Salim Mehajer is a nasty peacock who has swapped plumage for plastic surgery, a Narcissus with an Instagram account instead of a pond.

Menacing video footage of the former Auburn deputy mayor leaked this week showed him appearing to threaten to rape various relatives of his reportedly estranged wife, Aysha.

A day after explosive footage surfaced of Salim Mehajer threatening his estranged wife Aysha, he posts video of himself celebrating and toasting A Current Affair.

He is also recorded expressing a hope that she will die and demands she phone him.

Of course, he calls her a slut, because men like Mehajer lack imagination. "Slut" is the best they can come up with, the insult within easiest reach.

Given his apparent predilection for Botox, it was difficult to gauge Mehajer's emotional reaction to this embarrassing public relations blip, which was broadcast on the high-ratingA Current Affair.

But going on past form we can assume it is somewhere between: "This can only be good for my profile, yeah?" and "Whatever, I've got a Maserati."

Because there is no such thing as bad publicity, right?

And for no one is that more true than for an apparently textbook narcissist, a man who loved his wife so much that he choppered her into their wedding and closed a street for it, only to be filmed violently ranting against her a few months post-honeymoon.

But even Mehajer, who doesn't court the limelight so much as he gropes it needily, must see that those videos didn't do him any favours.

His career as a councillor is in hiatus, pending a public inquiry into the council's decisions, many of which seem to have financially benefited some of its councillors, including Mehajer.

His stated ambition to enter politics, starting off at "state, federal" level and then going "up to the very top spot" has disappeared into the mist, and his business interests, which are complex and varied, have been under close scrutiny by various authorities, including the tax office.

Luckily there is another gig open to Mehajer: it seems that everywhere these days, angry privileged men such as him are warning the world they are in peril.

These men need an advocate - and who better than Mehajer, who can garner press attention just as easily as he can command third-tier US rappers to appear at his wife's birthday party?

One shouldn't tar all these men-at-threat with the same brush, of course. Mehajer's video is the vilest kind of man-howl, reserved for the vilest kind of man.

As was pointed out by Assistant Police Commissioner Mick Fuller this week, it would be "chilling" viewing for victims of domestic violence.

It was a threatening rant apparently directed at a very real person, but on another level it was also just the long, Munchian scream of a spurned bully.

US Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte, recently in trouble in Rio, didn't threaten violence to anyone (that he will admit to), but he did literally piss on the livelihood of the Brazilian service station owner whose property he damaged during the now-infamous incident involving him and three of his fellow frat-boy-cum-Olympians.

Lochte's apology on US television was a transparent attempt at a public relations mop-up, in which he said he was "hurt".

The 32-year-old apologised, but in a non-specific, global kinda way, like he was apologising for something unconnected to him, say, the Cambodian genocide, or climate change.

His teary eyes seemed to confirm the person he was most sorry for was himself.

He was also a victim. Just ask him.

It would be facetious to put the entire presidential campaign of Donald Trump down to the grievances of the angry white man, deprived, or soon-to-be deprived, of his former privileges, but plenty of people have.

As Jason Wilson wrote this week in The Guardian, the mish-mash of far-right elements powering Trump's campaign have at their centre a story about the "injured identity" of the white male, who grows increasingly imperilled as women and minority groups take all the power.

In a much more polite setting, The Australian Financial Review this week convened a meeting of the Male Champions of Change group, business leaders who are pushing gender equality from the inside.

A report of the meeting ran on the Fin's front page on Wednesday, with the headline: "Resentful men: adapt or push off."

Commonwealth Bank chief executive Ian Narev said his bank had little need for men who object to targets for women in senior management roles on the grounds this amounts to discrimination against men.

"If you're a senior male and you genuinely believe that an appointment's been made other than on merit, and you genuinely believe you won't get a chance because you're a male, you're probably not a good fit anymore," he said.

ANZ CEO Shayne Elliott spoke of "an absolute backlash of middle management males".

What these men haven't caught up with is that their definition of merit is largely egocentric. The definition is changing as women get a say in what the criteria for it are.

Some of these men won't go down easy.

But the wind has turned, and nothing makes that more apparent than when the anger and distress of men like Mehajer is turned into mass entertainment.

Twitter: @JacquelineMaley