The Gender Rage Industry

How news and social media shape our emotions, distort our perceptions and influence how we see each other.

Yesterday I saw a book called Middle Rage, by Australian media personality Myf Warhurst. She's a familiar and much-loved figure from Spicks & Specks and the Js, so I was intrigued by the title.

The blurb talks about the “seething fury” of middle-aged women, the injustices they face and the “volcanic rage of a Gen X woman”.

It got me wondering: Why is Myf so angry? and How big is the Gender Rage Industry?

How much money, media space and human effort goes into making people angry? Books, podcasts, documentaries, news stories, influencers, social media accounts and political campaigns all compete for our attention, often by telling us about the terrible things other people are doing.

Some of these issues are genuinely important. Violence, discrimination and injustice deserve attention. But I'm interested in a different question: What does constantly hearing about these things do to us?

And perhaps more importantly, how much control do we have over the way we feel?

Feelings spread

We tend to think of emotions as something that happens inside an individual, but emotions are also social. Humans have always caught feelings from each other. Panic spreads through crowds, laughter spreads through audiences, and one person starts dancing and suddenly everyone is dancing.

Researchers call one version of this emotional contagion. A famous Facebook experiment involving nearly 700,000 people found that changing the emotional content people encountered in their feeds produced measurable changes in the emotions they subsequently expressed themselves.

Other research has found that moral and emotional language spreads particularly well online. And there's an obvious reason: emotion gets our attention, especially negative emotion.

Fear, disgust, anger and outrage are extraordinarily effective ways of keeping us looking at a screen. The algorithms that determine what we see don't necessarily care whether we're becoming happier, healthier or more trusting of each other. They're largely designed to keep us engaged.

When the exceptional becomes normal

Imagine two headlines:

“Millions of Australian men and women interacted peacefully today.”

“Woman murdered by man in horrific attack.”

Which one are you going to click?

Obviously the second. The first isn't even news.

And therein lies the problem. The media doesn't provide us with a representative sample of reality. It provides us with the most newsworthy parts of reality, and newsworthy generally means unusual.

A plane landing safely isn't news. A plane crashing is. Millions of couples going about their ordinary lives, loving each other, arguing, reconciling and raising children aren't news. One horrific act of violence is.

Nor should we stop reporting these things. But something strange happens when our brains are exposed to enough exceptional events: the exceptional begins to feel normal.

Today, someone in Melbourne can wake up and encounter stories of violence in Sydney, a rape in London, a murder in Mexico and an appalling comment from an American influencer, all before breakfast.

Every story may be completely real, but taken together they can create something that isn't necessarily real: an accurate picture of everyday life.

Our brains weren't designed to process eight billion people's worst behaviour simultaneously.

The stories we tell ourselves about others

This becomes particularly interesting when we look at relationships between men and women.

A woman who regularly encounters stories of male violence, misogyny and abuse may understandably begin to see men as threatening. Meanwhile, a man consuming stories about women cheating, exploiting men financially, exploiting men financially, making false accusations or ridiculing men online may begin to see women as untrustworthy.

Both are looking at real events. Both may be developing a profoundly distorted picture of reality.

And both can become convinced that their view is simply common sense.

The manosphere and what might be called the femosphere are examples of this process. Each can reinforce particular interpretations of relationships between men and women by repeatedly presenting examples that confirm existing beliefs.

The problem isn't necessarily that the stories are false. It's that they're selected from billions of people, with little context about how representative they actually are.

Combine that exposure with one or two difficult experiences in real life and you've got a powerful story about what other people are like.

Our brains are doing what they evolved to do: learning about the world from what we repeatedly observe. But what we're observing isn't necessarily the world. It's a selection of the world made by systems competing for our attention.

Imagine a different news feed

I'd love to see an experiment.

Take a few hundred Australians and randomly divide them into two groups. One gets ordinary news and social media. The other gets a feed deliberately designed to represent everyday Australian life.

Not artificially positive. Representative.

It would show people going to work, parents picking children up from school, couples cooking dinner, neighbours helping each other, people arguing and reconciling, being generous and being selfish. There would be violence and tragedy too, but roughly in proportion to how often these things actually happen.

After a month, ask both groups how dangerous they think other people are. How much do they trust strangers? How do they feel about men and women? How optimistic are they about humanity?

I suspect we'd see a difference.

Perhaps we're not becoming more hostile towards each other. Perhaps we're simply watching more hostility.

Those aren't the same thing.

Taking back control

This brings me to something I think is central to empowerment: recognising how much of our emotional experience is influenced by things outside ourselves.

We can't control what happens on the other side of the planet, what politicians say or what someone posts on social media. But we can exercise some control over what we consume, what we believe and how we respond.

We can question whether the stories we're hearing are representative of reality. We can notice when we're being drawn into anger or fear, and ask whether those emotions are helping us achieve anything.

This doesn't mean ignoring injustice, pretending everything is wonderful or suppressing legitimate feelings. Anger can motivate us to make important changes. Fear can alert us to genuine danger.

But there's a difference between being informed about danger and living psychologically inside danger.

To me, empowerment is about developing the awareness, confidence and ability to make conscious choices about our lives, rather than simply reacting to whatever the world throws at us.

We don't have to let other people decide what we're angry about, who we're afraid of or what kind of world we believe we live in.

Perhaps taking back control of our attention is one of the most important steps towards taking back control of our lives.

At Forest & Flow, I offer counselling and empowerment coaching to help people understand what's holding them back, challenge unhelpful patterns and develop greater confidence, clarity and personal agency.

For a deeper exploration of the Gender Rage Industry, read my full essay on Just a Man's Perspective.