops working?

This is the most common experience when I talk to couples who have used it. He engages. He takes the cards. Things improve for a few weeks. And then gradually the old patterns creep back. He drops things. You pick them up. And before long you are back where you started, except now you also feel like you have exhausted your one good option.

Nobody changes overnight. Nobody maintains new behaviour without structure and accountability. Fair Play creates awareness but it does not always create the habit infrastructure that makes new behaviour stick permanently. And when it reverts, it can feel more defeating than if you had never tried at all.

So what do you do if your tried Fair Play and it didn’t work for you?

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This week we are covering three things. First: why value is a more useful goal than equality, and the one question I ask every friend who tells me she is drowning. Second: what the research actually says about whether women’s brains are wired differently (because I went looking for an answer and what I found changes the conversation entirely). And third: exactly how the load is divided in my household, domain by domain, including the one that most couples forget to assign to anyone at all.

I was scrolling social media recently when I came across a video of a man explaining the mental load.

And look, I didn’t hate it. I am, of course, glad that men are having these conversations. I applaud the initiative and the effort.

I’ve noticed a lot of women in this space publicly tearing down men who try to talk about the mental load. They will fairly point out that women have been talking about this for years, and that instead of men trying to take credit for these concepts, they should be highlighting the female creators who have been doing this work. I get that and I agree.

But it also doesn’t bother me if male creators share this message. If the right kind of ally helps us get our point across, I’ll take it. Should men only listen to other men? Absolutely not. Should men pay more attention to the women in their own lives who are trying to explain this through lived experience, instead of trusting a random guy on the internet? Yes. But at this point I’m keeping my eye on the prize: more people understanding invisible labour and how it impacts relationships is ultimately what matters most.

So the video didn’t bother me because a man was explaining the mental load. It bothered me because of what he left out.

He broke his wife’s roles into three buckets: Wife, Mum, Manager (Work).

And I sat there thinking… that’s not even close.

The first thing he missed: her. Just her. As a person with her own needs, her own identity, her own interior life that exists completely separately from her role as anyone’s wife or anyone’s mother. She deserves her own buckethe because she should not be just a collection of roles she performs for other people.

He put “wife” into a single bucket which in his framework included managing him. I disagree with this. Managing a partner and managing a marriage are two different things. Your husband is not a task he is a person, and the marriage itself (and by that I mean the health of it, the intimacy, the fun, the quality time) deserves its own domain entirely. Which I will come back to.

The other buckets he missed entirely: daughter, daughter-in-law, sister, friend, colleague, community member. The management of extended family relationships like keeping track of birthdays, managing his family’s expectations, maintaining her own family connections, navigating in-law dynamics, remembering who needs a call and who is going through something difficult. This is a significant, consistent, largely invisible category of labour that falls almost entirely to women and never once appeared in his framework.

He also missed: Health, friendships, extended family, professional development, creativity…. Then there’s the specific labour of maintaining her own sense of self inside a life that has, in many ways, been organised around everyone else’s needs.

Three buckets? She is living in at least ten.

I’ve been trying to understand why men struggle so much to grasp the mental load. Every time I share an article or a video, I hear the same responses. “It’s not real.” “It’s exaggerated.” “It’s just how women think.” And even the men who are genuinely trying to understand it often get it wrong, as in the video above.

So I did something I want you to promise me you will never do for the sake of your blood pressure: I went into men’s forums on Reddit and read how they discuss the mental load. 0/10, do not recommend.

What I ultimately found amidst endless complaining, whinging and misogyny, was a lot of variations on the same theme: Women just think differently to men. Men are simple in the way they think. Women have more on their minds. Women are better multitaskers. That’s just how it is.

So I thought to myself, is there something neurologically different happening? Are women’s brains actually wired to carry more? Is this biology, or is it something else entirely?

I went looking for the research and here is what I found.

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There was a period in my marriage where I just… stopped.

I didn’t leave. I didn’t try to fight him. I never gave him an ultimatum.

I just stopped talking.

He would come home at the end of the day and I would be there, physically present, yes, but completely somewhere else. He would try to talk to me and I would answer in single syllables, or not at all. And I can say with all honesty it wasn’t calculated. It wasn’t out of strategy or spite. It was out of depletion. Out of the simple, animal reality that I had nothing left.

I had spent all day keeping everything alive… the child, the house, the schedules, the mental catalogue of what we were out of and what needed booking and what was coming up, all on top of my paid work. And when he walked through the door and wanted to connect, I had already used everything I had on everyone and everything else.

So I shut down. And we became, for a little while, very polite strangers living in the same house.

The shutdown ended the way a lot of things in my marriage have ended: badly, and then better.

I’ve spent our entire relationship asking my husband to take out the rubbish. Every. Single. Week. The same conversation. The same reminder. The same moment where I wondered why I was the one who always noticed the bin was full, why the noticing was always mine to do, why I had to manage a grown adult man’s awareness of basic household functions.

And then one day I looked at the bins that were overflowing and something in me just broke open. Not tearfully. Not quietly. I exploded. In the way you do when you have been swallowing something for so long that one day it simply refuses to stay down.

I said things I had been thinking for months. About how exhausted I was. About how invisible I felt. About how I was not his mother and I was not his assistant and I was barely keeping my own head above water and I simply could not also be responsible for remembering every single thing that needed to happen in this household while he moved through it like a pleasant guest.

It was not my finest moment. It was also, I think, a necessary one.

Because something shifted after that. Not immediately. Not perfectly. But something changed in how he moved through our home. He started noticing things. Not everything. Not all at once. But enough. Enough for me to feel it. Enough for us to get to this point, where this morning I watched him take the rubbish out without a single word from me, which is now our norm.

Watching him take the rubbish out, completely unprompted, reminded me of those days when I could hardly speak to him. And it got me thinking:

• What does it actually take for a man to change?

• Does it have to reach this tipping point for change to happen?

• Is there a better way?

• Is any change really permanent?

• Are some men, and some relationships, just doomed?

These are the questions I’m going to ponder, and attempt to answer, throughout this essay.

On the TikTok tribunal

Before I get into it, I want to name something that has been bothering me.

There is a trend on social media right now that you may have seen where women who share their relationship frustrations online are met by other women with some version of: leave him or leave us out of it.

The implication being: if you are still with him, you have no right to complain. If you are still with him, it is your fault. If you are still with him and talking about it on the internet, you are wasting everyone’s time.

I struggle with this sentiment, firstly because I find it deeply unkind. And I think it deserves to be called what it is: mean girl energy dressed up as feminist wisdom.

The women who take to TikTok to talk about their relationships are not stupid. They are not weak. They are not asking for permission to leave or validation for staying. They are doing what women have always done when they are overwhelmed and don’t know what to do: they are looking for evidence that they are not alone. That they are not crazy. That the thing they are experiencing is real and recognised and shared and perhaps even common.

Telling them to leave or shut up does not help them. It just makes them feel more isolated than they already were. I often think about those women who are sitting there reading comments feeling worse off than before she posted.

The nuanced conversation about relationships (the one that sits in the enormous space between “leave him” and “pretend everything is fine”) is exactly why this space exists. Because so many of us live in that space. It’s an awkward and embarrassing conversation to have sometimes, but I am not going to stop having it.

The article that kept me up at night

A few weeks ago I read a piece by Bad Woman on Substack, titled Therapy Can’t Help Most Men, and I have been thinking about it ever since.

The argument, made with considerable rigour, is this: men are not less capable of understanding their partner’s distress. Research indicates that men accurately perceive their partner’s negative emotions but are more likely to disengage or respond defensively. The issue is not that they don’t understand, it is that they choose not to care, because we live in a patriarchal world that teaches and enables them to do that.

In other words: when a man continues a behaviour after being explicitly told that it causes harm, the explanation is not ignorance. It is choice. He has evaluated the cost of change against the benefits of staying the same and has decided accordingly.

Therapy offers something invaluable to a resistant partner: credibility. Once a man is “in therapy”, he is no longer simply failing to meet basic expectations. He is trying. He is working on himself. This reframing lowers the threshold for accountability. It shifts the narrative from harm to effort. It pressures the other party for patience.

A man who enters therapy without genuine accountability can learn the language of introspection without adopting its substance. He acquires terms like “boundaries”, “triggers”, and “emotional needs” not as pathways to self-examination but as instruments of negotiation. The vocabulary of therapy can quickly become a shield.

I think this is true. I have seen it myself and I have heard from women whose partners came home from therapy sessions more skilled at explaining why their behaviour was actually reasonable than they were before they went.

But I want to push back on one part of the argument. Because I think it makes an error that is easy to make and important to correct.

In these conversations, we are largely describing men who are entrenched. Men who are resistant. Men who, at some level, are aware that their behaviour causes harm and have calculated that the benefit of maintaining it outweighs the cost. In some cases, men who are in the territory of emotional abuse.

That is a real and serious problem. But I do not think it is the only problem and I do not think it describes every man.

It reminds me of a lot of Abby Eckel’s who often talks about how men can’t change, and although I adore her content, I do believe there is a category of man who exists outside of this space.

I believe, perhaps optimistically, that many of our partners fall into this category of a man who is not consciously calculating the benefit of his inaction, but who is simply operating inside a system that has never asked him to notice. He has been raised in a world that did not require him to develop the noticing muscle. His blindness is not malice, it is conditioning. Decades and decades of it.

And here’s the thing: conditioning, unlike character, can be interrupted.

This distinction matters, and I use it not to excuse anyone, but because the solution is different depending on which problem you are actually dealing with. And most women, before they can know which problem they have, need to make the invisible visible. But more on that later.

On doing less

The other piece of advice that always comes up as I pour myself into research on the mental load is this: just do less. Step back. Stop filling every gap. Let him feel the consequence of his own absence.

I’ve written previously about how I think this is terrible advice that blames women for their own circumstances and frames their exhaustion as simply a stubborn refusal to let go.

I’ve always felt strongly about this and then I read this powerful piece from Diana Fox Tilson. She was raised by a single father after her mother left when she was seven. There was no maternal gatekeeper in her household to discourage her father from taking on the mental load. And guess what? He did not step up. He simply did not do it. And the children in his care experienced the consequences of that in ways that were not trivial.

This is the thing the “just do less” advice never accounts for. It assumes that when you stop doing something, he will notice the gap and fill it. But there are two other possibilities. One: he doesn’t notice the gap at all, because noticing was never his responsibility and he has no infrastructure for it. Two: he notices and doesn’t act, because acting was never required of him and nothing has changed to make it so.

The children eat cereal for dinner three nights in a row. The school form doesn’t get submitted. The doctor’s appointment doesn’t get booked. And you, watching all of this, eventually crack and do it yourself because you cannot watch the consequences land on your children just to prove a point.

So no. Just doing less is not the answer. At least not on its own.

So what actually works?

Here is what I have landed on, from my own marriage and from everything I have read and researched.

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I get asked this question more than you might think.

Usually it comes from women who have stumbled across my content and have read through the essays about the mental load, the posts about resentment and exhaustion, the captions that say the quiet part loud about how hard this really is. And they land in my comments or my DMs with some version of the sam…

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