August 22, 2024 • 50 mins
This week Scott is joined by author and cultural critic, Ruth Whippman. Scott and Ruth discuss what it's like being a mother raising boys in modern society, the role of "masculinity influencers”, and what healthy masculinity looks like.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
We see it as a promotion.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
So it's like great, be tough, be brave, be assertive,
be strong, be courageous, And we really encourage girls to
embrace those things. And you see it a lot in
the culture. We see it in books, we see in movies,
we see it in you know, just the kind of
language we used to talk about girls. But we still
see embracing anything feminine as a demotion, as a humiliation,
(00:24):
and so I think that's part of something in a
sexist culture where we see anything that's associated with girls
and women as being trivial or not worth having, or
fine for girls, but nothing for boys and men to
actually aspire to.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
It's a real delight to welcome Ruth Whitman back on
the show after quite a few years. Ruth is an author, essayist,
and cultural critic from London living in the United States.
She is author of a few books, but her most
recent one and the topic of our conversation today, is
called boy Mom, Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity.
(01:03):
In this stimulating episode, we discussed masculinity influencers, the role
of biological sex in predicting personality, and what healthy or
aspirational masculinity actually looks like, as Ruth says, quote, we
need to give boys a more expansive, less suffocating story
about their own possibilities and place in the world. End quote.
(01:24):
And I'm here for it. So, without further ado, I
bring you Ruth Whitman. Oh, Ruth, Hi Scott, Welcome back
to the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
It is so good to talk to you again.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
It's been many years how many years of this this
new book that you wrote called boy Mom, Reimagining Boyhood
in the Age of Impossible Masculinity. Talk to me a
little bit about your thoughts of like the Me Too
movement and how it kind of led and led to
your thinking about boys.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
So I was pretty heavily pregnant with my third boy
when the me to movement exploded, and it just suddenly overnight,
really changed the conversation that we were having about men
and boys. You know, I already had two sons. You know,
there was this it was like this kind of rolling
horror show of bad news about men. Really, I was,
(02:18):
you know, I was about to give birth. I was
already quite hormone or I was already quite sort of
anxious in that angsty pregnancy way, and suddenly I was thinking,
you know, I'm going to be a mother to three boys,
and there's obviously something wrong going on at a systemic level.
It's no longer just like here are a few bad apples,
are what bad luck? You know, there's something in the
culture that about the way that we're socializing boys that
(02:39):
is causing this kind of thing to be normalized. And
as a feminist I was really kind of delighted by
this new conversation. I was really thrilled that women suddenly
had this voice, that we were looking at these issues
more clearly. But as a mother, I was pretty scared
and a little bit defensive and quite conflicted, And so
that really inspired me to just go and investigate this
(03:01):
phenomenon further, like what are we where are we going wrong.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
With how we socialize boys?
Speaker 2 (03:06):
What's happening in the culture, and what is it sort
of doing to this generation of boys to grow up
in the shadow of that conversation.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
You know, this this whole book is extremely nuanced. It's
not you know, you're not buying the line that men
are inherently toxic.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Absolutely no, no, I think that it is a really
complicated and nuanced subject, and the more I started to
unpack it, the more layers there were, and the more
I have my preconceptions challenged, and the more all my
kind of shibaliths about feminism, about parenthood, about the culture
were challenged over and over again, and so it was
a really fascinating process. I had to really look at
(03:49):
some of my own biases and my own thoughts and
sort of question my own premises and at all. Through
that time, I was parenting three boys, and so you know,
whatever ideas I was coming up with in my reporting
and whatever I was hearing in the culture, I was
sort of road testing at home. So it made it,
you know, it was a really interesting back and forth
(04:09):
because I had I couldn't just sort of rely on
these platitudes and being like, well, girls are like this,
some boys are like that, or this is this is
what's happening. Oh, this is the way that we raised boys.
You know, I'm doing it live, and you often realize
that when you try to do things with real humans
or real children, they don't actually go the way that
you think. In fact, one of the conversations that you
and I had was very influential in that if you're
(04:33):
willing for me to share. But I remember when the
last time we spoke, and I don't think this was
actually on the podcast. I think it was off Mike,
But we talked about some of the some of the
research on gender differences in kids, and I think I
was quite resistant to it at the time, you know,
I was quite resistant to the idea that there were
these biologically hardwired differences. And I think you sent me
(04:57):
some research that showed me that was quite convincing. There
are there are some differences, whether they're biologically hardwired, or
whether they're socialized, or whether it's a kind of complicated
mix of the two. The differences in the sexes is
quite large in many.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
Ways in some areas. Yeah, but I would never use
the word hardwired as a as a scientist. I think
that that's a word that needs to be stricken from
the discussion. You know, nothing, nothing's hard genes. Genes are
just bullprints, you know, for they're not even bullprints. Actually
they're not even bullprint. That's even too extreme as it is.
(05:33):
You know, it's it's a very hazy set of instructions
that can get that doesn't need to be determined, right, and.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
They can and you know, the whole field of epigenetics.
It's like, you know, I think we get stuck on
this is it nature or is it nurture? But everything
is absolutely a combination of both, and what gets switched on,
what doesn't get switched on, what you know, how how
it all shakes down. But that was really an interesting
conversation that we had.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Yeah, I'm sure that that'll come up later in this
conversation even more, or will be kind of a thread
running through everything. But you say, I'm going to put
some quotes out here of what you say. Everywhere I turned,
there were bad men trying to raise good sons suddenly
felt like a hopeless task. It felt as though society
was fracturing along gender lines. What I get from reading
(06:21):
your book is that there's an awful lot of compassion,
which is consistent with your your prior writing as well,
but compassion for everyone involved. You didn't really write a
finger pointing book. You didn't write a man hating book.
You know, you really wrote a book like, well, what
kind of society can we live in? That kind of
rides that raises the tide for men and and and
(06:45):
and we're boys and girls. You know, I'm really.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Glad to hear that that that was the way that
you received it and read it, because absolutely, I think
that we got into a kind of cultural moment where
we were very fractured on all kinds of lines, and
one of those was gender. And I think that what
ended up happening was that women and girls kind of
became a cause of the left, and men and boys
kind of became a cause of the right. And you know,
(07:12):
obviously I'm not talking about individuals here, I'm talking about
the kind of cultural understanding of it. So you know,
there were there are obviously many conservative women and progressive men.
That's not really the point, but it was just like
the left had taken up the cause of girls and
women and it was almost the cause of boys and
men was almost coded as this kind of right wing endeavor.
(07:34):
And I wanted to get past that and just be like, well, look,
we all have to live in this world together, and
the same system, we're all trapped in, this same system together.
The same system that teaches boys and men to harm
other people also harms them too. It's not healthy for them,
it's not healthy for the way that they're growing up.
And so, you know, I wanted to I wanted to
(07:57):
approach this subject with compassion, and I think I had
a very natural into approach it with compassion because obviously
I'm talking about my own children.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
Of course, of course, Well, I would love to hear
more precisely what you see as the message that boys
are being taught to hurt others. What is that message?
Where where boys being taught to hurt others?
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Well, I don't think that boys are specific. I don't
think it's as direct as that. So I don't think
it's like anyone saying go and hurt others and nobody.
I think it would be very rare to find a
parent that wants to raise a harmful boy.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
But I think there are.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Many subtle messages that boys receive which are psychologically unhealthy
for them and psychologically unhealthy for the people that they
have to be around. I think that some of these
messages have to do with masculinity and what we sort
of expect from boys as they live in the world.
So we have the you know, the subtitle of the book,
(08:53):
so it's boy Mom raising boys, you know, reimagining boyhood
in the age of impossible masculinity. And I think this
idea of impossible masculinity was something that just kept coming
up for me over and over again, was that we
hold boys to this standard of masculinity, and if anything,
that standard is ramping up. So I think that we
send this message to boys about who they should be
(09:14):
in the world, which is that they should be tough,
that they should be strong, that they should be that
they should suppress their emotions, that anything associated with femininity
culturally is somehow humiliating or emasculating for them. So emotionality
a certain type of intimacy. And I interviewed many, many
boys for this book, and they felt that same way.
(09:35):
They felt that masculinity was something that they had to
perform and that was very easily lost, and that they
could they kind of had to be on their guard
all the time, and we set them this model. I
think that in terms of we don't teach boys the
kind of relational skills that we teach to girls as standard.
We don't give them role models for them to be
(09:55):
these fully connected, relational, intimate human beings, and I think
that's harmful for them, and it means that they have
this sort of absence of learning those kinds of skills.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
What do you think of the phrase toxic and masculinity.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
I think that that phrase was useful in a certain
time and place to explain a certain type of behavior.
So I think during the Meto movement, when it really
kind of gained a head of steam, I think that,
you know, it was a useful phrase as a kind
of banner headline for talking about a specific type of
male behavior. So, you know, we're talking about the Winestein's,
(10:31):
we're talking about some of the things in the Trump administration,
We're talking about this wild, widespread sexual abuse and violence.
And I think that phrase kind of captured something that
no other phrase quite can. I'm not sure it's the
most helpful phrase for the ongoing conversations. I think that
a lot of boys and men can feel very shut
(10:51):
down by it, and it can, and especially when you're
raising boys, you're talking about children, and I think a
lot of boys feel as though that phrase kind of
hard frames them as harmful right from the start. You know,
it's sort of setting the terms where boys are sort
of growing up feeling like they're these harmful, harmful characters,
that there's something inherently bad about them, which I don't
(11:13):
think is very helpful way to talk about children.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
Do you think the way that a lot of young
boys are being socialized is contributing to this depression epidemic
that you talk about in adolescent boys.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Absolutely, I think we're socializing boys away from intimate connection,
you know. So one of the things that kept coming
up over and over again in my interviews was about loneliness,
you know that these boys felt so some of these
boys were genuinely isolated, and those trends are kind of
we're seeing a lot of that in the data that
(11:47):
boys are becoming increasingly isolated. Everyone is becoming increasingly isolated,
but particularly boys and young men. There's a lot of
displacement where they're replacing in person social.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Time with screen time.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
There's a lot of ways in which they're feelings shut
down and spending less time socializing with peers. So that's
sort of something that's showing up. But even the boys
that did have friends, that did have peers, that did
socialize often felt lonely in the sense that they couldn't
talk to those peers about anything very personal or vulnerable
or intimate. So I think that, yes, we are socializing
(12:20):
boys in a way which is really kind of keeping
them from the kind of deep intimate connections that women
often culturally find much easier to make.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Yeah, and also I think their genetic contributions to that proclivity.
I'm trying to I love playing Devil's autocate on my
podcast for the sake of conversations. What if someone came
to you and was like, are you basically making the
argument that boys need to be more like girls?
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (12:48):
I mean this is one, know what you're saying.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
So this is one that I hear a lot, and
I think it's a lot more nils than that.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Now.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
I don't think there is such a thing as like girls,
but I think that we have historically done really great
work encouraging girls to embrace qualities and pursuits and pastimes
that are associated we're traditionally associated with boys and men.
So when we tell a girl to behave like a boy,
you know, like a boy, not meaning genetically like a
(13:15):
boy or anything to do with anything predetermined, but just
to embrace those kinds of qualities that are traditionally associated
with masculinity. We see it as a promotion. So it's like, great,
be tough, be brave, be assertive, be strong, be courageous,
And we really encourage girls to embrace those things, and
you see it a lot in the culture. We see
it in books, we see it in movies, we see
(13:36):
it in you know, just the kind of language we
used to talk about girls. But we still see embracing
anything feminine as a demotion, as a humiliation. And so
I think that's part of something in a sexist culture
where we see anything that's associated with girls and women
as being trivial or not worth having or fine for girls,
but nothing for boys and men to actually aspire to.
(13:59):
So I think if we really valued those culturally feminine
coded virtues like emotionality, intimacy, and nurturing, if we really
saw those as worth having in the culture, then we
wouldn't see it as a bad thing to be like, well,
behave like girls. I mean that's a real simplification. But
I want to see everybody girls, boys, and every other
(14:20):
gender able to expres to express, and embrace the full
range of human possibility.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
Yeah, well, thank you. I want to really, I really
want to think this through with you as a collaboration.
It feels like there it depends on what subgroups you're
talking about, Like, are what communities like Certainly within a
certain women empowerment self help group, They're constantly rewarding each
(14:51):
other for being relational and being having self worth. You know,
a major concern is, oh, I don't feel worthy, you know.
And and then within certain bruh I'll call them broish,
you know, self help spears, they're constantly rewarding each other
for being strong and tough and standing up. I guess
when you use the word culture or society as this
(15:13):
overall blanket, my head goes to, you know, well, there
are different subcommunities of people that are rewarding different things,
you know. So and I know it's of course, so
I'm just trying to think this through because it just
it seems like on average, there are gender differences in
(15:35):
what's appreciated. And I for instance, if women ruled the world,
if there wasn't a patriarchy, right, if there was a matriarchy,
you would see someone like you would have to come
on and say, we're not appreciating agency and domination enough.
You know, in our society, like that has been gone
(15:55):
under the radar as important because you have all these
women running the world talking about importance relationships all the time.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Possibly yeah, and I think it's great you know, look,
all of these things are important, and that they have
different importance to different people. I mean, one of the
things about masculinity and you're talking about different subgroups. One
of the things that really struck me actually because I
talked to boys of very different kinds of backgrounds, and
(16:22):
what was really surprising to me. You know, so different
racial groups, different economic circumstances, different ages, different geographic locations,
and I thought that I would actually see more variation
than I did. What was really striking was more than similarities.
And so people would use like really different kinds of
boys from really different kinds of backgrounds would actually describe
(16:44):
their experience in very similar terms. So I remember talking
to a black kid who was from a very low
income neighborhood in.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Oakland, and he used.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
The exact same phrase to describe his experience of sort
of masculinity I expectation as this kid who was like
a very privileged white kid who went to a tennis
specialist boarding school in southern California that costs multiple thousands
of dollars a year, And they both use the exact
same phrase, which is, you have to no, you can
never let your guard down. They both you know, and
(17:17):
it was really striking to me that they were both
using the same phrase, and what they were describing was
that this kind of feeling that you had to perform
and if you ever slipped up and did the wrong
thing and showed weakness or fear them, you would, you know,
you would be humiliated, you would be out of the loop.
That you know, that something bad would happen. They didn't
know exactly what that bad thing was, and that it
(17:39):
was all sort of centered around the ideas. So and
you know, I've had experts sor to say this to
me as well, which is that masculinity is almost defined
by its opposite. It's like, don't be a woman, don't
be a girl, you know, and so it's sort of
it's like a negative virtue in some way. So it
was just like they were constantly avoiding that threat of emasculation.
(18:00):
Even though it looked very different in some superficial ways,
the similarities were pretty striking.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
It's a really good point I've learned. I've learned so
much from your book that it like stimulated lots of
things I want to discuss with you, and I hope
you're okay that we're not just having an interview where
I just ask you questions.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Now, I love it, and I've done so many interviews
and now that it's real, it's really great to be
challenged on.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
Let's let's really wrestle with this in a in a
not toxic masculinity sort of way.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Let's really relate emotionally about this.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Yeah, there are so many deep issues and implications of this.
You know, it feels like it's you know, is the
argument at the end of the day that like, is
it just simply like society needs to appreciate more traditionally
feminine ways of being because one could make again, a
(18:56):
devil's advocate couldn't come to you and say, well, what's
wrong with some like like traditionally masculine ways of being
channeled in the right way?
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Nothing? Absolutely nothing.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Yeah, So my point with this is that there's absolutely
nothing wrong with either masculinity or femininity. So there's a
lot of these really positive virtues that are associated with masculinity.
So bravery, strength, courage, even emotional stoicism, you know, in
the right context can be incredibly important. And those things
are not necessarily just for men. Obviously, you know, women
(19:31):
also embody those qualities, so it's not about saying that,
you know, we should throw out those qualities and everyone
should behave like women. It's more about just allowing everyone
to have access to all of these things without it
being seen as a humiliation. So, whether those feminine coded virtues,
whether they're masculine code of virtues, I think that we
could all benefit from having all of the access to
(19:54):
all of these things. Each individual will be different, and
I think there are gender differences in the sense of
how much, you know, we want to embrace certain sides
of ourselves, of course, but I think the problem is
that we've given this kind of cultural value to one
set of one set of qualities, and we've kind of
given less value to another set of qualities. But actually,
(20:17):
the feminine coded qualities, like you know, intimacy, emotionality, relationships
are really fundamental for mental health and for connectivity and
for being a connected human in the world.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
Yeah, that's a really great point. The segues into I
really would have you to tell her all into about
the young male friendship crisis. Yes, and it's huge, and
you're right, we are seeing a willliness epidemic across the board. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
Yeah, so this is also something that I was really
being led by what these boys were telling me. It
wasn't that I went into this being like, Oh, we
want to make boys more like girls, and let's, you know,
let's prove that point.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
I really didn't know what people were going to tell me.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
I spoke to many, many boys in lots of different settings,
and one of the things that kept coming up was
this theme of loneliness that they felt that they partly
it was that they were genuinely quite isolated, many of them,
and I think the COVID pandemic really accelerated that, but
I think those trends were very much in evidence before
that as well. There was this sense that their social
(21:19):
lives were kind of migrating online a little bit, whether
that was their just general sort of socializing often was
done through video games, through discord, through those kinds of
channels rather than in person. And also their sex lives
were migrating online. They were sort of rejecting real world
sex and relationships in favor of porn, partly because the
(21:40):
real world socializing and the real world stuff felt very fraught,
whereas the online stuff felt very easy and convenient and
accessible and low stress to them. But I think that
what they were feeling was that actually, although in the
moment it was much easier to do those things, something
very large was missing for them. They felt disconnected, they
felt depressed. Many of them they felt lonely. And similarly,
(22:04):
as you know, as I was saying before that, I
think a lot of even the guys who did have
friends and who were you know, socially successful and had
social capital, often felt like those friendships were kind of superficial,
that they couldn't really engage with their friends in the
kind of depths that they wanted to, and when they
did want to have those deeper conversations, they tended to
(22:24):
look to girls and women for that. So, whether it
was like female friends or girlfriends, or their moms or
whatever it was, they sort of saw women as playing
that role, which is fine to a certain extent, but
I think one you're seeing a trend now where so
many women are fed up with that role.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
You know, they've lost.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Their kind of goodwill to provide that kind of emotional
support for men and not have it reciprocated. And so
I think women want to feel that they have better
partners who are more engaged with them. And also, you know,
I think that boys should be able to do it
for each other as well.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
Yeah, oh for sure. Well it's really good that you're
you're shotting a spotlight on that. It does seem like
there's gender differences in how, you know, girls relate with
each other when they get together and hang out, and
how guys friends get together. I mean, I noticed the difference,
you know, if I'm just sitting and observing at a
coffee shop and I listen to how girls talk to
(23:23):
each other and what they're talking about. I listened to
two guys talk to each other. I mean, it's it's
there's definitely a pattern. I'm not gonna say one hundred
percent gender difference, but there's definitely a trend, you know.
You know, you know, women tend to be a lot
more relational and intimate in there, you know. I just
I just don't, you know, with my guy friends, it
(23:45):
almost feel weird being that intimate.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
I mean, the plays was saying that to me as well.
They were like, well, I can't have that kind of
conversation with my guy friends because maybe if feminine. I
mean that there was definitely a kind of slightly homophobic
as to it that they felt that maybe it was gay.
That there was you know, there were all those feelings.
But it wasn't that they didn't want to connect. It
wasn't that these guys were like, actually, this is just
(24:10):
the way I like it. You know, had they been saying,
had they genuinely been telling me, actually, I don't want
to connect on any more personal intimate level. I don't
need that than fine, you know the great horses for
cause these people are different. But that wasn't what they
were saying. They were saying, I feel lonely, I feel isolated.
I don't have anyone to talk to, you know. There
was this one example of this guy who he shared
(24:31):
an apartment with his brother. They were both in college.
They both attended the same college, and they were both
going through this period of major depression at the same time,
and they only knew about it because they both told
their parents and their parents fed it back. Even though
they were in an apartment together, they got along fine,
they hung out every night, they played video games, but
they just didn't know this about each other as brothers.
(24:54):
And I think at least the one, the brother that
I interviewed, was actually really sad about that. He wanted
to have a deeper connection, and he just didn't feel
that he had either the skills or the social permission
or you know, the way in to achieve that.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Yeah. Yeah, Well, this is obviously a very compassionate book
towards boys, and you do make it clear that you've listened,
and you actually have a whole chapter. I loved your
last chapter, maybe my favorite chapter of your book, where
you really do argue we need to listen more to boys. Yeah,
and so in a lot of ways, I mean, this
(25:31):
book comes from a place of a mom who cares
about the development of boys in a healthy way.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
It's right, Yeah, I mean, I you know, I think
it was really a strange moment with the med too
movement as a feminist and as a mother of boys,
because it felt like those things were kind of pulling
in opposite directions.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Because it felt like as.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
A feminist it was time to you know, crack down
on men and take a tough stance. And you know,
there's time for men to shut up because they've been
so privileged for so long time for them to be quiet.
And you know, obviously as a mother you can't really
do that. I mean I didn't have that option, and
had I had three girls, I think I would have
probably very much brought into that line of thinking. But like,
(26:13):
these are my children, this is who I'm raising. I
have to listen to them, you know. And I think
that it actually was a real experience of growth for
me that I really had to hear their story in
a very deep way and hear the position that they
were in and not try to shut it down. And
I think, now, you know, it's something that I've written
about a lot that I think boys are feeling kind
(26:34):
of shut down in politics or the general kind of
cultural discourse in.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
From both sides.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
You know, they still have this like old system of
masculinity which is just like you know, be quiet, suppress
your emotions, tough enough, be a tough guy. And now
there's this kind of new voice from the left which
is like, be quiet. You're so privileged, you know, it's
somebody else's turn. It's you shouldn't be speaking, and you
shouldn't be taking up space. They don't come from, you know,
(27:00):
I don't want to get into some kind of both
sides ism that these are equivalent. They're not equivalent. They're
not equivalent at all. And one of them comes with
a very genuine reason, and there's absolutely it is important
for men to listen as well. But I think boys
are feeling like, well, what do I do?
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Where do I go? Who do I talk to? You know?
Speaker 2 (27:18):
And I think ultimately they're kind of silencing thing. I
think it's I think a lot of boys are feeling
like they actually can't articulate what they're going through. They
don't know how to seek help, they don't know how
to talk about their feelings, and so they're kind of
channeling all of that into these quite toxic opinions on
the right, you know, the masculinity influencers, the manisphere and
(27:41):
all of that.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Yeah, but you know, I just want to double click
on a point you need and really double click on it,
because there is a lot of this talk about, you know,
male privilege, and you have a very provocative part of
your book where you argue that male privilege is actually
no longer a useful term when talking about teenagers because
power to ynamics have shifted so much to the point
where the categories of privilege and oppressed don't map so
(28:05):
clearly onto teenage boys and girls anymore. Can you unpack
that more? Because I think it's a super interesting point.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Yeah, So it's not that I don't think the male
privilege is real, because I think it absolutely is real.
But I think that it's complicated. It's much more complicated
than we're giving it credit for, because partly in the
sense that male privilege is always very real and that
is very important to recognize, but it comes with its
own harms. So it's not a simple like benefits only equation.
(28:38):
So even historically, you know, male privilege has always come
with this, you know. So what I said in the
book is that we've overvalued access to things like power
and money and economic success, which meant absolutely do get,
and we've kind of undervalued things like access to emotions, connectivity,
human connection, which in the system of atriarchy, boys don't
(29:01):
have access to in the same way. So I think privilege,
male privilege has always been complicated, but historically as well,
for this generation, I think it doesn't map well onto
what's going on with teenagers. I think this is why
a lot of boys don't recognize it. In this description,
it's like, be quiet your privilege, But what does that
actually mean when you're talking about young people. They're not
(29:23):
in the world of work, they're not earning money, there's
no pay gap, there's no you know, a lot of
these sort of tropes of what privilege actually means aren't
relevant to their lives, and so I think it's something
that we have to treat with caution. I don't think
we can see it as a as a simple thing anymore.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
Especially considering the high rates of depression among boys and
mental nance, suicide, various aspects that are real statistics that
you don't want to hide under the rug.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Absolutely, I mean, male suicide at the moment is around
well close to for four times the male's adolescent suicide
rate is close to four times the rate of the
female suicide rate. And the interesting thing about that statistic
is that usually when they take, you know, the CDC
does these sort of surveys of teenagers, girls tend to
(30:15):
show up as more depressed than boys, But then the
male suicide rate is much higher. So there's a serious
problem with the underreporting of male depression, I think. And
that's part of the same reason why they're depressed in
the first place, is because they can't talk about their feelings,
they can't seek help, They feel lonely, they feel isolated,
and those are the same things that are preventing them
from when a survey taker calls up and says, you know,
(30:38):
are you depressed for them say, oh no, no, no,
I'm absolutely fine, and they don't report it until it's
too late and tragedy happens, you know, which is something
that we really need to look at.
Speaker 3 (30:49):
Absolutely completely agree, completely agree. I'm so glad you're making
this point. Let's talk about in cells. You know, my
colleague and friend William has done quite a bit of
research on in cells. I don't know if you came
across his research.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
At all, a little bit, but yeah, but for me
in about yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
Yeah, yeah, Well I definitely want you to talk about
what you've discovered when you when you looked at in cells,
but and what we get wrong about in cells, because
he had his research has found that we get a
lot wrong. You know, most of them are not violent, yes,
you know, we have a lot of misconceptions of them
as the school shooters, you know. But I would like
to hear, you know, because I don't want to like
(31:29):
go into a lectra mode. I'd love to hear what
you were you discovered in your real Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
I mean what I found was very similar to that,
so that there is a section of the Intel movement
which is violent, and there have the Intel movement has
been associated with several mass shootings and killings, and so
that is real. But I would say that the vast
majority of the guys that identify that way or who
are part of that movement are not violent, and they're
(31:54):
actually what they are is profoundly depressed.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
You know, they're suffering from really severe mental health problems.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
They feel hopeless around.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Women, they feel extremely hopeless.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
So which is a big source of depression among adolescens.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Yes, and I think that what I found from talking
to Inseel so I spent time on in cell message boards,
which in many ways are some of the most toxic,
repulsive places that you can possibly imagine. I mean, there's
extreme misogyny, there's violent threats, there's racism, there's anti semitism,
there's white supremacist it's they're horrific spaces in many ways.
(32:28):
But what's also really shocking is that there are also
these places where there's this real tenderness and brotherhood towards
each other. That these guys really find belonging in these
spaces and support each other almost more than men do.
In many other spaces and feel able to.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
That was a real shock.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Yeah, and so what you know, So I don't know
how much our listeners know about the in cell ideology,
but basically in cell stands for involuntary celibates. So they're
these guys who are either virgins or they they're not
able to have sex, and they really want to and
they're extremely lonely, and they have this kind of ideology
(33:07):
where they believe that there's this sort of alpha male,
you know, guy that they are not, you know, they
call them chads, you know. Then they're they're like sex
sexually successful. They're like square jawed, tall masculine guy who
gets all the women. And this is all predetermined by genetics.
And then there's kind of beta males below them, and
then right at the bottom are the insults. And they
(33:29):
believe that they just have this Their ideology is all
just about hopelessness. They've just given up that they they
believe in this sort of system of masculinity. And in
a way it's really different from the rest of the
kind of manisphere because generally, like masculinity influencers are all
about holding out this promise that there's this thing called
an alpha male, and they can help you achieve that status,
(33:50):
and if you just do these kind of these ten things,
then you two can be an alpha male. But the
intels have just like given up. They're like, they don't
believe that they can achieve that status of my masculinity.
And it has these sort of two very weird effects.
One is that it can be very freeing for them
in this strange way, so they felt that they could
really be emotional and intimate with each other. It's almost
(34:11):
like they have no hope of ever achieving these standards
of masculinity, so they've almost just given up and just
they can just be behave in ways that men don't
often behave in real life. So the guys that I
went deep with really felt that they were finding this
real belonging and connectivity in those spaces, which was very
(34:31):
sad and very sweet and all of these all of
these competing things. And then you know, in the fringes
of the moment, I think that sometimes those feelings of
emasculation or hopelessness can lead to violent impulses. You know,
there's a lot of research on this, which is this
idea that it's not masculinity that causes men to become violent.
It's the shame of not feeling masculine enough. So there's
(34:55):
all this data that shows it's, you know, a measure
they call masculine discrepancy stress. It's men who feel like
they don't meet society's standards for masculinity are more likely
to be violent in all kinds of different ways, sexual violence,
intimate partner violence, I sort, with a weapon, et cetera,
et cetera.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
So it can go kind of both ways.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
Really, yeah, it can. And it is a rich literature
and I really do highly recommend people follow and read
William Costello's papers on this as well. And but what
you're saying is as absolutely wine with all that research,
for sure, and it is a very complex issue, you know,
(35:35):
the question of well, what do most women actually want?
Speaker 1 (35:39):
You know?
Speaker 3 (35:40):
And I think they get. I think there's a nuance here.
I'm not gonna say that the in cells are one
hundred percent wrong, you know, in what they're perceiving. I
think they have a distorted lens for sure, And I
don't think you have to be a chad. But I
also have noticed that most women do not want to
push over, They don't want a uber uber feminine male.
(36:05):
And I know that might be a triggering for you
to hear that, you know, because of the whole point
you're trying to make in your book. But I do
think there are some realities of what most women really
do want, you know, they want a man.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
I mean, no, I absolutely agree with you in the
sense that this is what many boys were finding really
confusing about this moment in our culture, was that they
felt that on the one hand, they were being told,
you know, you have to be this cautious and sensitive
and emotionally open and extremely you know, cautious was the
(36:37):
main thing, and the sense of, especially when approaching women,
you cannot be seen as a creep. You can't overstep
by even the tiniest midge. But at the same time,
all the old standards were still very much in circulation,
so they were still also expected to be dominant and
to make the first move, and women were policing their
masculinity in lots of ways as well, so they felt like, well,
(36:58):
we just don't know what to do, which is why
I think they felt like it was just easier to
just watch porn in their bedrooms than actually.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
I think that's exactly right, you know, if we really
think through the experience of a lot of young boys
who grow up who aren't the traditionally masculine ideal ideal
I put that in quotes. Of course, of course, the
societal ideal. What they see is it is the the
uber masking guys who are getting all the women. Yes,
(37:32):
that's what that's what, that's the I'm just talking about
the experience of being a middle school, high school student,
if and and just seeing who gets the girls.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
Yeah, I think a lot of this is not necessarily
about masculinity. It's also about confidence.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
I think that.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
I agree.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
I think that you can be confident in lots of
different ways, and it's very attractive to people. And that's
also true the other way around as well. It's also
true for women, you know, for girls, and what is
appealing to men, you know, in females, I think they
like people who are confident, and I think that's maybe
a human trait, but I agree that it does have
this gender sort of presentation. And I think this is
(38:10):
why boys felt very confused by the messages that they
were they were getting, and I think they felt very
very shut down and very scared.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
You know.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
I think we didn't they didn't get a very good
education in the nuances of relationships and how to read
social cues and how to you know. And this is
stuff that goes right back to the you know, the
things we were talking about at the beginning, that we
don't give them this very good education. It's not just
about being emotional and vulnerable, but it's about reading another
person's signals. It's about seeing when you're overstepping, it's about
(38:43):
seeing when somebody when you're boring somebody, or like taking
an interest in another person's feelings, and all of those qualities,
you know, we don't teach them well to boys, and
so I think what they're getting are these very blunt
messages about masculinity, which are like strong, tough, be a
tough guy. And I think the reality of what is
attractive is much more complex and comes with maturity and
(39:05):
confidence and those sorts of things. So I don't think
like being emotional and sensitive is in opposition to being
attractive or masculine.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
But it's it's complicated that I love that.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
Actually, I was just featured in a documentary this past
weekend called Sensitive Men Rising.
Speaker 1 (39:21):
I love that.
Speaker 3 (39:22):
I want to send it to you. I want to
send you the link. I'll look forward to saying that
it's right up the alley of your book, I mean
the whole. It's a three hour, three part documentary series
with Alanis mar Said and Scott Berry Kaufman. But I
would love to share that documentary with you.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
I think I would love to see.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
Yeah, And I think they're just the more that we
can open up these conversations and talk about these things.
But I think we tend to kind of equite being
sensitive and emotionally competent with being weak and emasculated in
a pushover. But those things are not that they really
are not aligned.
Speaker 3 (39:56):
Well, that's such a great and important point and a
point that I've been trying to bang that drum as well.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
For sure, this is a complicated and yes, in terms
of this is one of the reasons why I want
parents of girls to read this book as well, and
also not just parents, you know, people in general, because
I think we all need to think about our complicity
in all of these things.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
You know.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
I love that it's something that these systems we all
play a part in creating them, and we all play
you know, to a different extents, but we and we
all have these unconscious biases, and we all have these things,
and I think the more we can talk about it
and just lay it out there and be less rigid
about the way that we talk about it and who's
right and who's wrong, you know, and just sort of
(40:40):
examine it and be curious about it, I think the
more healthy and better that we can all be.
Speaker 3 (40:47):
I agree with that. I agree with that. The only
thing that I think we may disagree on, or that
maybe a major thing we may disagree on if we
really started to get into it, is I think evolution
evolutionary psychology plays a much bigger role here then maybe
you give it credit for. You know, I think there
are evolutionary instincts that we evolve. They are not just
going to disappear by someone reading a book and being like, Okay,
(41:09):
I'm going to change my value system. They can't change
what turns them on at a deep, deep, at a
deep evolutionary level.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
Yes, I mean, I think that desire is really complex,
and desire is really sort of often flies in the
face of.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
Our politics or our values or you know.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
And this is not just to do with gender. I mean,
it's to do with everything, you know. What we find
desirable is very specific and often, you know, you see this,
people have a lot of shame about that because they
often will find things exciting or desirable that are really
very much not in line with their value systems.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
And yeah, I think, but I think the more we
can talk about.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
It and acknowledge that and think about it, and you know,
you know, and I think that it's complicated because nobody
owes anybody desire or sex, right, That's something that's a
very personal decision, you know, that is something that each
person navigates for themselves, and we don't owe it to
(42:09):
anybody else, and there's no moral obligation. And I think
sometimes with these conversations, you know, and especially in the
sort of further reaches of the men's rights movement, it's like, well,
these women don't find me attractive, so therefore we have
to make them find me attractive, or they owe us sex,
or we're entitled to their bodies, or we're entitled to
their desires. And this is repulsive, and it's repulsive the
(42:29):
other way around. You know, nobody owes anyone their sexual
desire or their sexual you know, any sexual act. But
we do, we do have a moral obligation to think
about these things and think about how we treat other people,
and think about how we allow each group to show
(42:50):
up in the world and to be their their full selves.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:53):
I really like the spirit of that, but I think
that what a lot what the point, like Jordan Peterson
is med which I agree with, is that there is
a gender difference, for instance, in rough and tumble play
and in young sort of there are differences in sort
of like the way that people play, you know, boys
play with each other, the ways girls play with each other,
(43:16):
And there is kind of like a there seems to
be by a lot of women in our society right now,
is sort of like wanting to to just view all
of that instinct as like toxic, Like I think we
can over use the phrase toxic masculinity.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
I agree.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
And this is something that I really wrestle with in
the early chapters of the book because my own sons,
you know, I had went into parenting with this very
sort of subristic and I think a lot of parents,
not just with gender, but with everything. You think, Oh,
I'm just going to socialize the exact child that I
want and that you know, if I just do everything right,
(43:52):
then i'll know input equals output and I'll just get
the exactal that I want. And I think especially this
was all happening within the context of the conversations about toxic.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
Masculinity and male harm.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
And meanwhile, my own boys were extremely physical. I was
absolutely blindsided. You know, I grew up as one of
two girls that you know, we were very bookish, We
were very quiet, and I know many girls are not
like that, but I think on average, you're absolutely right
that the level of physical activity amongst boys is higher
in than it is in girls. At a group level, obviously,
(44:26):
you know it's variation, et cetera, et cetera. But at
a group level, we know that that's true. And I
was absolutely blindsided by it, and it was very easy
to see it through this lens of toxic masculinity. You know,
you're like, my kids want to play with nerve guns
or like wrestle each other. Is this like straight line
to you know, school shootings and pussy grabbing and all
(44:46):
of this, you know, toxic stuff, and I think it's
hard to unpack. And also, you know, you're exhausted and
you're parenting these very physical, very wild kids, and so yeah,
it was something that I had this constant back and
forth about, you know, not to pathology their behaviors. And
I think also I hit a lot of it the
other way around as well, which is just like, you know,
(45:06):
I get a lot of sort of slightly patronizing parenting advice,
especially for men, which will be like, well, boys just
need they need more wrestling, They just need you to
wrestle them. They need more physical play, they need more this.
And it's not that that's not true, but it sort
of often comes with this, well, you couldn't possibly understand
boyhood is this kind of momentous thing that women couldn't
(45:28):
possibly know about, and so only men can really handle it.
And also this sort of this this doubling down on
the physicality. It's just like, this is what they're like,
so what they really need is more of that. Whereas
with girls, we tend to have a slightly different conversation.
No one's saying, well, this is what they're naturally like.
You know, girls naturally like princesses, and so therefore what
we need is to just give them more and more
(45:48):
and more princesses. You know, we're saying, Okay, maybe this
is true, Maybe this is what they like, but also
let's expand them to other things too.
Speaker 1 (45:57):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (45:58):
The reason why I I bring this up is because
the whole section of your book on why are boys
moving to the right and why is feminism failing to
connect with them? You asked that question through the lens
of a feminist who's not on the right. But just
to take perspective taking here, like, there are people who
are not feminists on the right who would say good
(46:20):
because what we're doing is we're shaming men for being men.
That's their perspective.
Speaker 1 (46:25):
Yeah, and I think that, you.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
Know, I have some sympathy with that perspective, and I
really really don't want this to be misstated because.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
I'm not.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
I believe that what is harming men primarily is not feminism.
It is the system that feminism is fighting against, you know,
I think that that is where the problems are. But
I think somehow the feminists have kind of brought into
that same framing. You know, smashing the patriarchy will benefit
all of us, I believe, you know, it will allow
(46:55):
us all to embrace more expensive, fulfilling lives men and
and people of all genders. But I think what we've
the feminist have ended up doing is sort of almost
selling it to boys and men as this kind of punishment.
It's like, well, you're terrible and you suck and shut up,
and therefore we, you know, we're going to smash the
patriarchy to punish you. That's a real caricature of the position.
(47:18):
But I think that it's I think as feminists we
have not done a great job of articulating empathy or
understanding for men and boys, and so I can see
why they're just like, well, this, this is our enemy,
you know, this feminism is the enemy, rather than you know,
feminism is on our side.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
It makes complete sense, you know.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
And when I was interviewing one of the insults, you know,
we were actually shows him this essay which was written
by the philosopher Emirshri in a essen. She's written this
great essay called the Right to Sex, which is extremely
complex and about sex.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
And desire and all of these things.
Speaker 2 (47:54):
And she was saying, you know, in that essay feminism,
you know, Elliot Roger, who is like a famous in
cel shooter, you know, and a sort of insel hero.
She was saying that, you know, feminism could have helped him.
Speaker 1 (48:08):
You know, this is the.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
You know, it's fighting against the system that's oppressing him
and making him feel undesirable and whatever.
Speaker 1 (48:18):
And the insult.
Speaker 2 (48:18):
I showed it to him and he just found it
so odd. He was like, how could this have helped him?
And I sympathized with that. I was like, well, yeah,
I can see why this doesn't seem like a framework
for you to understand your own life and your own problems.
We haven't done a good job of articulating that.
Speaker 3 (48:33):
My gosh, Ruth, I could speak to you the rest
of today and tomorrow about this. I do want to
be respectful of your time. I have five more pages
of notes, which I promise I'm not going to get
through right now. But this is just a testament to
how much you know. Like I'm a nerd at the
end of the day, and you stimulated so many questions
I had in alternative perspectives. I always try to think
(48:55):
of other perspectives, you know, and how far put them
on the table. But all that side, I think that
we can all agree, the left and the right in
a fundamental point of your book that I want to
end with, when you talk about what can we do
as a society. You make a fundamental point that we
need to aim higher for men, and I think that's
a point that we can all I hope we can
(49:18):
all rally around. Regardless if you're a Tait fan or
or you're an uber extreme left feminist with green hair,
you can still agree on the same thing, which is
that the more that we empower men to be better humans,
the more we empower girls as well, the more society
(49:42):
will be better.
Speaker 1 (49:43):
I absolutely agree with that, yes, and.
Speaker 3 (49:46):
I think it's such an important point, and I'm glad
that you are making that point and that you're bringing
this important discussion to the table. So I wish you
all the best with your book. And I really am
thankful and grateful that you came my podcast and that
you let me play Devil's advocate a little bit, because
I feel like it's a boring conversation if you don't
play Devil's advocate, and.
Speaker 1 (50:04):
I really appreciate.
Speaker 2 (50:05):
I think these are really important issues and we should
be talking about them in the most open and you know,
we should look at all sides of this, So I
really appreciate that conversation.
Speaker 1 (50:14):
Thank you, Thank you, Ruth all the best you too,
great talking with you
We see it as a promotion.
Speaker 2 (00:01):
So it's like great, be tough, be brave, be assertive,
be strong, be courageous, And we really encourage girls to
embrace those things. And you see it a lot in
the culture. We see it in books, we see in movies,
we see it in you know, just the kind of
language we used to talk about girls. But we still
see embracing anything feminine as a demotion, as a humiliation,
(00:24):
and so I think that's part of something in a
sexist culture where we see anything that's associated with girls
and women as being trivial or not worth having, or
fine for girls, but nothing for boys and men to
actually aspire to.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
It's a real delight to welcome Ruth Whitman back on
the show after quite a few years. Ruth is an author, essayist,
and cultural critic from London living in the United States.
She is author of a few books, but her most
recent one and the topic of our conversation today, is
called boy Mom, Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity.
(01:03):
In this stimulating episode, we discussed masculinity influencers, the role
of biological sex in predicting personality, and what healthy or
aspirational masculinity actually looks like, as Ruth says, quote, we
need to give boys a more expansive, less suffocating story
about their own possibilities and place in the world. End quote.
(01:24):
And I'm here for it. So, without further ado, I
bring you Ruth Whitman. Oh, Ruth, Hi Scott, Welcome back
to the Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
It is so good to talk to you again.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
It's been many years how many years of this this
new book that you wrote called boy Mom, Reimagining Boyhood
in the Age of Impossible Masculinity. Talk to me a
little bit about your thoughts of like the Me Too
movement and how it kind of led and led to
your thinking about boys.
Speaker 1 (01:55):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:55):
So I was pretty heavily pregnant with my third boy
when the me to movement exploded, and it just suddenly overnight,
really changed the conversation that we were having about men
and boys. You know, I already had two sons. You know,
there was this it was like this kind of rolling
horror show of bad news about men. Really, I was,
(02:18):
you know, I was about to give birth. I was
already quite hormone or I was already quite sort of
anxious in that angsty pregnancy way, and suddenly I was thinking,
you know, I'm going to be a mother to three boys,
and there's obviously something wrong going on at a systemic level.
It's no longer just like here are a few bad apples,
are what bad luck? You know, there's something in the
culture that about the way that we're socializing boys that
(02:39):
is causing this kind of thing to be normalized. And
as a feminist I was really kind of delighted by
this new conversation. I was really thrilled that women suddenly
had this voice, that we were looking at these issues
more clearly. But as a mother, I was pretty scared
and a little bit defensive and quite conflicted, And so
that really inspired me to just go and investigate this
(03:01):
phenomenon further, like what are we where are we going wrong.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
With how we socialize boys?
Speaker 2 (03:06):
What's happening in the culture, and what is it sort
of doing to this generation of boys to grow up
in the shadow of that conversation.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
You know, this this whole book is extremely nuanced. It's
not you know, you're not buying the line that men
are inherently toxic.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Absolutely no, no, I think that it is a really
complicated and nuanced subject, and the more I started to
unpack it, the more layers there were, and the more
I have my preconceptions challenged, and the more all my
kind of shibaliths about feminism, about parenthood, about the culture
were challenged over and over again, and so it was
a really fascinating process. I had to really look at
(03:49):
some of my own biases and my own thoughts and
sort of question my own premises and at all. Through
that time, I was parenting three boys, and so you know,
whatever ideas I was coming up with in my reporting
and whatever I was hearing in the culture, I was
sort of road testing at home. So it made it,
you know, it was a really interesting back and forth
(04:09):
because I had I couldn't just sort of rely on
these platitudes and being like, well, girls are like this,
some boys are like that, or this is this is
what's happening. Oh, this is the way that we raised boys.
You know, I'm doing it live, and you often realize
that when you try to do things with real humans
or real children, they don't actually go the way that
you think. In fact, one of the conversations that you
and I had was very influential in that if you're
(04:33):
willing for me to share. But I remember when the
last time we spoke, and I don't think this was
actually on the podcast. I think it was off Mike,
But we talked about some of the some of the
research on gender differences in kids, and I think I
was quite resistant to it at the time, you know,
I was quite resistant to the idea that there were
these biologically hardwired differences. And I think you sent me
(04:57):
some research that showed me that was quite convincing. There
are there are some differences, whether they're biologically hardwired, or
whether they're socialized, or whether it's a kind of complicated
mix of the two. The differences in the sexes is
quite large in many.
Speaker 3 (05:12):
Ways in some areas. Yeah, but I would never use
the word hardwired as a as a scientist. I think
that that's a word that needs to be stricken from
the discussion. You know, nothing, nothing's hard genes. Genes are
just bullprints, you know, for they're not even bullprints. Actually
they're not even bullprint. That's even too extreme as it is.
(05:33):
You know, it's it's a very hazy set of instructions
that can get that doesn't need to be determined, right, and.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
They can and you know, the whole field of epigenetics.
It's like, you know, I think we get stuck on
this is it nature or is it nurture? But everything
is absolutely a combination of both, and what gets switched on,
what doesn't get switched on, what you know, how how
it all shakes down. But that was really an interesting
conversation that we had.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Yeah, I'm sure that that'll come up later in this
conversation even more, or will be kind of a thread
running through everything. But you say, I'm going to put
some quotes out here of what you say. Everywhere I turned,
there were bad men trying to raise good sons suddenly
felt like a hopeless task. It felt as though society
was fracturing along gender lines. What I get from reading
(06:21):
your book is that there's an awful lot of compassion,
which is consistent with your your prior writing as well,
but compassion for everyone involved. You didn't really write a
finger pointing book. You didn't write a man hating book.
You know, you really wrote a book like, well, what
kind of society can we live in? That kind of
rides that raises the tide for men and and and
(06:45):
and we're boys and girls. You know, I'm really.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Glad to hear that that that was the way that
you received it and read it, because absolutely, I think
that we got into a kind of cultural moment where
we were very fractured on all kinds of lines, and
one of those was gender. And I think that what
ended up happening was that women and girls kind of
became a cause of the left, and men and boys
kind of became a cause of the right. And you know,
(07:12):
obviously I'm not talking about individuals here, I'm talking about
the kind of cultural understanding of it. So you know,
there were there are obviously many conservative women and progressive men.
That's not really the point, but it was just like
the left had taken up the cause of girls and
women and it was almost the cause of boys and
men was almost coded as this kind of right wing endeavor.
(07:34):
And I wanted to get past that and just be like, well, look,
we all have to live in this world together, and
the same system, we're all trapped in, this same system together.
The same system that teaches boys and men to harm
other people also harms them too. It's not healthy for them,
it's not healthy for the way that they're growing up.
And so, you know, I wanted to I wanted to
(07:57):
approach this subject with compassion, and I think I had
a very natural into approach it with compassion because obviously
I'm talking about my own children.
Speaker 3 (08:04):
Of course, of course, Well, I would love to hear
more precisely what you see as the message that boys
are being taught to hurt others. What is that message?
Where where boys being taught to hurt others?
Speaker 2 (08:19):
Well, I don't think that boys are specific. I don't
think it's as direct as that. So I don't think
it's like anyone saying go and hurt others and nobody.
I think it would be very rare to find a
parent that wants to raise a harmful boy.
Speaker 1 (08:32):
But I think there are.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Many subtle messages that boys receive which are psychologically unhealthy
for them and psychologically unhealthy for the people that they
have to be around. I think that some of these
messages have to do with masculinity and what we sort
of expect from boys as they live in the world.
So we have the you know, the subtitle of the book,
(08:53):
so it's boy Mom raising boys, you know, reimagining boyhood
in the age of impossible masculinity. And I think this
idea of impossible masculinity was something that just kept coming
up for me over and over again, was that we
hold boys to this standard of masculinity, and if anything,
that standard is ramping up. So I think that we
send this message to boys about who they should be
(09:14):
in the world, which is that they should be tough,
that they should be strong, that they should be that
they should suppress their emotions, that anything associated with femininity
culturally is somehow humiliating or emasculating for them. So emotionality
a certain type of intimacy. And I interviewed many, many
boys for this book, and they felt that same way.
(09:35):
They felt that masculinity was something that they had to
perform and that was very easily lost, and that they
could they kind of had to be on their guard
all the time, and we set them this model. I
think that in terms of we don't teach boys the
kind of relational skills that we teach to girls as standard.
We don't give them role models for them to be
(09:55):
these fully connected, relational, intimate human beings, and I think
that's harmful for them, and it means that they have
this sort of absence of learning those kinds of skills.
Speaker 3 (10:05):
What do you think of the phrase toxic and masculinity.
Speaker 2 (10:10):
I think that that phrase was useful in a certain
time and place to explain a certain type of behavior.
So I think during the Meto movement, when it really
kind of gained a head of steam, I think that,
you know, it was a useful phrase as a kind
of banner headline for talking about a specific type of
male behavior. So, you know, we're talking about the Winestein's,
(10:31):
we're talking about some of the things in the Trump administration,
We're talking about this wild, widespread sexual abuse and violence.
And I think that phrase kind of captured something that
no other phrase quite can. I'm not sure it's the
most helpful phrase for the ongoing conversations. I think that
a lot of boys and men can feel very shut
(10:51):
down by it, and it can, and especially when you're
raising boys, you're talking about children, and I think a
lot of boys feel as though that phrase kind of
hard frames them as harmful right from the start. You know,
it's sort of setting the terms where boys are sort
of growing up feeling like they're these harmful, harmful characters,
that there's something inherently bad about them, which I don't
(11:13):
think is very helpful way to talk about children.
Speaker 3 (11:17):
Do you think the way that a lot of young
boys are being socialized is contributing to this depression epidemic
that you talk about in adolescent boys.
Speaker 1 (11:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (11:27):
Absolutely, I think we're socializing boys away from intimate connection,
you know. So one of the things that kept coming
up over and over again in my interviews was about loneliness,
you know that these boys felt so some of these
boys were genuinely isolated, and those trends are kind of
we're seeing a lot of that in the data that
(11:47):
boys are becoming increasingly isolated. Everyone is becoming increasingly isolated,
but particularly boys and young men. There's a lot of
displacement where they're replacing in person social.
Speaker 1 (11:57):
Time with screen time.
Speaker 2 (11:59):
There's a lot of ways in which they're feelings shut
down and spending less time socializing with peers. So that's
sort of something that's showing up. But even the boys
that did have friends, that did have peers, that did
socialize often felt lonely in the sense that they couldn't
talk to those peers about anything very personal or vulnerable
or intimate. So I think that, yes, we are socializing
(12:20):
boys in a way which is really kind of keeping
them from the kind of deep intimate connections that women
often culturally find much easier to make.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
Yeah, and also I think their genetic contributions to that proclivity.
I'm trying to I love playing Devil's autocate on my
podcast for the sake of conversations. What if someone came
to you and was like, are you basically making the
argument that boys need to be more like girls?
Speaker 2 (12:47):
Yeah?
Speaker 3 (12:48):
I mean this is one, know what you're saying.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
So this is one that I hear a lot, and
I think it's a lot more nils than that.
Speaker 1 (12:54):
Now.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
I don't think there is such a thing as like girls,
but I think that we have historically done really great
work encouraging girls to embrace qualities and pursuits and pastimes
that are associated we're traditionally associated with boys and men.
So when we tell a girl to behave like a boy,
you know, like a boy, not meaning genetically like a
(13:15):
boy or anything to do with anything predetermined, but just
to embrace those kinds of qualities that are traditionally associated
with masculinity. We see it as a promotion. So it's like, great,
be tough, be brave, be assertive, be strong, be courageous,
And we really encourage girls to embrace those things, and
you see it a lot in the culture. We see
it in books, we see it in movies, we see
(13:36):
it in you know, just the kind of language we
used to talk about girls. But we still see embracing
anything feminine as a demotion, as a humiliation. And so
I think that's part of something in a sexist culture
where we see anything that's associated with girls and women
as being trivial or not worth having or fine for girls,
but nothing for boys and men to actually aspire to.
(13:59):
So I think if we really valued those culturally feminine
coded virtues like emotionality, intimacy, and nurturing, if we really
saw those as worth having in the culture, then we
wouldn't see it as a bad thing to be like, well,
behave like girls. I mean that's a real simplification. But
I want to see everybody girls, boys, and every other
(14:20):
gender able to expres to express, and embrace the full
range of human possibility.
Speaker 3 (14:29):
Yeah, well, thank you. I want to really, I really
want to think this through with you as a collaboration.
It feels like there it depends on what subgroups you're
talking about, Like, are what communities like Certainly within a
certain women empowerment self help group, They're constantly rewarding each
(14:51):
other for being relational and being having self worth. You know,
a major concern is, oh, I don't feel worthy, you know.
And and then within certain bruh I'll call them broish,
you know, self help spears, they're constantly rewarding each other
for being strong and tough and standing up. I guess
when you use the word culture or society as this
(15:13):
overall blanket, my head goes to, you know, well, there
are different subcommunities of people that are rewarding different things,
you know. So and I know it's of course, so
I'm just trying to think this through because it just
it seems like on average, there are gender differences in
(15:35):
what's appreciated. And I for instance, if women ruled the world,
if there wasn't a patriarchy, right, if there was a matriarchy,
you would see someone like you would have to come
on and say, we're not appreciating agency and domination enough.
You know, in our society, like that has been gone
(15:55):
under the radar as important because you have all these
women running the world talking about importance relationships all the time.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Possibly yeah, and I think it's great you know, look,
all of these things are important, and that they have
different importance to different people. I mean, one of the
things about masculinity and you're talking about different subgroups. One
of the things that really struck me actually because I
talked to boys of very different kinds of backgrounds, and
(16:22):
what was really surprising to me. You know, so different
racial groups, different economic circumstances, different ages, different geographic locations,
and I thought that I would actually see more variation
than I did. What was really striking was more than similarities.
And so people would use like really different kinds of
boys from really different kinds of backgrounds would actually describe
(16:44):
their experience in very similar terms. So I remember talking
to a black kid who was from a very low
income neighborhood in.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
Oakland, and he used.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
The exact same phrase to describe his experience of sort
of masculinity I expectation as this kid who was like
a very privileged white kid who went to a tennis
specialist boarding school in southern California that costs multiple thousands
of dollars a year, And they both use the exact
same phrase, which is, you have to no, you can
never let your guard down. They both you know, and
(17:17):
it was really striking to me that they were both
using the same phrase, and what they were describing was
that this kind of feeling that you had to perform
and if you ever slipped up and did the wrong
thing and showed weakness or fear them, you would, you know,
you would be humiliated, you would be out of the loop.
That you know, that something bad would happen. They didn't
know exactly what that bad thing was, and that it
(17:39):
was all sort of centered around the ideas. So and
you know, I've had experts sor to say this to
me as well, which is that masculinity is almost defined
by its opposite. It's like, don't be a woman, don't
be a girl, you know, and so it's sort of
it's like a negative virtue in some way. So it
was just like they were constantly avoiding that threat of emasculation.
(18:00):
Even though it looked very different in some superficial ways,
the similarities were pretty striking.
Speaker 3 (18:10):
It's a really good point I've learned. I've learned so
much from your book that it like stimulated lots of
things I want to discuss with you, and I hope
you're okay that we're not just having an interview where
I just ask you questions.
Speaker 2 (18:20):
Now, I love it, and I've done so many interviews
and now that it's real, it's really great to be
challenged on.
Speaker 3 (18:25):
Let's let's really wrestle with this in a in a
not toxic masculinity sort of way.
Speaker 1 (18:32):
Let's really relate emotionally about this.
Speaker 3 (18:34):
Yeah, there are so many deep issues and implications of this.
You know, it feels like it's you know, is the
argument at the end of the day that like, is
it just simply like society needs to appreciate more traditionally
feminine ways of being because one could make again, a
(18:56):
devil's advocate couldn't come to you and say, well, what's
wrong with some like like traditionally masculine ways of being
channeled in the right way?
Speaker 1 (19:08):
Nothing? Absolutely nothing.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
Yeah, So my point with this is that there's absolutely
nothing wrong with either masculinity or femininity. So there's a
lot of these really positive virtues that are associated with masculinity.
So bravery, strength, courage, even emotional stoicism, you know, in
the right context can be incredibly important. And those things
are not necessarily just for men. Obviously, you know, women
(19:31):
also embody those qualities, so it's not about saying that,
you know, we should throw out those qualities and everyone
should behave like women. It's more about just allowing everyone
to have access to all of these things without it
being seen as a humiliation. So, whether those feminine coded virtues,
whether they're masculine code of virtues, I think that we
could all benefit from having all of the access to
(19:54):
all of these things. Each individual will be different, and
I think there are gender differences in the sense of
how much, you know, we want to embrace certain sides
of ourselves, of course, but I think the problem is
that we've given this kind of cultural value to one
set of one set of qualities, and we've kind of
given less value to another set of qualities. But actually,
(20:17):
the feminine coded qualities, like you know, intimacy, emotionality, relationships
are really fundamental for mental health and for connectivity and
for being a connected human in the world.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
Yeah, that's a really great point. The segues into I
really would have you to tell her all into about
the young male friendship crisis. Yes, and it's huge, and
you're right, we are seeing a willliness epidemic across the board. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:44):
Yeah, so this is also something that I was really
being led by what these boys were telling me. It
wasn't that I went into this being like, Oh, we
want to make boys more like girls, and let's, you know,
let's prove that point.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
I really didn't know what people were going to tell me.
Speaker 2 (20:56):
I spoke to many, many boys in lots of different settings,
and one of the things that kept coming up was
this theme of loneliness that they felt that they partly
it was that they were genuinely quite isolated, many of them,
and I think the COVID pandemic really accelerated that, but
I think those trends were very much in evidence before
that as well. There was this sense that their social
(21:19):
lives were kind of migrating online a little bit, whether
that was their just general sort of socializing often was
done through video games, through discord, through those kinds of
channels rather than in person. And also their sex lives
were migrating online. They were sort of rejecting real world
sex and relationships in favor of porn, partly because the
(21:40):
real world socializing and the real world stuff felt very fraught,
whereas the online stuff felt very easy and convenient and
accessible and low stress to them. But I think that
what they were feeling was that actually, although in the
moment it was much easier to do those things, something
very large was missing for them. They felt disconnected, they
felt depressed. Many of them they felt lonely. And similarly,
(22:04):
as you know, as I was saying before that, I
think a lot of even the guys who did have
friends and who were you know, socially successful and had
social capital, often felt like those friendships were kind of superficial,
that they couldn't really engage with their friends in the
kind of depths that they wanted to, and when they
did want to have those deeper conversations, they tended to
(22:24):
look to girls and women for that. So, whether it
was like female friends or girlfriends, or their moms or
whatever it was, they sort of saw women as playing
that role, which is fine to a certain extent, but
I think one you're seeing a trend now where so
many women are fed up with that role.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
You know, they've lost.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Their kind of goodwill to provide that kind of emotional
support for men and not have it reciprocated. And so
I think women want to feel that they have better
partners who are more engaged with them. And also, you know,
I think that boys should be able to do it
for each other as well.
Speaker 3 (23:01):
Yeah, oh for sure. Well it's really good that you're
you're shotting a spotlight on that. It does seem like
there's gender differences in how, you know, girls relate with
each other when they get together and hang out, and
how guys friends get together. I mean, I noticed the difference,
you know, if I'm just sitting and observing at a
coffee shop and I listen to how girls talk to
(23:23):
each other and what they're talking about. I listened to
two guys talk to each other. I mean, it's it's
there's definitely a pattern. I'm not gonna say one hundred
percent gender difference, but there's definitely a trend, you know.
You know, you know, women tend to be a lot
more relational and intimate in there, you know. I just
I just don't, you know, with my guy friends, it
(23:45):
almost feel weird being that intimate.
Speaker 2 (23:49):
I mean, the plays was saying that to me as well.
They were like, well, I can't have that kind of
conversation with my guy friends because maybe if feminine. I
mean that there was definitely a kind of slightly homophobic
as to it that they felt that maybe it was gay.
That there was you know, there were all those feelings.
But it wasn't that they didn't want to connect. It
wasn't that these guys were like, actually, this is just
(24:10):
the way I like it. You know, had they been saying,
had they genuinely been telling me, actually, I don't want
to connect on any more personal intimate level. I don't
need that than fine, you know the great horses for
cause these people are different. But that wasn't what they
were saying. They were saying, I feel lonely, I feel isolated.
I don't have anyone to talk to, you know. There
was this one example of this guy who he shared
(24:31):
an apartment with his brother. They were both in college.
They both attended the same college, and they were both
going through this period of major depression at the same time,
and they only knew about it because they both told
their parents and their parents fed it back. Even though
they were in an apartment together, they got along fine,
they hung out every night, they played video games, but
they just didn't know this about each other as brothers.
(24:54):
And I think at least the one, the brother that
I interviewed, was actually really sad about that. He wanted
to have a deeper connection, and he just didn't feel
that he had either the skills or the social permission
or you know, the way in to achieve that.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
Yeah. Yeah, Well, this is obviously a very compassionate book
towards boys, and you do make it clear that you've listened,
and you actually have a whole chapter. I loved your
last chapter, maybe my favorite chapter of your book, where
you really do argue we need to listen more to boys. Yeah,
and so in a lot of ways, I mean, this
(25:31):
book comes from a place of a mom who cares
about the development of boys in a healthy way.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
It's right, Yeah, I mean, I you know, I think
it was really a strange moment with the med too
movement as a feminist and as a mother of boys,
because it felt like those things were kind of pulling
in opposite directions.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
Because it felt like as.
Speaker 2 (25:50):
A feminist it was time to you know, crack down
on men and take a tough stance. And you know,
there's time for men to shut up because they've been
so privileged for so long time for them to be quiet.
And you know, obviously as a mother you can't really
do that. I mean I didn't have that option, and
had I had three girls, I think I would have
probably very much brought into that line of thinking. But like,
(26:13):
these are my children, this is who I'm raising. I
have to listen to them, you know. And I think
that it actually was a real experience of growth for
me that I really had to hear their story in
a very deep way and hear the position that they
were in and not try to shut it down. And
I think, now, you know, it's something that I've written
about a lot that I think boys are feeling kind
(26:34):
of shut down in politics or the general kind of
cultural discourse in.
Speaker 1 (26:39):
From both sides.
Speaker 2 (26:40):
You know, they still have this like old system of
masculinity which is just like you know, be quiet, suppress
your emotions, tough enough, be a tough guy. And now
there's this kind of new voice from the left which
is like, be quiet. You're so privileged, you know, it's
somebody else's turn. It's you shouldn't be speaking, and you
shouldn't be taking up space. They don't come from, you know,
(27:00):
I don't want to get into some kind of both
sides ism that these are equivalent. They're not equivalent. They're
not equivalent at all. And one of them comes with
a very genuine reason, and there's absolutely it is important
for men to listen as well. But I think boys
are feeling like, well, what do I do?
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Where do I go? Who do I talk to? You know?
Speaker 2 (27:18):
And I think ultimately they're kind of silencing thing. I
think it's I think a lot of boys are feeling
like they actually can't articulate what they're going through. They
don't know how to seek help, they don't know how
to talk about their feelings, and so they're kind of
channeling all of that into these quite toxic opinions on
the right, you know, the masculinity influencers, the manisphere and
(27:41):
all of that.
Speaker 3 (27:42):
Yeah, but you know, I just want to double click
on a point you need and really double click on it,
because there is a lot of this talk about, you know,
male privilege, and you have a very provocative part of
your book where you argue that male privilege is actually
no longer a useful term when talking about teenagers because
power to ynamics have shifted so much to the point
where the categories of privilege and oppressed don't map so
(28:05):
clearly onto teenage boys and girls anymore. Can you unpack
that more? Because I think it's a super interesting point.
Speaker 2 (28:12):
Yeah, So it's not that I don't think the male
privilege is real, because I think it absolutely is real.
But I think that it's complicated. It's much more complicated
than we're giving it credit for, because partly in the
sense that male privilege is always very real and that
is very important to recognize, but it comes with its
own harms. So it's not a simple like benefits only equation.
(28:38):
So even historically, you know, male privilege has always come
with this, you know. So what I said in the
book is that we've overvalued access to things like power
and money and economic success, which meant absolutely do get,
and we've kind of undervalued things like access to emotions, connectivity,
human connection, which in the system of atriarchy, boys don't
(29:01):
have access to in the same way. So I think privilege,
male privilege has always been complicated, but historically as well,
for this generation, I think it doesn't map well onto
what's going on with teenagers. I think this is why
a lot of boys don't recognize it. In this description,
it's like, be quiet your privilege, But what does that
actually mean when you're talking about young people. They're not
(29:23):
in the world of work, they're not earning money, there's
no pay gap, there's no you know, a lot of
these sort of tropes of what privilege actually means aren't
relevant to their lives, and so I think it's something
that we have to treat with caution. I don't think
we can see it as a as a simple thing anymore.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
Especially considering the high rates of depression among boys and
mental nance, suicide, various aspects that are real statistics that
you don't want to hide under the rug.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
Absolutely, I mean, male suicide at the moment is around
well close to for four times the male's adolescent suicide
rate is close to four times the rate of the
female suicide rate. And the interesting thing about that statistic
is that usually when they take, you know, the CDC
does these sort of surveys of teenagers, girls tend to
(30:15):
show up as more depressed than boys, But then the
male suicide rate is much higher. So there's a serious
problem with the underreporting of male depression, I think. And
that's part of the same reason why they're depressed in
the first place, is because they can't talk about their feelings,
they can't seek help, They feel lonely, they feel isolated,
and those are the same things that are preventing them
from when a survey taker calls up and says, you know,
(30:38):
are you depressed for them say, oh no, no, no,
I'm absolutely fine, and they don't report it until it's
too late and tragedy happens, you know, which is something
that we really need to look at.
Speaker 3 (30:49):
Absolutely completely agree, completely agree. I'm so glad you're making
this point. Let's talk about in cells. You know, my
colleague and friend William has done quite a bit of
research on in cells. I don't know if you came
across his research.
Speaker 1 (31:03):
At all, a little bit, but yeah, but for me
in about yeah.
Speaker 3 (31:08):
Yeah, yeah, Well I definitely want you to talk about
what you've discovered when you when you looked at in cells,
but and what we get wrong about in cells, because
he had his research has found that we get a
lot wrong. You know, most of them are not violent, yes,
you know, we have a lot of misconceptions of them
as the school shooters, you know. But I would like
to hear, you know, because I don't want to like
(31:29):
go into a lectra mode. I'd love to hear what
you were you discovered in your real Yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:33):
I mean what I found was very similar to that,
so that there is a section of the Intel movement
which is violent, and there have the Intel movement has
been associated with several mass shootings and killings, and so
that is real. But I would say that the vast
majority of the guys that identify that way or who
are part of that movement are not violent, and they're
(31:54):
actually what they are is profoundly depressed.
Speaker 1 (31:58):
You know, they're suffering from really severe mental health problems.
Speaker 3 (32:01):
They feel hopeless around.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Women, they feel extremely hopeless.
Speaker 3 (32:04):
So which is a big source of depression among adolescens.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Yes, and I think that what I found from talking
to Inseel so I spent time on in cell message boards,
which in many ways are some of the most toxic,
repulsive places that you can possibly imagine. I mean, there's
extreme misogyny, there's violent threats, there's racism, there's anti semitism,
there's white supremacist it's they're horrific spaces in many ways.
(32:28):
But what's also really shocking is that there are also
these places where there's this real tenderness and brotherhood towards
each other. That these guys really find belonging in these
spaces and support each other almost more than men do.
In many other spaces and feel able to.
Speaker 1 (32:45):
That was a real shock.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
Yeah, and so what you know, So I don't know
how much our listeners know about the in cell ideology,
but basically in cell stands for involuntary celibates. So they're
these guys who are either virgins or they they're not
able to have sex, and they really want to and
they're extremely lonely, and they have this kind of ideology
(33:07):
where they believe that there's this sort of alpha male,
you know, guy that they are not, you know, they
call them chads, you know. Then they're they're like sex
sexually successful. They're like square jawed, tall masculine guy who
gets all the women. And this is all predetermined by genetics.
And then there's kind of beta males below them, and
then right at the bottom are the insults. And they
(33:29):
believe that they just have this Their ideology is all
just about hopelessness. They've just given up that they they
believe in this sort of system of masculinity. And in
a way it's really different from the rest of the
kind of manisphere because generally, like masculinity influencers are all
about holding out this promise that there's this thing called
an alpha male, and they can help you achieve that status,
(33:50):
and if you just do these kind of these ten things,
then you two can be an alpha male. But the
intels have just like given up. They're like, they don't
believe that they can achieve that status of my masculinity.
And it has these sort of two very weird effects.
One is that it can be very freeing for them
in this strange way, so they felt that they could
really be emotional and intimate with each other. It's almost
(34:11):
like they have no hope of ever achieving these standards
of masculinity, so they've almost just given up and just
they can just be behave in ways that men don't
often behave in real life. So the guys that I
went deep with really felt that they were finding this
real belonging and connectivity in those spaces, which was very
(34:31):
sad and very sweet and all of these all of
these competing things. And then you know, in the fringes
of the moment, I think that sometimes those feelings of
emasculation or hopelessness can lead to violent impulses. You know,
there's a lot of research on this, which is this
idea that it's not masculinity that causes men to become violent.
It's the shame of not feeling masculine enough. So there's
(34:55):
all this data that shows it's, you know, a measure
they call masculine discrepancy stress. It's men who feel like
they don't meet society's standards for masculinity are more likely
to be violent in all kinds of different ways, sexual violence,
intimate partner violence, I sort, with a weapon, et cetera,
et cetera.
Speaker 1 (35:13):
So it can go kind of both ways.
Speaker 3 (35:15):
Really, yeah, it can. And it is a rich literature
and I really do highly recommend people follow and read
William Costello's papers on this as well. And but what
you're saying is as absolutely wine with all that research,
for sure, and it is a very complex issue, you know,
(35:35):
the question of well, what do most women actually want?
Speaker 1 (35:39):
You know?
Speaker 3 (35:40):
And I think they get. I think there's a nuance here.
I'm not gonna say that the in cells are one
hundred percent wrong, you know, in what they're perceiving. I
think they have a distorted lens for sure, And I
don't think you have to be a chad. But I
also have noticed that most women do not want to
push over, They don't want a uber uber feminine male.
(36:05):
And I know that might be a triggering for you
to hear that, you know, because of the whole point
you're trying to make in your book. But I do
think there are some realities of what most women really
do want, you know, they want a man.
Speaker 2 (36:17):
I mean, no, I absolutely agree with you in the
sense that this is what many boys were finding really
confusing about this moment in our culture, was that they
felt that on the one hand, they were being told,
you know, you have to be this cautious and sensitive
and emotionally open and extremely you know, cautious was the
(36:37):
main thing, and the sense of, especially when approaching women,
you cannot be seen as a creep. You can't overstep
by even the tiniest midge. But at the same time,
all the old standards were still very much in circulation,
so they were still also expected to be dominant and
to make the first move, and women were policing their
masculinity in lots of ways as well, so they felt like, well,
(36:58):
we just don't know what to do, which is why
I think they felt like it was just easier to
just watch porn in their bedrooms than actually.
Speaker 3 (37:09):
I think that's exactly right, you know, if we really
think through the experience of a lot of young boys
who grow up who aren't the traditionally masculine ideal ideal
I put that in quotes. Of course, of course, the
societal ideal. What they see is it is the the
uber masking guys who are getting all the women. Yes,
(37:32):
that's what that's what, that's the I'm just talking about
the experience of being a middle school, high school student,
if and and just seeing who gets the girls.
Speaker 2 (37:41):
Yeah, I think a lot of this is not necessarily
about masculinity. It's also about confidence.
Speaker 1 (37:47):
I think that.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
I agree.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
I think that you can be confident in lots of
different ways, and it's very attractive to people. And that's
also true the other way around as well. It's also
true for women, you know, for girls, and what is
appealing to men, you know, in females, I think they
like people who are confident, and I think that's maybe
a human trait, but I agree that it does have
this gender sort of presentation. And I think this is
(38:10):
why boys felt very confused by the messages that they
were they were getting, and I think they felt very
very shut down and very scared.
Speaker 1 (38:19):
You know.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
I think we didn't they didn't get a very good
education in the nuances of relationships and how to read
social cues and how to you know. And this is
stuff that goes right back to the you know, the
things we were talking about at the beginning, that we
don't give them this very good education. It's not just
about being emotional and vulnerable, but it's about reading another
person's signals. It's about seeing when you're overstepping, it's about
(38:43):
seeing when somebody when you're boring somebody, or like taking
an interest in another person's feelings, and all of those qualities,
you know, we don't teach them well to boys, and
so I think what they're getting are these very blunt
messages about masculinity, which are like strong, tough, be a
tough guy. And I think the reality of what is
attractive is much more complex and comes with maturity and
(39:05):
confidence and those sorts of things. So I don't think
like being emotional and sensitive is in opposition to being
attractive or masculine.
Speaker 1 (39:13):
But it's it's complicated that I love that.
Speaker 3 (39:16):
Actually, I was just featured in a documentary this past
weekend called Sensitive Men Rising.
Speaker 1 (39:21):
I love that.
Speaker 3 (39:22):
I want to send it to you. I want to
send you the link. I'll look forward to saying that
it's right up the alley of your book, I mean
the whole. It's a three hour, three part documentary series
with Alanis mar Said and Scott Berry Kaufman. But I
would love to share that documentary with you.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
I think I would love to see.
Speaker 2 (39:40):
Yeah, And I think they're just the more that we
can open up these conversations and talk about these things.
But I think we tend to kind of equite being
sensitive and emotionally competent with being weak and emasculated in
a pushover. But those things are not that they really
are not aligned.
Speaker 3 (39:56):
Well, that's such a great and important point and a
point that I've been trying to bang that drum as well.
Speaker 2 (40:03):
For sure, this is a complicated and yes, in terms
of this is one of the reasons why I want
parents of girls to read this book as well, and
also not just parents, you know, people in general, because
I think we all need to think about our complicity
in all of these things.
Speaker 1 (40:18):
You know.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
I love that it's something that these systems we all
play a part in creating them, and we all play
you know, to a different extents, but we and we
all have these unconscious biases, and we all have these things,
and I think the more we can talk about it
and just lay it out there and be less rigid
about the way that we talk about it and who's
right and who's wrong, you know, and just sort of
(40:40):
examine it and be curious about it, I think the
more healthy and better that we can all be.
Speaker 3 (40:47):
I agree with that. I agree with that. The only
thing that I think we may disagree on, or that
maybe a major thing we may disagree on if we
really started to get into it, is I think evolution
evolutionary psychology plays a much bigger role here then maybe
you give it credit for. You know, I think there
are evolutionary instincts that we evolve. They are not just
going to disappear by someone reading a book and being like, Okay,
(41:09):
I'm going to change my value system. They can't change
what turns them on at a deep, deep, at a
deep evolutionary level.
Speaker 2 (41:16):
Yes, I mean, I think that desire is really complex,
and desire is really sort of often flies in the
face of.
Speaker 1 (41:24):
Our politics or our values or you know.
Speaker 2 (41:26):
And this is not just to do with gender. I mean,
it's to do with everything, you know. What we find
desirable is very specific and often, you know, you see this,
people have a lot of shame about that because they
often will find things exciting or desirable that are really
very much not in line with their value systems.
Speaker 1 (41:46):
And yeah, I think, but I think the more we
can talk about.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
It and acknowledge that and think about it, and you know,
you know, and I think that it's complicated because nobody
owes anybody desire or sex, right, That's something that's a
very personal decision, you know, that is something that each
person navigates for themselves, and we don't owe it to
(42:09):
anybody else, and there's no moral obligation. And I think
sometimes with these conversations, you know, and especially in the
sort of further reaches of the men's rights movement, it's like, well,
these women don't find me attractive, so therefore we have
to make them find me attractive, or they owe us sex,
or we're entitled to their bodies, or we're entitled to
their desires. And this is repulsive, and it's repulsive the
(42:29):
other way around. You know, nobody owes anyone their sexual
desire or their sexual you know, any sexual act. But
we do, we do have a moral obligation to think
about these things and think about how we treat other people,
and think about how we allow each group to show
(42:50):
up in the world and to be their their full selves.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (42:53):
I really like the spirit of that, but I think
that what a lot what the point, like Jordan Peterson
is med which I agree with, is that there is
a gender difference, for instance, in rough and tumble play
and in young sort of there are differences in sort
of like the way that people play, you know, boys
play with each other, the ways girls play with each other,
(43:16):
And there is kind of like a there seems to
be by a lot of women in our society right now,
is sort of like wanting to to just view all
of that instinct as like toxic, Like I think we
can over use the phrase toxic masculinity.
Speaker 1 (43:31):
I agree.
Speaker 2 (43:32):
And this is something that I really wrestle with in
the early chapters of the book because my own sons,
you know, I had went into parenting with this very
sort of subristic and I think a lot of parents,
not just with gender, but with everything. You think, Oh,
I'm just going to socialize the exact child that I
want and that you know, if I just do everything right,
(43:52):
then i'll know input equals output and I'll just get
the exactal that I want. And I think especially this
was all happening within the context of the conversations about toxic.
Speaker 1 (44:01):
Masculinity and male harm.
Speaker 2 (44:04):
And meanwhile, my own boys were extremely physical. I was
absolutely blindsided. You know, I grew up as one of
two girls that you know, we were very bookish, We
were very quiet, and I know many girls are not
like that, but I think on average, you're absolutely right
that the level of physical activity amongst boys is higher
in than it is in girls. At a group level, obviously,
(44:26):
you know it's variation, et cetera, et cetera. But at
a group level, we know that that's true. And I
was absolutely blindsided by it, and it was very easy
to see it through this lens of toxic masculinity. You know,
you're like, my kids want to play with nerve guns
or like wrestle each other. Is this like straight line
to you know, school shootings and pussy grabbing and all
(44:46):
of this, you know, toxic stuff, and I think it's
hard to unpack. And also, you know, you're exhausted and
you're parenting these very physical, very wild kids, and so yeah,
it was something that I had this constant back and
forth about, you know, not to pathology their behaviors. And
I think also I hit a lot of it the
other way around as well, which is just like, you know,
(45:06):
I get a lot of sort of slightly patronizing parenting advice,
especially for men, which will be like, well, boys just
need they need more wrestling, They just need you to
wrestle them. They need more physical play, they need more this.
And it's not that that's not true, but it sort
of often comes with this, well, you couldn't possibly understand
boyhood is this kind of momentous thing that women couldn't
(45:28):
possibly know about, and so only men can really handle it.
And also this sort of this this doubling down on
the physicality. It's just like, this is what they're like,
so what they really need is more of that. Whereas
with girls, we tend to have a slightly different conversation.
No one's saying, well, this is what they're naturally like.
You know, girls naturally like princesses, and so therefore what
we need is to just give them more and more
(45:48):
and more princesses. You know, we're saying, Okay, maybe this
is true, Maybe this is what they like, but also
let's expand them to other things too.
Speaker 1 (45:57):
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3 (45:58):
The reason why I I bring this up is because
the whole section of your book on why are boys
moving to the right and why is feminism failing to
connect with them? You asked that question through the lens
of a feminist who's not on the right. But just
to take perspective taking here, like, there are people who
are not feminists on the right who would say good
(46:20):
because what we're doing is we're shaming men for being men.
That's their perspective.
Speaker 1 (46:25):
Yeah, and I think that, you.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
Know, I have some sympathy with that perspective, and I
really really don't want this to be misstated because.
Speaker 1 (46:32):
I'm not.
Speaker 2 (46:34):
I believe that what is harming men primarily is not feminism.
It is the system that feminism is fighting against, you know,
I think that that is where the problems are. But
I think somehow the feminists have kind of brought into
that same framing. You know, smashing the patriarchy will benefit
all of us, I believe, you know, it will allow
(46:55):
us all to embrace more expensive, fulfilling lives men and
and people of all genders. But I think what we've
the feminist have ended up doing is sort of almost
selling it to boys and men as this kind of punishment.
It's like, well, you're terrible and you suck and shut up,
and therefore we, you know, we're going to smash the
patriarchy to punish you. That's a real caricature of the position.
(47:18):
But I think that it's I think as feminists we
have not done a great job of articulating empathy or
understanding for men and boys, and so I can see
why they're just like, well, this, this is our enemy,
you know, this feminism is the enemy, rather than you know,
feminism is on our side.
Speaker 1 (47:37):
It makes complete sense, you know.
Speaker 2 (47:39):
And when I was interviewing one of the insults, you know,
we were actually shows him this essay which was written
by the philosopher Emirshri in a essen. She's written this
great essay called the Right to Sex, which is extremely
complex and about sex.
Speaker 1 (47:52):
And desire and all of these things.
Speaker 2 (47:54):
And she was saying, you know, in that essay feminism,
you know, Elliot Roger, who is like a famous in
cel shooter, you know, and a sort of insel hero.
She was saying that, you know, feminism could have helped him.
Speaker 1 (48:08):
You know, this is the.
Speaker 2 (48:10):
You know, it's fighting against the system that's oppressing him
and making him feel undesirable and whatever.
Speaker 1 (48:18):
And the insult.
Speaker 2 (48:18):
I showed it to him and he just found it
so odd. He was like, how could this have helped him?
And I sympathized with that. I was like, well, yeah,
I can see why this doesn't seem like a framework
for you to understand your own life and your own problems.
We haven't done a good job of articulating that.
Speaker 3 (48:33):
My gosh, Ruth, I could speak to you the rest
of today and tomorrow about this. I do want to
be respectful of your time. I have five more pages
of notes, which I promise I'm not going to get
through right now. But this is just a testament to
how much you know. Like I'm a nerd at the
end of the day, and you stimulated so many questions
I had in alternative perspectives. I always try to think
(48:55):
of other perspectives, you know, and how far put them
on the table. But all that side, I think that
we can all agree, the left and the right in
a fundamental point of your book that I want to
end with, when you talk about what can we do
as a society. You make a fundamental point that we
need to aim higher for men, and I think that's
a point that we can all I hope we can
(49:18):
all rally around. Regardless if you're a Tait fan or
or you're an uber extreme left feminist with green hair,
you can still agree on the same thing, which is
that the more that we empower men to be better humans,
the more we empower girls as well, the more society
(49:42):
will be better.
Speaker 1 (49:43):
I absolutely agree with that, yes, and.
Speaker 3 (49:46):
I think it's such an important point, and I'm glad
that you are making that point and that you're bringing
this important discussion to the table. So I wish you
all the best with your book. And I really am
thankful and grateful that you came my podcast and that
you let me play Devil's advocate a little bit, because
I feel like it's a boring conversation if you don't
play Devil's advocate, and.
Speaker 1 (50:04):
I really appreciate.
Speaker 2 (50:05):
I think these are really important issues and we should
be talking about them in the most open and you know,
we should look at all sides of this, So I
really appreciate that conversation.
Speaker 1 (50:14):
Thank you, Thank you, Ruth all the best you too,
great talking with you
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