November 5, 2024 • 54 mins
In this episode, Ruth Whippman discusses navigating the impossible standards of masculinity. Ruth has grappled with the conflicting emotions of mothering boys and societal shifts and she found herself questioning the very essence of masculinity and its impact on her sons. She delves into the challenges boys face in navigating societal expectations and the lack of language for them to articulate their experiences. Through her personal experience and research, Ruth sheds light on the overwhelming pressure boys encounter to conform to traditional masculine standards, while also questioning the divisive nature of the term "toxic masculinity."
Key Takeaways:
- Understanding toxic masculinity and learning to empower boys to be their authentic selves
- Navigating the shifting landscape of raising sons for healthier relationships and respectful behavior
- Embracing the beauty of blending masculinity and femininity to create a more inclusive and empathetic society
- Embracing the profound impact of body shaming on men and how to promote positive body image for boys
- Redefining masculinity standards for boys to foster a culture of kindness, emotional intelligence, and self-expression
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
The sort of ideal body shape for men has like
ramped up to this ridiculous proportions in the same way
that the ideal body shape for women has kind of
shrunk to the part where you know, if Barbie was
sized up to a real person, she'd have a feeding
tube and not be able to work.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Wow, welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great
thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have,
quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what
you think, ring true. And yet for many of us,
our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
(00:41):
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
(01:01):
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is
Ruth Whitman, a British author, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. Her
essays cultural criticism and journalism have appeared in The New
York Times, Time Magazine, New York Magazine, The Guardian, and
many more. Her first book, America The Anxious, was a
New York Post Best Book of the Year and a
(01:40):
New York Times Editor's choice. Ruth is a regular speaker
at venues including ted Ex, Google, The Moth, and Somerset
House in London. Today, Ruth and Eric discuss her newest book,
Boy Mom, Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity,
and don't forget that The One You Feed podcast is
now on YouTube, so you can watch some of your
(02:01):
favorite interviews by going to the One You Feed pod
on YouTube.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
Hi, Ruth, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 5 (02:08):
Thanks so much for having me on.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
It's nice to have you back on. We had you
on maybe four or five years ago, and I remember
really enjoying the conversation, so I'm glad we're getting to
do it again. We're going to be discussing your latest book,
which is called Boy Mom, Reimagining Boyhood in the Age
of Impossible Masculinity. But before we get into that, we'll
start like we always do, with the parable. And in
(02:30):
the Parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild
and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside
of us that are always at battle. One is a
good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love,
and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things
like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops
think about it for a second. They look up at
(02:52):
their grandparent and they say which one wins, and the
grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to
start off by asking you what that parable means to
you in your life and in the work that you do.
Speaker 5 (03:03):
First, thanks for having me back on the show.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
And so this parable, I think it speaks to the
fact that we are all complex beings. We are all
both good and bad. These qualities exist within all of us,
and there's no point denying that. There's no point pretending
that we're all virtue and there's nothing wrong, or that
we're sort of better than everybody else. But I think
it also points to the fact that we have some
(03:27):
agency in our lives. That we don't have full control,
and the other wolf will always be there, but we
have some choices around how we live and what our
values are.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
I love that you know these things are in everyone,
and I think that's relevant to your book because it's
a book about masculinity. But you can't really talk about
masculinity without talking about femininity, right, They exist on a pole.
And as I walked away from your book, the one
thing that sort of landed on me, and it's something
I've thought about a lot over the years, is that
(03:57):
the ideal person really has a blend of those characteristics.
They're not all masculine, they're not all feminine, and to
force ourselves into being all one way is damaging to us.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
I agree, and I think also i'd rather see us
moving away from labeling qualities and traits with a gender.
So whether we're talking about bravery or courage, or strength
or physical toughness, which are associated with masculinity traditionally, or nurturing, caregiving, empathy, emotionality,
you know, which are traditionally like feminine coded traits. In
(04:36):
a way, I'd rather see a world where we're all
able to embrace all of those things. They don't have
a gender exactly.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
Yeah, that's an interesting way to think of it. It's
so deeply conditioned to think of things that way, and
obviously those didn't get made up in a vacuum. Right
over the millennia that there have been humans, there's been
observations made and it said, hey, you know, more men
seem to have this and women have that. But I
agree with you that maybe taking them out of a
(05:02):
gendered context makes them more applicable to everybody.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Yeah, and more accessible to everybody, because I think, and
I just want to state here, there's nothing bad about
masculinity and there's nothing bad about femininity. They're both associated
with all kinds of wonderful things. It's just that when
we use that as a framework for, you know, a
standard that we have to meet in order to be worthy,
I think that's where the problem's coming. Whether that's if
(05:26):
you're growing up as a boy and you feel you
have to be you know, tough and strong and invulnerable
and not show your feelings and not be like a woman.
You know, that's quite an exhausting and kind of debilitating
an unhealthy standard really to try to meet. Or whether
you're a woman who has to feels they have to
be demure and submissive and not have agency or pretty
or you know, like an ornamental kind of object, and
(05:48):
that is the standard you feel you have to meet.
I'd rather that we just allowed everybody to embrace whatever
sides of themselves they would like.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
To, right.
Speaker 4 (05:58):
Right. So the book is a personal book because you
are sort of trying to balance a couple things inside yourself. Right.
One is your deeply held feminist values, and the other
is the fact that when you start the book, you
have two boys and you're pregnant with your third boy.
So there's this moment trying to embrace these feminine ideals.
(06:20):
I've got boys. The culture is changing in such a
way that some of the problems with masculinity around Me
Too movement and all that sort of coming out, and
you're trying to figure out, like, how do you raise
boys in all of this. So it's a deeply personal
book as you walk through it. It's also deeply personal
in the challenges that you're having with your boys.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
The book is a mixture of memoir and reporting and analysis.
But the memoir part of it opens in twenty seventeen,
when I am eight and a half nearly nine months
pregnant with my third boy, and the Me Too movement
is just like bloading all around us. So you know,
Weinstein's been exposed, and it kind of you know, as
(07:04):
I write in the book, it seems to go within
like a few days from Harvey Weinstein as a sex
offender to every man on the planet is a sex offender.
You know, it's just like one after another after another.
There like horror show of bad news about men, and
like the whole conversation about men and masculinity and kind
of harm that men have inflicted on the world takes
(07:26):
on this like very new and very different flavor and
kind of a scary flavor, and especially a scary flavor
if you're about to give birth to your third boy, right, Yeah,
And so it was this very conflicted moment for me,
both politically and personally. You know, personally, I'm there going,
how do I raise a good son? Are men just hopeless?
Speaker 5 (07:44):
You know?
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Is it just that whatever I do, you know, it's
inevitable that he's going to end up as being either
some kind of predator or a school shooter or a
you know, rapist or something like that. You know, That's
the kind of angsty state of mind that I was in.
But then like I'm like, I'm a feminist. I believe
that so much of this is socialized, and we can
(08:06):
do something differently. But there's part of me that's like
very exhilarated and happy about the me too conversation.
Speaker 5 (08:12):
It's like, finally women have a voice.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
We can call out this bad behavior, we can finally
speak to it, and people are listening for the first
time ever. You know, I feel like pretty much every
woman feels like they've been saying this stuff for millennia
and nobody, nobody has been listening. So finally people are listening.
Finally women have a voice. But at the same time,
you know, the mother part of me is like, I'm
raising boys. I feel defensively, I don't want to think
(08:37):
of them as being toxic or terrible or inevitably going
to cause harm. So it was this very conflicted, very defensive,
very complicated moment that the book opens, and it carries on,
you know, the memoir part of the book lasts for
the next five years until my youngest son goes off
to kindergarten, and the whole time we're in the kind
of shadow of this wider cultural conversation about masculinity, toxic masculinity,
(09:02):
What is it? How do we do differently, how do
we do better? And where are we going with men
and boys?
Speaker 4 (09:08):
Yep. And I think that what you do such a
great job of in this book is you said it's complicated, right,
you keep the complicated in it because this becomes sort
of a political issue, right, and each side I often
think lacks the nuance to have conversations that are actually useful.
(09:30):
And that's true of the way that I lean politically
and the other side, and you do a very nice
job of keeping that in there and the struggles with it.
I thought maybe we could move into asking you about
the title, right, reimagining Boyhood, But it's the last part
of the title. I'd like to get you to say
(09:51):
something about which is impossible masculinity? What do you mean
by that?
Speaker 1 (09:55):
So this was a really interesting process coming up with
that title because you know, what do we say here?
And actually the British version of this book, they chose
to replace the word impossible with the word toxic, and
I didn't like that choice. I prefer the impossible masculinity
framing of this rather than toxic because I feel like
(10:16):
masculinity has become impossible from all sides. So on the
one hand, like all of the old pressures of masculinity,
you know, the manner be tough, be strong, don't express
your emotions, don't be vulnerable.
Speaker 5 (10:28):
Don't be a woos, don't be a pussy.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
You know, those pressures are still very much in circulation
for boys.
Speaker 5 (10:34):
They still have to subscribe to that.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
They still are living in fear of as I think
many men are of like being exposed as feminine or
as not a real man. You know, there's this standard
that they feel they have to live up to. But
now there's this sort of voice from the left, or
a sort of newer voice, which is, you know, boys,
you're toxic, you're harmful, you know, you're very being is
(11:00):
you know, you're just kind of like a predator in waiting.
Whatever you do, you're wrong. And it's also it's time
for you to shut up. It's everybody else's turn. Don't
speak to your pain, don't speak to your experiences, because
men have been listened to for so long and it's
time for everybody else.
Speaker 5 (11:14):
To ever go.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
So I think many men and boys that in this
moment of just feeling like this is impossible, you know,
from all sides, you know.
Speaker 5 (11:23):
Where do we go with this?
Speaker 1 (11:24):
You know, on the one hand, we're supposed to be
so privileged and powerful, but we don't feel that way.
We still have all of these old problems that nobody's
really addressing or saying, and nobody really has any empathy.
Like it feels like we have run out of goodwill
for men and boys completely.
Speaker 5 (11:41):
We're done. And so I think what I wanted to.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Capture with the idea of impossible masculinity was just it's
kind of impossible from everywhere. We're in this moment in
the culture wars where things are very complex and boys
and men just don't really know how to be, And
I prefer that to toxic masculinity. I think there's something
about the phrase time masculinity, and I believe it was
a really important phrase in its moment. I think it
really spoke to very specific phenomenon which is really important
(12:08):
to call out. But I think for this generation of
boys who weren't the ones doing this stuff, I think
they just see it as so shaming and so shutting
down of conversations rather than opening them up that I
kind of didn't want to perpetuate that.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
Yeah, the book resonated with me in a lot of
ways as a man, because I don't think the pressures
you're describing are new and what I mean is I
believe that in my generation might be the generation that
first I think started to really face this a little
bit more my dad's generation a little bit, but not
(12:44):
as much, where if you were paying attention, you started
to realize that the be a man story that was
the traditional one was problematic. There was a lot of
encouragement from it. And again I think this does start
a lot on the liberal side and in communities that
(13:05):
are more psychologically informed, spiritually informed, and I don't mean
maybe not Christianity, but alternative spirituality, this idea that that
way of being a man isn't right and it's problematic,
so you should be different. And so that tension I
have felt my whole life. Right, I grew up in
a sense my father was very angry, very manly, and
(13:28):
I grew up with I will not be like that.
But that's a reaction to the standard, right, and it's
still a way of like being in the box, so
to speak. Right, it's just a slightly different box. So
I just really resonated with a lot of that. I
was surprised by how much I resonated with some of
(13:50):
the in cells. Will get to that in a second.
Really powerful book because I think I have wrestled for
a long long time with what does it mean to
be a man? And what do I do with these
characteristics that again, maybe we get to a day where
we don't gender them, but that are traditionally thought of
as male, Those are in me, I feel them, those
(14:11):
energies are there. To shove them away is problematic, but
to let them just run wild is also, you know,
can be very problematic. Right.
Speaker 5 (14:22):
You know.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
One thing that I found when I was reporting and
researching this book and talking to a lot of boys
is one thing that I think is really hard for
men and boys is that they don't have a very
good vocabulary or sort of you know, just a good
language and a good framework to really talk about this stuff.
And I think that there's all these ways in which
men are sort of subtly socialized not to really talk
(14:45):
about their pain in different ways, or not to really
talk about their issues, and so it's like, I think
a lot of boys are feeling like I don't know
how to be Everything feels wrong, but I don't really
have the framework to talk about it. And I think
that we have done as a society a pretty good
job over the last few decades of giving women and
girls a vocabulary to talk about the issues that face them.
(15:08):
So it's not that those issues have gone away. But
I think like pretty much any fifth grade girl, say,
has the ability to like look through a book or
look through a magazine and be like, that's sexist, you know,
to call it out, this is wrong, this is oppressing me.
Speaker 5 (15:20):
You know.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
I think these guys are so savvy to this stuff,
and I think we've done a good job of giving
them that framework to think about it and to call
it out.
Speaker 5 (15:29):
Was I think with boys.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
And men, it's just they feel something's wrong, they don't
feel like they have permission to talk about it, and
they don't really have the tools to talk about it
or the language. And so this is what I was
trying to do in the book, was just give it
a framework, give it a name, name the problem.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
Yep. So let's start with a core idea that is
in the middle of all this, which is sort of
gender essentialism, meaning boys have certain traits, girls have other traits.
In the book, you say very clearly that it's possible
to read the same research and come to two different
(16:06):
conclusions that there are characteristics that are you know, built
into boys, and there are characteristics that are built into girls.
And you can find the research and read research and
walk away completely convinced that that's true, and you can
come to the exact opposite conclusion. And even if you're
actually trying to get to the truth, which a lot
(16:26):
of people just want to be confirmed of what they believe.
But even when you're open to finding the truth, good lord,
it's confusing.
Speaker 5 (16:33):
It's really confusing.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
And I think also, as I write in the book,
I think that the whole thing becomes a kind of
proxy for a different fight, which is like, you know,
when we're talking about is it nature or is it nurture?
You know, are we really trying to find out about
that or are we using this research to further an
agenda that we already have.
Speaker 5 (16:51):
And that happens on both sides.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
I think there are people with very traditional gender beliefs
who go through that research and they're like, look, it's
all innate, it's natural that there's nothing we can do
about it. Women are like this, men are like that,
and women should stay in their place, you know, and
men should stay in their place. And you know, it's
a way to justify sort of regressive things, And on
the other side of things, you have feminists who are like,
(17:13):
this stuff is all socialized, it's all just you know,
the only reason why that men and boys behave the
way they do is because we socialize them into that.
And if we socialize them differently, we'd have a totally
different outcome. And I think, you know, I read through
this body of research many times and I feel like, honestly,
anyone who's really approaching it in good faith would say
(17:35):
that this is a mix. You know, it is a
mix of nature and nurture. We will never know in
exactly what proportions. And these are always group level differences,
you know, they don't necessarily apply to anyone individuals.
Speaker 5 (17:46):
So you know, it's like height.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
You know, most men are taller than most women, but
you will find women who are six foot tall, and
you will find men who are five feet tall. And
that's true. But at a group level there are differences,
I think. And also nature and natural sort of aren't
really distinct. You know, there's the field of epigenetics, so
what genes get turned on and off by how we
socialize people. But what I ended up feeling was that, yes,
(18:13):
there are some elements of this which are hardwired biologically,
or tendencies which are biologically hardwired.
Speaker 5 (18:19):
But actually we use.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
That, we use the idea that you know, boys will
be boys, or that you know, boys are just wired
this way as an excuse to kind of not do
anything about it, you know, to do less parenting, when
actually those traits should encourage us to do more, you know,
to step in more to help boys find and girls,
you know, to help everybody find new ways to be.
Speaker 4 (18:41):
You tell a really compelling story near the end of
the book about something you observed when you took Abe
to his first day of kindergarten. Yeah, we want to
tell that story.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Yeah, so this is like a very very tiny story,
and I think, you know, I'm always slightly hesitant to
tell it because it's the kind of thing that people
to be like so minor, so nothing. But I think
what I was trying to convey is that these kinds
of very minor things add up, right, you know, it's
a million million examples of the same thing. So what
I noticed I took him to kindergarten. He's this tiny
(19:14):
little kid, he's very anxious. It's his first day of
school and we're going through the gate and there's this
like big guy there. I think he might be a
teacher or a volunteer. I'm not sure, but so right
in front of my son in line, there's these two
girls and the guy says to the first girl.
Speaker 5 (19:30):
Hi sweetheart, you know this little.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Sweet voice, and then the next girl, Hi sweetheart, And
then my son walks through and his voice goes down.
Speaker 5 (19:38):
An entire octavity.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
He's like, oh, buddy, and gives him a high five,
and it's like he has communicated in this tiny way
that these girls are vulnerable, they're in need of protection
and nurture, and that they have a right to be scared,
they have a right to be anxious, and that adults
are going to respond to that. And he's communicated to
my son that he must tough enough, that he's a
man now, he's in the system of masculinity.
Speaker 5 (20:02):
It's not really okay that he's.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Scared and vulnerable and he has to kind of toughen
up and get through it. And it's this tiny little moment,
and it's very well meaning, and the guy was a
lovely person. He's not trying to do anything wrong, but
it's just having boys. You notice that like right from birth.
And there's a lot of research to support this that
we kind of masculinize them in all these subtle ways
(20:26):
that we project these masculine qualities. We see them as sturdier,
we see them as tougher, we see them as less
in neative nurture and protection, and we give them less
nurture and protection as a result.
Speaker 4 (20:36):
And I think that's what the process of conditioning is.
It's little things that add up. It's a thousand little
experiences that grow into something bigger. So I found this,
you know, Yeah, it's very little, and I think your
point is important. The guy there was a kind, good
person doing the best he could, right, And yet there
is a message encoded in that, And it's interest because
(21:01):
we tend to think of boys as being stronger, but
you say that boys are by almost every measure, more sensitive, fragile,
and emotionally vulnerable. Explain that, because I think it's easy
for us to see the boys could be more aggressive
or rambunctious, right, those boy things, But in what ways
(21:21):
are they also sensitive, fragile, and emotionally vulnerable.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Yeah, this was one of the biggest surprises to me,
and it's actually really well established in the literature. It's
not like some controversial thing that I've blacked out of nowhere.
What is really surprising is that a baby boy is
born with his brain. And when I'm talking about the
right hemisphere of his brain, which is the part that
deals with emotions, emotional self regulation, attachments, relationships, he's born
(21:47):
with that part of his brain about a month behind
a baby girl in development. So baby girl is born
naturally more emotionally resilient and independent and with less need
for a caregiver. And so you see that boys at
birth are like a little fustier, like they find it
harder to calm down. They're more stressed by difficult events
like being separated from their mothers. And you can see
(22:10):
that actually, any sort of bad thing that can happen
to a baby, like any adverse event, like you know
that the mom has postpartum depression and doesn't bond properly,
or that you know he's neglected, or that he's abused,
or he grows up in poverty, all of those things
have been shown in the data to have a bigger
effect on boys than they do on girls. Boys' brains
(22:32):
are just naturally more vulnerable to disruption in those early years,
and that carries on. But I think what happens so
boys actually need a little more care and a little
more support right from birth. But because of our stories
about masculinity, we believe that a boy is tougher and
sturdier and he needs less care. And you see all
this research about how parents like handle baby boys differently.
(22:55):
They rough house with them, they jiggle them, whereas they
tend to give girls more of this kind of caretaking touch,
you know, and they talk to girls more about their emotions,
they use more words, they use more language, and you know,
they just treat them in a slightly more nurturing and
emotive way. And so I think this like combination boys
(23:15):
need more that they get less really leads to some
problems down the line.
Speaker 4 (23:42):
So listener, consider this. You're halfway through the episode Integration reminder.
Remember knowledge is power, but only if combined with action
and integration. It can be transformative to take a minute
to synthesize information rather than just ingesting it in a
detached way. So let's collectively take a moment to pause
and refin. What's your one big insight so far and
(24:02):
how can you put it into practice?
Speaker 3 (24:04):
In your life.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
Seriously, just take a second, pause the audio and reflect.
It can be so powerful to have these reminders to
stop and be present. Cant it. If you want to
keep this momentum going that you built with this little exercise,
I'd encourage you to get on our Good Wolf Reminders
SMS list. I'll shoot you two texts a week with
insightful little prompts and wisdom from podcast guests. They're a
(24:27):
nice little nudge to stop and be present in your life,
and they're a helpful way to not get lost in
the busyness and forget what is important. You can join
at one youufeed dot net slash sms and if you
don't like them, you can get off a list really easily.
So far, there are over one and seventy two others
from the one you feed community on the list, and
(24:48):
we'd love to welcome you as well. So head on
over to oneufeed dot net slash sms and let's feed
our good Wolves together. You quote somebody who works in
this space as saying, you know, we have an epidemic
of uncared for boys. No wonder we're seeing all this
toxic masculinity when they grow up. The other thing that
we're seeing is and again this is not controversial. This
(25:11):
is very clear in the data. Boys are not thriving
in the world today. Young men are struggling in many ways.
Tell me about some of those ways.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
So, young men are struggling in education. They're falling behind
girls in pretty much every measure from kindergarten to college
through postgraduate degrees. They're enrolling in college in fewer numbers
than girls. They're much more likely to drop out of college.
Unemployment rates amongst young men are rising faster than in
any other group. Boys and young men are not socializing
(25:44):
as much as young women are. They're spending far more
time on screens and far less time socializing in person.
So the suicide rate for young men is about close
to four times the rate for young women, even though
we see in the data that young women are more
likely to report that they're depressed. So boys and men
(26:06):
are like holding this stuff inside until it's way too late.
Speaker 5 (26:09):
They're not seeking help.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
There's a serious mental health problem with young men at
the moment, but they're not getting help for it, and
they're not able to articulate it. So all these different
ways boys are not doing well.
Speaker 4 (26:21):
And so I know there are a lot of theories
about why this is, and you probably don't have an answer,
but what are the theories that make most sense to you.
Speaker 5 (26:32):
Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I think.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
You know, there's this voice from the mainly from the right,
which is like, boys don't have enough masculinity. They just
need to toughen out. What we need to sort of
toughen them up more. And back in the good old days,
they were tougher and stronger and they were doing better.
But I think that is a misreading of everything that's
going on personally.
Speaker 5 (26:52):
I think that what's going.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
On with boys at the moment is a combination of
an old problem and a new problem. So the old
problem is the old story that we've had for generations
and generations, which is, you know, the tough en up
that boys are undercard for in those sort of emotional
and nurturing ways that they're meant to squash their emotions,
and these things can lead to quite psychologically unhealthy mind
(27:18):
So all of those old pressures of masculinity I think
are really unhealthy for boys and men. Men used to
rise just because they had privilege. You know, it used
to be that they would rise to the top just
because everybody else was kept down. But now we're taking
away the barriers for everybody else. We're starting to see
that the way that we're raising boys is actually really unhealthy,
(27:38):
and that you know, without privilege, they're just kind of crumbling. Also,
I think there are sort of more modern pressures which
are like things like screens have given boys a real
kind of option to avoid the real world in a
way that they never really had before, And so I
think that it's easier. For example, you know, it's never
been a more fraught time to have sex and relationships
(28:00):
as a boy or young man. And it's never been
easier to get your phone and just watch porn, for example,
And it's very fraught for boys socializing in the real world.
They don't know how to be. It's never been easier
to just get on a video game and like live
out your heroic masculine fantasy.
Speaker 5 (28:16):
You know.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
One expect that I spoke to in the book characterized
it as a kind of combination of.
Speaker 5 (28:21):
Fear and ease.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
So it's like fearful being in the real world and
it's easeful being on a screen. Yeah, So that's one
part of it. And you know, there are also economic reasons.
I think that the types of jobs that boys used
to go into are in decline, you know, all of
those kind of manufacturing roles. So I think it's a
combination of all different kinds of things that are all
coming together in this cultural moment that we're at.
Speaker 4 (28:45):
And when we talk about this, you know, you can't
talk about it without talking about privilege, right, that men
have had over time. There was something in the book though,
that genuinely shocked me, and it was that black girls,
many measures, are doing better than white boys.
Speaker 5 (29:03):
Yes, and that was really surprising to me as well.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
This was in the chapter about education specifically, So when
it comes to success in high school, rates of going
to college, rates of postgraduate degrees, on most of these measures,
black girls.
Speaker 5 (29:18):
Are doing better than white boys.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
And so all of our understanding of systems of privilege,
you know, of race and gender are being turned on
their head. You know, if privilege leads to success, then
you would think that white boys would be doing better
than anyone because they've had every type of privilege, you know,
racial and gender privilege. And black girls, you know, you
have to hand it to them, you know, it's amazing.
They have the same limitations, the same structural obstacles, the
(29:44):
same underfunded schools, the same lack of opportunities as black boys,
but they've managed to overcome all of those and you know,
overtake white boys. And so I think what we're seeing
is that something about the way we are socializing boys
and particularly when it comes to education, is really harmful.
One thing that I would say about this sort of
(30:04):
modern moment that we're in is that, you know, we've
got all the old pressures of masculinity that all our
fathers lived with and our grandfathers, but also like this
kind of flavor of masculinity is changing as well. So
it used to be this kind of we had this
model which was like be a tough guy, to press
your emotions, but also be a family man, be a breadwinner,
be a provider, and those stories were also like really
(30:27):
part of masculinity. But our kind of model for masculinity
is becoming like more of a kind of cartoon action
hero kind of masculinity. You know, a kind of muscle man.
You see these kinds of masculinity. Influencers are all kind
of doubling down on this model. So it's like taking
all the seeds of the old model, but just turning
it into a cartoon. It's basically you know, muscles and
(30:50):
guns and cage fighting all the way down. And so
that is creating even more pressures around masculinity.
Speaker 5 (30:58):
For boys in this moment.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
I think it's even more ridiculous and even more hyped
up than it ever was in many ways.
Speaker 4 (31:05):
Yeah, and it's interesting. My son and I've talked about this.
My son is twenty six, so he's a young man,
and we've talked about how there is lots of resources
for men right out there, but they are overwhelmingly right
wing and or very very Christian, which again that's not
(31:26):
necessarily bad unless you're neither of those.
Speaker 5 (31:30):
Things, right, and then where do you go?
Speaker 4 (31:32):
Yeah, Yeah, And that is the question him and I've
talked about, is it just doesn't seem that there's places
to go to talk about what being a man is
or masculinity is in a time where the social pressures
around that are changing very rapidly.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
And I think boys are very fearful to talk about it,
and rightly so, for being called out for being overprivileged
or being entitled, or man's blending or taking up too
much space, you.
Speaker 4 (31:58):
Know, exactly. And yet it's critical, right you talk about
this idea, you say, we don't experience our lives or
emotions as part of a political class, but as individuals.
So the fact that men, for as long as we
can go back, have been privileged and have had power
is all true. And some of that trickles down to
(32:18):
young men of today. Right. It's not that there's not
some inherited benefit there, but I know that around young
people today, in a lot of spaces, I think being
a straight white man is possibly the lowest social category.
It is just a category that nobody, like you said,
nobody wants to hear from shut up, right, We've heard
(32:40):
from you for long enough, right, And that's not tenable
as an individual, right.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
And these boys who are growing up now, they haven't
lived that context, you know, And that context is real
and it's important and we have to remind boys and
men of it. And so it's really complicated. My friend
was telling me this story the other day about how Hassan,
who's I think eleven, was at school and they had
an affinity group for every sort of identity category. So
(33:06):
it was like the black students affinity.
Speaker 4 (33:08):
Group, the LGBTQ girls.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Affinity group, and the one that they didn't have was
for boys. And it's like, well, boys have already had power,
you know, and this is meaningless to an eleven year
old boy. They defin look powerful in their own life,
they have nowhere to process it. And the thing that
kind of compounds it is that, yes, it is true
that patriarchy has given boys and men access to power.
(33:32):
That is a very real thing. But even in that system,
boys and men have been deprived of some really important things,
which is emotionality, intimacy, human connection. So, as I say
in the book, you know, under patriarchy, boys and men
have everything except the thing that's most worth having, which
(33:52):
is human connection, access to human intimacy. And so even
under patriarchy, it's not that men had all benefit and
no harm. Patriarchy harms men and boys precisely, and so
there's no way to talk about that.
Speaker 5 (34:05):
We've focused so heavily.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Particularly, there is a rich tradition within feminism of recognizing
that patriarchy harms men and boys. But it's like we've
forgotten it all, you know, in this moment post me too.
It's just like your privilege, you get everything you're lucky.
Shut up, and that is not a healthy way for
any young person to live or to grow right.
Speaker 4 (34:26):
And there's a couple different points in the book that
you make this point that you know, what we're doing
is we're trying to sort of push men down instead
of sort of get everybody to the same level. That
doesn't really work. And you say, you talk about this
because what we're talking about you put it in one sentence.
It's hard to square male privilege with male vulnerability. You
(34:49):
have both those things happening at the same time. Men
have had privilege, do have privilege to a certain extent,
and yet men as a whole, younger ones in particular,
are extraordinarily vulnerable right now to many different problems. And
so I think you do a great job of walking
through this. I wanted to turn a little bit now
(35:11):
to something that I didn't really know about it. I
had heard the term in cell, but I didn't honestly
even know what that really meant. Yeah, before we go
into it, share with me what that is.
Speaker 5 (35:23):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
So the word in cell stands for involuntary cell of it.
So it's a group of generally pretty young men on
the internet and often adolescent boys as well. We're pretty
young men who believe that they have been excluded from
sex and relationships. They can't have sex, they can't find
a girlfriend or a partner, and they're extremely lonely and
(35:49):
usually profoundly depressed, and often have pretty toxic politics. Not always,
but often have pretty toxic politics. So they are misogynistic.
There's sort of links between in cells and like white
supremacy and all kinds of like really repulsive.
Speaker 5 (36:07):
Ways of being in the world.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
Not all in cells are like that, and they have
all these theories about you know, they believe that it's
a kind of genetic inevitability that they will never find women.
They believe that women are terrible and they're shallow, and
they're only interested in men for their looks, And they
congregate in these online communities, and at their most extreme
they have this kind of violent fringe. So the in
(36:28):
cells and sort of in cell adjacent men have been
associated with several acts of mass violence, including mass shootings.
Some of the very prominent school shootings have been traced
back to men who have been associated with this movement.
And it's a really complicated and scary and also fascinating
and sad phenomenon. And in the book, I spend some
(36:51):
time digging into this community. So I spend a lot
of time in their spaces online, in their communities and forums,
and I go pretty deep into viewing a few of them.
Speaker 5 (37:01):
Two of them end.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
Up in the book, two of these interviews that are
really quite lengthy and detailed with these two guys. Yeah,
it was really quite an eye opening experience in a
lot of different ways.
Speaker 4 (37:11):
Yeah, what I find interesting about it is there are
many people who believe that you shouldn't even give these
people any airtime, that they're not lonely sad men, that
they're toxic, dangerous people. So that you've got that view
of the world. Now, I tend to be of the
view that generally that you know that phrase hurt people,
hurt people meaning that like you're hurting somebody, it's because
(37:34):
you are damaged right in many ways. And look at
the in cell community. Was difficult for me because a
lot of these men are feeling like they're not attractive enough,
they're not tall enough, they're not strong enough for any
women to desire them. I was a scrawny child and
a short child, and it took me really till high school,
(37:56):
before I was able to really have sort of any
success with women. Is that even a useful phrase anymore?
Did I just say something that people are gonna be like,
you can't say that?
Speaker 5 (38:06):
But I don't know. I mean it didn't like for me,
but you know, who knows, probably.
Speaker 4 (38:11):
Before I could have any relationships and go on any dates, right, Okay, Yeah,
So a lot of reading them with their complete belief
that because of their physical looks they would never find
a relationship was really saddening. And the thing that was
most sad about the community to me and you talk
about it is just the deep hopelessness in the whole thing.
(38:34):
It's this belief that nothing could get better for them.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
Yeah, And this sort of is in contrast to a
lot of what we have come to call them manisphere,
which is like the you know, all of these sort
of masculinity people online, the masculinity influencers, the Andrew Tates,
the sort of quasi self help masculinity groups on the internet.
Because most of that sort of manisfhit is predicated on
this idea that there is a thing called an alpha
(39:01):
male and that if you work hard at it, you.
Speaker 5 (39:05):
Can become that.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
So They sell this like they sort of prey on
these vulnerable boys by saying, we know that you already
feel insecure about your masculinity.
Speaker 5 (39:14):
Yes there is an alpha male.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Yes, this person is going to get all the women
and all the success and all the status. And I
can sell you exactly the model.
Speaker 5 (39:22):
To get together.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
So pumpey and and this, And the difference between those
guys and the in cells is that the in cells
they believe all this stuff. They believe there's an alpha male,
they believe there's a hierarchy. They believe in this system,
but they've given up hope of ever climbing that ladder themselves.
And what's so interesting about them is that, so on
the one hand, there's some of the most like it
(39:44):
is toxic masculinity central over there. You go on those boards,
there is misogyny that you just wouldn't believe. There's talking
about raping and torturing women. There's like some of the
most repulsive views that you could ever imagine on those boards.
What there also is is this deep sense of vulnerability,
(40:04):
belonging and connection like brotherhood. It's almost that because they've
kind of given up on ever climbing the masculinity ladder,
that they're freed from all of its pressures as well,
so they don't have to mann up and be tough
and strong and invulnerable, and they can actually express their
emotions and their sort of love for one another in
a way that most men can't. So it's like both
(40:28):
the worst of masculinity and this kind of freedom from masculinity,
which is really interesting.
Speaker 4 (40:50):
You say that the irony hit me hard. I'd spend
all this time searching for a space in which boys
and young men felt they could disregard masculine norms, and
I thought I might find it in some kind of
feminist affinity circle or a therapy group run by a
soft spoken vegan. But instead I'd found it right here
at the heart of manisphere, in Toxic Masculinity Central. It's fascinating,
(41:11):
you say in cells are generally deeply preoccupied with their appearance.
And I think this is interesting because the narrative that
has been going on most of my adult life is
that we have a culture in which women are body
shamed and women are held up to these impossible standards,
and one hundred percent true, I also believe that men
(41:35):
have been too.
Speaker 5 (41:36):
And it's more socially acceptable.
Speaker 4 (41:38):
Yeah. I mean when I was reading comic books as
a kid, right, one of the ads was the Charles
Atlas Ads. And in the Charles Atlas Ads, he was
a weightlifter. There was a little scrawny kid on the
beach who was getting sand kicked on him, and none
of the girls would look at him. He orders the
Charles Atlas stuff, does the weightlifting, and comes back and
takes over the beach.
Speaker 5 (41:57):
Right.
Speaker 4 (41:57):
I mean that was being marketed to young boys fifty
years ago, and it's.
Speaker 1 (42:01):
Only ramped up that pressure exactly exponentially worse on boys.
Speaker 4 (42:05):
Yeah, And so I think that that is an important
part of the story that often isn't told right, or
another way in which men suffer that isn't talked about often,
because if I were to sort of say that sort
of thing generally to females, they would be like, yeah,
but nothing like we were not to the degree we were,
And I don't know whether that's true or not, right,
(42:27):
I think measuring degree doesn't matter because the level of
suffering was great for me.
Speaker 1 (42:32):
Yeah, absolutely, And I think those pressures on boys, so
it's like the muscleman, you know, the online fitness influences.
You know, you can see the sort of ideal body
shape for men has like ramped up to this ridiculous
proportions in the same way that the ideal body shape
for women has kind of shrunk to the part where right,
you know, if Barbie was sized up to a real person,
(42:53):
she'd have a feeding tube and not be able to walk.
You know, there is no human that can look like
the cgi superheroes, and you know, the online fitness influences
and that culture has really changed. But yeah, I mean
one of the insults was talking to me about short
shaming of men, for example, and you know, yes, body
image pressures on women are terrible. You know, I grew
(43:16):
up with diet culture. It's a generation of women have
been damaged by that, or several generations of women.
Speaker 5 (43:22):
But it's like at this.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Point, I feel like I would never talk about somebody
as having like a fat girl complex, you know, it
would just be unthinkable, But like to talk about somebody
as having a short man complex is completely fine, you know.
And this intel who was very short, was telling me that,
you know, online there are women telling short men to
(43:43):
kill themselves, that they would never have a short boyfriend,
that they were shaming boys for being short. It's something
they can't do anything about. And it's like, you know,
somehow we've got this notion that if we shame boys
and men, you know, that we're kind of punching up
with joke. We have this idea that it's like okay
to punch up, and it's okay to rib somebody who's powerful,
(44:05):
and you know, whereas punching down is not acceptable. But
at what point do we need to stop and say,
is this really punching up to like body shame like
whatever he was at the time, nineteen year old boy,
you know, who has serious mental health problems, no financial
or social capital. You know, these insels are like profoundly depressed, marginalized.
(44:27):
Is it really punching up to call him short, to
shame him for that? I believe not, you know, and
I think we really need to look at that. You know,
it's a blind spot, and I think we need to
stop body shaming boys and men agree.
Speaker 4 (44:40):
I mean, you shouldn't body shame anybody anybody, of course.
I mean I remember clearly an incident in middle school
of like girls laughing at me because I was too skinny.
And again, these things aren't new. I'm not a young person, right,
So I just think there's this sense that you're not
punching up to you know, any time you're shaming anybody
(45:02):
or making fun of anybody's appearance, you're being mean.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
You're being mean and you're harming that person. Yes, there's
no punching up in there. And I think again this
starts to get back to the thing we're talking about,
which is like, do you experience your life as part
of a political class or.
Speaker 5 (45:16):
As an individual.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
You know, yes, men have had power, but that makes
no difference when you're body shaming somebody who's you know,
anybody for anything.
Speaker 4 (45:26):
Yeah, and you say this might be inching as closer
to a quality, but it doesn't feel like progress right
in the sense that like now men are being shamed
at a level that women are. It's not progress, right exactly.
Speaker 1 (45:36):
We're not doing things better and we should be learning
from what we did with women, what we got wrong.
And I think also because things have historically been so
bad for women in that area, we have now like
a really robust, like body positivity movement. We have like
language to describe it, we know how to talk about
body shaming, we know how to call it out. We
know how to like fight back, and I think the
(45:59):
boys and men just did know how to even start
to fight back, and they felt that when they did,
they were shamed for you know, well, back in your box,
you've got too much privilege. You know, women have suffered
worse from you, don't, you know, don't call it out.
And this, this insult was telling me. You know, he
wanted to go to therapy and to find a therapist.
I mean, partly he couldn't afford it, which is a
(46:20):
huge problem, but also he was scared because he felt
that if he articulated his problems to a therapist, they
would shame.
Speaker 5 (46:27):
Him and say, you know, well, women have had it
far worse than you. Now.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
I believe that a good therapist would never do that.
But at the same time, the fact that he's fearful
of that speaks to something very real.
Speaker 4 (46:37):
It speaks to something very real, and it also speaks
to the cultural messaging that he's getting from other men. Right.
I mean, as I was reading about the insults, the
layer upon layer of mistruth or misunderstanding was painful to read.
And one of the things I was thinking about is like,
there's a mistake that's being made there. And there's often
(46:59):
something in psychological literature called the three p's, and it
has to do with how you explain things, right. You
take things to be permanent, you think they're personal, and
you think they're pervasive, right, And what these poor boys
are doing is they're taking the fact that some women
only want tall men, and that is true, that is true,
to mean all women only want tall men. They're taking
(47:20):
these things to be pervasive, and that's the big mistake
I think that's happening there is. It's not that they're
not right some of the time. They're not right all
the time, though. I mean, and that's just a general
thing I think we do across the board, is we
just take an incident of a person on the left
acting badly and we say that's the left, it's pervasive,
(47:42):
or somebody on the right doing that, and it just
doesn't do any of us good.
Speaker 5 (47:46):
I think that's true.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
And I think we've just got to the point where
we've just lost empathy for anybody.
Speaker 5 (47:51):
You know. It's just like, yes, I was talking to
these insults and there was.
Speaker 1 (47:54):
Just layer upon layer of pain and trauma and terrible
message and half truths and you know, all of these things,
and these people are really suffering. And I think the
more we say we're not going to talk to them,
we don't want to humanize them. You know, this is
a whole thing, you know, we don't want to humanize
these people because you know, and there's this argument which
(48:16):
is like, you know, if an Arab Muslim commits an
act of violence, we call him a terrorist, and but
if a sort of white man, we say he has
mental health problems. And there's truth in that for sure,
but like what we've decided is that we're going to
do about that is this like race to the bottom.
Speaker 5 (48:33):
So it's like, okay, let's.
Speaker 1 (48:34):
Dehumanize everyone, you know, rather than trying to humanize the
Arab Muslim and see, well, what's going on for him,
and like how did he get to this place and
why does he want to and you know, he's a
real person who probably got into terrorism through poverty and
terrible messaging and terrible ideas about masculinity as well. Actually,
let's just dehumanize the white guy as well to like,
(48:55):
you know, and I think that is just this terrible mistake.
Speaker 5 (48:58):
It's a race to the bottom.
Speaker 4 (49:00):
Yeap, the other thing that you mentioned I thought was
very interesting was that you say, a wide body of
research shows that it's not masculinity itself that makes men violent,
but the sense of shame that they are not masculine enough.
Oh yes, wow, And I actually resonate with that personally also,
not that I'm violent, but I can share a little
bit about that in a minute, but say a little
(49:21):
bit more.
Speaker 1 (49:21):
Yeah, this was really fascinating to me. And it's one
of those things that you see in the research and
it feels so profoundly true. Yeah, when you hear it,
you're like, yes, of course, because there's this like impossible
standard for masculinity that boys and men feel that they
have to meet, and there's always going to be inadequacy
built into that. No human man can be the kind
(49:43):
of superhero, you know, the model that they're expected to be,
so they will always fall short. But some fall more
short than others, you know, and some people are more
successful in this system than others. But it comes it
with built in shame. And the research shows it's this
measure called masculine discrepancies stress, which means that when a
(50:04):
man believes that he falls short of the standard for manhood.
He is far more likely, you know, when he feels
shame about his inability to live up to masculinity standards,
then he's more likely to commit pretty much all kinds
of violence, sexual violence, domestic violence, you know what they
call intimate partner violence, assault with a weapon, assault of
(50:25):
all kinds. And you can see it's that anger, it's
that shame, it's the shame cycle that.
Speaker 5 (50:31):
Just keeps going and going and going. It rangs so true.
Speaker 1 (50:34):
And this is why, you know, we talk about all
these extremes, you know, the in cells, the manisphere that
you know, the sex offender and everything. But I think
this is so built into the culture at every level.
We give boys right from the beginning this kind of
superhero myth about who they're.
Speaker 5 (50:49):
Supposed to be.
Speaker 1 (50:50):
So all boys are operating with this impossible pressure, this
impossible standard, and so I think, you know, we really
need to look at what we're asking of men and boys.
Speaker 5 (50:59):
And that's why I.
Speaker 1 (51:00):
Don't like this masculinity framework, even when it's positive, even
when we're talking about positive masculinity, we just keep on
reinforcing this idea that the most important thing is to
be masculine.
Speaker 4 (51:11):
I just am very non violent by nature. So I'm
lucky in that way. But I resonated with this because
again this is mostly stuff as a young man. You know,
I wasn't quote unquote masculine enough, right that what I
just did was I just got in lots of trouble.
That was my way of being tough is I'm in trouble, right,
I'm not afraid of the law, you know. And again
(51:33):
it wasn't violent, but it certainly wasn't It wasn't pro
social behavior, you know, it didn't help me or society,
And it was this I can see it now, this
semi conscious attempt to be like, but I am tough.
Speaker 1 (51:47):
To compensate, right, And so that's a sort of very
minor and you know, relatively healthy example of the same
thing that you see with say, school shooters. You know,
when you read the manifestos written by these guys, it's
this like utter shame. They've internalized this message that they're
supposed to be this kind of glorious masculine hero and
(52:08):
then the shame of like falling short and then something
like a school shooting. It's like this very obvious, splashy
trope of masculinity. You know, you get a gun and
you shoot a bunch of people. It's like a way
of reclaiming this masculine status. And that's like the most
tragic and awful example of it. But you see it,
you know, you see lesser versions of it everywhere.
Speaker 4 (52:29):
Yeah, well, I think this is a good place for
us to wrap up. You and I are going to
continue talking in the post show conversation because we just
didn't get to at all. What ways this has caused
you to parent your boys differently? And so I'd love
to take this into some actual practical examples. Listeners if
you would like to hear this post show conversation and
(52:51):
many other post show conversations which some people tell me
are the best conversations, as well as ad free episodes,
and to support podcast that you care about, you could
go to one you feed, dot net slash join and
become part of our community. Ruth, thank you so much
for coming on. I thought the book was so well done.
I mean your last book was too. You're just you're great.
Speaker 5 (53:13):
Oh, thank you. It's been such a pleasure to get
to talk to you again. So thank you.
Speaker 2 (53:33):
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the show.
The sort of ideal body shape for men has like
ramped up to this ridiculous proportions in the same way
that the ideal body shape for women has kind of
shrunk to the part where you know, if Barbie was
sized up to a real person, she'd have a feeding
tube and not be able to work.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
Wow, welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great
thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have,
quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what
you think, ring true. And yet for many of us,
our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,
(00:41):
self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't
have instead of what we do. We think things that
hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not
just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent
and creative effort to make a life worth living. This
podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in
(01:01):
the right direction, how they feed their good wolf.
Speaker 3 (01:19):
Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is
Ruth Whitman, a British author, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. Her
essays cultural criticism and journalism have appeared in The New
York Times, Time Magazine, New York Magazine, The Guardian, and
many more. Her first book, America The Anxious, was a
New York Post Best Book of the Year and a
(01:40):
New York Times Editor's choice. Ruth is a regular speaker
at venues including ted Ex, Google, The Moth, and Somerset
House in London. Today, Ruth and Eric discuss her newest book,
Boy Mom, Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity,
and don't forget that The One You Feed podcast is
now on YouTube, so you can watch some of your
(02:01):
favorite interviews by going to the One You Feed pod
on YouTube.
Speaker 4 (02:06):
Hi, Ruth, Welcome to the show.
Speaker 5 (02:08):
Thanks so much for having me on.
Speaker 4 (02:09):
It's nice to have you back on. We had you
on maybe four or five years ago, and I remember
really enjoying the conversation, so I'm glad we're getting to
do it again. We're going to be discussing your latest book,
which is called Boy Mom, Reimagining Boyhood in the Age
of Impossible Masculinity. But before we get into that, we'll
start like we always do, with the parable. And in
(02:30):
the Parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild
and they say, in life, there are two wolves inside
of us that are always at battle. One is a
good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love,
and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things
like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops
think about it for a second. They look up at
(02:52):
their grandparent and they say which one wins, and the
grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to
start off by asking you what that parable means to
you in your life and in the work that you do.
Speaker 5 (03:03):
First, thanks for having me back on the show.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
And so this parable, I think it speaks to the
fact that we are all complex beings. We are all
both good and bad. These qualities exist within all of us,
and there's no point denying that. There's no point pretending
that we're all virtue and there's nothing wrong, or that
we're sort of better than everybody else. But I think
it also points to the fact that we have some
(03:27):
agency in our lives. That we don't have full control,
and the other wolf will always be there, but we
have some choices around how we live and what our
values are.
Speaker 4 (03:37):
I love that you know these things are in everyone,
and I think that's relevant to your book because it's
a book about masculinity. But you can't really talk about
masculinity without talking about femininity, right, They exist on a pole.
And as I walked away from your book, the one
thing that sort of landed on me, and it's something
I've thought about a lot over the years, is that
(03:57):
the ideal person really has a blend of those characteristics.
They're not all masculine, they're not all feminine, and to
force ourselves into being all one way is damaging to us.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
I agree, and I think also i'd rather see us
moving away from labeling qualities and traits with a gender.
So whether we're talking about bravery or courage, or strength
or physical toughness, which are associated with masculinity traditionally, or nurturing, caregiving, empathy, emotionality,
you know, which are traditionally like feminine coded traits. In
(04:36):
a way, I'd rather see a world where we're all
able to embrace all of those things. They don't have
a gender exactly.
Speaker 4 (04:41):
Yeah, that's an interesting way to think of it. It's
so deeply conditioned to think of things that way, and
obviously those didn't get made up in a vacuum. Right
over the millennia that there have been humans, there's been
observations made and it said, hey, you know, more men
seem to have this and women have that. But I
agree with you that maybe taking them out of a
(05:02):
gendered context makes them more applicable to everybody.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Yeah, and more accessible to everybody, because I think, and
I just want to state here, there's nothing bad about
masculinity and there's nothing bad about femininity. They're both associated
with all kinds of wonderful things. It's just that when
we use that as a framework for, you know, a
standard that we have to meet in order to be worthy,
I think that's where the problem's coming. Whether that's if
(05:26):
you're growing up as a boy and you feel you
have to be you know, tough and strong and invulnerable
and not show your feelings and not be like a woman.
You know, that's quite an exhausting and kind of debilitating
an unhealthy standard really to try to meet. Or whether
you're a woman who has to feels they have to
be demure and submissive and not have agency or pretty
or you know, like an ornamental kind of object, and
(05:48):
that is the standard you feel you have to meet.
I'd rather that we just allowed everybody to embrace whatever
sides of themselves they would like.
Speaker 3 (05:57):
To, right.
Speaker 4 (05:58):
Right. So the book is a personal book because you
are sort of trying to balance a couple things inside yourself. Right.
One is your deeply held feminist values, and the other
is the fact that when you start the book, you
have two boys and you're pregnant with your third boy.
So there's this moment trying to embrace these feminine ideals.
(06:20):
I've got boys. The culture is changing in such a
way that some of the problems with masculinity around Me
Too movement and all that sort of coming out, and
you're trying to figure out, like, how do you raise
boys in all of this. So it's a deeply personal
book as you walk through it. It's also deeply personal
in the challenges that you're having with your boys.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
The book is a mixture of memoir and reporting and analysis.
But the memoir part of it opens in twenty seventeen,
when I am eight and a half nearly nine months
pregnant with my third boy, and the Me Too movement
is just like bloading all around us. So you know,
Weinstein's been exposed, and it kind of you know, as
(07:04):
I write in the book, it seems to go within
like a few days from Harvey Weinstein as a sex
offender to every man on the planet is a sex offender.
You know, it's just like one after another after another.
There like horror show of bad news about men, and
like the whole conversation about men and masculinity and kind
of harm that men have inflicted on the world takes
(07:26):
on this like very new and very different flavor and
kind of a scary flavor, and especially a scary flavor
if you're about to give birth to your third boy, right, Yeah,
And so it was this very conflicted moment for me,
both politically and personally. You know, personally, I'm there going,
how do I raise a good son? Are men just hopeless?
Speaker 5 (07:44):
You know?
Speaker 1 (07:45):
Is it just that whatever I do, you know, it's
inevitable that he's going to end up as being either
some kind of predator or a school shooter or a
you know, rapist or something like that. You know, That's
the kind of angsty state of mind that I was in.
But then like I'm like, I'm a feminist. I believe
that so much of this is socialized, and we can
(08:06):
do something differently. But there's part of me that's like
very exhilarated and happy about the me too conversation.
Speaker 5 (08:12):
It's like, finally women have a voice.
Speaker 1 (08:14):
We can call out this bad behavior, we can finally
speak to it, and people are listening for the first
time ever. You know, I feel like pretty much every
woman feels like they've been saying this stuff for millennia
and nobody, nobody has been listening. So finally people are listening.
Finally women have a voice. But at the same time,
you know, the mother part of me is like, I'm
raising boys. I feel defensively, I don't want to think
(08:37):
of them as being toxic or terrible or inevitably going
to cause harm. So it was this very conflicted, very defensive,
very complicated moment that the book opens, and it carries on,
you know, the memoir part of the book lasts for
the next five years until my youngest son goes off
to kindergarten, and the whole time we're in the kind
of shadow of this wider cultural conversation about masculinity, toxic masculinity,
(09:02):
What is it? How do we do differently, how do
we do better? And where are we going with men
and boys?
Speaker 4 (09:08):
Yep. And I think that what you do such a
great job of in this book is you said it's complicated, right,
you keep the complicated in it because this becomes sort
of a political issue, right, and each side I often
think lacks the nuance to have conversations that are actually useful.
(09:30):
And that's true of the way that I lean politically
and the other side, and you do a very nice
job of keeping that in there and the struggles with it.
I thought maybe we could move into asking you about
the title, right, reimagining Boyhood, But it's the last part
of the title. I'd like to get you to say
(09:51):
something about which is impossible masculinity? What do you mean
by that?
Speaker 1 (09:55):
So this was a really interesting process coming up with
that title because you know, what do we say here?
And actually the British version of this book, they chose
to replace the word impossible with the word toxic, and
I didn't like that choice. I prefer the impossible masculinity
framing of this rather than toxic because I feel like
(10:16):
masculinity has become impossible from all sides. So on the
one hand, like all of the old pressures of masculinity,
you know, the manner be tough, be strong, don't express
your emotions, don't be vulnerable.
Speaker 5 (10:28):
Don't be a woos, don't be a pussy.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
You know, those pressures are still very much in circulation
for boys.
Speaker 5 (10:34):
They still have to subscribe to that.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
They still are living in fear of as I think
many men are of like being exposed as feminine or
as not a real man. You know, there's this standard
that they feel they have to live up to. But
now there's this sort of voice from the left, or
a sort of newer voice, which is, you know, boys,
you're toxic, you're harmful, you know, you're very being is
(11:00):
you know, you're just kind of like a predator in waiting.
Whatever you do, you're wrong. And it's also it's time
for you to shut up. It's everybody else's turn. Don't
speak to your pain, don't speak to your experiences, because
men have been listened to for so long and it's
time for everybody else.
Speaker 5 (11:14):
To ever go.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
So I think many men and boys that in this
moment of just feeling like this is impossible, you know,
from all sides, you know.
Speaker 5 (11:23):
Where do we go with this?
Speaker 1 (11:24):
You know, on the one hand, we're supposed to be
so privileged and powerful, but we don't feel that way.
We still have all of these old problems that nobody's
really addressing or saying, and nobody really has any empathy.
Like it feels like we have run out of goodwill
for men and boys completely.
Speaker 5 (11:41):
We're done. And so I think what I wanted to.
Speaker 1 (11:45):
Capture with the idea of impossible masculinity was just it's
kind of impossible from everywhere. We're in this moment in
the culture wars where things are very complex and boys
and men just don't really know how to be, And
I prefer that to toxic masculinity. I think there's something
about the phrase time masculinity, and I believe it was
a really important phrase in its moment. I think it
really spoke to very specific phenomenon which is really important
(12:08):
to call out. But I think for this generation of
boys who weren't the ones doing this stuff, I think
they just see it as so shaming and so shutting
down of conversations rather than opening them up that I
kind of didn't want to perpetuate that.
Speaker 4 (12:22):
Yeah, the book resonated with me in a lot of
ways as a man, because I don't think the pressures
you're describing are new and what I mean is I
believe that in my generation might be the generation that
first I think started to really face this a little
bit more my dad's generation a little bit, but not
(12:44):
as much, where if you were paying attention, you started
to realize that the be a man story that was
the traditional one was problematic. There was a lot of
encouragement from it. And again I think this does start
a lot on the liberal side and in communities that
(13:05):
are more psychologically informed, spiritually informed, and I don't mean
maybe not Christianity, but alternative spirituality, this idea that that
way of being a man isn't right and it's problematic,
so you should be different. And so that tension I
have felt my whole life. Right, I grew up in
a sense my father was very angry, very manly, and
(13:28):
I grew up with I will not be like that.
But that's a reaction to the standard, right, and it's
still a way of like being in the box, so
to speak. Right, it's just a slightly different box. So
I just really resonated with a lot of that. I
was surprised by how much I resonated with some of
(13:50):
the in cells. Will get to that in a second.
Really powerful book because I think I have wrestled for
a long long time with what does it mean to
be a man? And what do I do with these
characteristics that again, maybe we get to a day where
we don't gender them, but that are traditionally thought of
as male, Those are in me, I feel them, those
(14:11):
energies are there. To shove them away is problematic, but
to let them just run wild is also, you know,
can be very problematic. Right.
Speaker 5 (14:22):
You know.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
One thing that I found when I was reporting and
researching this book and talking to a lot of boys
is one thing that I think is really hard for
men and boys is that they don't have a very
good vocabulary or sort of you know, just a good
language and a good framework to really talk about this stuff.
And I think that there's all these ways in which
men are sort of subtly socialized not to really talk
(14:45):
about their pain in different ways, or not to really
talk about their issues, and so it's like, I think
a lot of boys are feeling like I don't know
how to be Everything feels wrong, but I don't really
have the framework to talk about it. And I think
that we have done as a society a pretty good
job over the last few decades of giving women and
girls a vocabulary to talk about the issues that face them.
(15:08):
So it's not that those issues have gone away. But
I think like pretty much any fifth grade girl, say,
has the ability to like look through a book or
look through a magazine and be like, that's sexist, you know,
to call it out, this is wrong, this is oppressing me.
Speaker 5 (15:20):
You know.
Speaker 1 (15:20):
I think these guys are so savvy to this stuff,
and I think we've done a good job of giving
them that framework to think about it and to call
it out.
Speaker 5 (15:29):
Was I think with boys.
Speaker 1 (15:30):
And men, it's just they feel something's wrong, they don't
feel like they have permission to talk about it, and
they don't really have the tools to talk about it
or the language. And so this is what I was
trying to do in the book, was just give it
a framework, give it a name, name the problem.
Speaker 4 (15:44):
Yep. So let's start with a core idea that is
in the middle of all this, which is sort of
gender essentialism, meaning boys have certain traits, girls have other traits.
In the book, you say very clearly that it's possible
to read the same research and come to two different
(16:06):
conclusions that there are characteristics that are you know, built
into boys, and there are characteristics that are built into girls.
And you can find the research and read research and
walk away completely convinced that that's true, and you can
come to the exact opposite conclusion. And even if you're
actually trying to get to the truth, which a lot
(16:26):
of people just want to be confirmed of what they believe.
But even when you're open to finding the truth, good lord,
it's confusing.
Speaker 5 (16:33):
It's really confusing.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
And I think also, as I write in the book,
I think that the whole thing becomes a kind of
proxy for a different fight, which is like, you know,
when we're talking about is it nature or is it nurture?
You know, are we really trying to find out about
that or are we using this research to further an
agenda that we already have.
Speaker 5 (16:51):
And that happens on both sides.
Speaker 1 (16:53):
I think there are people with very traditional gender beliefs
who go through that research and they're like, look, it's
all innate, it's natural that there's nothing we can do
about it. Women are like this, men are like that,
and women should stay in their place, you know, and
men should stay in their place. And you know, it's
a way to justify sort of regressive things, And on
the other side of things, you have feminists who are like,
(17:13):
this stuff is all socialized, it's all just you know,
the only reason why that men and boys behave the
way they do is because we socialize them into that.
And if we socialize them differently, we'd have a totally
different outcome. And I think, you know, I read through
this body of research many times and I feel like, honestly,
anyone who's really approaching it in good faith would say
(17:35):
that this is a mix. You know, it is a
mix of nature and nurture. We will never know in
exactly what proportions. And these are always group level differences,
you know, they don't necessarily apply to anyone individuals.
Speaker 5 (17:46):
So you know, it's like height.
Speaker 1 (17:48):
You know, most men are taller than most women, but
you will find women who are six foot tall, and
you will find men who are five feet tall. And
that's true. But at a group level there are differences,
I think. And also nature and natural sort of aren't
really distinct. You know, there's the field of epigenetics, so
what genes get turned on and off by how we
socialize people. But what I ended up feeling was that, yes,
(18:13):
there are some elements of this which are hardwired biologically,
or tendencies which are biologically hardwired.
Speaker 5 (18:19):
But actually we use.
Speaker 1 (18:20):
That, we use the idea that you know, boys will
be boys, or that you know, boys are just wired
this way as an excuse to kind of not do
anything about it, you know, to do less parenting, when
actually those traits should encourage us to do more, you know,
to step in more to help boys find and girls,
you know, to help everybody find new ways to be.
Speaker 4 (18:41):
You tell a really compelling story near the end of
the book about something you observed when you took Abe
to his first day of kindergarten. Yeah, we want to
tell that story.
Speaker 1 (18:53):
Yeah, so this is like a very very tiny story,
and I think, you know, I'm always slightly hesitant to
tell it because it's the kind of thing that people
to be like so minor, so nothing. But I think
what I was trying to convey is that these kinds
of very minor things add up, right, you know, it's
a million million examples of the same thing. So what
I noticed I took him to kindergarten. He's this tiny
(19:14):
little kid, he's very anxious. It's his first day of
school and we're going through the gate and there's this
like big guy there. I think he might be a
teacher or a volunteer. I'm not sure, but so right
in front of my son in line, there's these two
girls and the guy says to the first girl.
Speaker 5 (19:30):
Hi sweetheart, you know this little.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Sweet voice, and then the next girl, Hi sweetheart, And
then my son walks through and his voice goes down.
Speaker 5 (19:38):
An entire octavity.
Speaker 1 (19:39):
He's like, oh, buddy, and gives him a high five,
and it's like he has communicated in this tiny way
that these girls are vulnerable, they're in need of protection
and nurture, and that they have a right to be scared,
they have a right to be anxious, and that adults
are going to respond to that. And he's communicated to
my son that he must tough enough, that he's a
man now, he's in the system of masculinity.
Speaker 5 (20:02):
It's not really okay that he's.
Speaker 1 (20:04):
Scared and vulnerable and he has to kind of toughen
up and get through it. And it's this tiny little moment,
and it's very well meaning, and the guy was a
lovely person. He's not trying to do anything wrong, but
it's just having boys. You notice that like right from birth.
And there's a lot of research to support this that
we kind of masculinize them in all these subtle ways
(20:26):
that we project these masculine qualities. We see them as sturdier,
we see them as tougher, we see them as less
in neative nurture and protection, and we give them less
nurture and protection as a result.
Speaker 4 (20:36):
And I think that's what the process of conditioning is.
It's little things that add up. It's a thousand little
experiences that grow into something bigger. So I found this,
you know, Yeah, it's very little, and I think your
point is important. The guy there was a kind, good
person doing the best he could, right, And yet there
is a message encoded in that, And it's interest because
(21:01):
we tend to think of boys as being stronger, but
you say that boys are by almost every measure, more sensitive, fragile,
and emotionally vulnerable. Explain that, because I think it's easy
for us to see the boys could be more aggressive
or rambunctious, right, those boy things, But in what ways
(21:21):
are they also sensitive, fragile, and emotionally vulnerable.
Speaker 1 (21:25):
Yeah, this was one of the biggest surprises to me,
and it's actually really well established in the literature. It's
not like some controversial thing that I've blacked out of nowhere.
What is really surprising is that a baby boy is
born with his brain. And when I'm talking about the
right hemisphere of his brain, which is the part that
deals with emotions, emotional self regulation, attachments, relationships, he's born
(21:47):
with that part of his brain about a month behind
a baby girl in development. So baby girl is born
naturally more emotionally resilient and independent and with less need
for a caregiver. And so you see that boys at
birth are like a little fustier, like they find it
harder to calm down. They're more stressed by difficult events
like being separated from their mothers. And you can see
(22:10):
that actually, any sort of bad thing that can happen
to a baby, like any adverse event, like you know
that the mom has postpartum depression and doesn't bond properly,
or that you know he's neglected, or that he's abused,
or he grows up in poverty, all of those things
have been shown in the data to have a bigger
effect on boys than they do on girls. Boys' brains
(22:32):
are just naturally more vulnerable to disruption in those early years,
and that carries on. But I think what happens so
boys actually need a little more care and a little
more support right from birth. But because of our stories
about masculinity, we believe that a boy is tougher and
sturdier and he needs less care. And you see all
this research about how parents like handle baby boys differently.
(22:55):
They rough house with them, they jiggle them, whereas they
tend to give girls more of this kind of caretaking touch,
you know, and they talk to girls more about their emotions,
they use more words, they use more language, and you know,
they just treat them in a slightly more nurturing and
emotive way. And so I think this like combination boys
(23:15):
need more that they get less really leads to some
problems down the line.
Speaker 4 (23:42):
So listener, consider this. You're halfway through the episode Integration reminder.
Remember knowledge is power, but only if combined with action
and integration. It can be transformative to take a minute
to synthesize information rather than just ingesting it in a
detached way. So let's collectively take a moment to pause
and refin. What's your one big insight so far and
(24:02):
how can you put it into practice?
Speaker 3 (24:04):
In your life.
Speaker 4 (24:05):
Seriously, just take a second, pause the audio and reflect.
It can be so powerful to have these reminders to
stop and be present. Cant it. If you want to
keep this momentum going that you built with this little exercise,
I'd encourage you to get on our Good Wolf Reminders
SMS list. I'll shoot you two texts a week with
insightful little prompts and wisdom from podcast guests. They're a
(24:27):
nice little nudge to stop and be present in your life,
and they're a helpful way to not get lost in
the busyness and forget what is important. You can join
at one youufeed dot net slash sms and if you
don't like them, you can get off a list really easily.
So far, there are over one and seventy two others
from the one you feed community on the list, and
(24:48):
we'd love to welcome you as well. So head on
over to oneufeed dot net slash sms and let's feed
our good Wolves together. You quote somebody who works in
this space as saying, you know, we have an epidemic
of uncared for boys. No wonder we're seeing all this
toxic masculinity when they grow up. The other thing that
we're seeing is and again this is not controversial. This
(25:11):
is very clear in the data. Boys are not thriving
in the world today. Young men are struggling in many ways.
Tell me about some of those ways.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
So, young men are struggling in education. They're falling behind
girls in pretty much every measure from kindergarten to college
through postgraduate degrees. They're enrolling in college in fewer numbers
than girls. They're much more likely to drop out of college.
Unemployment rates amongst young men are rising faster than in
any other group. Boys and young men are not socializing
(25:44):
as much as young women are. They're spending far more
time on screens and far less time socializing in person.
So the suicide rate for young men is about close
to four times the rate for young women, even though
we see in the data that young women are more
likely to report that they're depressed. So boys and men
(26:06):
are like holding this stuff inside until it's way too late.
Speaker 5 (26:09):
They're not seeking help.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
There's a serious mental health problem with young men at
the moment, but they're not getting help for it, and
they're not able to articulate it. So all these different
ways boys are not doing well.
Speaker 4 (26:21):
And so I know there are a lot of theories
about why this is, and you probably don't have an answer,
but what are the theories that make most sense to you.
Speaker 5 (26:32):
Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I think.
Speaker 1 (26:35):
You know, there's this voice from the mainly from the right,
which is like, boys don't have enough masculinity. They just
need to toughen out. What we need to sort of
toughen them up more. And back in the good old days,
they were tougher and stronger and they were doing better.
But I think that is a misreading of everything that's
going on personally.
Speaker 5 (26:52):
I think that what's going.
Speaker 1 (26:54):
On with boys at the moment is a combination of
an old problem and a new problem. So the old
problem is the old story that we've had for generations
and generations, which is, you know, the tough en up
that boys are undercard for in those sort of emotional
and nurturing ways that they're meant to squash their emotions,
and these things can lead to quite psychologically unhealthy mind
(27:18):
So all of those old pressures of masculinity I think
are really unhealthy for boys and men. Men used to
rise just because they had privilege. You know, it used
to be that they would rise to the top just
because everybody else was kept down. But now we're taking
away the barriers for everybody else. We're starting to see
that the way that we're raising boys is actually really unhealthy,
(27:38):
and that you know, without privilege, they're just kind of crumbling. Also,
I think there are sort of more modern pressures which
are like things like screens have given boys a real
kind of option to avoid the real world in a
way that they never really had before, And so I
think that it's easier. For example, you know, it's never
been a more fraught time to have sex and relationships
(28:00):
as a boy or young man. And it's never been
easier to get your phone and just watch porn, for example,
And it's very fraught for boys socializing in the real world.
They don't know how to be. It's never been easier
to just get on a video game and like live
out your heroic masculine fantasy.
Speaker 5 (28:16):
You know.
Speaker 1 (28:17):
One expect that I spoke to in the book characterized
it as a kind of combination of.
Speaker 5 (28:21):
Fear and ease.
Speaker 1 (28:23):
So it's like fearful being in the real world and
it's easeful being on a screen. Yeah, So that's one
part of it. And you know, there are also economic reasons.
I think that the types of jobs that boys used
to go into are in decline, you know, all of
those kind of manufacturing roles. So I think it's a
combination of all different kinds of things that are all
coming together in this cultural moment that we're at.
Speaker 4 (28:45):
And when we talk about this, you know, you can't
talk about it without talking about privilege, right, that men
have had over time. There was something in the book though,
that genuinely shocked me, and it was that black girls,
many measures, are doing better than white boys.
Speaker 5 (29:03):
Yes, and that was really surprising to me as well.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
This was in the chapter about education specifically, So when
it comes to success in high school, rates of going
to college, rates of postgraduate degrees, on most of these measures,
black girls.
Speaker 5 (29:18):
Are doing better than white boys.
Speaker 1 (29:19):
And so all of our understanding of systems of privilege,
you know, of race and gender are being turned on
their head. You know, if privilege leads to success, then
you would think that white boys would be doing better
than anyone because they've had every type of privilege, you know,
racial and gender privilege. And black girls, you know, you
have to hand it to them, you know, it's amazing.
They have the same limitations, the same structural obstacles, the
(29:44):
same underfunded schools, the same lack of opportunities as black boys,
but they've managed to overcome all of those and you know,
overtake white boys. And so I think what we're seeing
is that something about the way we are socializing boys
and particularly when it comes to education, is really harmful.
One thing that I would say about this sort of
(30:04):
modern moment that we're in is that, you know, we've
got all the old pressures of masculinity that all our
fathers lived with and our grandfathers, but also like this
kind of flavor of masculinity is changing as well. So
it used to be this kind of we had this
model which was like be a tough guy, to press
your emotions, but also be a family man, be a breadwinner,
be a provider, and those stories were also like really
(30:27):
part of masculinity. But our kind of model for masculinity
is becoming like more of a kind of cartoon action
hero kind of masculinity. You know, a kind of muscle man.
You see these kinds of masculinity. Influencers are all kind
of doubling down on this model. So it's like taking
all the seeds of the old model, but just turning
it into a cartoon. It's basically you know, muscles and
(30:50):
guns and cage fighting all the way down. And so
that is creating even more pressures around masculinity.
Speaker 5 (30:58):
For boys in this moment.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
I think it's even more ridiculous and even more hyped
up than it ever was in many ways.
Speaker 4 (31:05):
Yeah, and it's interesting. My son and I've talked about this.
My son is twenty six, so he's a young man,
and we've talked about how there is lots of resources
for men right out there, but they are overwhelmingly right
wing and or very very Christian, which again that's not
(31:26):
necessarily bad unless you're neither of those.
Speaker 5 (31:30):
Things, right, and then where do you go?
Speaker 4 (31:32):
Yeah, Yeah, And that is the question him and I've
talked about, is it just doesn't seem that there's places
to go to talk about what being a man is
or masculinity is in a time where the social pressures
around that are changing very rapidly.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
And I think boys are very fearful to talk about it,
and rightly so, for being called out for being overprivileged
or being entitled, or man's blending or taking up too
much space, you.
Speaker 4 (31:58):
Know, exactly. And yet it's critical, right you talk about
this idea, you say, we don't experience our lives or
emotions as part of a political class, but as individuals.
So the fact that men, for as long as we
can go back, have been privileged and have had power
is all true. And some of that trickles down to
(32:18):
young men of today. Right. It's not that there's not
some inherited benefit there, but I know that around young
people today, in a lot of spaces, I think being
a straight white man is possibly the lowest social category.
It is just a category that nobody, like you said,
nobody wants to hear from shut up, right, We've heard
(32:40):
from you for long enough, right, And that's not tenable
as an individual, right.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
And these boys who are growing up now, they haven't
lived that context, you know, And that context is real
and it's important and we have to remind boys and
men of it. And so it's really complicated. My friend
was telling me this story the other day about how Hassan,
who's I think eleven, was at school and they had
an affinity group for every sort of identity category. So
(33:06):
it was like the black students affinity.
Speaker 4 (33:08):
Group, the LGBTQ girls.
Speaker 1 (33:11):
Affinity group, and the one that they didn't have was
for boys. And it's like, well, boys have already had power,
you know, and this is meaningless to an eleven year
old boy. They defin look powerful in their own life,
they have nowhere to process it. And the thing that
kind of compounds it is that, yes, it is true
that patriarchy has given boys and men access to power.
(33:32):
That is a very real thing. But even in that system,
boys and men have been deprived of some really important things,
which is emotionality, intimacy, human connection. So, as I say
in the book, you know, under patriarchy, boys and men
have everything except the thing that's most worth having, which
(33:52):
is human connection, access to human intimacy. And so even
under patriarchy, it's not that men had all benefit and
no harm. Patriarchy harms men and boys precisely, and so
there's no way to talk about that.
Speaker 5 (34:05):
We've focused so heavily.
Speaker 1 (34:06):
Particularly, there is a rich tradition within feminism of recognizing
that patriarchy harms men and boys. But it's like we've
forgotten it all, you know, in this moment post me too.
It's just like your privilege, you get everything you're lucky.
Shut up, and that is not a healthy way for
any young person to live or to grow right.
Speaker 4 (34:26):
And there's a couple different points in the book that
you make this point that you know, what we're doing
is we're trying to sort of push men down instead
of sort of get everybody to the same level. That
doesn't really work. And you say, you talk about this
because what we're talking about you put it in one sentence.
It's hard to square male privilege with male vulnerability. You
(34:49):
have both those things happening at the same time. Men
have had privilege, do have privilege to a certain extent,
and yet men as a whole, younger ones in particular,
are extraordinarily vulnerable right now to many different problems. And
so I think you do a great job of walking
through this. I wanted to turn a little bit now
(35:11):
to something that I didn't really know about it. I
had heard the term in cell, but I didn't honestly
even know what that really meant. Yeah, before we go
into it, share with me what that is.
Speaker 5 (35:23):
Okay.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
So the word in cell stands for involuntary cell of it.
So it's a group of generally pretty young men on
the internet and often adolescent boys as well. We're pretty
young men who believe that they have been excluded from
sex and relationships. They can't have sex, they can't find
a girlfriend or a partner, and they're extremely lonely and
(35:49):
usually profoundly depressed, and often have pretty toxic politics. Not always,
but often have pretty toxic politics. So they are misogynistic.
There's sort of links between in cells and like white
supremacy and all kinds of like really repulsive.
Speaker 5 (36:07):
Ways of being in the world.
Speaker 1 (36:08):
Not all in cells are like that, and they have
all these theories about you know, they believe that it's
a kind of genetic inevitability that they will never find women.
They believe that women are terrible and they're shallow, and
they're only interested in men for their looks, And they
congregate in these online communities, and at their most extreme
they have this kind of violent fringe. So the in
(36:28):
cells and sort of in cell adjacent men have been
associated with several acts of mass violence, including mass shootings.
Some of the very prominent school shootings have been traced
back to men who have been associated with this movement.
And it's a really complicated and scary and also fascinating
and sad phenomenon. And in the book, I spend some
(36:51):
time digging into this community. So I spend a lot
of time in their spaces online, in their communities and forums,
and I go pretty deep into viewing a few of them.
Speaker 5 (37:01):
Two of them end.
Speaker 1 (37:02):
Up in the book, two of these interviews that are
really quite lengthy and detailed with these two guys. Yeah,
it was really quite an eye opening experience in a
lot of different ways.
Speaker 4 (37:11):
Yeah, what I find interesting about it is there are
many people who believe that you shouldn't even give these
people any airtime, that they're not lonely sad men, that
they're toxic, dangerous people. So that you've got that view
of the world. Now, I tend to be of the
view that generally that you know that phrase hurt people,
hurt people meaning that like you're hurting somebody, it's because
(37:34):
you are damaged right in many ways. And look at
the in cell community. Was difficult for me because a
lot of these men are feeling like they're not attractive enough,
they're not tall enough, they're not strong enough for any
women to desire them. I was a scrawny child and
a short child, and it took me really till high school,
(37:56):
before I was able to really have sort of any
success with women. Is that even a useful phrase anymore?
Did I just say something that people are gonna be like,
you can't say that?
Speaker 5 (38:06):
But I don't know. I mean it didn't like for me,
but you know, who knows, probably.
Speaker 4 (38:11):
Before I could have any relationships and go on any dates, right, Okay, Yeah,
So a lot of reading them with their complete belief
that because of their physical looks they would never find
a relationship was really saddening. And the thing that was
most sad about the community to me and you talk
about it is just the deep hopelessness in the whole thing.
(38:34):
It's this belief that nothing could get better for them.
Speaker 1 (38:39):
Yeah, And this sort of is in contrast to a
lot of what we have come to call them manisphere,
which is like the you know, all of these sort
of masculinity people online, the masculinity influencers, the Andrew Tates,
the sort of quasi self help masculinity groups on the internet.
Because most of that sort of manisfhit is predicated on
this idea that there is a thing called an alpha
(39:01):
male and that if you work hard at it, you.
Speaker 5 (39:05):
Can become that.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
So They sell this like they sort of prey on
these vulnerable boys by saying, we know that you already
feel insecure about your masculinity.
Speaker 5 (39:14):
Yes there is an alpha male.
Speaker 1 (39:16):
Yes, this person is going to get all the women
and all the success and all the status. And I
can sell you exactly the model.
Speaker 5 (39:22):
To get together.
Speaker 1 (39:23):
So pumpey and and this, And the difference between those
guys and the in cells is that the in cells
they believe all this stuff. They believe there's an alpha male,
they believe there's a hierarchy. They believe in this system,
but they've given up hope of ever climbing that ladder themselves.
And what's so interesting about them is that, so on
the one hand, there's some of the most like it
(39:44):
is toxic masculinity central over there. You go on those boards,
there is misogyny that you just wouldn't believe. There's talking
about raping and torturing women. There's like some of the
most repulsive views that you could ever imagine on those boards.
What there also is is this deep sense of vulnerability,
(40:04):
belonging and connection like brotherhood. It's almost that because they've
kind of given up on ever climbing the masculinity ladder,
that they're freed from all of its pressures as well,
so they don't have to mann up and be tough
and strong and invulnerable, and they can actually express their
emotions and their sort of love for one another in
a way that most men can't. So it's like both
(40:28):
the worst of masculinity and this kind of freedom from masculinity,
which is really interesting.
Speaker 4 (40:50):
You say that the irony hit me hard. I'd spend
all this time searching for a space in which boys
and young men felt they could disregard masculine norms, and
I thought I might find it in some kind of
feminist affinity circle or a therapy group run by a
soft spoken vegan. But instead I'd found it right here
at the heart of manisphere, in Toxic Masculinity Central. It's fascinating,
(41:11):
you say in cells are generally deeply preoccupied with their appearance.
And I think this is interesting because the narrative that
has been going on most of my adult life is
that we have a culture in which women are body
shamed and women are held up to these impossible standards,
and one hundred percent true, I also believe that men
(41:35):
have been too.
Speaker 5 (41:36):
And it's more socially acceptable.
Speaker 4 (41:38):
Yeah. I mean when I was reading comic books as
a kid, right, one of the ads was the Charles
Atlas Ads. And in the Charles Atlas Ads, he was
a weightlifter. There was a little scrawny kid on the
beach who was getting sand kicked on him, and none
of the girls would look at him. He orders the
Charles Atlas stuff, does the weightlifting, and comes back and
takes over the beach.
Speaker 5 (41:57):
Right.
Speaker 4 (41:57):
I mean that was being marketed to young boys fifty
years ago, and it's.
Speaker 1 (42:01):
Only ramped up that pressure exactly exponentially worse on boys.
Speaker 4 (42:05):
Yeah, And so I think that that is an important
part of the story that often isn't told right, or
another way in which men suffer that isn't talked about often,
because if I were to sort of say that sort
of thing generally to females, they would be like, yeah,
but nothing like we were not to the degree we were,
And I don't know whether that's true or not, right,
(42:27):
I think measuring degree doesn't matter because the level of
suffering was great for me.
Speaker 1 (42:32):
Yeah, absolutely, And I think those pressures on boys, so
it's like the muscleman, you know, the online fitness influences.
You know, you can see the sort of ideal body
shape for men has like ramped up to this ridiculous
proportions in the same way that the ideal body shape
for women has kind of shrunk to the part where right,
you know, if Barbie was sized up to a real person,
(42:53):
she'd have a feeding tube and not be able to walk.
You know, there is no human that can look like
the cgi superheroes, and you know, the online fitness influences
and that culture has really changed. But yeah, I mean
one of the insults was talking to me about short
shaming of men, for example, and you know, yes, body
image pressures on women are terrible. You know, I grew
(43:16):
up with diet culture. It's a generation of women have
been damaged by that, or several generations of women.
Speaker 5 (43:22):
But it's like at this.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Point, I feel like I would never talk about somebody
as having like a fat girl complex, you know, it
would just be unthinkable, But like to talk about somebody
as having a short man complex is completely fine, you know.
And this intel who was very short, was telling me that,
you know, online there are women telling short men to
(43:43):
kill themselves, that they would never have a short boyfriend,
that they were shaming boys for being short. It's something
they can't do anything about. And it's like, you know,
somehow we've got this notion that if we shame boys
and men, you know, that we're kind of punching up
with joke. We have this idea that it's like okay
to punch up, and it's okay to rib somebody who's powerful,
(44:05):
and you know, whereas punching down is not acceptable. But
at what point do we need to stop and say,
is this really punching up to like body shame like
whatever he was at the time, nineteen year old boy,
you know, who has serious mental health problems, no financial
or social capital. You know, these insels are like profoundly depressed, marginalized.
(44:27):
Is it really punching up to call him short, to
shame him for that? I believe not, you know, and
I think we really need to look at that. You know,
it's a blind spot, and I think we need to
stop body shaming boys and men agree.
Speaker 4 (44:40):
I mean, you shouldn't body shame anybody anybody, of course.
I mean I remember clearly an incident in middle school
of like girls laughing at me because I was too skinny.
And again, these things aren't new. I'm not a young person, right,
So I just think there's this sense that you're not
punching up to you know, any time you're shaming anybody
(45:02):
or making fun of anybody's appearance, you're being mean.
Speaker 1 (45:05):
You're being mean and you're harming that person. Yes, there's
no punching up in there. And I think again this
starts to get back to the thing we're talking about,
which is like, do you experience your life as part
of a political class or.
Speaker 5 (45:16):
As an individual.
Speaker 1 (45:17):
You know, yes, men have had power, but that makes
no difference when you're body shaming somebody who's you know,
anybody for anything.
Speaker 4 (45:26):
Yeah, and you say this might be inching as closer
to a quality, but it doesn't feel like progress right
in the sense that like now men are being shamed
at a level that women are. It's not progress, right exactly.
Speaker 1 (45:36):
We're not doing things better and we should be learning
from what we did with women, what we got wrong.
And I think also because things have historically been so
bad for women in that area, we have now like
a really robust, like body positivity movement. We have like
language to describe it, we know how to talk about
body shaming, we know how to call it out. We
know how to like fight back, and I think the
(45:59):
boys and men just did know how to even start
to fight back, and they felt that when they did,
they were shamed for you know, well, back in your box,
you've got too much privilege. You know, women have suffered
worse from you, don't, you know, don't call it out.
And this, this insult was telling me. You know, he
wanted to go to therapy and to find a therapist.
I mean, partly he couldn't afford it, which is a
(46:20):
huge problem, but also he was scared because he felt
that if he articulated his problems to a therapist, they
would shame.
Speaker 5 (46:27):
Him and say, you know, well, women have had it
far worse than you. Now.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
I believe that a good therapist would never do that.
But at the same time, the fact that he's fearful
of that speaks to something very real.
Speaker 4 (46:37):
It speaks to something very real, and it also speaks
to the cultural messaging that he's getting from other men. Right.
I mean, as I was reading about the insults, the
layer upon layer of mistruth or misunderstanding was painful to read.
And one of the things I was thinking about is like,
there's a mistake that's being made there. And there's often
(46:59):
something in psychological literature called the three p's, and it
has to do with how you explain things, right. You
take things to be permanent, you think they're personal, and
you think they're pervasive, right, And what these poor boys
are doing is they're taking the fact that some women
only want tall men, and that is true, that is true,
to mean all women only want tall men. They're taking
(47:20):
these things to be pervasive, and that's the big mistake
I think that's happening there is. It's not that they're
not right some of the time. They're not right all
the time, though. I mean, and that's just a general
thing I think we do across the board, is we
just take an incident of a person on the left
acting badly and we say that's the left, it's pervasive,
(47:42):
or somebody on the right doing that, and it just
doesn't do any of us good.
Speaker 5 (47:46):
I think that's true.
Speaker 1 (47:46):
And I think we've just got to the point where
we've just lost empathy for anybody.
Speaker 5 (47:51):
You know. It's just like, yes, I was talking to
these insults and there was.
Speaker 1 (47:54):
Just layer upon layer of pain and trauma and terrible
message and half truths and you know, all of these things,
and these people are really suffering. And I think the
more we say we're not going to talk to them,
we don't want to humanize them. You know, this is
a whole thing, you know, we don't want to humanize
these people because you know, and there's this argument which
(48:16):
is like, you know, if an Arab Muslim commits an
act of violence, we call him a terrorist, and but
if a sort of white man, we say he has
mental health problems. And there's truth in that for sure,
but like what we've decided is that we're going to
do about that is this like race to the bottom.
Speaker 5 (48:33):
So it's like, okay, let's.
Speaker 1 (48:34):
Dehumanize everyone, you know, rather than trying to humanize the
Arab Muslim and see, well, what's going on for him,
and like how did he get to this place and
why does he want to and you know, he's a
real person who probably got into terrorism through poverty and
terrible messaging and terrible ideas about masculinity as well. Actually,
let's just dehumanize the white guy as well to like,
(48:55):
you know, and I think that is just this terrible mistake.
Speaker 5 (48:58):
It's a race to the bottom.
Speaker 4 (49:00):
Yeap, the other thing that you mentioned I thought was
very interesting was that you say, a wide body of
research shows that it's not masculinity itself that makes men violent,
but the sense of shame that they are not masculine enough.
Oh yes, wow, And I actually resonate with that personally also,
not that I'm violent, but I can share a little
bit about that in a minute, but say a little
(49:21):
bit more.
Speaker 1 (49:21):
Yeah, this was really fascinating to me. And it's one
of those things that you see in the research and
it feels so profoundly true. Yeah, when you hear it,
you're like, yes, of course, because there's this like impossible
standard for masculinity that boys and men feel that they
have to meet, and there's always going to be inadequacy
built into that. No human man can be the kind
(49:43):
of superhero, you know, the model that they're expected to be,
so they will always fall short. But some fall more
short than others, you know, and some people are more
successful in this system than others. But it comes it
with built in shame. And the research shows it's this
measure called masculine discrepancies stress, which means that when a
(50:04):
man believes that he falls short of the standard for manhood.
He is far more likely, you know, when he feels
shame about his inability to live up to masculinity standards,
then he's more likely to commit pretty much all kinds
of violence, sexual violence, domestic violence, you know what they
call intimate partner violence, assault with a weapon, assault of
(50:25):
all kinds. And you can see it's that anger, it's
that shame, it's the shame cycle that.
Speaker 5 (50:31):
Just keeps going and going and going. It rangs so true.
Speaker 1 (50:34):
And this is why, you know, we talk about all
these extremes, you know, the in cells, the manisphere that
you know, the sex offender and everything. But I think
this is so built into the culture at every level.
We give boys right from the beginning this kind of
superhero myth about who they're.
Speaker 5 (50:49):
Supposed to be.
Speaker 1 (50:50):
So all boys are operating with this impossible pressure, this
impossible standard, and so I think, you know, we really
need to look at what we're asking of men and boys.
Speaker 5 (50:59):
And that's why I.
Speaker 1 (51:00):
Don't like this masculinity framework, even when it's positive, even
when we're talking about positive masculinity, we just keep on
reinforcing this idea that the most important thing is to
be masculine.
Speaker 4 (51:11):
I just am very non violent by nature. So I'm
lucky in that way. But I resonated with this because
again this is mostly stuff as a young man. You know,
I wasn't quote unquote masculine enough, right that what I
just did was I just got in lots of trouble.
That was my way of being tough is I'm in trouble, right,
I'm not afraid of the law, you know. And again
(51:33):
it wasn't violent, but it certainly wasn't It wasn't pro
social behavior, you know, it didn't help me or society,
And it was this I can see it now, this
semi conscious attempt to be like, but I am tough.
Speaker 1 (51:47):
To compensate, right, And so that's a sort of very
minor and you know, relatively healthy example of the same
thing that you see with say, school shooters. You know,
when you read the manifestos written by these guys, it's
this like utter shame. They've internalized this message that they're
supposed to be this kind of glorious masculine hero and
(52:08):
then the shame of like falling short and then something
like a school shooting. It's like this very obvious, splashy
trope of masculinity. You know, you get a gun and
you shoot a bunch of people. It's like a way
of reclaiming this masculine status. And that's like the most
tragic and awful example of it. But you see it,
you know, you see lesser versions of it everywhere.
Speaker 4 (52:29):
Yeah, well, I think this is a good place for
us to wrap up. You and I are going to
continue talking in the post show conversation because we just
didn't get to at all. What ways this has caused
you to parent your boys differently? And so I'd love
to take this into some actual practical examples. Listeners if
you would like to hear this post show conversation and
(52:51):
many other post show conversations which some people tell me
are the best conversations, as well as ad free episodes,
and to support podcast that you care about, you could
go to one you feed, dot net slash join and
become part of our community. Ruth, thank you so much
for coming on. I thought the book was so well done.
I mean your last book was too. You're just you're great.
Speaker 5 (53:13):
Oh, thank you. It's been such a pleasure to get
to talk to you again. So thank you.
Speaker 2 (53:33):
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Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this
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(53:54):
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Host
Eric Zimmer
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