April 8, 2025 • 62 mins
In this episode of Cults and the Culting of America, hosts Scot Loyd and Daniella Mesteneck Young engage in a profound conversation with Jack about the complexities of masculinity, the cultural constructs surrounding gender identity, and the emotional struggles faced by men in contemporary society. Jack shares his personal journey from a troubled upbringing to his work in men's circles, emphasizing the need for vulnerability, community, and a redefinition of masculinity that moves away from harmful stereotypes. The discussion explores the impact of societal expectations, the illusion of male superiority, and the importance of emotional expression and connection among men.
Jack's Links:
Website: https://healthecycle.com/
TikTok: @watchfulcayote
Youtube (His podcast is here) : @WatchfulCayote
Daniella's Links:
You can read all about my story in my book, Uncultured-- buy signed copies here. https://bit.ly/SignedUncultured
For more info on me:
Patreon: https://bit.ly/YTPLanding
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:25):
Welcome to another edition of Cults and the Culting of America podcast.
My name is Scott Lloyd along with my friend, the knitting cult lady herself, DanielaMesteneck Young.
Daniela, has it been a day?
It's been a day.
It has been a day.
I had some Bernie Bros fun today.
(00:48):
And we're gonna talk to a very exciting guest.
So yeah, yeah.
Jack, it's a pleasure to have you.
Why don't you take a few moments and introduce yourself to our audience?
You've been here once before, and I think for whatever reason, I was not in theconversation, but I'm glad to be here with you tonight.
(01:14):
tell us a little bit about yourself, Jack.
Welcome.
Yeah, it's good to meet you, Scott.
And thank you all very much for having me back on.
introductions.
I grew up in the woods of Maine.
Both my parents were pastors, so I grew up deep in the Christian church, grew up dirtpoor, redneck culture, hunting, fishing and got into my household, had a lot of trauma,
(01:39):
lot of violence.
My whole community had a lot of addiction and violence grown up and.
Like a lot of folks from those circumstances, I found my way into drugs and alcohol veryearly on in my life, early teens.
Spent a decade in the bottom of a bottle addicted to opiates, causing a lot of harm tomyself and others.
(02:01):
in my 20s, I went to college for biology and education.
So I'm a biology teacher, which is I was on last time talking about education, which wasdelightful.
And it came to my awareness.
community, I was called out and went through a process of a bunch of different pieces forthe fact that I had a pattern of harming women in my life in my early twenties and through
college.
(02:22):
And that was very hard and sobering and led me to men's work.
And so since then, now almost 40, and I've been doing men's work and men's circles and allsorts of different pieces around that for a long time and found a lot of beauty and joy in
it.
and it's a very complicated world.
(02:43):
There's a lot of different men's influencers out there, most of whom I would notrecommend.
And on both sides of the political aisle, for different reasons.
You Jack, you mentioned growing up in Maine and I was struck at how similar, I grew up inArkansas, but a lot of what you described in rural Arkansas certainly applied as well.
(03:08):
There was a lot of ideas about what it meant to be a man, what it meant to be a woman.
And the things that you described that, you know, when it comes to the conventionalwisdom, a lot of times people think, well, this is going to produce
strong men, but what you experienced, what I experienced is a lot of times it ends upproducing the exact opposite.
(03:36):
Yeah, there's a way in which masculinity today can be defined as a catastrophic fragilitythat dresses as strength.
But before we get too deep into that part of the conversation, I think it might bebeneficial here to define our terms, because I run into a lot of misconceptions about
(03:58):
terminology.
So if you don't mind me just taking a second on that.
Please.
Part of this, you'll see my biology teacher hat come on for a second as well.
Being male is a sex, and being a man or masculine is a gender, and these are not at allthe same thing.
(04:22):
Both sex and gender are aggregate data sets with concentrations that plot bimodally, whichmeans there's two large chunks of data.
but there's absolutely tales on both of those and people who exist all across thesespectrums.
So when we talk about sex, we're talking about being male.
The aggregate data that's often in that is chromosomes, gametes, genitalia, physique, andhormone balance.
(04:48):
And when we take these things together, most people who, for example, have XY chromosomesalso have external genitalia.
And we think of this as a classic expression of being male as a sex.
But not all.
There are absolutely people who have external genitalia and XX chromosomes.
So people think that one or the other of these is going to be binary.
(05:11):
A lot of people think that sex is a binary and it's not.
It's absolutely a spectrum of variables that we measure together and plot in this bimodalgraph.
Does that make sense?
Is that am I explaining that clearly?
Gender is the same thing.
It's a concentration of traits that we choose to measure together.
(05:33):
Things like hair length, character traits, clothing styles, hormone ratios and behaviors.
Individually, gender is just what a person is like, but socially it's a method ofcategorization.
So these things have a relationship.
There's a relationship between sex and gender.
You'll notice that hormone ratios show up on both, and there's a reason for that.
Testosterone, for example, high testosterone levels do impact behavior.
(05:56):
So there is some relationship between sex and gender, but they are absolutely not the samething.
And the relationship between them within the cult of masculinity is often seen asabsolute.
People think that to be a to be male is to be a man.
And a little bit of interrogation of the data immediately shows that to be not the case.
(06:19):
And interestingly enough, the people who think that often will betray their own beliefthat it's not the case with phrases like that guy's effeminate, that guy's a sissy.
Those embedded in those phrases is the awareness that gender is different than sex, eventhough they wouldn't phrase it that way.
So I just wanted to get some of that terminology out there.
(06:40):
In this particular instance, we're talking about the we're analyzing the gender ofmasculinity as a cult, potentially with the interrogative question, is masculinity a cult?
Which I think will become clear by the end of this interview.
But in this case, we're talking about every specific.
of masculinity, which is the dominant culture, Western mainstream masculinity, which isthe one that is forced down all of our throats by all the media we consume all of our
(07:05):
lives.
But it is very important at the beginning of this conversation to note that there arepluralities of masculinity all over the world.
And we are not talking about masculinity as a whole around the world.
We're talking about this one expression of masculinity.
There are indigenous masculinities alive and well on this land that are very different.
than the kind of masculinity that we're analyzing as a cult today.
(07:26):
And so with those differentiations clearly in mind, I'd love to get deeper into some ofthose nuances you were getting us into.
Yeah, and it's interesting to me that, you know, so much of what we define, especially inthe United States and Western cultures, as masculine and feminine have nothing to do with
(07:48):
what is between our legs or even what is between our ears.
But it has a lot to do with what we have been taught to believe what we receive, right,even before we're born.
There are forces that are shaping our identity and it has nothing to do with our identityas we see ourselves or as we feel in our own bodies, but it has everything to do with the
(08:19):
world that is being imposed upon us.
Does that track with you?
Yes, yes, I do shy away from absolutes a little bit.
when we say nothing or everything, the little scientist part of my line says, well, theremight be some influences or connections here and there, but as a whole, the amount of
(08:43):
The amount of belief that is pushed onto us from, as you say, before we are born aboutwhat gender is, what it means to be a man, is overwhelming, and often at this point, one
of the largest determining factors in someone's behavior and how someone shows up in theworld, and not in a good way.
(09:05):
So, you know, it just, makes me think of, I was having a conversation with someone who wasvery sure that gender was something that children were born with because she knew that her
son at a very early age was reaching for trucks and preferring these masculine things,right?
(09:25):
And I just looked at her and I said, and you don't think you as the parent had anyinfluence on your son in the first year of his life?
You know?
It's a common conversation with parents, and it's a fascinating one because, as I said,there is a correlation.
(09:46):
When we plot these things, if we were to plot sex and gender next to each other, we wouldsee that most people in the society are cis, meaning that their sex is the same as their
gender.
And I would agree with that parent that gender is something that children are born with.
I just don't think that means what she thinks it means.
And I would agree that most children who are male are odds statistically more likely to bemen by a long shot.
(10:16):
Those pieces about what they reach for that is likely culturally influenced play styles,though these things track globally and we see very different types of play and behavior
between very young boys and girls that correlate with what we see in the animal kingdom.
Interestingly, so it does look like this correlation between sex and gender does lead tosome different expressions of play and expressions of personality.
(10:45):
And this it relates to what I was talking about about hormone balance, because, forexample, a lot of folks who transition from being female to male start taking
testosterone.
And when they start taking testosterone, many describe having a lot more difficultygetting in touch with their emotions.
This is something that was so validating to me to hear the first time a trans man sharedthis with me because I was like, what?
(11:11):
It's not just my trauma and my internalized programming that makes it hard for me to feelmy emotions.
It actually has to do with my hormone balances that I was born with in my brain.
And that can be a very validating thing.
And for me, that can help lead me out of the inherited forms of gender that are prescribedand pushed onto us from birth rather than feeling more locked into them.
(11:34):
if that makes sense.
My background is in communication studies and there is a communications theorist, her nameis Deborah Tannen and she's done a lot of research into communication styles and she used
toddlers.
And what her research rendered was that even early on there was a difference in the waythat men, boys and women, girls communicated with one another.
(12:06):
I'm going off memory here, but if memory serves, something that she discovered was thatwhen boys were placed into a room, they would often choose, instead of sitting face to
face, they would sit side by side.
And a lot of times their games and their communication style involved establishing ahierarchy and came across as being competitive.
(12:32):
Whereas girls would often try to
face one another when communicating with each other and would play games that fosteredcooperation and alliances.
Is there any truth to that or is that something that perhaps is also something that weobserve because the power of culture is so
(13:05):
unaltered when it comes to even the way that we speak to one another.
It's such a, it's a brilliant question.
And the answer is right now, we really can't know the power of observation, mentorship andobservation is the single largest influence in children's lives by orders of magnitude.
(13:28):
Children don't do what you tell them to do.
They do what they see others doing.
And that is true from far earlier than many people today think.
So in our culture,
we are much more likely to see women engaging in clear, emotional, fluent conversation,directly approaching conversations in these ways.
(13:49):
I know this gets a little squirrely because we tend to think of men as being direct inthis way, but in this instance, the behaviors that you're describing would be mirrored
almost perfectly by adults of those same genders.
And children emulate those adults.
So especially when we talk about hierarchy and dominance.
in a culture as addicted to dominance and hierarchy as ours is, especially one that ispatriarchal, it would be absurd to think that that wasn't having an effect on how boys
(14:21):
play.
I don't know if that really answers your question or just leads to more.
Yeah, no, I tend to agree with you.
think that that's so much of what we emulate, even as children, happens because of what weobserve, even if at the earliest stages, right?
(14:42):
So you think of a toddler being two to three to four years of age, they've had enough timein this world, especially observing their fathers, the men in their lives and their
mothers, the women in their lives interacting
with one another and the power of this culture, I take it back to the idea that I openedwith that so much of who we are, especially when it comes to gender, is influenced way
(15:14):
before we show up on this planet.
My mother talked to me about how she remembers when they started having the ability todetermine a baby's gender before they were born.
And what a huge shift that was in prenatal care.
All of a sudden, people were painting baby rooms in gendered colors.
(15:37):
And she was like, before then, that just wasn't the case.
Baby's rooms were painted kind of a cute yellow or some sort of, there was no emphasis ongender.
But as soon as people could determine a baby's gender before it was born, was the wholeculture got hyper fixated on that.
The gendered baby toys took this huge spike.
So since then, and over the last handful of decades in general, we've seen this rapidescalation of what would we call it?
(16:02):
Genderification, where we push gender harder and harder onto people.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
I grew up, and thus the name of this podcast, I grew up in a cult, a religious cult.
And even within that cult where there were very strong lines of demarcation about what wewere taught, it meant to be a male and what it meant to be a female, even within that
(16:34):
group, there were still people that
deviated that we didn't have a category for.
I remember in our small rural Pentecostal church that I grew up in, that there were acouple of women who were single and they chose to live with one another.
(16:54):
And one of them, based upon what we were taught, right, as far as constructs, as what itmeant to be gender, one appeared
to be very masculine, and the other appeared to be very feminine.
But they had a cooperative relationship where they pooled their resources.
(17:18):
They even adopted children.
But there was nothing, right, because of the preaching and of the labeling of homosexuallifestyles as being sinful.
There was nothing that hinted at that.
It was just a deviation.
And we saw it even displayed in men and women that were married.
(17:42):
And it's amazing to me that we had all of these examples, but yet the diatribe that weendured from the pulpit and from the preaching of the Bible, which by the way, what I've
come to learn isn't as hard and fast as we would like to believe it.
to be when it comes to these ideas of masculinity and femininity.
(18:07):
We were taught that living in this way is OK, but if you're going to be a Christian, thenthis is what it means to be a man.
This is what it means to be a woman.
And it was hard and fast with little deviation, although we saw all of these examplesaround us.
And you know, from a cult perspective, what this reminds me of is a couple thing.
(18:30):
Number one, the promise of the cult is always a lie, right?
You're going to have these perfect categories and everything's going be easy tounderstand.
But number two, like if it's not a cult, you don't have to keep telling people it's acult, right?
Like if it was so obvious what it means to be a man, you wouldn't have to keep tellingyourselves what it means to be a man, you know?
And it's just so I have this very interesting.
(18:53):
journey with my husband, who's known professionally as Mr.
Knitting Cult Lady.
Okay.
And, you know, when I was defining myself and who I was gonna be, and he was this strong,special operations helicopter pilot, right?
So he was fine.
And then when he was transitioning from the military and I was getting book deals anddoing things, and he was shaky, right?
(19:18):
I think, like, he felt his masculinity was shaky and even trying to figure out hisfashion.
And one day I really looked at him and I said to him, babe, you're retired specialoperations military helicopter pilot.
Nobody's gonna question your masculinity.
And this was over wearing a flowered shirt, by the way, which he rocks with his beard andhis, know, lace button downs with vests.
(19:44):
And he's like, great now, right?
And very secure in his masculinity and hence his feminism and his journey has beeninspiring, but like.
It was interesting for me to be like, there is this fear, right?
That you will be demasculinized by something.
the exit costs are catastrophic, horrifying.
(20:06):
But back to Scott's point, a bimodal distribution is just two bell curves next to eachother.
You're looking at two lumps of data.
And one of the interesting things that people tend to forget about both bell curves andbimodal distributions is that people are like, well, most of the data is in the middle of
(20:28):
this lump of data, which is true.
The percentage of people who truly fall at the peak of a bell curve is infinitesimallysmall.
And what that means, the same thing is true of a bimodal distribution with two large dataclusters, the percentage of people at the true dead center of each of those bimodal data
(20:51):
clusters is next to nothing.
And what that means is that virtually everyone has some deviation.
from the culturally enforced paradigm of what it means to be their gender.
There's basically no one who represents the platonic ideal, which relates.
I took notes because I love your list of characteristics of a cult and I find themfascinating.
(21:18):
So I took notes and ran down and your first characteristic of a cult is this charismaticleader.
And I was thinking about this and I was like, well,
Certainly, just as there are Christian religious leaders that frame themselves as beingcloser to God than the people below them, the men who are leaders in the cult of
(21:41):
masculinity frame themselves as being closer to this platonic ideal of masculinity.
So you get somebody like Andrew Tate, whose entire framing is that he's a man's man, he'stough and strong and dominant and all these different things.
He's supposed to be closer to the ideal of masculine than you are.
And therefore you should pay him $40 a month to be part of his weird little club.
(22:06):
But the whole concept there relates to this concept of a male archetype.
And this is where the cult of masculinity becomes emphatically spiritual, even though mostpeople in it wouldn't define it on those terms.
But most men who are solidly in this cult of masculinity and haven't analyzed it have thisidea, often unanalyzed and subconscious somewhere in the back of their head, that there is
(22:32):
a right way to be a man.
and that you are somewhere on a spectrum of proximity to that right way to be a man.
And the further you get from that, the less masculine you are.
You'll see guys be like, you're not a man if you can't defend your house, stuff like that.
Very common rhetoric without ever considering that they are excluding Stephen Hawking,every old man.
(22:55):
Like, there's just no critical analysis in that whatsoever, there's just this reinforcedspiritual belief of a platonic ideal and then a measurement of all men as a linear
gradient of proximity to that ideal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, it seems to me that I've noticed in recent years, and I always go back tothis example.
(23:20):
Last year, I was teaching a class on the college level on diversity and, you know, helpingstudents understand the diverse world in which we live and the dynamics around diversity
specifically, as it has to do with communication.
And I remember it was either the first day or the second class period.
I asked the people in that room who were predominantly, it was predominantly white males,white young males, and with a few young women in the class, I asked them a question about
(23:53):
who they believed was the most persecuted group, the most marginalized group in the UnitedStates today.
And without fail, every one of those young men lifted their hand and said, we are.
And of course, I laughed because I had, I have the same reaction to that as to when peopletell me that, you know, Christianity in the United States is being persecuted.
(24:22):
I'm like, how, right?
You are the most privileged people on the planet.
The entire system was built for you.
I'm a white male, so I'll put my, it was built for us.
by people who look like us.
(24:42):
So how have we arrived at this moment where you have people like the Vice President ofUnited States, JD Vance, the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, promoting this idea that
men, this warrior class, is somehow under duress?
(25:04):
Where did that come from?
It relates to a couple of other points here.
Our current system of socioeconomic governance catastrophically fails to meet the needs ofentire population.
(25:33):
And the wealth gap right now is larger than it was right before they started removingmonarchs' heads from their bodies in France.
People's fundamental needs are not being met.
Financial needs, emotional needs, community needs.
(25:53):
Pick a need and the current system doesn't meet it.
So somehow they have to come up with a narrative that explains why the most privilegedclass of people in a society's needs are being catastrophically failed.
And this is where we enter
(26:15):
worldview shift that brings you under the sacred assumption number two, which I believe isthe shift into the belief that men are naturally dominant and superior.
And within that narrative, there's the belief that men are currently being oppressed bybeing prevented from expressing our natural dominance and superiority over women, over
(26:41):
everything, over pick a thing.
If the, if the
sacred assumption is of dominance and superiority.
Everything else should be subject to that.
And it's objectively not.
Men do not have unchecked dominance and superiority over the rest of the world.
And they think they want that.
(27:03):
That's the narrative that they've been brought into.
So when, when these young men, it's funny, we were just, last time I was on was rightafter this happened.
But when,
when young men at schools were screaming, your body my choice.
That is them experiencing a sense of being liberated from the oppression of big feminismto express their natural dominance and superiority as taught by Andrew Tate.
(27:30):
Yeah, and you know, this is is lining up like kismet because I'm gonna bring Bernie Brosin now.
Okay, because now I'm sorry, but I think it's relevant to talk about angry white maleAmerica and to say upfront here, I was married to a man named William Jeffrey Poole, who
(27:51):
was kicked out of the army for being a fully radicalized white supremacist calling fornuclear war against America.
And I've written a whole book about this, re-examining everything.
It's called Un-American.
You can watch it as a video book on my Patreon, folks.
Watch me read it to you or wait for it to come out in a few years.
But like, I've looked at this really hard, right?
(28:14):
And he explains the process of his own radicalization being that he was choosing betweenTrump and Bernie.
He was an angry
mediocre white man, The kind of man that would walk up to his wife after she justgraduated valedictorian after escaping a cult and say, think the other guy's speech was
(28:38):
funnier.
And he was so angry.
He was so angry.
And he thought, right, he recognized the tactics.
The tactics being both of these candidates, Trump and Bernie,
We're appealing, intentionally or not, we can say, to angry, white, male America, saying,you're angry, it's valid, it's another group's fault, and I'm the only one who can fix it.
(29:13):
And he said, this is gonna work.
Which one am I gonna choose?
What pushed him to Trump, by the way, was when the Reddit subthread, fat people hate, gotbanned.
And then he said, my free speech.
Okay, so every time I say this on the internet, I get canceled, right?
Like today my TikTok got demonetized for saying I didn't call Bernie an extremist.
(29:37):
The extremist described his own process of radicalization.
And I'm gonna be dealing with this for weeks, right?
And I can, I as the expert can separate my own.
personal feelings about this man and what I know I nearly escaped and what I have to livewith in order to understand that the extremist account of his own extremism is an
(30:08):
important thing to know but people that are supporting Bernie blindly like cannot separatetheir feelings about Bernie from you know, just just even to hear me say that like
Cult and extremism experts agree on this.
It doesn't matter what you believe, right?
They're like, what are you saying is extreme about Bernie?
(30:31):
Nothing.
I honestly was so busy supporting Senator Elizabeth Warren that I don't really know thatmuch about his platform, right?
Like I also kind of saw Bernie bros and I was like, it's giving cult, you know?
And then I didn't spend that much time around it until my ex-husband described his ownprocess of radicalization and that being part of it.
(30:52):
And then you go kind of further and listen to black women as we always should, right?
And like they've been calling some alarms and there was other things, but again, it's notabout content.
It's about like, there's so much in kind of like what you're saying right now with white,angry, male America and not to keep the soap box, but it's my podcast.
(31:18):
about definitions, right?
Like when you first said cult to masculinity, I say cult of patriarchy, cult to whitesupremacy.
I'm like, well, I always like to be very clear that a cult is a group, right?
But I think when we say cult groups, we're talking about like, we say children of Godcult.
We don't say cult of children of God.
(31:39):
And when people ask me if like,
Patriarchy is a cult, right?
I'm like, I think the cult of patriarchy, the cult of capitalism, the cult of whitesupremacy are like cult systems that we've built.
And here's masculinity, right?
Cult of masculinity, this like system.
And one of the very scary things about systems is they're stronger than groups, right?
(32:01):
And they influence groups and they replicate systemic biases.
And by the way, I wrote uncultured to...
hit on that point you talked about about being in a world not made for you.
You know, as like a woman the whole time in the military that was built for guys like youand not gals like me.
(32:24):
It matters.
And to that point, Jack, you said something very interesting a moment ago.
You talked about the discrepancy between needs being met, Felt needs being met by a systemand the disconnect between people who feel like that their basic needs aren't being met.
(32:46):
And so if anger is the distance between expectations and discipline,
there are a lot of white men in our society today who are being disappointed by a systemthat set up a false standard to begin with.
(33:12):
the system, right?
The cult of patriarchy, the cult of white supremacy makes the promise, which is a lie,that if you are white and you are
male, then you should be privileged, you should have status that is unquestioned and powerthat is assumed and privilege that goes unchallenged in our society.
(33:42):
But as things become more equal, as progress continues to be made, these white malesperceive this pursuit of equality
to be punishment, right?
Because they're no longer enjoying the privilege or the power or the status that they oncehad, thus producing this anger.
(34:04):
And I think one of the things that we can point to as evidence of this, right, is theattraction of Donald Trump to his constituency of white males.
I think about people in my own family.
My oldest brother who sees in Donald Trump, right?
(34:27):
Everything that he aspires to be.
So my theory on Trump's popularity with white males is that what they see in him iseverything that they want or everything that they were promised by the media, by society
growing up.
They see a quote unquote successful person who is rich.
(34:51):
who has a beautiful wife, who has access to beautiful women, and that is what they aspireto be.
And when they look around them and they see the world changing, they perceive that to beas oppression and as punishment because they're being disappointed by a system that wasn't
(35:14):
prepared to follow through on its promises to begin with.
Certainly.
Certainly.
Where I live in rural Maine in 2016, there were a lot of houses around that had a Trumpsign next to a Bernie sign.
(35:38):
so I know that you will get blowback for what you just said, Daniela, and there's obvioustruth in it.
There's undeniable truth in it.
Those two candidates held appeal to the same base.
The fact that one was openly guiding the country towards totalitarian fascism.
and the other was sort of aiming for some sort of mediocre socialist democratic Europeanmodel doesn't change the fact that their appeal was the same for exactly the reasons that
(36:08):
Scott is pointing out that anger and that sense of betrayal.
I also think that it's a good time to point out how everyone on the left, let's say, has acatastrophic failure in branding and marketing.
Mm-hmm.
(36:28):
So Scott, I agree with everything that you just said, and that language would be deeplyoff putting to any of my neighbors.
Part of that is a misconception of what privilege is.
There's just a consistent misconception of what privilege is.
And when my neighbors hear privilege, they laugh because they think that privilege meanssomebody is going to pay their bills or they're going to get a leg up.
(36:50):
Whereas in reality, around here, what privilege means is that when my brother and
who's a black man, walks down the street, he gets insults, racial insults hurled at him,cans thrown at him, trucks swerve at him, sometimes people stop and chase him into the
bushes.
That doesn't happen to me.
That's my white privilege.
That is the difference of privilege.
(37:11):
It is the oppression of my brother that makes my relative safety walking down the street aprivilege.
And when I explain it in those terms, my neighbors can understand it.
But when it's explained in ways that they think they are supposed to have had some leg upand they've lived in destitute poverty and trailer parks in the woods of Appalachia their
entire lives, they're like, what are you talking about?
(37:31):
Get out of here with your privilege nonsense.
And they're right.
They're right.
Because the thing that they're feeling, that emotion, that anger is the failure of thesystem to live up to its promises.
So the things that my neighbors, my, none of my neighbors would acknowledge that they haveprivilege because well, whatever, for media reasons and for a whole set of reasons that I
think we all understand.
But.
If you were to say, do you think that if you work hard, you should be able to have a goodlife?
(37:55):
They would agree with that statement.
And that is the part that they feel betrayed on right now.
They don't feel betrayed in their own language because their privilege hasn't been upheld.
They feel betrayed because working hard doesn't buy them a good life anymore.
They can't pay their bills.
They can't do the things that you should be able to expect to do in a civil and a healthysociety.
And they're right.
And we should all be furious.
(38:18):
The misdirection of anger is a huge part of this, which to bounce through two points, likewhat we're talking about here is, you you've got this transcendent mission, number three
on your list.
The transcendent mission for the cult of patriarchy, which is a much better term, thankyou, is that good old days when women just submitted to men's natural superiority.
(38:40):
People picture the 1940s, nevermind the fact that those women were...
all blown out of their mind on pharmaceuticals in order to stay out of psychiatrichospitals and like often like just whatever that period of time is not what the cult of
patriarchy thinks it was by any stretch of the imagination.
They were trying to survive and get by and if you talk to those grandmothers from thatperiod of time they're not talking about it as though it was some ideal utopic time for
(39:05):
women.
But the cult of patriarchy doesn't care about that.
Please.
here's just one thing I wanted to add in when you were talking about all the promises ofthe cult of patriarchy is there's also the promise of labor, right?
Free labor.
And this is what men on both sides are losing, right?
And this is part of what I feel is the blowback right now, right?
(39:25):
That while like all of the millennials grandmas were in the kitchen telling them how muchworse it was back then.
All the white grandpas were in the drawing room telling the grandsons how much better itwas back then.
So, you know, it's like competing messages.
Now they're feeling betrayed.
I think it's so funny that in a world where goodbye Earl exists, we're still gonna try tolike go back.
(39:52):
okay, I'll hat pins.
Yeah, I'll go 90s country with you all day.
Ha
Lord.
I also, I wanted to say one more thing is that when you talked about like the sacredassumption, this is where I think cracking the sacred assumption, right?
Getting the key, in case we don't say it later, is getting white men to realize they'renot better off.
(40:19):
And we talk about this a lot on my podcast, Hey White Women with White Women, you know,and people ask me like, why do want white supremacy to go down?
Well, like social justice, hate cults, all that, right?
But like, I'm not better off.
I'm not better off under white supremacy.
You look at one list of things black people have invented and then just imagine we didn'thold people back for 400 years, right?
(40:40):
None of us are better off.
So like, I'm better off than a black woman, but I'm not better off than I would be outsideof the cult, all of us.
And so I really just always think it's like, you know the thing if you don't convinceChristians that God is not.
real, convince him he's not good.
It's like you don't convince men.
Like you convince, which I think both of you definitely understand that like you're notbetter off in the cult.
(41:05):
You're better off outside.
It, yeah, and this, you know, Martin Luther King was tolerated sort of when he was justorganizing black people.
But his later writings are really worth getting into because he says some things that arechallenging for everyone.
(41:28):
And one of the things that he gets into in his later writings is the idea that oppressionis like a circle of rope.
and if you pull on any one part of it, the whole thing rotates in a way that turns it awayfrom health and wellness.
So he was and this is when he started organizing the Poor People's Campaign and gettinginto this work that was much more class conscious or class oriented, I'll say the
(41:50):
emphasis.
But his point in some of that was that white supremacy did not benefit white people.
In fact, he said it harmed white people.
And he's right.
In exactly the same way, patriarchy harms harms men, which is
as tidy a segue as we could hope into your point four of the characteristics of a cultwhich is self-sacrifice, which is the one that I feel like
(42:14):
I just wish I could help men understand more.
And can I just say y'all gave up everything good y'all gave up things drinks that tastegood like things that look good things that feel good clothes that are fun I mean
It's so much more than that.
You're absolutely right.
(42:34):
Like men should love learn to try fruity drinks again.
They're delicious.
I was just in Puerto Rico and we were drinking pina coladas and it was delightful.
But let's start with the fact that for 80 % of men in the U.S., people who are born with apenis, their literal first experience outside of the womb is being non-consensually
(42:55):
strapped to a board and having the most sensitive part of their body, their genitals,tortured against their will.
The fact that circumcision is normalized in this country is barbaric in ways that aresimply hard to describe.
is infant genital mutilation on a mass scale.
And one of the things that's most fascinating about how normalized it is is how many menwill defend it and insist that it has no impact whatsoever.
(43:22):
And if you ask them about any other instance of torturing infants, they'll be like, no,torturing infants should be illegal.
But when you apply it to their own lived experience, they'll say, it's not a big deal.
I don't remember it.
Can't have been trauma.
Can't have had any impact on my psyche.
It's wild.
It is mind blowing and it's taboo.
(43:42):
You're not supposed to talk about it.
And then we get to puberty.
There's this fantastic film called The Mask You Live In.
If you haven't seen it, either of you or your audience, should absolutely go.
Fantastic.
And that point about how your average things, is this massive, overwhelming pressurecooker of cultural pressure.
(44:06):
I work with men every day.
It's it's what I do professionally.
And the amount of work that it often takes to get back to these emotions of what they feltwhen they were in a locker room and being shamed, shamed for the color of their towel,
shamed for saying something in a higher pitched voice.
shamed for their body in whatever way.
And these experiences are simply ubiquitous.
(44:28):
All men go through them and they shape the culture of masculinity.
So these are things that the cult of patriarchy costs men.
then the thing, there's so many we could get into here, but the one that I want to mentionhere that I think many men, cause I think a lot of guys are becoming aware of those
points.
But one of the things that is sacrificed on the altar of the cult of masculinity for men,
(44:50):
is our very sense of sacrifice itself.
One thing that I run into many, many men, I would dare to say most, carrying is awillingness and a desire to sacrifice themselves for their family, for their loved ones,
for a better world.
(45:10):
Many men carry this sense that they're willing to lose their health and wellness, losetheir life.
lose anything about themselves to protect their wife, to stabilize their home, to givesomething to their children.
There's this innate sense of sacrifice that may be entirely human, because obviously womencarry this in different ways as well.
see, mom, like all these different pieces.
(45:31):
But the piece I'm talking about is this male, this appropriation of men's sense ofsacrifice, which is currently fed back into 60 hour work weeks and taking pride in the
grind, separating ourselves from our families, from the very things that
our children actually need of present and loving and emotionally fluent fathers andparents in the home, supportive spouses, role modeling of healthy relational dynamics.
(45:56):
All of that gets thrown out and sacrificed for the sake of trying to get ahead in thisimpossible losing game of degrading end stage capitalism under emergent fascism.
And then men end up feeling this simultaneous pride and bitterness.
And this combination is one that I see in my community a lot.
(46:18):
Guys take pride in the fact that they do all this work and give themselves up over andover and over again to go to a job they hate, to do things they don't want to do, to give
up time with their friends, to give up everything in their life, and then bitternessbecause it's not actually buying them what they were promised.
So this self-sacrifice of the members of the cult of patriarchy is just ongoing, lifelong,and absolutely debilitating in ways that are very hard to overstate.
(46:46):
That's a powerful point.
And it really gets to the heart of the matter, right?
That everything that we are taught, I say everything, most of what we are taught by theculture is counterintuitive, counterproductive to the goals and to the standards that all
(47:07):
of us would universally embrace, which is a loving, supporting family.
and human flourishing of all of the members of that family and all of the members of oursociety.
But what we are taught arrives at the exact opposite location of what it promises toproduce.
(47:30):
Right?
And there from comes this vast sense of betrayal for men.
Betrayal, outrage, and anger.
And this is, you know, I was just reading my final chapter on exit costs, not finalchapter, but my final pass through the 40 page chapter on entrance and exit costs.
(47:51):
And I talked a little bit about recovery and part of it was like, you need to feel theanger.
You know, you were betrayed.
Like you were abused, you know, and I really deconstructed the army as kind of like a verytoxic system, especially to me as a woman.
You know, I do feel very angry because I did believe in it and I did waste those years andI did, you know, participate in a system that harmed other people and all of these
(48:19):
different things.
Yeah.
Hard things to process, especially when you've been stripped from all ability to processemotions or even face your own emotions your entire life, especially when all the role
modeling that you had for the gender that you embody was a complete severance fromemotional presence.
So we're either fighting through this lifelong programming of being severed from ouremotional connectivity, our emotional body to get through to the things that we actually
(48:46):
feel.
Or we're acting in a reactive way.
where we're trying to embody the opposite of what we don't want to be, which is still aresponse to that thing and still not actually a healthy or whole expression of self.
For years, I could only recognize emotions in myself in retrospect.
(49:08):
After experiences, I would be like, I was angry then.
that was grief.
I felt disappointed in that moment.
But in that moment, I just felt like tense and like uncomfortable.
And I'm sure that expressed, but none of this is subtle.
But yeah.
tie this right into the damage of cults, I think the self-sacrifice that we all pay incults is having to tamp down your individuality.
(49:36):
And that is right there is what leads to the suicides.
And obviously in the cult of patriarchy, cult of masculinity, suicides are more of aproblem for men than for women.
And I...
Obviously we're not gonna get through the whole list.
We're gonna have to have you back on for like the second five.
(49:56):
But like, can we end by talking about step five, isolation?
And like the isolation in the cult of masculinity, I think brings us to so much of theproblem of right now and what we're seeing.
Yeah, it takes a deep, conscientious effort for men to not be isolated today.
(50:20):
And most men don't see the value in it because we're taught not to.
All of these things come full circle here, where when all of the men we experience growingup are isolated, friendships that we witness often among adult men as children are
superficial at best and often kind of antagonistic or harmful.
(50:41):
And then you're like, well, why would you want that?
What would that do for you really?
so, but, we have these deep human needs because we're actually human beings with soft,fuzzy little emotional underbellies and deep human emotional needs that are consistently
chronically not being met.
And so we ended up dumping that all onto our individual romantic partners who are usuallywomen.
(51:05):
and then feeling disappointed and frustrated and bitter in them because we still don'tfeel like our emotional needs are being met and we blame our spouses for that failure to
meet emotion for that failure in that without ever really getting to the point ofrecognizing that what we want is a type of community that we've never seen and certainly
never had.
Most of us have no models of what a healthy male community looks like.
(51:27):
And the times when I find myself in those spaces, there's a number of men's gatheringsthat I go to.
and one of them is entirely indigenous, organized and led.
And when I find myself in that space with a group of elder adult men around who like notjust having one adult man who I actually want to emulate, who I actually think is someone
who's healthy, healthy in relationship, healthy in their mind, healthy in how they show upin the world, but having a whole set of these men in the same space, having five or 10
(51:56):
indigenous elders of different flavors of different like
mindsets of different diversity of ways of being who are all just there and healthy.
It breaks something open in me where I'm just like, my God, I don't have to just bethrashing around looking for any possible slightly healthier model of masculinity.
(52:16):
I can actually be in a space where there are multiple types of healthy adult men, old,much older than me, who I can turn to for different situations and different things that I
need in my life.
And
Most men never ever experienced that.
Most men struggle to even imagine it.
Most of us go our entire lives with all of the men around and above us being harmful insome way or another, being someone who we actively don't want to learn from.
(52:43):
They're all object lessons.
Well, that dude's funny, but he's super addicted to whatever he's addicted to.
well, that dude's fairly nice to his kids.
But like, I know what he's doing on the side with his wife, and that's actually not thatgreat.
And like guys are just
Super wounded.
Super wounded.
And so...
(53:04):
And I think that the desire to keep that private also limits us from community.
Which is why I think there's such an emerging need for men's groups.
For spaces where men can actually share our wounds with each other.
And be like, I've caused harm in these ways.
I feel awful in these ways.
These are the darkest little corners of my soul that I'm terrified I'll be completelyunlovable if I ever share with anyone.
Things that like the number of times in men's groups when guys are like, I've never saidthis to anyone before in my entire life.
(53:29):
I've never shared this in any capacity because where would they?
Their model of romantic relationship doesn't include that level of transparency orvulnerability or weakness.
How could they possibly share that with a spouse with the models of relationship they'vebeen taught?
Their models of friendship are all about reinforcing that they're on the same team,reinforcing in-group status.
We're on the go sports ball, go sports ball, you know?
(53:50):
making sure I'm doing the right thing, right?
We're all on the same side.
It's all this constant reinforcing of this very fragile sense of being on the same teamrather than any actual connectivity.
So the need for that is vast, potentially may determine the future of the world andsomething that takes a great deal of intention for men to practice.
takes what, depending on what research you like somewhere between 70 and 300 hours toactually feel like your friends with somebody.
(54:17):
Where do men find that in their lives?
If it's just at work, then you're reinforcing hierarchy in the sense that you don't wantto be there.
It's not a good basis for friendship.
I'm not saying you can't make friends at work.
I'm just saying they're stacked against you.
So like, where are you making the space guys in your life to actually feel like you'refriends with somebody?
Jack, everything that you just said is beautiful in so many ways and really resonates withme.
(54:41):
perhaps we can end on this note because I'm going to ask you to give men like me.
Okay, so I grew up in a context where I'm somewhat of an anomaly, right?
So when I talk about these issues, most people that are in my world are like,
(55:01):
they don't have the capacity or the baseline to understand what I'm attempting to say.
Perhaps they might feel it.
It might resonate with them on some level, but they don't have the vocabulary and theycertainly don't have the self-awareness to engage in these conversations.
(55:24):
So when you describe that kind of community and something within me leaps and says,
Yeah.
What do men like me do?
How do we find that community?
What's one thing that we can start doing besides talking about it that we can make theworld a better place?
(55:49):
For lack of a better, yeah, answer that one, Jack.
You just pull out my silver bullet and knock that one
This is when I get these kinds of questions, I just lean forward and say, I'm only 37.
I haven't solved all the problems yet.
The first thing that comes to mind, Scott, is that literally every men's group that I'veever been a part of and men's groups are a whole world.
(56:15):
There's a lot of them that are super wounded and super harmful.
And a lot of them, I don't have a whole lot of respect for the mythopoetic tradition.
There's things that got really right.
Opening up men's emotions, there's things that got really wrong.
Breaking away in like the dichotomy with feminine, whatever.
That's his own conversation.
But my point is that men's groups have been one of the healthiest contexts in my life toget in touch with my own emotions and make actual friendships and build bonds with other
(56:38):
men.
And they have all, all started with conversations, vulnerable conversations with other menthat I knew personally.
So it's funny how I know that I'm actually giving you the answer that you sort ofsidestepped in your question where you were like, what can we do besides talk about it?
And what I'm saying is...
I want you to go talk about it.
want you to whatever the men are who are close in your life, actually start talking aboutthem with what's going on in your life.
(57:05):
This is just this strangely radical idea for men.
We're like, right.
I could actually talk about how insecure I feel in my marriage right now because like whator whatever else is up.
Guys just don't do it.
And so talking about that.
then I found books to be really valuable.
Bell Hooks, Will to Change is phenomenal.
Glenn Mazas, trickster, magician and grieving man.
to be sitting right here, one of my favorite books written by a guy about masculinity.
(57:28):
Absolutely phenomenal.
Can you pull it more into the frame, like in front of your face?
thank you.
magician and grieving man, reconnecting men with Earth.
But pick a book, talk about what you don't like, read it together, decide to read achapter every month and then shoot the shit with about it.
And like even if that's just you and your buddy, both one of my very best friends in thewhole world and I reread Will to Change before each of our weddings and had little one on
(57:56):
one sort of book conversations about it.
Just very casual, low key.
And it was super healthy for us.
So those kinds of things can build organically.
The other thing I'll mention, I know you asked for just one, but I'm going to tack it on,is break out of the box that you're currently culturally in.
Whatever that box is, because outside of the demographic that you're a part of and theworld that you currently live in, there are other kinds of masculinity.
(58:23):
One of my neighbors was recently kidnapped by ICE.
And if I've sounded tense or angry in this conversation, it's because we're navigatingthis intense community situation.
We started a fundraiser, it raised a quarter million dollars.
That brought up its whole own world of problems and all kinds of accusations, all kinds ofnonsense that we're dealing with.
So I'm sorry if my tone sounds a little sharp in this interview.
(58:44):
from that world and going right back to it after this.
But one of the things that's brought up for me is this wonderful family.
And one of the things that stood out to me is that this guy is the one constantly pushingfor deeper emotional dialogue.
In this particular iteration, this one relationship that's not representative of anythingat all other than different than my norm, the woman is like, no, let's not talk about
(59:07):
that.
She's like wanting to kind of close down the conversation regularly.
And it's the man who's like starting to cry a little and being like, we need to talk aboutthis.
And just being present with that broadens my sense of masculinity and breaks me out of thecult of patriarchy a little bit.
So this is yet another way that white supremacy harms men.
(59:29):
is that it keeps us locked in these weird little silos where we don't get to experienceother ways of being masculine.
You spend time around Latin American men, around African men, around even European men.
The level of physical contact and affection that you will experience is just mind blowingto dudes who are stuck in a US paradigm.
(59:49):
So talk to other men in your life and break out of your boxes a little.
And by the way, we're definitely gonna get just a little bit of shiz for publishing thisepisode during Women's History Month.
So I'm just gonna throw in there that Daniela Mestenec's Young's book, Uncultured, wasjust put on a list with Michelle Obama's book amongst others by Goodreads for Women's
(01:00:19):
History Month.
So.
Jack, thank you so much.
Wow.
I am thrilled that I made this episode because I'm sorry that I missed the last one.
Wow.
You have a lot of insight to share and we appreciate it so very much.
We'll be sure to put all of your contact information within the show notes if people wantto reach out to you.
(01:00:44):
And we will have you back because there's more that I want to know and learn from you.
And by the way,
I've got to compliment you on that powerful voice.
Wow.
If you're not broadcasting in some form on a regular basis, you're missing out, my friend.
You have a beautiful, powerful voice.
(01:01:04):
So thank you in more ways than one.
So thank you for sharing that with us today.
You know, Scott, when I first met you at the beginning of this interview, you startedtalking, I was just a little struck and taken aback.
was like, wow, Scott has such a beautiful voice.
I just like listening to this dude talk.
I can see why Daniela put him up as cohost.
So right back at you, Scott.
(01:01:25):
Thank you, my friend.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
he has a good radio voice and also this dialogue between you two makes me feel like Scott,you need to start a men's book club, you know, so we should talk about that.
absolutely.
Jack, we will be in touch, my friend.
It was a pleasure as always, and I look forward to it again.
(01:01:47):
Great to meet you, Scott, and thank you, Daniela.
And thank you all for tuning into this edition of Cults and the Culting of America.
Be sure and hit that subscribe button, share with a friend, subscribe, let us know whatyou think about the podcast.
And as always, we'll see you on the next episode of Cults and the Culting of America.
Welcome to another edition of Cults and the Culting of America podcast.
My name is Scott Lloyd along with my friend, the knitting cult lady herself, DanielaMesteneck Young.
Daniela, has it been a day?
It's been a day.
It has been a day.
I had some Bernie Bros fun today.
(00:48):
And we're gonna talk to a very exciting guest.
So yeah, yeah.
Jack, it's a pleasure to have you.
Why don't you take a few moments and introduce yourself to our audience?
You've been here once before, and I think for whatever reason, I was not in theconversation, but I'm glad to be here with you tonight.
(01:14):
tell us a little bit about yourself, Jack.
Welcome.
Yeah, it's good to meet you, Scott.
And thank you all very much for having me back on.
introductions.
I grew up in the woods of Maine.
Both my parents were pastors, so I grew up deep in the Christian church, grew up dirtpoor, redneck culture, hunting, fishing and got into my household, had a lot of trauma,
(01:39):
lot of violence.
My whole community had a lot of addiction and violence grown up and.
Like a lot of folks from those circumstances, I found my way into drugs and alcohol veryearly on in my life, early teens.
Spent a decade in the bottom of a bottle addicted to opiates, causing a lot of harm tomyself and others.
(02:01):
in my 20s, I went to college for biology and education.
So I'm a biology teacher, which is I was on last time talking about education, which wasdelightful.
And it came to my awareness.
community, I was called out and went through a process of a bunch of different pieces forthe fact that I had a pattern of harming women in my life in my early twenties and through
college.
(02:22):
And that was very hard and sobering and led me to men's work.
And so since then, now almost 40, and I've been doing men's work and men's circles and allsorts of different pieces around that for a long time and found a lot of beauty and joy in
it.
and it's a very complicated world.
(02:43):
There's a lot of different men's influencers out there, most of whom I would notrecommend.
And on both sides of the political aisle, for different reasons.
You Jack, you mentioned growing up in Maine and I was struck at how similar, I grew up inArkansas, but a lot of what you described in rural Arkansas certainly applied as well.
(03:08):
There was a lot of ideas about what it meant to be a man, what it meant to be a woman.
And the things that you described that, you know, when it comes to the conventionalwisdom, a lot of times people think, well, this is going to produce
strong men, but what you experienced, what I experienced is a lot of times it ends upproducing the exact opposite.
(03:36):
Yeah, there's a way in which masculinity today can be defined as a catastrophic fragilitythat dresses as strength.
But before we get too deep into that part of the conversation, I think it might bebeneficial here to define our terms, because I run into a lot of misconceptions about
(03:58):
terminology.
So if you don't mind me just taking a second on that.
Please.
Part of this, you'll see my biology teacher hat come on for a second as well.
Being male is a sex, and being a man or masculine is a gender, and these are not at allthe same thing.
(04:22):
Both sex and gender are aggregate data sets with concentrations that plot bimodally, whichmeans there's two large chunks of data.
but there's absolutely tales on both of those and people who exist all across thesespectrums.
So when we talk about sex, we're talking about being male.
The aggregate data that's often in that is chromosomes, gametes, genitalia, physique, andhormone balance.
(04:48):
And when we take these things together, most people who, for example, have XY chromosomesalso have external genitalia.
And we think of this as a classic expression of being male as a sex.
But not all.
There are absolutely people who have external genitalia and XX chromosomes.
So people think that one or the other of these is going to be binary.
(05:11):
A lot of people think that sex is a binary and it's not.
It's absolutely a spectrum of variables that we measure together and plot in this bimodalgraph.
Does that make sense?
Is that am I explaining that clearly?
Gender is the same thing.
It's a concentration of traits that we choose to measure together.
(05:33):
Things like hair length, character traits, clothing styles, hormone ratios and behaviors.
Individually, gender is just what a person is like, but socially it's a method ofcategorization.
So these things have a relationship.
There's a relationship between sex and gender.
You'll notice that hormone ratios show up on both, and there's a reason for that.
Testosterone, for example, high testosterone levels do impact behavior.
(05:56):
So there is some relationship between sex and gender, but they are absolutely not the samething.
And the relationship between them within the cult of masculinity is often seen asabsolute.
People think that to be a to be male is to be a man.
And a little bit of interrogation of the data immediately shows that to be not the case.
(06:19):
And interestingly enough, the people who think that often will betray their own beliefthat it's not the case with phrases like that guy's effeminate, that guy's a sissy.
Those embedded in those phrases is the awareness that gender is different than sex, eventhough they wouldn't phrase it that way.
So I just wanted to get some of that terminology out there.
(06:40):
In this particular instance, we're talking about the we're analyzing the gender ofmasculinity as a cult, potentially with the interrogative question, is masculinity a cult?
Which I think will become clear by the end of this interview.
But in this case, we're talking about every specific.
of masculinity, which is the dominant culture, Western mainstream masculinity, which isthe one that is forced down all of our throats by all the media we consume all of our
(07:05):
lives.
But it is very important at the beginning of this conversation to note that there arepluralities of masculinity all over the world.
And we are not talking about masculinity as a whole around the world.
We're talking about this one expression of masculinity.
There are indigenous masculinities alive and well on this land that are very different.
than the kind of masculinity that we're analyzing as a cult today.
(07:26):
And so with those differentiations clearly in mind, I'd love to get deeper into some ofthose nuances you were getting us into.
Yeah, and it's interesting to me that, you know, so much of what we define, especially inthe United States and Western cultures, as masculine and feminine have nothing to do with
(07:48):
what is between our legs or even what is between our ears.
But it has a lot to do with what we have been taught to believe what we receive, right,even before we're born.
There are forces that are shaping our identity and it has nothing to do with our identityas we see ourselves or as we feel in our own bodies, but it has everything to do with the
(08:19):
world that is being imposed upon us.
Does that track with you?
Yes, yes, I do shy away from absolutes a little bit.
when we say nothing or everything, the little scientist part of my line says, well, theremight be some influences or connections here and there, but as a whole, the amount of
(08:43):
The amount of belief that is pushed onto us from, as you say, before we are born aboutwhat gender is, what it means to be a man, is overwhelming, and often at this point, one
of the largest determining factors in someone's behavior and how someone shows up in theworld, and not in a good way.
(09:05):
So, you know, it just, makes me think of, I was having a conversation with someone who wasvery sure that gender was something that children were born with because she knew that her
son at a very early age was reaching for trucks and preferring these masculine things,right?
(09:25):
And I just looked at her and I said, and you don't think you as the parent had anyinfluence on your son in the first year of his life?
You know?
It's a common conversation with parents, and it's a fascinating one because, as I said,there is a correlation.
(09:46):
When we plot these things, if we were to plot sex and gender next to each other, we wouldsee that most people in the society are cis, meaning that their sex is the same as their
gender.
And I would agree with that parent that gender is something that children are born with.
I just don't think that means what she thinks it means.
And I would agree that most children who are male are odds statistically more likely to bemen by a long shot.
(10:16):
Those pieces about what they reach for that is likely culturally influenced play styles,though these things track globally and we see very different types of play and behavior
between very young boys and girls that correlate with what we see in the animal kingdom.
Interestingly, so it does look like this correlation between sex and gender does lead tosome different expressions of play and expressions of personality.
(10:45):
And this it relates to what I was talking about about hormone balance, because, forexample, a lot of folks who transition from being female to male start taking
testosterone.
And when they start taking testosterone, many describe having a lot more difficultygetting in touch with their emotions.
This is something that was so validating to me to hear the first time a trans man sharedthis with me because I was like, what?
(11:11):
It's not just my trauma and my internalized programming that makes it hard for me to feelmy emotions.
It actually has to do with my hormone balances that I was born with in my brain.
And that can be a very validating thing.
And for me, that can help lead me out of the inherited forms of gender that are prescribedand pushed onto us from birth rather than feeling more locked into them.
(11:34):
if that makes sense.
My background is in communication studies and there is a communications theorist, her nameis Deborah Tannen and she's done a lot of research into communication styles and she used
toddlers.
And what her research rendered was that even early on there was a difference in the waythat men, boys and women, girls communicated with one another.
(12:06):
I'm going off memory here, but if memory serves, something that she discovered was thatwhen boys were placed into a room, they would often choose, instead of sitting face to
face, they would sit side by side.
And a lot of times their games and their communication style involved establishing ahierarchy and came across as being competitive.
(12:32):
Whereas girls would often try to
face one another when communicating with each other and would play games that fosteredcooperation and alliances.
Is there any truth to that or is that something that perhaps is also something that weobserve because the power of culture is so
(13:05):
unaltered when it comes to even the way that we speak to one another.
It's such a, it's a brilliant question.
And the answer is right now, we really can't know the power of observation, mentorship andobservation is the single largest influence in children's lives by orders of magnitude.
(13:28):
Children don't do what you tell them to do.
They do what they see others doing.
And that is true from far earlier than many people today think.
So in our culture,
we are much more likely to see women engaging in clear, emotional, fluent conversation,directly approaching conversations in these ways.
(13:49):
I know this gets a little squirrely because we tend to think of men as being direct inthis way, but in this instance, the behaviors that you're describing would be mirrored
almost perfectly by adults of those same genders.
And children emulate those adults.
So especially when we talk about hierarchy and dominance.
in a culture as addicted to dominance and hierarchy as ours is, especially one that ispatriarchal, it would be absurd to think that that wasn't having an effect on how boys
(14:21):
play.
I don't know if that really answers your question or just leads to more.
Yeah, no, I tend to agree with you.
think that that's so much of what we emulate, even as children, happens because of what weobserve, even if at the earliest stages, right?
(14:42):
So you think of a toddler being two to three to four years of age, they've had enough timein this world, especially observing their fathers, the men in their lives and their
mothers, the women in their lives interacting
with one another and the power of this culture, I take it back to the idea that I openedwith that so much of who we are, especially when it comes to gender, is influenced way
(15:14):
before we show up on this planet.
My mother talked to me about how she remembers when they started having the ability todetermine a baby's gender before they were born.
And what a huge shift that was in prenatal care.
All of a sudden, people were painting baby rooms in gendered colors.
(15:37):
And she was like, before then, that just wasn't the case.
Baby's rooms were painted kind of a cute yellow or some sort of, there was no emphasis ongender.
But as soon as people could determine a baby's gender before it was born, was the wholeculture got hyper fixated on that.
The gendered baby toys took this huge spike.
So since then, and over the last handful of decades in general, we've seen this rapidescalation of what would we call it?
(16:02):
Genderification, where we push gender harder and harder onto people.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
I grew up, and thus the name of this podcast, I grew up in a cult, a religious cult.
And even within that cult where there were very strong lines of demarcation about what wewere taught, it meant to be a male and what it meant to be a female, even within that
(16:34):
group, there were still people that
deviated that we didn't have a category for.
I remember in our small rural Pentecostal church that I grew up in, that there were acouple of women who were single and they chose to live with one another.
(16:54):
And one of them, based upon what we were taught, right, as far as constructs, as what itmeant to be gender, one appeared
to be very masculine, and the other appeared to be very feminine.
But they had a cooperative relationship where they pooled their resources.
(17:18):
They even adopted children.
But there was nothing, right, because of the preaching and of the labeling of homosexuallifestyles as being sinful.
There was nothing that hinted at that.
It was just a deviation.
And we saw it even displayed in men and women that were married.
(17:42):
And it's amazing to me that we had all of these examples, but yet the diatribe that weendured from the pulpit and from the preaching of the Bible, which by the way, what I've
come to learn isn't as hard and fast as we would like to believe it.
to be when it comes to these ideas of masculinity and femininity.
(18:07):
We were taught that living in this way is OK, but if you're going to be a Christian, thenthis is what it means to be a man.
This is what it means to be a woman.
And it was hard and fast with little deviation, although we saw all of these examplesaround us.
And you know, from a cult perspective, what this reminds me of is a couple thing.
(18:30):
Number one, the promise of the cult is always a lie, right?
You're going to have these perfect categories and everything's going be easy tounderstand.
But number two, like if it's not a cult, you don't have to keep telling people it's acult, right?
Like if it was so obvious what it means to be a man, you wouldn't have to keep tellingyourselves what it means to be a man, you know?
And it's just so I have this very interesting.
(18:53):
journey with my husband, who's known professionally as Mr.
Knitting Cult Lady.
Okay.
And, you know, when I was defining myself and who I was gonna be, and he was this strong,special operations helicopter pilot, right?
So he was fine.
And then when he was transitioning from the military and I was getting book deals anddoing things, and he was shaky, right?
(19:18):
I think, like, he felt his masculinity was shaky and even trying to figure out hisfashion.
And one day I really looked at him and I said to him, babe, you're retired specialoperations military helicopter pilot.
Nobody's gonna question your masculinity.
And this was over wearing a flowered shirt, by the way, which he rocks with his beard andhis, know, lace button downs with vests.
(19:44):
And he's like, great now, right?
And very secure in his masculinity and hence his feminism and his journey has beeninspiring, but like.
It was interesting for me to be like, there is this fear, right?
That you will be demasculinized by something.
the exit costs are catastrophic, horrifying.
(20:06):
But back to Scott's point, a bimodal distribution is just two bell curves next to eachother.
You're looking at two lumps of data.
And one of the interesting things that people tend to forget about both bell curves andbimodal distributions is that people are like, well, most of the data is in the middle of
(20:28):
this lump of data, which is true.
The percentage of people who truly fall at the peak of a bell curve is infinitesimallysmall.
And what that means, the same thing is true of a bimodal distribution with two large dataclusters, the percentage of people at the true dead center of each of those bimodal data
(20:51):
clusters is next to nothing.
And what that means is that virtually everyone has some deviation.
from the culturally enforced paradigm of what it means to be their gender.
There's basically no one who represents the platonic ideal, which relates.
I took notes because I love your list of characteristics of a cult and I find themfascinating.
(21:18):
So I took notes and ran down and your first characteristic of a cult is this charismaticleader.
And I was thinking about this and I was like, well,
Certainly, just as there are Christian religious leaders that frame themselves as beingcloser to God than the people below them, the men who are leaders in the cult of
(21:41):
masculinity frame themselves as being closer to this platonic ideal of masculinity.
So you get somebody like Andrew Tate, whose entire framing is that he's a man's man, he'stough and strong and dominant and all these different things.
He's supposed to be closer to the ideal of masculine than you are.
And therefore you should pay him $40 a month to be part of his weird little club.
(22:06):
But the whole concept there relates to this concept of a male archetype.
And this is where the cult of masculinity becomes emphatically spiritual, even though mostpeople in it wouldn't define it on those terms.
But most men who are solidly in this cult of masculinity and haven't analyzed it have thisidea, often unanalyzed and subconscious somewhere in the back of their head, that there is
(22:32):
a right way to be a man.
and that you are somewhere on a spectrum of proximity to that right way to be a man.
And the further you get from that, the less masculine you are.
You'll see guys be like, you're not a man if you can't defend your house, stuff like that.
Very common rhetoric without ever considering that they are excluding Stephen Hawking,every old man.
(22:55):
Like, there's just no critical analysis in that whatsoever, there's just this reinforcedspiritual belief of a platonic ideal and then a measurement of all men as a linear
gradient of proximity to that ideal.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, it seems to me that I've noticed in recent years, and I always go back tothis example.
(23:20):
Last year, I was teaching a class on the college level on diversity and, you know, helpingstudents understand the diverse world in which we live and the dynamics around diversity
specifically, as it has to do with communication.
And I remember it was either the first day or the second class period.
I asked the people in that room who were predominantly, it was predominantly white males,white young males, and with a few young women in the class, I asked them a question about
(23:53):
who they believed was the most persecuted group, the most marginalized group in the UnitedStates today.
And without fail, every one of those young men lifted their hand and said, we are.
And of course, I laughed because I had, I have the same reaction to that as to when peopletell me that, you know, Christianity in the United States is being persecuted.
(24:22):
I'm like, how, right?
You are the most privileged people on the planet.
The entire system was built for you.
I'm a white male, so I'll put my, it was built for us.
by people who look like us.
(24:42):
So how have we arrived at this moment where you have people like the Vice President ofUnited States, JD Vance, the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, promoting this idea that
men, this warrior class, is somehow under duress?
(25:04):
Where did that come from?
It relates to a couple of other points here.
Our current system of socioeconomic governance catastrophically fails to meet the needs ofentire population.
(25:33):
And the wealth gap right now is larger than it was right before they started removingmonarchs' heads from their bodies in France.
People's fundamental needs are not being met.
Financial needs, emotional needs, community needs.
(25:53):
Pick a need and the current system doesn't meet it.
So somehow they have to come up with a narrative that explains why the most privilegedclass of people in a society's needs are being catastrophically failed.
And this is where we enter
(26:15):
worldview shift that brings you under the sacred assumption number two, which I believe isthe shift into the belief that men are naturally dominant and superior.
And within that narrative, there's the belief that men are currently being oppressed bybeing prevented from expressing our natural dominance and superiority over women, over
(26:41):
everything, over pick a thing.
If the, if the
sacred assumption is of dominance and superiority.
Everything else should be subject to that.
And it's objectively not.
Men do not have unchecked dominance and superiority over the rest of the world.
And they think they want that.
(27:03):
That's the narrative that they've been brought into.
So when, when these young men, it's funny, we were just, last time I was on was rightafter this happened.
But when,
when young men at schools were screaming, your body my choice.
That is them experiencing a sense of being liberated from the oppression of big feminismto express their natural dominance and superiority as taught by Andrew Tate.
(27:30):
Yeah, and you know, this is is lining up like kismet because I'm gonna bring Bernie Brosin now.
Okay, because now I'm sorry, but I think it's relevant to talk about angry white maleAmerica and to say upfront here, I was married to a man named William Jeffrey Poole, who
(27:51):
was kicked out of the army for being a fully radicalized white supremacist calling fornuclear war against America.
And I've written a whole book about this, re-examining everything.
It's called Un-American.
You can watch it as a video book on my Patreon, folks.
Watch me read it to you or wait for it to come out in a few years.
But like, I've looked at this really hard, right?
(28:14):
And he explains the process of his own radicalization being that he was choosing betweenTrump and Bernie.
He was an angry
mediocre white man, The kind of man that would walk up to his wife after she justgraduated valedictorian after escaping a cult and say, think the other guy's speech was
(28:38):
funnier.
And he was so angry.
He was so angry.
And he thought, right, he recognized the tactics.
The tactics being both of these candidates, Trump and Bernie,
We're appealing, intentionally or not, we can say, to angry, white, male America, saying,you're angry, it's valid, it's another group's fault, and I'm the only one who can fix it.
(29:13):
And he said, this is gonna work.
Which one am I gonna choose?
What pushed him to Trump, by the way, was when the Reddit subthread, fat people hate, gotbanned.
And then he said, my free speech.
Okay, so every time I say this on the internet, I get canceled, right?
Like today my TikTok got demonetized for saying I didn't call Bernie an extremist.
(29:37):
The extremist described his own process of radicalization.
And I'm gonna be dealing with this for weeks, right?
And I can, I as the expert can separate my own.
personal feelings about this man and what I know I nearly escaped and what I have to livewith in order to understand that the extremist account of his own extremism is an
(30:08):
important thing to know but people that are supporting Bernie blindly like cannot separatetheir feelings about Bernie from you know, just just even to hear me say that like
Cult and extremism experts agree on this.
It doesn't matter what you believe, right?
They're like, what are you saying is extreme about Bernie?
(30:31):
Nothing.
I honestly was so busy supporting Senator Elizabeth Warren that I don't really know thatmuch about his platform, right?
Like I also kind of saw Bernie bros and I was like, it's giving cult, you know?
And then I didn't spend that much time around it until my ex-husband described his ownprocess of radicalization and that being part of it.
(30:52):
And then you go kind of further and listen to black women as we always should, right?
And like they've been calling some alarms and there was other things, but again, it's notabout content.
It's about like, there's so much in kind of like what you're saying right now with white,angry, male America and not to keep the soap box, but it's my podcast.
(31:18):
about definitions, right?
Like when you first said cult to masculinity, I say cult of patriarchy, cult to whitesupremacy.
I'm like, well, I always like to be very clear that a cult is a group, right?
But I think when we say cult groups, we're talking about like, we say children of Godcult.
We don't say cult of children of God.
(31:39):
And when people ask me if like,
Patriarchy is a cult, right?
I'm like, I think the cult of patriarchy, the cult of capitalism, the cult of whitesupremacy are like cult systems that we've built.
And here's masculinity, right?
Cult of masculinity, this like system.
And one of the very scary things about systems is they're stronger than groups, right?
(32:01):
And they influence groups and they replicate systemic biases.
And by the way, I wrote uncultured to...
hit on that point you talked about about being in a world not made for you.
You know, as like a woman the whole time in the military that was built for guys like youand not gals like me.
(32:24):
It matters.
And to that point, Jack, you said something very interesting a moment ago.
You talked about the discrepancy between needs being met, Felt needs being met by a systemand the disconnect between people who feel like that their basic needs aren't being met.
(32:46):
And so if anger is the distance between expectations and discipline,
there are a lot of white men in our society today who are being disappointed by a systemthat set up a false standard to begin with.
(33:12):
the system, right?
The cult of patriarchy, the cult of white supremacy makes the promise, which is a lie,that if you are white and you are
male, then you should be privileged, you should have status that is unquestioned and powerthat is assumed and privilege that goes unchallenged in our society.
(33:42):
But as things become more equal, as progress continues to be made, these white malesperceive this pursuit of equality
to be punishment, right?
Because they're no longer enjoying the privilege or the power or the status that they oncehad, thus producing this anger.
(34:04):
And I think one of the things that we can point to as evidence of this, right, is theattraction of Donald Trump to his constituency of white males.
I think about people in my own family.
My oldest brother who sees in Donald Trump, right?
(34:27):
Everything that he aspires to be.
So my theory on Trump's popularity with white males is that what they see in him iseverything that they want or everything that they were promised by the media, by society
growing up.
They see a quote unquote successful person who is rich.
(34:51):
who has a beautiful wife, who has access to beautiful women, and that is what they aspireto be.
And when they look around them and they see the world changing, they perceive that to beas oppression and as punishment because they're being disappointed by a system that wasn't
(35:14):
prepared to follow through on its promises to begin with.
Certainly.
Certainly.
Where I live in rural Maine in 2016, there were a lot of houses around that had a Trumpsign next to a Bernie sign.
(35:38):
so I know that you will get blowback for what you just said, Daniela, and there's obvioustruth in it.
There's undeniable truth in it.
Those two candidates held appeal to the same base.
The fact that one was openly guiding the country towards totalitarian fascism.
and the other was sort of aiming for some sort of mediocre socialist democratic Europeanmodel doesn't change the fact that their appeal was the same for exactly the reasons that
(36:08):
Scott is pointing out that anger and that sense of betrayal.
I also think that it's a good time to point out how everyone on the left, let's say, has acatastrophic failure in branding and marketing.
Mm-hmm.
(36:28):
So Scott, I agree with everything that you just said, and that language would be deeplyoff putting to any of my neighbors.
Part of that is a misconception of what privilege is.
There's just a consistent misconception of what privilege is.
And when my neighbors hear privilege, they laugh because they think that privilege meanssomebody is going to pay their bills or they're going to get a leg up.
(36:50):
Whereas in reality, around here, what privilege means is that when my brother and
who's a black man, walks down the street, he gets insults, racial insults hurled at him,cans thrown at him, trucks swerve at him, sometimes people stop and chase him into the
bushes.
That doesn't happen to me.
That's my white privilege.
That is the difference of privilege.
(37:11):
It is the oppression of my brother that makes my relative safety walking down the street aprivilege.
And when I explain it in those terms, my neighbors can understand it.
But when it's explained in ways that they think they are supposed to have had some leg upand they've lived in destitute poverty and trailer parks in the woods of Appalachia their
entire lives, they're like, what are you talking about?
(37:31):
Get out of here with your privilege nonsense.
And they're right.
They're right.
Because the thing that they're feeling, that emotion, that anger is the failure of thesystem to live up to its promises.
So the things that my neighbors, my, none of my neighbors would acknowledge that they haveprivilege because well, whatever, for media reasons and for a whole set of reasons that I
think we all understand.
But.
If you were to say, do you think that if you work hard, you should be able to have a goodlife?
(37:55):
They would agree with that statement.
And that is the part that they feel betrayed on right now.
They don't feel betrayed in their own language because their privilege hasn't been upheld.
They feel betrayed because working hard doesn't buy them a good life anymore.
They can't pay their bills.
They can't do the things that you should be able to expect to do in a civil and a healthysociety.
And they're right.
And we should all be furious.
(38:18):
The misdirection of anger is a huge part of this, which to bounce through two points, likewhat we're talking about here is, you you've got this transcendent mission, number three
on your list.
The transcendent mission for the cult of patriarchy, which is a much better term, thankyou, is that good old days when women just submitted to men's natural superiority.
(38:40):
People picture the 1940s, nevermind the fact that those women were...
all blown out of their mind on pharmaceuticals in order to stay out of psychiatrichospitals and like often like just whatever that period of time is not what the cult of
patriarchy thinks it was by any stretch of the imagination.
They were trying to survive and get by and if you talk to those grandmothers from thatperiod of time they're not talking about it as though it was some ideal utopic time for
(39:05):
women.
But the cult of patriarchy doesn't care about that.
Please.
here's just one thing I wanted to add in when you were talking about all the promises ofthe cult of patriarchy is there's also the promise of labor, right?
Free labor.
And this is what men on both sides are losing, right?
And this is part of what I feel is the blowback right now, right?
(39:25):
That while like all of the millennials grandmas were in the kitchen telling them how muchworse it was back then.
All the white grandpas were in the drawing room telling the grandsons how much better itwas back then.
So, you know, it's like competing messages.
Now they're feeling betrayed.
I think it's so funny that in a world where goodbye Earl exists, we're still gonna try tolike go back.
(39:52):
okay, I'll hat pins.
Yeah, I'll go 90s country with you all day.
Ha
Lord.
I also, I wanted to say one more thing is that when you talked about like the sacredassumption, this is where I think cracking the sacred assumption, right?
Getting the key, in case we don't say it later, is getting white men to realize they'renot better off.
(40:19):
And we talk about this a lot on my podcast, Hey White Women with White Women, you know,and people ask me like, why do want white supremacy to go down?
Well, like social justice, hate cults, all that, right?
But like, I'm not better off.
I'm not better off under white supremacy.
You look at one list of things black people have invented and then just imagine we didn'thold people back for 400 years, right?
(40:40):
None of us are better off.
So like, I'm better off than a black woman, but I'm not better off than I would be outsideof the cult, all of us.
And so I really just always think it's like, you know the thing if you don't convinceChristians that God is not.
real, convince him he's not good.
It's like you don't convince men.
Like you convince, which I think both of you definitely understand that like you're notbetter off in the cult.
(41:05):
You're better off outside.
It, yeah, and this, you know, Martin Luther King was tolerated sort of when he was justorganizing black people.
But his later writings are really worth getting into because he says some things that arechallenging for everyone.
(41:28):
And one of the things that he gets into in his later writings is the idea that oppressionis like a circle of rope.
and if you pull on any one part of it, the whole thing rotates in a way that turns it awayfrom health and wellness.
So he was and this is when he started organizing the Poor People's Campaign and gettinginto this work that was much more class conscious or class oriented, I'll say the
(41:50):
emphasis.
But his point in some of that was that white supremacy did not benefit white people.
In fact, he said it harmed white people.
And he's right.
In exactly the same way, patriarchy harms harms men, which is
as tidy a segue as we could hope into your point four of the characteristics of a cultwhich is self-sacrifice, which is the one that I feel like
(42:14):
I just wish I could help men understand more.
And can I just say y'all gave up everything good y'all gave up things drinks that tastegood like things that look good things that feel good clothes that are fun I mean
It's so much more than that.
You're absolutely right.
(42:34):
Like men should love learn to try fruity drinks again.
They're delicious.
I was just in Puerto Rico and we were drinking pina coladas and it was delightful.
But let's start with the fact that for 80 % of men in the U.S., people who are born with apenis, their literal first experience outside of the womb is being non-consensually
(42:55):
strapped to a board and having the most sensitive part of their body, their genitals,tortured against their will.
The fact that circumcision is normalized in this country is barbaric in ways that aresimply hard to describe.
is infant genital mutilation on a mass scale.
And one of the things that's most fascinating about how normalized it is is how many menwill defend it and insist that it has no impact whatsoever.
(43:22):
And if you ask them about any other instance of torturing infants, they'll be like, no,torturing infants should be illegal.
But when you apply it to their own lived experience, they'll say, it's not a big deal.
I don't remember it.
Can't have been trauma.
Can't have had any impact on my psyche.
It's wild.
It is mind blowing and it's taboo.
(43:42):
You're not supposed to talk about it.
And then we get to puberty.
There's this fantastic film called The Mask You Live In.
If you haven't seen it, either of you or your audience, should absolutely go.
Fantastic.
And that point about how your average things, is this massive, overwhelming pressurecooker of cultural pressure.
(44:06):
I work with men every day.
It's it's what I do professionally.
And the amount of work that it often takes to get back to these emotions of what they feltwhen they were in a locker room and being shamed, shamed for the color of their towel,
shamed for saying something in a higher pitched voice.
shamed for their body in whatever way.
And these experiences are simply ubiquitous.
(44:28):
All men go through them and they shape the culture of masculinity.
So these are things that the cult of patriarchy costs men.
then the thing, there's so many we could get into here, but the one that I want to mentionhere that I think many men, cause I think a lot of guys are becoming aware of those
points.
But one of the things that is sacrificed on the altar of the cult of masculinity for men,
(44:50):
is our very sense of sacrifice itself.
One thing that I run into many, many men, I would dare to say most, carrying is awillingness and a desire to sacrifice themselves for their family, for their loved ones,
for a better world.
(45:10):
Many men carry this sense that they're willing to lose their health and wellness, losetheir life.
lose anything about themselves to protect their wife, to stabilize their home, to givesomething to their children.
There's this innate sense of sacrifice that may be entirely human, because obviously womencarry this in different ways as well.
see, mom, like all these different pieces.
(45:31):
But the piece I'm talking about is this male, this appropriation of men's sense ofsacrifice, which is currently fed back into 60 hour work weeks and taking pride in the
grind, separating ourselves from our families, from the very things that
our children actually need of present and loving and emotionally fluent fathers andparents in the home, supportive spouses, role modeling of healthy relational dynamics.
(45:56):
All of that gets thrown out and sacrificed for the sake of trying to get ahead in thisimpossible losing game of degrading end stage capitalism under emergent fascism.
And then men end up feeling this simultaneous pride and bitterness.
And this combination is one that I see in my community a lot.
(46:18):
Guys take pride in the fact that they do all this work and give themselves up over andover and over again to go to a job they hate, to do things they don't want to do, to give
up time with their friends, to give up everything in their life, and then bitternessbecause it's not actually buying them what they were promised.
So this self-sacrifice of the members of the cult of patriarchy is just ongoing, lifelong,and absolutely debilitating in ways that are very hard to overstate.
(46:46):
That's a powerful point.
And it really gets to the heart of the matter, right?
That everything that we are taught, I say everything, most of what we are taught by theculture is counterintuitive, counterproductive to the goals and to the standards that all
(47:07):
of us would universally embrace, which is a loving, supporting family.
and human flourishing of all of the members of that family and all of the members of oursociety.
But what we are taught arrives at the exact opposite location of what it promises toproduce.
(47:30):
Right?
And there from comes this vast sense of betrayal for men.
Betrayal, outrage, and anger.
And this is, you know, I was just reading my final chapter on exit costs, not finalchapter, but my final pass through the 40 page chapter on entrance and exit costs.
(47:51):
And I talked a little bit about recovery and part of it was like, you need to feel theanger.
You know, you were betrayed.
Like you were abused, you know, and I really deconstructed the army as kind of like a verytoxic system, especially to me as a woman.
You know, I do feel very angry because I did believe in it and I did waste those years andI did, you know, participate in a system that harmed other people and all of these
(48:19):
different things.
Yeah.
Hard things to process, especially when you've been stripped from all ability to processemotions or even face your own emotions your entire life, especially when all the role
modeling that you had for the gender that you embody was a complete severance fromemotional presence.
So we're either fighting through this lifelong programming of being severed from ouremotional connectivity, our emotional body to get through to the things that we actually
(48:46):
feel.
Or we're acting in a reactive way.
where we're trying to embody the opposite of what we don't want to be, which is still aresponse to that thing and still not actually a healthy or whole expression of self.
For years, I could only recognize emotions in myself in retrospect.
(49:08):
After experiences, I would be like, I was angry then.
that was grief.
I felt disappointed in that moment.
But in that moment, I just felt like tense and like uncomfortable.
And I'm sure that expressed, but none of this is subtle.
But yeah.
tie this right into the damage of cults, I think the self-sacrifice that we all pay incults is having to tamp down your individuality.
(49:36):
And that is right there is what leads to the suicides.
And obviously in the cult of patriarchy, cult of masculinity, suicides are more of aproblem for men than for women.
And I...
Obviously we're not gonna get through the whole list.
We're gonna have to have you back on for like the second five.
(49:56):
But like, can we end by talking about step five, isolation?
And like the isolation in the cult of masculinity, I think brings us to so much of theproblem of right now and what we're seeing.
Yeah, it takes a deep, conscientious effort for men to not be isolated today.
(50:20):
And most men don't see the value in it because we're taught not to.
All of these things come full circle here, where when all of the men we experience growingup are isolated, friendships that we witness often among adult men as children are
superficial at best and often kind of antagonistic or harmful.
(50:41):
And then you're like, well, why would you want that?
What would that do for you really?
so, but, we have these deep human needs because we're actually human beings with soft,fuzzy little emotional underbellies and deep human emotional needs that are consistently
chronically not being met.
And so we ended up dumping that all onto our individual romantic partners who are usuallywomen.
(51:05):
and then feeling disappointed and frustrated and bitter in them because we still don'tfeel like our emotional needs are being met and we blame our spouses for that failure to
meet emotion for that failure in that without ever really getting to the point ofrecognizing that what we want is a type of community that we've never seen and certainly
never had.
Most of us have no models of what a healthy male community looks like.
(51:27):
And the times when I find myself in those spaces, there's a number of men's gatheringsthat I go to.
and one of them is entirely indigenous, organized and led.
And when I find myself in that space with a group of elder adult men around who like notjust having one adult man who I actually want to emulate, who I actually think is someone
who's healthy, healthy in relationship, healthy in their mind, healthy in how they show upin the world, but having a whole set of these men in the same space, having five or 10
(51:56):
indigenous elders of different flavors of different like
mindsets of different diversity of ways of being who are all just there and healthy.
It breaks something open in me where I'm just like, my God, I don't have to just bethrashing around looking for any possible slightly healthier model of masculinity.
(52:16):
I can actually be in a space where there are multiple types of healthy adult men, old,much older than me, who I can turn to for different situations and different things that I
need in my life.
And
Most men never ever experienced that.
Most men struggle to even imagine it.
Most of us go our entire lives with all of the men around and above us being harmful insome way or another, being someone who we actively don't want to learn from.
(52:43):
They're all object lessons.
Well, that dude's funny, but he's super addicted to whatever he's addicted to.
well, that dude's fairly nice to his kids.
But like, I know what he's doing on the side with his wife, and that's actually not thatgreat.
And like guys are just
Super wounded.
Super wounded.
And so...
(53:04):
And I think that the desire to keep that private also limits us from community.
Which is why I think there's such an emerging need for men's groups.
For spaces where men can actually share our wounds with each other.
And be like, I've caused harm in these ways.
I feel awful in these ways.
These are the darkest little corners of my soul that I'm terrified I'll be completelyunlovable if I ever share with anyone.
Things that like the number of times in men's groups when guys are like, I've never saidthis to anyone before in my entire life.
(53:29):
I've never shared this in any capacity because where would they?
Their model of romantic relationship doesn't include that level of transparency orvulnerability or weakness.
How could they possibly share that with a spouse with the models of relationship they'vebeen taught?
Their models of friendship are all about reinforcing that they're on the same team,reinforcing in-group status.
We're on the go sports ball, go sports ball, you know?
(53:50):
making sure I'm doing the right thing, right?
We're all on the same side.
It's all this constant reinforcing of this very fragile sense of being on the same teamrather than any actual connectivity.
So the need for that is vast, potentially may determine the future of the world andsomething that takes a great deal of intention for men to practice.
takes what, depending on what research you like somewhere between 70 and 300 hours toactually feel like your friends with somebody.
(54:17):
Where do men find that in their lives?
If it's just at work, then you're reinforcing hierarchy in the sense that you don't wantto be there.
It's not a good basis for friendship.
I'm not saying you can't make friends at work.
I'm just saying they're stacked against you.
So like, where are you making the space guys in your life to actually feel like you'refriends with somebody?
Jack, everything that you just said is beautiful in so many ways and really resonates withme.
(54:41):
perhaps we can end on this note because I'm going to ask you to give men like me.
Okay, so I grew up in a context where I'm somewhat of an anomaly, right?
So when I talk about these issues, most people that are in my world are like,
(55:01):
they don't have the capacity or the baseline to understand what I'm attempting to say.
Perhaps they might feel it.
It might resonate with them on some level, but they don't have the vocabulary and theycertainly don't have the self-awareness to engage in these conversations.
(55:24):
So when you describe that kind of community and something within me leaps and says,
Yeah.
What do men like me do?
How do we find that community?
What's one thing that we can start doing besides talking about it that we can make theworld a better place?
(55:49):
For lack of a better, yeah, answer that one, Jack.
You just pull out my silver bullet and knock that one
This is when I get these kinds of questions, I just lean forward and say, I'm only 37.
I haven't solved all the problems yet.
The first thing that comes to mind, Scott, is that literally every men's group that I'veever been a part of and men's groups are a whole world.
(56:15):
There's a lot of them that are super wounded and super harmful.
And a lot of them, I don't have a whole lot of respect for the mythopoetic tradition.
There's things that got really right.
Opening up men's emotions, there's things that got really wrong.
Breaking away in like the dichotomy with feminine, whatever.
That's his own conversation.
But my point is that men's groups have been one of the healthiest contexts in my life toget in touch with my own emotions and make actual friendships and build bonds with other
(56:38):
men.
And they have all, all started with conversations, vulnerable conversations with other menthat I knew personally.
So it's funny how I know that I'm actually giving you the answer that you sort ofsidestepped in your question where you were like, what can we do besides talk about it?
And what I'm saying is...
I want you to go talk about it.
want you to whatever the men are who are close in your life, actually start talking aboutthem with what's going on in your life.
(57:05):
This is just this strangely radical idea for men.
We're like, right.
I could actually talk about how insecure I feel in my marriage right now because like whator whatever else is up.
Guys just don't do it.
And so talking about that.
then I found books to be really valuable.
Bell Hooks, Will to Change is phenomenal.
Glenn Mazas, trickster, magician and grieving man.
to be sitting right here, one of my favorite books written by a guy about masculinity.
(57:28):
Absolutely phenomenal.
Can you pull it more into the frame, like in front of your face?
thank you.
magician and grieving man, reconnecting men with Earth.
But pick a book, talk about what you don't like, read it together, decide to read achapter every month and then shoot the shit with about it.
And like even if that's just you and your buddy, both one of my very best friends in thewhole world and I reread Will to Change before each of our weddings and had little one on
(57:56):
one sort of book conversations about it.
Just very casual, low key.
And it was super healthy for us.
So those kinds of things can build organically.
The other thing I'll mention, I know you asked for just one, but I'm going to tack it on,is break out of the box that you're currently culturally in.
Whatever that box is, because outside of the demographic that you're a part of and theworld that you currently live in, there are other kinds of masculinity.
(58:23):
One of my neighbors was recently kidnapped by ICE.
And if I've sounded tense or angry in this conversation, it's because we're navigatingthis intense community situation.
We started a fundraiser, it raised a quarter million dollars.
That brought up its whole own world of problems and all kinds of accusations, all kinds ofnonsense that we're dealing with.
So I'm sorry if my tone sounds a little sharp in this interview.
(58:44):
from that world and going right back to it after this.
But one of the things that's brought up for me is this wonderful family.
And one of the things that stood out to me is that this guy is the one constantly pushingfor deeper emotional dialogue.
In this particular iteration, this one relationship that's not representative of anythingat all other than different than my norm, the woman is like, no, let's not talk about
(59:07):
that.
She's like wanting to kind of close down the conversation regularly.
And it's the man who's like starting to cry a little and being like, we need to talk aboutthis.
And just being present with that broadens my sense of masculinity and breaks me out of thecult of patriarchy a little bit.
So this is yet another way that white supremacy harms men.
(59:29):
is that it keeps us locked in these weird little silos where we don't get to experienceother ways of being masculine.
You spend time around Latin American men, around African men, around even European men.
The level of physical contact and affection that you will experience is just mind blowingto dudes who are stuck in a US paradigm.
(59:49):
So talk to other men in your life and break out of your boxes a little.
And by the way, we're definitely gonna get just a little bit of shiz for publishing thisepisode during Women's History Month.
So I'm just gonna throw in there that Daniela Mestenec's Young's book, Uncultured, wasjust put on a list with Michelle Obama's book amongst others by Goodreads for Women's
(01:00:19):
History Month.
So.
Jack, thank you so much.
Wow.
I am thrilled that I made this episode because I'm sorry that I missed the last one.
Wow.
You have a lot of insight to share and we appreciate it so very much.
We'll be sure to put all of your contact information within the show notes if people wantto reach out to you.
(01:00:44):
And we will have you back because there's more that I want to know and learn from you.
And by the way,
I've got to compliment you on that powerful voice.
Wow.
If you're not broadcasting in some form on a regular basis, you're missing out, my friend.
You have a beautiful, powerful voice.
(01:01:04):
So thank you in more ways than one.
So thank you for sharing that with us today.
You know, Scott, when I first met you at the beginning of this interview, you startedtalking, I was just a little struck and taken aback.
was like, wow, Scott has such a beautiful voice.
I just like listening to this dude talk.
I can see why Daniela put him up as cohost.
So right back at you, Scott.
(01:01:25):
Thank you, my friend.
I appreciate it.
Thank you.
he has a good radio voice and also this dialogue between you two makes me feel like Scott,you need to start a men's book club, you know, so we should talk about that.
absolutely.
Jack, we will be in touch, my friend.
It was a pleasure as always, and I look forward to it again.
(01:01:47):
Great to meet you, Scott, and thank you, Daniela.
And thank you all for tuning into this edition of Cults and the Culting of America.
Be sure and hit that subscribe button, share with a friend, subscribe, let us know whatyou think about the podcast.
And as always, we'll see you on the next episode of Cults and the Culting of America.
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