Revisiting Chopper Read reveals a time when the manosphere was on TV

In the 1990s and 2000s Chopper Read was transformed from criminal into beloved folk legend. ( Supplied )

To say that we're currently living through an era of backlash seems bleedingly obvious.

The cigar-smoking, private-jet flaunting, women-hating influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate were arrested in Miami in July on British charges of rape, trafficking for sexual exploitation and offences related to indecent images of a child.

Pauline Hanson called domestic violence a "two-way street" and referred to family violence leave as "holiday leave". And an education report found that female school teachers are being subjected to intimidation and sexual harassment from male students in a culture some described as "toxic masculinity".

In the aftermath of #metoo — a time that witnessed a global outpouring of women's stories of sexual violence as well as popular and political discussion on its causes and remedies — regressive gender norms are again having a renaissance.

And who better represents this than the Tate brothers with their fantasies of masculine physical prowess, financial affluence, emotional repression and garden-variety misogyny?

Andrew tells us that women should be men's domestic or sexual servants and the reporting by journalist Heidi Blake in The New Yorker into the most recent sexual allegations argues that this is not mere rhetoric. Date night with Andrew involved strangulation, being beaten unconscious and rape. He denies this and claims he "loves women".

While it's hard to disagree with the idea that there's been an almighty swing against feminism by men of a younger generation, the problem with framing our current moment as simply "backlash" is that it limits our collective memory to 2017 when #metoo went global.

Tristan and Andrew Tate in Romania in 2025. ( Reuters: Inquam Photos/Eduard Vinatoru )

If we go back a few decades earlier to the 1990s and early 2000s we find something much worse than the manosphere: the manosphere writ large as national culture.

This is conservative, Howard-era Australia.

Rather than the Andrew Tates of the world ferreting away in a dark and grubby corner of the internet preying on pimply teenaged boys, they're on our national television giving public service announcements on domestic violence and drink driving, they're ambling into the offices of the ABC where they're adored as great Australian raconteurs, they have advice columns in national newspapers, they write best-selling autobiographies and audiences rush to their comedy shows to hear unfiltered racism, sexism and homophobia, normalised as larrikin culture.

What's my evidence for this? Research I recently did for ABC history podcast The Dead Can't Sue into Chopper Read, a man who transformed from criminal into beloved folk legend and who was elevated to the pantheon of national heroes in the period following his prison release in the 1990s until his death in 2013.

Today most of us remember Chopper as that laughable boganical figure with a handlebar moustache, an inky gallery of tattoos on his hulking, mutilated body, Miami Vice-style glasses and a penchant for tossing enemies into cement mixers — at least this was what he claimed in a notorious interview with Elle McFeast.

But revisiting his writing and his life-story today is like rewatching a beloved childhood film only to find that Aladdin is an Orientalist hellscape and Molly Ringwald ended up with a sex-pest in Sixteen Candles.

Leaving aside the fact that Chopper stole almost all of his stories of being a fearsome stand-over man from other prisoners in Pentridge, the model of masculinity that he represented, and that Australians lapped up at the time, bears a lot in common with the Tate brothers.

Former underworld figure Mark 'Chopper' Read in 2002. ( AAP: Dean Lewins )

Firstly, they both grew up in the bleached atmospheres of dread that permeate a physically and psychologically abusive family.

Like the Tate brothers who believe that their father's physical beatings made men of them, Chopper too claims in his autobiography that he loved his dad and "he belted the hell out of me as a child right up until I fought him back at the age of 15".

Being a man meant emotional repression and physical aggression, which, like the Tate brothers, led Chopper to bare-knuckle fighting.

Both Chopper and the Tate bros promote a model of masculinity based on physical power which sees its most benign forms in gym culture — all share a commitment to working out to maintain a muscular, indomitable masculine physique — and its most terrifying forms in intimate violence.

The Tates are currently facing 59 offences in the UK related to sexual violence.

Chopper was never charged but his first wife Mary-Ann Hodge has written of the nightmare of living with a domestically abusive man.

"He'd get wild with me about something, hold me down on the floor and hogtie my arms behind my back. Then he'd bash me around the head," she told journalist Rochelle Jackson.

More publicly, Chopper was shamelessly racist, much like the Tates.

In his autobiography he says that he grew up hating "all Asians", but claims that this is not "real racism, just part of the rough as guts Australian sense of humour, part of the Aussie culture and attitude".

Eric Bana as Mark 'Chopper' Read in the 2000 film Chopper.

And he was right, at least for a large part of Australian society in the 1990s and early 2000s. People flocked to his shows, his autobiography remains one of Australia's best-selling books, he released a rap album and the media adored him. And yes, he was asked to do Public Service Announcements on domestic violence and drink driving.

We don't often think of the 1990s and early 2000s as an historical era. But like any moment in time, it was crosscut with intimations of the future and residues of the past.

In the life of Chopper we see both: he was born of a culture that has long elevated toxic forms of masculinity to a proud national tradition and a future that draws on this tradition to create its new masculinist monsters.

Perhaps the most uplifting part of this story is that today we have a rich vocabulary to understand and call out the behaviour of today's Choppers, to confine them to grubby corners of the internet or prison, if they're found guilty.