#664 - Christine Emba - Talking To A Feminist About Masculinity - Modern Wisdom: Summary & Transcript

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Podcast Summary: Modern Wisdom - Episode #664: Christine Emba on Masculinity

Overview In this episode of *Modern Wisdom*, host Chris Williamson interviews Christine Emba, an opinion columnist at The Washington Post and author, who discusses her influential article on modern masculinity. Emba's piece has generated significant attention and sparked a conversation about the challenges men face today, particularly in a cultural landscape dominated by female perspectives on masculinity.

Key Themes and Discussions

The Crisis of Masculinity
Crisis Definition: Emba discusses the term "crisis of masculinity," stressing that many men feel lost in the current societal framework. This crisis is evidenced by declining educational achievements, rising health issues, and stagnant wages among men, particularly those from working-class backgrounds.
Statistics:
Women outnumber men in college, with only 74 degrees awarded to men for every 100 awarded to women.
A significant percentage of college dropouts during the pandemic were men.
Men account for 75% of deaths from despair (suicide, drug overdose).

Changing Gender Roles
Evolving Expectations: Emba highlights that traditional masculine roles (protector, provider) are being questioned. As societal values shift, many young men find themselves without clear role models or guidance on what it means to be a man today.
Impact of Feminism: The conversation about masculinity is complicated by the feminist movement, which, while beneficial for women, has led some men to feel disenfranchised. Emba notes that men often feel they are being blamed for historical patriarchal structures without acknowledgment of their current struggles.

The Role of Women in Discussing Masculinity
Narrative Control: Emba critiques the predominance of female voices in the discourse around masculinity, questioning why the conversation is often led by women discussing men's issues rather than men themselves.
Cultural Perception: The media portrayal of men tends to focus on negative stereotypes, reinforcing the idea that masculinity is toxic without offering positive alternatives.

The Need for Positive Male Role Models
Role Models: Emba emphasizes the importance of male role models who can provide guidance and support to younger men. The absence of positive male figures can lead to feelings of dispossession and confusion about identity.
Initiation and Mentorship: Historically, boys learned about manhood through mentorship from older males. The decline of such mentorship opportunities has contributed to the identity crisis many young men face today.

Addressing the Issues
Cultural Shifts: Both Emba and Williamson discuss the need for a cultural shift that allows for open dialogue about men’s issues without fear of backlash or stigmatization.
Community Support: Emba advocates for communities to support boys and men, providing spaces where they can learn and grow. This includes fostering environments that allow for mentorship and positive male bonding.

Responses to Emba’s Article
Public Reaction: Emba's article received mixed responses, with some praising its empathetic approach to discussing men's issues, while others criticized it for perpetuating the idea that men are victims.
Intersection of Feminism and Masculinity: Emba notes that men feel caught between the feminist narrative and their struggles, leading to a reluctance to engage in discussions about masculinity.

Key Takeaways

The conversation around masculinity must evolve to include both critique and constructive solutions.
There is a pressing need for positive male role models and mentorship to guide younger generations.
Cultural narratives around masculinity often marginalize men's voices and feelings, leading to a crisis of identity.
Addressing the issues men face requires collaboration and understanding from all genders, moving beyond zero-sum thinking.

Conclusion The episode underscores the complexities surrounding modern masculinity and the urgent need for open, inclusive discussions that empathize with men's struggles while promoting positive role models and healthy expressions of masculinity. Emba’s insights challenge listeners to rethink societal narratives and engage with the pressing issues affecting men today.

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This summary encapsulates the key points discussed in the episode, providing a clear and structured overview of Christine Emba's insights on masculinity and the current challenges men face in society.

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Transcript

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0:00You wrote an article a week ago that I'm guessing you didn't intend or didn't expect to get quite as much attention as it did. I really, really did not. I had been working on the article, men are lost for a couple of months beforehand, and I knew that there was sort of growing discussion about the crisis of men in general. I'd read Richard Reef's book, I've been following, Scott Galloway and others on their podcasts. But it seems like the piece was almost the permission that some people needed to finally talk about the issue out in the open. And they were really surprised to see it in a mainstream publication too.

0:40And also at length, I will admit that it is quite long. But I've been really excited by the response. I think the reason that it needed to be so long is because having this discussion is so far away from the typical cultural zeitgeist that you have to take people there one step at a time. You know Richard Reeves talks about this, he has to prostrate himself on that. We're not saying that women shouldn't have their focus on them and we are not trying to take away any and we must remember that the problems of the LGBT trans community are also. And finally after we've gone through this big rigmarole, we can actually get to the conversation of talking about men.

1:18So there is no such thing as having a short article about the crisis of modern men because it leaves so many holes that people who want to interpret it in an ungenerous light are just immediately going, oh, so you think that such and such. It's like, no, obviously not. Yeah, yeah, you have to leave space for all of the caveats and the like not necessarily shut us to different groups. Like, and we're acknowledging that this kind of man and like that kind of woman, et cetera, et cetera. But I mean, it was also long for me at least. And honestly, it was longer. My editors did cut it down because there are just so many different threads that are coming together in this question.

2:00Another columnist at the post wrote to me and she was like, you know, it almost feels like you could draw a dotted line from just this question of what's happening with men to kind of everything that's happening in our moment, whether it's like politics or religion or like all these different trends. So there are just so many kind of angles to this question and sources of discontent and maybe solutions that it's hard to fit it into one piece. I guess that's why Rickard wrote a book. What is happening with men nowadays? Well, we, I mean, we throw around the phrase the crisis of masculinity. But I actually do think that there is a crisis.

2:42I mean, explaining it out is also a long process, too, because again, so many factors. But basically, we can start by saying that society has changed a lot over the past 30 to 40 years. And many of those challenges have been great for some groups, for women, especially. But they have not necessarily been so great for men, especially working class men. But men of all kinds seem to be feeling a sort of malaise. I mean, we can tick off a couple of statistics, right? When it comes to education, first, women were finally allowed to go to college, which is great. Very supportive of that. But right now, in most colleges, we're seeing that women, you know, outnumber men hugely for every 100 undergraduate degrees, bachelor's degrees that women get, men only get 74.

3:33And you know, we saw a huge wave of kind of college dropouts, basically during the COVID -19 pandemic. like when you look at the data, 70 % of those who just sort of like gave up in less school were men. You can look at health statistics. So you know, we've talked about deaths of despair, deaths from suicide, alcohol and dust illness or drug overdose, three out of four deaths of despair are men. You can talk about, you know, wages and workplace achievement. So wages have stagnated for men since basically the 1970s, either stagnated or fallen for all men, but the top of the economic ladder. And I think that this has just huge ramifications for how men feel about their place in the world, or rather don't feel about their place in the world.

4:27Women are thriving. The economy is moving away from labor -intensive jobs towards jobs that reward soft skills and social skills and credentials. Many men are feeling a little bit lost. They are not sure what role they play, especially when there are these traditional archetypes that men used to play in our society of protector, provider, especially. Now, 50 % of women say they make as much as or more within their partner, women can have children by themselves through artificial reproductive technology. And then, of course, the LGBTQ movement has achieved more acceptance in society, but it also seems to have kind of made the question of gender even more unclear if you can change your gender if sex doesn't really mean anything.

5:21What does it mean to be a man, actually? And so a lot of young men, especially feeling, as I said, lost, like they don't know where to fit and they're kind of looking for role models of what a man should be or could be in this moment. And coming up short, except for some pretty bad examples, which I also talk about in the piece. Yeah, there's an interesting one -two punch, I think, that has kind of happened. The first being a structural change that has disadvantaged young men or at least meant that they have been able to take advantage of their talents quite as much you mentioned. We've gone from a brown base to a brain -based economy.

6:03Credentialism is much more important now. Conscientiousness, skews, female. Girls are better at setting still through the time that their teenagers and adolescents and remembering to get their homework in on time. Two to one, basically females to males, completing a four -year U .S. college degree. It gets even worse if you you look at master's level, seven times more men dropped out of college during COVID than women did. So, you know, all of these things on top has created a structural environment in which men aren't exactly thriving. And then the sort of second punch has been a loss culturally, I think, of their position of what does it mean to be a man, you know, if gender is up for debate and if your biological sex and the person that you show up as in world is available to be discussed.

6:49Then what does it mean to be a man? Like literally that question, you know, there's a very famous documentary called What Is A Woman, but What Is A Man is an equally valid question when we're talking about the roles of men. And it's not just I am a man who has this sort of physical biological manifestation, it's the symbolic representation of what does it mean? How should I show up? What are the archetypes and the virtues and the values that I should rely on? what are the things that one times get tough? I should believe in myself. What is greater than me, the grand narrative that explains my life as a male?

7:24And it's that one too that I think has caused a lot of men to feel very dispossessed. They feel like they're not really getting much sympathy. I think you have this really, really great quote where you say, many young men feel their difficulties are often dismissed out of hand as whining from a patriarchy that they don't feel a part of. And it definitely seems like modern men are sort of being made to pay for the sins of the advantages of their fathers and grandfathers while not really feeling like they get any themselves now. Yeah, that was a big part of what I wanted to talk about in this piece because I think another factor that's making men feel dispossessed or not sure of what they belong to is that our culture has also shifted and I think many of these shifts have been good things again like it's it's great that we've recognized that you know, sexual assault is real, but you need to get consent.

8:17The Me Too movement was a good thing. It outed a lot of predators. At the same time, I think especially in in media culture and in progressive spaces, frankly, there's been this reflexive push to say, you know, the future is female. Men suck. Men are garbage. Masculinity is toxic. those are kind of acceptable things to say now. And telling somebody that the person they are, like that they are toxic. Obviously doesn't make them feel good. Obviously doesn't make them feel accepted by society. And when you say, okay, men are toxic, men are toxic, masculine is toxic. What's the alternative? Like what does a good masculinity look like?

9:04And that picture isn't really being made very clear. I mean, you look at media representations of men and even popular TV shows. And I feel like the most common archetype right now is the male schlaub. He lives in his mom's basement and just... Almost seems so griffin. Right. Yeah, they're not like father figures that one looks up to or respects. They're sort of people you would make fun of or look down on. And I feel like this comes at... I think the expense of a productive dialogue actually pushes men out of the conversation and opens up a space of vulnerability that is often filled by bad actors.

9:45It's also not really, I think, fair, actually, but you were going to say something. Yeah, just that Richard Reeves again talked about this. He talked me about this over a year ago now, where he said that as soon as you throw out the term toxic masculinity, it causes so many men to just check out of the conversation. If you're going to tell me that there is something in me, which is like original sin and it needs to be expunged from me, I need to be exercised of my toxic masculinity, what do you think? You're really going to allow, you really expect men to engage in a conversation after the first thing you've done is say that a core part of them is something that's inherently toxic.

10:30And yeah, you know, putting forward the a positive view for men has been as the decrease in that has been the same, I would say, almost perfectly in line with the increase in what I would class as a patronizing view of women's success. So the difference between the two Mulan films is a perfect example of this. In the first one, And she's small and not as strong, but she's crafty and she works harder and she overcomes and she uses a size to her advantage. And through hard work and determination, she tells a tale of someone with a disadvantage that overcomes it to now be as good or even better than people who had more advantages than them.

11:10You look at the most recent Willan film and she's just born to be perfect. She's more talented. The only restriction that she ever faces is that the men don't believe in her enough and that there's some sort of oppression out there. or the second Dr. Strange film where the Central American daughter of a lesbian couple has the most power in the entire world and the only reason that she doesn't have it is because she doesn't believe in herself enough. Like that to me is not an inspiring story to tell young women either. Like, you know, we need to be able to build a society with resilient girls who have archetypes that they can look up to too, who overcame difficult things, who don't expect the world to bend to their every whim and that if they do encounter any sort of difficulty, that this is like an aberration, that this is the sign that there's something wrong with the world.

11:57It's like, no, this is baked into what the world is. The world is a series of challenges. So I think that we, it's been this very interesting like men and women have almost sort of like passed each other in high five, or maybe not high five on the way past, where the role models for men have become increasingly less inspirational. Ostensibly the role models for women have become more inspirational, but I don't actually think that they are. I think that it's like a very fragile, thinly veiled form of like pedestalization. Yeah, that's such an interesting example. I mean, I did a lot of interviews with young men for this piece.

12:32And one thing that a guy who I mentioned at the end of this piece, his name is Ronan Bray, said to me, really stood out. He was talking about role models and where he saw messages about how to be a man. And he was like, you know, I see all the stuff for women now, like women, you can be astronauts, you can be scientists, you can be race car drivers, you can do everything. And that's really cool. But at the same time, I hear as a man, like, man, this is what you shouldn't do. Get out of the way. Stop talking over women and holding them back. But there's no, like, kind of positive, like things that you can be for men.

13:13It seems of all transferred. And then also I think you're onto something too when you talk about this sort of almost thin thin veneer that is on some of these aspirational messages that are that are given to women. I think one other thing that we see in our our moment our modern moment is an ethos of gender neutrality. An idea that actually gender doesn't matter we shouldn't talk about it. Women can do anything that men can do, men can do anything that women can do. Really, you don't need to be a good man or a good woman. There's no such thing. Just be a good person. We're all kind of the same.

13:52Just be a good one. And I find that rather grating because I simply don't believe that's realistic or that useful. A, most people don't want to live in an androgynous society where everyone is the same. But, B, I think that there is something specific about the embodied existence of being a man or a woman. And there is lots of overlap in sort of personality traits and physical traits and things that the two sexes share. But there are also differences. And part of being a good man or a good woman, in my opinion at least, is kind of recognizing recognizing those differences and recognizing ones, strengths, weaknesses, skills, etc.

14:36and figuring out how to use those specific to you traits well. And so if you're a man, it's likely that you are probably stronger than women and old ladies. So being a good man would suggest that you figure out what your duties and responsibilities are when it comes to that thing about being a man, not just being like, well, we're all just be good. It's so, you're right to say as well that this is a commonly rolled out criticism of people that say, ah, men and women, they're more similar than they are different. And you go, well, if you look at some traits on their own, yes, yes. There is tons and tons of overlap in the middle of the distribution.

15:19Some of them, like strength, for instance, hand strength, basically they don't touch that like the weakest man and the strongest woman on average would be like, they even and they wouldn't be close to each other. But when you actually fold them all together, when you look at the suite of traits overall, when it's not just aggression, but it's also height and it's neuroticism and it's extroversion, it's conscientiousness and it's the, the, the, the, the, the, these things just separate out and this isn't because of socialization, this is because of inbuilt innate biological differences. Now, are they perpetuated through culture?

15:50Yeah, absolutely. But when do you think the culture came from? But it wasn't just created out of nothing, it was built off the back of a biological framework. And you're right as well. It is the difference between trying to make men and women equal and trying to make men and women the same. It's aiming for Androgyny rather than equality. And that has been a very rapid slippery slope to say, well, there are no differences. And because men held positions of esteem and advantage for quite a long time, what I think it made was almost like an echo So that almost taught women or people that were pro women, that because men had held these positions, the way to get those positions of advantage was for women to emulate the men things that men were doing, yet precisely.

16:39Yeah, so I wrote a book, Rethinking Sex, A Provocation. It came out last spring. And it was basically about our sexual culture, our relationship culture, and questions of consent and sexual ethics. But this is one thing that I spent a lot of time thinking about and writing about in the book actually This idea that the feminist movement kind of shifted over time in a way that I don't necessarily think was positive You know original feminists were What they said really was that you know women are important women should be respected as much as men are respected women should be allowed to partake in society as much as men are but women should also be respected as as women for being themselves.

17:23And then solely over the years, we've shifted through this kind of like playboy to girl boss culture where it's like, okay, well, men have a lot of power. And in fact, honestly, kind of the worst men tend to have a lot of power to be a successful woman, just be more like the most powerful man who's often like the worst kind of man. And so it's like women be a girl boss, which is still a boss, like instead of being a playboy, you're just a playgirl. Yeah, you're just like thinking of the same things instead of being respected for like your actual self. And that hasn't been healthy for women either.

18:02But when the same thing is asked of men, you know, it's not healthy for them themselves. No, I think modern feminism told women that true freedom was achieved by working like your father and having sex like your brother. I think that that's, and I know that your friend, the Louise Perry and Mary Harrington, and I was chatting to both of them a lot over the last year about this very topic. And the failings of modern feminism, what it really hasn't given to women, that it maybe had the opportunity to, and then how it's also, to bring it back to the men conversation, I think a lot of men see feminism as overreaching from beyond equality into retribution.

18:43I think that they feel like feminism. And it seems to me like there is a good amount of like women out there who would class themselves as feminists that are almost looking to get one over on men because now there are upper hands culturally that could perhaps be used to push a particular sort of narrative. And it doesn't surprise me that men feel like dispossessed from that movement too, which which creates this recursive antagonism between the sexes that men feel like that they're being mistreated and women are the only ones whose problems are being seen. So I'm going to either retreat or become more misogynist, which means that I'm going to retreat further, which means that they're gonna dislike me more.

19:24And it keeps on going and going and going. So going back to the conversation, the cultural milieu around this, why are people struggling to advocate for the problems of boys and men so easily? Well, so really quickly, just there are some data points that actually totally support your thesis about this, this retrobative. I knew it. I knew it wasn't just pro science. I knew it wasn't. Yeah, no, I mean, a recent survey came out that showed that among Gen Z men right now in America, fewer than half of them would say that feminism has been good for American in society, which is a pretty startling statistic, actually.

20:06For Gen Z, the like, soluboid blue -killed cook, cook, cook, generate, and yeah, precisely. Yeah, and then there was a survey done by Ipsos. It was a global survey about sort of the state of gender relations around the world, but you can isolate out countries. And in the United States, I think it was 43 % of men agreed with exactly the statement you made that the push for women's equality has gone so far that it has turned into discrimination against men. And so almost half of men in America apparently think this, which is something that should be maybe a little bit alarming to women and to progressives to anyone who wants cooperation between the sexes.

20:48But that kind of leads to your next question. You know, why is this discourse so hard to have in society? You know, that was one of the tough things about writing this piece in a way, because kind of as you were saying at the beginning, like you want to respect all sides and you also don't want to be read as something other than what you are. I think that there is, first of all, an unfortunate tendency in politics and American politics, specifically, to view things as very zero some. You know, like, okay, well, we have spent some time helping women, you know, the feminist movement has succeeded in some ways, but the gains are still real fragile, you know, as we saw when the DOBS decision came down and abortion rights were rolled back, we saw this during the COVID -19 pandemic, like women had entered the workforce and then they just started dropping out because they didn't have support during COVID -19.

21:49So there's this feeling that like, okay, we kind of just started moving forward for women. If we turn our attention to men now, then I guess we're just women are over. Like women are not going to get anything anymore. We're not going to focus on them. And so there's a resistance to changing the focus because it's due to like, we can either help one sex or help the other. I don't think that's true. In fact, I think that the sex is rely on each other to support each other. And if one is in a tfloppyra, the other one's going to be in trouble too. I also think that there is an unfortunate mixed association.

22:28So the right has really, like the political right has kind of been first to the men question. And sort of right leaning or right coded influencers have been the ones to talk about men's issues the most. And unfortunately, some of them have used, you know, talking about men's issues as an excuse to say like, well, what we really need to do to help men and to give them jobs again is to put women back into the home, you know, and, you know, it's actually a bad thing that women can provide for themselves right now. So we need to like make sure that women have to get married to be economically successful, like that sort of thing.

23:08And no one really The progressives, I think, many people, moderates don't want to be associated with that. And there's a feeling that if you start talking about men, there's kind of like a sideways look that one gets where it's like, oh, are you like, oh, you're one of those? There is 100 percent. There is 100 percent of branding problem for men's advice at the moment. I mean, it's one of the advantages of a black woman that you are able to say things without jumping through quite so many hoops or caveats, then I would, with the way that I present. Every single time that I come on to have a conversation like this, someone in the comments that has never seen my stuff before and doesn't actually know what I talk about, will accuse me of being a budget andry -tate.

23:54I'm like, look, I am so blue -pilled in the eyes of Manosphere that I'm a cook. But I'm so bigoted in the eyes of Guardian readers that I'm unspeakable. So, really, really managing to slice through the middle there, but that's another reason why even I've spoken about men, women, the problems that we're facing at the moment with masculinity and dating for a long time never, ever once identified with the manosphere. Despite the fact that like, ostensibly, I should do, right? Like if the manosphere means anything, it means people talking to men online about the problems that men face and like how to be a good man.

24:32You are literally doing that. And yet, branding problem, massive branding problem. Yeah, totally. And I mean, that was an interesting thing about publishing this piece too, right? Like I kind of began to feel that. I honestly do think that it is that you're totally right. It is the case that someone like me kind of had to write this piece, it'd be taken seriously. But at the same time, I kind of am feeling a little bit of blowback from men who read the piece. They're like, what? A woman talking about men's business. She has, she knows nothing. I'm not going to read this. And it's like funny to get that response from from both sides.

25:09So it's I can only imagine actually trying to be taken seriously. This is a male disadvantage. The male disadvantage that you're facing here. Oh man. And toxic misandry. Yeah, so this is something that I've noticed a lot, right? Especially over the last couple of months. Why is it the case that the conversation about masculinity in mainstream media is being so dominated by women? It's a comment on the state of discourse that most of the voices are being given mainstream platforms about masculinity. All of them, almost all of them are women. There was that the masculinity issue that got released by Politico.

25:43Did you read that? I did and it's all women. Yeah. It's like seven articles, seven different essays, not single man anywhere on there. And also the fact that your piece has resonated so much suggests this is an issue. to anybody that doesn't think that there is a problem with men at the moment, explain to me why this article of yours has exploded. But yeah, what do you think is going on here? Is it just the the softly, softly acceptable, fluffy face of being able to talk about men's problems without being accused of being a budget andry -tate? Is that, are you the thin end of the wedge so that this conversation is not...

26:20I'm either soft pianosphere. You're a gateway drug. You're a gateway drug. I don't, I don't, I hope not, but maybe I don't know. That's a, that is a really interesting question. And it's something that, honestly, I wanna sit with in more detail. I have a, okay, what I'm gonna say now is theoretical. So this is just like me spinning on a cloud. Gross science, that's fine, that's the best fight. Chick science, girl science. Whatever you find. Yeah, so I think that when you're looking for examples of positive masculinity, the best and most positive masculine examples or men are usually not just out there talking about themselves and their problems in the public square, like that's kind of not what they do.

27:19they're just sort of they go about their business. So that's one thing and often the people in the manuscript, like the loudest people, the Andrew Tates and to some extent Jordan Peterson who really you know started from a place where I was like, oh, interesting. And now is maybe a little off the rails. You'd note that they are kind of unusual rather attention -womping figures and that is that is why they're in public. I would also say perhaps that it has something to do with just media culture overall. I think media is a slightly more feminized space maybe or at least like the almost soft commentary space like when we're talking about questions of like society and social cues and social norms.

28:09that space seems to be heavier on the female lens than other spaces might be. And then let's see, what was my last take on this one? I mean, in general, I also think that not necessarily in the media space, but in general, I'm sorry if this is very gender essentialist of me, but I do think that women spend more time thinking about these sort of like social cues and gender cues and not necessarily taking them for granted. You know, there is sort of a whole sphere of academic study now that's women's studies and it's just about how identities are formed, what they look like. And my senses that men don't spend as much time thinking in abstract about like, what to our friendships and communities look like, what is the space here?

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29:13And so like that sort of analysis often falls swim in. And then the last thing actually, and maybe this is most relevant to me, but you know, I started thinking about this question a long time ago, but my thinking about like, wait, what is going on here? was supercharged when I started writing about sex and relationships and dating culture, which women, I think, definitely talk more about and have more space to write about. And I think that is the place where the issue of what is going on with men exactly, we need to figure that out because they're really either acting up or not acting at all.

29:51Oh, like became very obvious to women who are like trying to date men, I think like why is everyone so terrible all of a sudden or not all of a sudden? Something has changed. What is it? And so women maybe sort of thinking about this earlier in some sense. There's some incredible percentage of psychologists that are female. It's like 70 plus percent, I think, of psychologists are female. And broadly, the closest area I think that we're talking to around this is in the world of evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, its social sciences, you know, it's the integration of what we are and the world culture, how does that all work?

30:31And you know, that I guess maybe is even in terms of academia dominated by women. I would disagree that women probably do have a predisposition toward thinking about people rather than things. And I think that this, even though it's kind of a things abstract conversation, is more people than it is thingsy. But I also agree that the conversation about dating was what got me into the thinking about masculinity and men's issues too. And you touch on this really, really well in your piece, which is to the extent that any vision of non -toxic masculinity is proposed, it ends up sounding more like stereotypical femininity than anything else.

31:14The problem being that even the women who support this narrative probably don't want to have sex with the men who are following it. And there is an issue that the men who women are hoping to date kind of aren't there, even while those same women may be sort of carrying the cards and the placards saying that they want more of them around. It's a very odd sort of juxtaposition. There's some definitely some cognitive dissonance going on there, I think. Yeah, totally. I mean, I even say in the piece that, you know, when Scott Galway said something like that, I cringed in recognition. And this is something that's come up as I've discussed the piece even with men where it's like, okay, well, women do want like men who are sensitive and aware and, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

32:01And then the guys were like, do you really? Because it kind of seems like women always date bad boys. And I don't actually think that that's exactly true. But there, there is something to do as I say, not as I do. Maybe that's not exactly what I do, not as I say. Yeah, basically. Yeah. It's funny. There's a friend of mine who's a writer for a conservative magazine and I have like joked about this where she's like, you know, I meet all these liberal women who say that they want a guy who like opens doors and like like, is works out, whatever. It's like, maybe you need to start dating conservatives.

32:43That's what a conservative is called. Well, you saw that article when Superviral a couple of weeks ago, which is like a liberal girl realized that the only guys that she found attractive had the opposite set of political beliefs to the ones that she did. And there's a really great study from Catherine Sammon. She looked at the front cover models of dark romance. You know, you have 50 shades of grey comes out. It kind of breaks open this entire new literary genre. I'm someone who's been on the cover of like 10 or more dark romance novels. So I can speak from this as a position of authority. Wait, really?

33:22Yeah, yeah, I went through a brief period. Went through a brief period of that. Didn't realize before I actually did it, I didn't realize that that person wasn't just a cool image on the front, but is actually supposed to be the protagonist. And then after I got my first one, and it got USA Today something something Kerry Lake. It's called Ricochet if people want to Google it. There's a lot more I'm not gonna give you those. But my mum asked me for a copy of it. And I was like, mum, like this is not Harry Potter. Like I don't think she knew. She was like, oh my son's on the front cover of a novel.

33:54Like that's so amazing. I'm like, no, mum, I'm not having you read this dark romance thing with me on the front cover. It's your son. Anyway, we are the sidetracked by a disgusting image. They tried during, so you have 50 shades, breaks everything open, talk romance comes out. Then in the early 2010s, there is a pushback against, why do we need to have these lumberjack men or like the big buff policeman or whatever or the billionaire on the front cover? We should put more sort of, feminized more agreeable men on the front cover and they did and the books didn't sell. The books didn't sell well because even though that might be publicly what is popular for women to uphold and pedestrianize, that's not necessarily what they're attracted to.

34:43There is a caveat here to add in which is the thing that you want to fantasize about is not necessarily the thing that you want to marry and there's a big difference there. You know, like men too, like she's for the streets is all well and good if it's not for a one night stand, right? Like she's not for the streets if she's ready willing and able. So both men and women fantasize sexually about things that they don't necessarily optimize for when it comes to a long -term relationship. So it's not strictly true, right? Like there are certain things that women may even optimize against, like the hypermasculine side, the super -disagreable man may be very sexually arousing but not super useful to be in a long -term relationship with because it would probably do your head in.

35:24But yeah, my point being that stated and revealed preferences sometimes clash up against each other. Yeah, and there is something interesting too about sort of subtle and ambient pressure to state a certain preference that you may not even hold, right? I think, you know, we talk about our society and there is a sort of a bias towards, and I think in some ways can be a good bias towards inclusivity, towards a sort of non -gendered, like, open -rolled, positive, inclusive atmosphere where anyone can do whatever they want. And so even if you are a woman who, like, I don't know, wants a super masculine looking, you know, like, cover boy, like to be a good feminist say or to feel like a good modern or a good progressive or something, you'll probably still say in public like, yeah, I want to date another, I want a date of feminist, you know, like I want to date someone who is evolved.

36:26I need to date a man who goes to therapy. Is that actually true? You may not be true, but like who's going to go out there in public and say, like, yeah, I want to, I want to date like a throwback. I want to date a caveman. That's my preference as a modern woman and worry about being looked at sideways again, going back to the sort of like people who talk about like the men problem. It's like, oh, are you want to, hmm, questionable? Yeah, it's a branding problem. It's a branding problem. Yeah. That's what the humanosphere fundamentally doesn't need to do more YouTube livestreams. What it needs is to hire a marketing agency.

37:02That's the, I really, really good rebranding agency and if you managed to do that then all of the typically masculine guys would be getting laid more as well because they wouldn't be so besmirched by whatever the sort of culture is saying about them. But yet you nail it I think. I had a really great conversation that I'll send to you once I'm done. It'll be up later this week with a guy called George who runs the Tin Men on Instagram. British, British dude, unapologetically from the left presents in a like not super masculine way, but is absolutely vehemently pro -men. And it's so interesting talking to someone that's a card carrying liberal who also is unforgiving in how pro -male he is talking about the problems of male suicide, homelessness, incarceration, family court, all of the things that you should not be talking about.

37:53And I spoke to him like, why is it that the left don't want to kind of acknowledge this problem? There's either an inability or an unwillingness for mainstream media and the left in general to advocate for men. And you nailed it. You had this really great quote where you say, many progressives have ignored the opportunity to sell men on a better vision of what they could be. And it is the point that if you do not like the current role models that are being put up for men, you need to offer them something else. It's not just a case that you can leave the vacuum and then start throwing your toys out of the pram because Oh, Andrew Tates Bugatti, like, I can't believe he smokes the gas and drinks bottled water.

38:31Like, you can't complain about that unless you're going to say, and here is something that I propose instead of that, because men are going to find someone, they need someone. Simply abandoning them is precisely the reason why the right has dominated this conversation. Right, that's a thing, And I say this often in this sort of conversation, in the fight between something and nothing, something is always going to win. Like it may be a very bad something, but like you're not offering anything else, then of course people go to what's on offer. And yeah, what's on offer right now is like pretty bad.

39:10It's not even, I mean, when you talk about Andrew K, it's, or Andrew Tate, it's not just he talked about his Bugatti, it's that he's a literal sex trafficker. But again, if it's an angelic or that - A ledge -sextrafica, alleged - alleged -sextrafica, Christie. Sure, that's true. I am a journalist. He has an alleged -sextrafica. And also admits it in his own words. But, yeah, who is the opposing figure that you're telling men to go out and seek? Who are you providing if you're from the left and think that that's a bad option? And just sort of like closing your eyes and wishing that these people would go away is unfortunately not going to do it.

39:50I mean another conflict I think too and I've heard this from a lot of commenters from the piece and people have written to me is the idea that okay well if you define masculinity and femininity or define masculinity first your isn't it that you're kind of saying that the good things about being a man say men are more risk -taking or men are more competitive or stronger. Are you saying that women don't take risks and can't be strong? And if men are interested in leadership, does that mean women have to be followers? And I think people are perhaps justifiably afraid of putting people back into boxes that they've only recently broken out of.

40:29And then, okay, if you have this one definition of masculinity that's all about, say, aggression and risk taking in, sex drive, et cetera, what about the men who don't fit into that? And I had a great debate with my colleague, Jonathan K. Partt, and he was like, you know, in this masculinity debate, like, I'm a gay married guy. Like, this traditional masculine, like, I'm not John Wayne. I was never going to be John Wayne. So sometimes when this debate is going on, I feel like it's not for me. Like that one model of maleness is not capacious enough. And so actually one of the things that I think will be key going forward for those who want to put forward like a better view of manhood and masculine, the in better role models, is also to have not just one role model or one vision of masculinity.

41:17Like ideally, there are many good ways to be a man as many ways as there are men. And by having more and different role models of masculinity, like more people can find a way, but you still have to have those models, right? You can't just be like, be good. And that's all. Yeah, so this is a really important point that I think we need to get into. I'm not convinced that there are as many ways to be a good man as there are men. And this came out of a debate that I had in Qatar a couple of months ago. I flew to Qatar to debate a gentleman who is a member of the LGBT community, but he's also a Kuwaiti -born American that's pro -Palestine and I think religious in some form as well.

42:03So it is an interesting sort of blend of yeah exactly and I could see he had this concept called the man box That I thought was really interesting and he said that basically the man box is this Prescriptive way of describing what a man can be if you're within this you are a man If you're outside of this you're not a man and if you make the box too narrow and if you make the walls of it too rigid It ends up causing many people who sit outside of the box in terms of their predisposition to feel like they're dispossessed and they're not included. And this is a guy who wanted to dance as a kid who growing up at least with some of the influences of an Arabic culture would have absolutely felt dispossessed and displaced.

42:43Right. I can totally see that. What I came to realize is that yes, there isn't just one way to be a good man, but there can't be an unlimited number of ways either because the problem of breaking open the expectations of being a man so much that there are no longer any provides zero guidance on for men's and boys on men and boys on how to behave. There has to be some limitations because you are defined by the boundaries of whatever it is that you're going to do. If being a good man means that you can be anything, if you can continue to redefine and redefine and redefine, that means that it's the same as it being nothing.

43:20There is no definition if the definition can be anything. So yes, actually, I do think that's right. So I should revise that, I would say. I mean, when I say I think that there are as many ways to be a good man as there are to be a man, it's like any person is capable of being a good person. And like what it looks like to be a good person as you specifically is different from what it looks like to be a good person as me specifically. But it's also clear that like you're a man and I'm a woman. So there's those are just going to be different. I think it's really important to recognize that people do actually need boundaries and need role models and norms that are specific, especially when they're younger.

44:01And so this is an interesting thing that I found reading responses to this piece. Like we only have comments open for three days and there were 10 ,500 comments on this piece. Did you sort it by most liked or most commented? Did you see what that top one was? I haven't today. What's the top one? The top one today. It seems like it's been around for a long time. So I'm going to guess that you've seen this one was I don't know what you're talking about. This doesn't resonate with me at all. That yes. So that is what I was going to say. They're like a comments from I think more like older men, not old men, but like men in there, maybe 40s and 50s.

44:41So many of them are like, I don't know what the problem is with massively. like, I'm fine. And it's the younger men who's like, oh, this really resonates. Like, I've been struggling with this too. And I think I actually do think what's happening is specific to younger men, because when you're younger, you simply don't know as much. And so you kind of need a roadmap or a path to start from, like at least a basic norm that you start from acknowledging. And then as you grow up and you get more experience and you figure out where you fit in the world, like you sort of begin to expand and figure out how that norm fits you.

45:18There's a path and as you become your own person, you branch out. But there has to be a starting point. What is a man? There's a basic starting point that you need to start from. Then as you figure it out, you become your own person. But there has to be at least some baseline, some original norm. I think that's what I'm saying. Like there there needs to be like a baseline. Okay, a man is X like how do you be a good man? Like it includes these things and what does that look like in your own life? Like that may vary depending on your profession whether you're married, etc., etc., but you start from here.

45:56And I worry sometimes that you know the push is that like well everyone is so different like there is no baseline exactly what you say. You're not a good man. Yeah, that doesn't tell you anything. Yeah, no, I think you're right. And it's a shame that we've got this thing called Gamma bias. Did you come across this? You describe it in your piece, but I don't know whether you can. No. Okay. So I think that you explain if there is something which is ardently pro female, it's very heavily gendered. If there's something that's ardently pro male, it gets desixed, right? And the reverse is also true.

46:38So male killer, male serial killer, if it was a female, which it probably almost certainly wouldn't be, but if it was a female, it would regularly get to D -sex. This is by John Barry from the Center for Male Psychology, and he calls it Gamma bias, which is that the successes of men are de -gendered and the successes of women are sexed, because that's, we're still living in a world where the culture presumes that success of women is a, an outlier or an aberration was successful women serial killer. Successful women serial killer. Yes, exactly. More role models for women. Women can be serial killers too.

47:16They can. I know. Where's the fucking parade for that? Yeah, but you end up with this situation in which there is a vacuum of positive examples of masculinity. He is this really great example where Sarah Everard, you remember that case? UK was this woman who was horrifically sort of followed home and killed by a British police officer and there was, you know, candle lit vigils and people in the streets and blah blah blah blah and horrific, like absolutely horrific story. The next week, a man jumped into the Thames to try and save a woman that was drowning and it didn't even say man in the headline.

48:04And it was like person jumps into river to try and save woman dies. So again, John seems to have done the work to have been able to show that this is replicated. And I don't really think that there's a broader conspiracy here, other than it's commonly applauded in the media to be like, yay women. And it's kind of less popular to be like, yay men. So what do they do? Well, they just lean into what they presume is going to be popular. And that seems to make sense. You know, we've explained today how many different hurdles you had to jump through to make sure that you didn't trigger any of the different trip -wise and defense mechanisms that would have potentially caused your article to be misinterpreted.

48:41So it's evident that these things still exist. But I do worry that by doing that, what is left as a positive role model for men. And as you said, the formative year is a formative for a reason. Like these are the times when you're looking for like, okay, what should I do? I'm confused. And for the, you know, the gentleman that commented on your piece saying, I don't know what you're talking about. All I spend my time doing is going to work and looking after my kids and, you know, like I get up on time and I do the things. Yeah, but where do you think that you've got those rules and guidelines from?

49:19Like, okay, it's not about your problem right now. Now, the goal of much of men's education and general life education overall is to get yourself moving to the stage where you can kind of pedal on your own two feet. It's okay. And now I have some of the advice that stabilizers have been taken off and I can kind of weave my own life path with the understanding that I've got these foundations behind me. Yeah. Yeah, no, exactly. I mean, also one of the things that, so I interviewed Richard Reams and Scott Galloway among other sort of experts for this piece. And one of the things that Scott said really resonated with me, he said that this is, first of all, this isn't an ongoing problem that's not going to be fixed overnight and part of it, unfortunately, or not unfortunately, but just truthfully, is a problem of responsibility.

50:10Like men do have to decide to be better and to work on themselves. that said, it's also the responsibility of older men and community role models. Like the 50 -year -old guy who's like, my life is great. I'm a great man. Okay, cool. Like go teach another young man how to do that. Because so much of this learning is also... And I think this is, I think that this is different in some way for men, almost than it is for women. Much of it does come from role modeling, from having someone to look up to. So like there's research that I cite in the piece from this landmark study by Raj Shetty. And it was actually about economic mobility in different neighborhoods.

50:54He studied this by zip code. But there were a lot of sort of interesting side findings in the work. And one of them was that for black boys, specifically economic mobility tended to be much lower. And actually a lot of the difference in economic mobility by race between white and black was due to the kind of poor performance of boys who were black. But he found that if these boys lived in a neighborhood that had more fathers present, not even their own fathers, just like more dads around, somebody else's dad, whatever, they were far more likely to achieve economic mobility. And so like just the presence of role models had a huge effect.

51:39And there's other research showing that boys are just much more affected by the presence of good figures in young age too. There's this sort of daisies versus dandelions model where girls, even when they're brought up in adverse circumstances, tend to be pretty resilient and can bounce back. They grow through the cracks, they just make it work. But actually, and perhaps unexpectedly, little boys are daisies. If they have adverse experiences, if they don't have good role models when they're younger, they're much less likely to bounce back. They just wilt. And so to raise good men, like men, other men, older men, men who have been successful and are comfortable in their masculinity, need to take it upon themselves to be part of the solution.

52:30Really amazing point. First thing that comes up for me is so interesting that that guy that commented that said that everything in his life was fine. I don't know what you're talking about. His first port of call was to go to atomized individuation. He was talking about me. I'm okay. As opposed to, wow, maybe there's some truth to this and maybe as somebody that feels comfortable in their own masculinity and like he's got his life together, I shouldn't reach out and say, can't believe that this is happening. Would love to try and help someone that's a young man that's suffering because I feel like I've managed to find my place in the world.

53:04Second thing being, I'm increasingly certain that a lot of the problems that we're seeing, especially amongst misbehavior, but also when it comes to academic outcomes, especially black inner -city youths are very, very heavily laid at the feet of single -parent households. It's like many of the problems we're seeing are fatherless problems as opposed to Culture problems or I guess fatherless and it could be born out of culture But you know what I mean like yeah like that and I wonder whether Part of the masculinity crisis is downstream from an increasing number of single -parent households I wonder if you could Dr.

53:46sufficiently big study to work out our men or young boys who grew up in a two -parent household more or less likely to say that they don't know what a real man is that they sort of go it would be insane if it wasn't the case it would be absolutely why that would be a much more shocking revelation than it was but until we've got the data it's just proscience but yeah I think the single -parent problem the lack of strong far the figures again is exactly why we need good role models out there, which is why, you know, in an age of social media ubiquity, you are going to gravitate towards someone. I know that I found this.

54:28You know, I got to the end of my 20s, probably a little bit late to try and stop being an adult infant, but I get to, you know, 27, 28, 29 and I've achieved a good bit of success in the way that society tells a young man that he maybe should, but I didn't feel like I understood myself. I didn't feel like I had a good conception of who I was or what I really should do I didn't have a firm foundation on how I should show up in the world. And then I see this old, like, wizard -druid -looking Canadian psychology professor on a bold MMA commentator's podcast. And I go, wow, this guy's telling me to tell the truth.

55:00Wow. What a radical idea to actually not lie to try and get things that you want out of people, but to focus on telling the truth instead of X and Y and Z. And then you need to speak to people like Sam Harris or a land of boton from the School of Life. You know, all of these different interesting people who had insights that weren't necessarily about masculinity, but were about Psychology and were about the world and the way that the world shows up and from that you infer what being a good person and being a good man is and Yeah, it's I One of the things I'm most interested in especially given that you've written this and now you've got all of this sort of attention You must have been able to look at the current landscape of how these conversations are being had previously, it's not like you're the first person ever to talk about this.

55:47What do you think most commentators are missing when they try to talk about the problem of boys and men? Oh boy, well I could go on at length. I mean first kind of does tack back to what you were saying about single parent households. Again, I think in modern society and progressive spaces, especially, there is this bias towards inclusivity. Everybody chooses their own life path. And that's okay. They're all great. They're all of equal value. We don't want to stigmatize anyone. But actually, I feel quite certain that maybe the question, the specific question is like the specific question, are you unsure of masculinity may not have been asked, but there are so much data that shows that children and single parent households and especially fatherless households tend to do worse and especially boys when it comes to exactly what you're saying about discipline and academic achievement.

56:45Like the data does show this very clearly, but there is a reluctance, I think, among many commentators to say that or to point out that that could be a problem because it's seen as stigmatizing. It's not inclusive to the single parent households. Yeah, and I mean that comes from sort of oversensitivity and also maybe just a sort of acceptance that this seems to be more common like this is the way things are I guess. And so like that it's not offered as a solution that men should be better fathers and stay with their fathers and that there should be more two parent households. But that is just an obviously important part of this problem.

57:26I interviewed as I said it a bunch of young men for this piece and almost all of them said that you know oh like one thing about this is like I had a really crappier relationship with my dad like my dad was a terrible person or he wasn't around and actually all of my friends like very few of us can say that we had good relationships with their fathers. And so like, maybe that has something to do with it. I don't know. And, you know, they're not sure. But it seems very clear. And actually, like, there's one young man who I spoke to and I didn't get to include this part in the essay. But he was like, yeah, I had a shini relationship with my dad, actually.

58:05And I was kind of allowed. Like, I was not a very good man. And actually what changed for me was when this priest in my neighborhood who officiated my dad's funeral actually just sort of took me under his wing and like taught me how to cook and just like hung out with me as a man and that was the role model I needed to become you know a better person the person that I am today but that was somebody who just sort of saw a lost young man and was like I'm just gonna care for him and be a model to him and teach him how to grow up. So I think I do think that that is one thing that commentators are either missing or purposefully not speaking about.

58:47And I think that that's a real problem. And I do think that when people try and speak about it, Barack Obama had my brother's keeper program and had several speeches about dads and missing dads. And he was often sort of shouted down for being a scold even though he was right. I think also that this question of representation is important actually and actually this has become kind of a buzz word in progressive and liberal spaces. The idea that representation is important. Like women need to see themselves in spaces. Like people of color need to see themselves in spaces. But when you look at what the data shows about men in formative spaces for men, There are very few primary school teachers and secondary school teachers.

59:39There are actually very few male nurses. As you said, male psychologists. And imagine if you're a boy growing up in a single parent household, you're raised by your mom, you go through the average public school system, average public medical system in the US. a you may really never see a man in a position of teaching authority until you know you're an adult. What does that do really? And so perhaps a policy solution might be to kind of acknowledge that and try to figure out how to get men into some of these spaces. And some of the problem there is that these spaces are considered feminized because there are so many women in them and that makes it harder to recruit men to those spaces.

1:00:24But I don't know, there has to be some way to do that there. Yeah, I mean, those are, those are just two things, actually. There are a number more, but the families situation, the role modeling, yeah. Both of those are huge. A couple of the conversations I've had. One with Max Rudd last year, this is a guy who was going to get married. And I think he'd gone, he's always had female friends, he tended to have more girl friends than guy friends and he went to get his suit fitted, I think, or something like that, maybe get fitted for the ring that he was going to wear. And the girl friend that he was with said, so who's going to be your best man?

1:01:10And he said, it'll come to me, don't worry, and he got home and he realized, fuck, like, where are all of my male friends? He didn't have any, he didn't have a guy that could be his best man at his wedding. And one of the things that he discovered, it was more to do with the loneliness epidemic for men there, but that men's only spaces were seen as these sort of vaulted halls of power that was exclusionary to women specifically. And this means that we need to break open the doors because, you know, I'm a female barrister and I want to make sure that there isn't a secret boys club somewhere so that I can be included because I also want to become a judge or a high up sort of legal person.

1:01:51But like, okay, that's true. But if downstream from that, like working men's clubs and stuff and men's sheds, which is this initiative coming out of Australia where men, older men, fix shit together and fixing shit together in a shed, literally called men's sheds, I'm sure it's coming out of Australia, they just fix stuff. So it will be a bench or a car or a lawnmower or something and these guys just come together because men bond over doing stuff. I see this in my own life. One of my best friends, one of my longest standing friends was my old business partner from my nightclub days. I'm still incredibly close.

1:02:29I was a groom's minute is wedding, all of this stuff. But now that I do the podcast full time, our relationship is in a different bucket. It's one of nostalgia and a huge amount of love. But it doesn't have that same sort of dopamine and that kind of rush that I do with my editor Dean, for instance, who's been with me for five and a half years, and it's every single day. It feels like going to war with someone. It feels like standing shoulder to shoulder. In fact, that's a Richard Reeves thing, right? Where he says that what is it? Women, women bond face to face, men bond shoulders. Shoulder side by side.

1:03:01Yeah, no, that is that is actually the right third point that I was kind of forgetting. It's that is kind of a cliche, the side to side versus shoulder shoulder thing. but I mean, it's a cliche because it does see the kind of true. And this also, I think, sort of throws it back to the question of why aren't, why are there so many women commentators on this problem in a way? I do think that women spend more time face to face, sort of, terrifying about like the problems where men may have the same problem, but they're just doing stuff together. Like they're not like, tell me about your problems.

1:03:34Like let's just look at each other over some wine and talk about our problems. No, no. Yeah, dangerous for one thing. But the single space's question, I think, is a really interesting one and a really touchy one in this moment. And I think it is a really important one too. So I think the last big conversation about it was when the Boy Scouts became open to all sexes instead of just being the Boy Scouts. And I actually think that we may look back on that and realize that it was a mistake. So like one of the reasons why it would be helpful to have more male teachers in primary and secondary school is because male teachers often end up being the coaches for boys' sports and boys' only sports.

1:04:23And often those are the places where like young men are sort of side by side, I don't know, moving stuff around. No one wants to learn rugby from a woman. No guy, no boy, seven year old boy, once a learn rugby from up there, want to get curd in mud and get pushed over by a big dude. Right. Yeah, I think that's true, actually, for sure. But I mean, there is a continuing like lack of and dismissal of the need for those spaces. And so one of the things that I wrote about in the piece, I cite that sociologist David Gilmore, who did this big survey of masculinity over like a broad number of cultures on multiple continents.

1:05:03And so he came up with a sort of protector, provider, per creator, paradigm. Like this is sort of the understanding that almost every culture shares about what it means to be a man. And being a man is different from being male. And that was the other thing. Like you can be born male, but you have to become a man. And in most societies, it seems like there's almost a kind of initiation process into becoming a real man that's led by older men in your community who sort of like would take a boy away and like teach him how to be a man and then he does stuff with them and he comes back an Adults and that happens in male only spaces or on the sports field or at war and we have fewer and fewer of those like specifically male only bonding spaces right now and you know It's easy to say well well that's good like exactly as you were saying We can't just like have all the men go to the strip club and bond together and leave women out.

1:06:01Well, the women are involved. The women are heavily involved in the strip club. I don't know how many strip clubs you've been to Christine. The women are a fundamental part of that process. I'll take care. I'll take care of that for future podcasts. Yeah, you're right. There aren't as many of those spaces in that as actually maybe it made your lots and we have to think about what it would look like to rebuild that process of initiation, that process of role modeling. Yeah, I think the other thing as well is that men's friendships are more flimsy in terms of the one -on -one than women's are. Men's friendship groups will have someone come and go, you know, Jim has been coming to the pub with you and you three mates every Friday for the last decade, but Jim's going to move to Thailand.

1:06:50And so Jim's gone and now Mike's in, Mike, you're the new Jim. Like, hope you like it. And that's the way that men's friendships work. That's literally the way that their friendships work. Because, ancestrally, if you were going to go out with a small cohort of your guys and try and take down a will debase or a woolly mammoth, and one, if you get scored, you're going to be very sad for quite a while, but you can't be completely despondent forever because you need to keep cracking on and doing the things. Whereas for women, if you're alloparenting, if you're doing shared child rearing between you and your girlfriends, you need to make damn sure that you trust them.

1:07:22You need to be incredibly tight and the likelihood of that cycling through would have been significantly less. Well, interesting in a, like, patro -local society, I actually wonder how that would have worked, because obviously women were often sort of picked up and moved to the new husband's location. So that actually kind of throws a spanner in it, but that insight is from Robin Dunbar, And this one is as well, the talking about the shoulder to shoulder or face to face thing. So the next time that you go to a party, if you look around, if it's like a house party and people are just talking or whatever, look around at the way that men and women are standing.

1:07:57So if you look at the angle of the feet that women have, it's almost exactly perpendicular, right? So it's the same, essentially. If you look at the angle that men stand at, on average, they stand at the angle of 120 degrees. So you could draw a line like that. It would be like this. and men do, they blade. So you stand at kind of like this and the other one standing kind of like that. And Dunbar's argument is that really the only time that guys stand face to face is if they're going to fight. Because you're able to fully size them up. It also makes you look the widest. And if you do it, if you're a guy, you can prove this to yourself.

1:08:34The next time you go to a party, try and close that whatever 60 degree gap and try and stand front on. And it's either going to need you out too. Weird. Yeah, it looks like you're either going to fight him or kiss him. Those are the two options. And it's kind of weird in the moment. Not for all guys. In the middle of it, you know, throw your keep your progressive credentials out front. Christine, yeah. But if you try and do it, it just feels like, oh yeah, this is, I can't. This needs to. Very natural. So obviously one of the things that we've kind of danced around so far and you make a big deal of in the article, which I think is really important, is that the writing around the crisis of masculinity firmly stops at the diagnosis stage.

1:09:20They refuse either purposefully or just through ignorance to try and put forward a concrete vision for what men should be. Why do you think it is the case that the diagnosis stage is as far as anyone's prepared to go? Yeah, I mean Richard Rees talks about this in the article. And he makes the point that we talked about earlier that there is kind of a branding problem. If you spend too much time thinking about men and trying to fix the men problem, you get the kind of questionable, what are you up to? Do you have some sort of hidden misogynist agenda thing? But then also there is also what we talked about this idea that we don't need to have special roles for men.

1:10:07We just need to be good people. No one wants to be prescriptive about what a man should be for fear of not being inclusive enough and leaving someone out or offending someone else, just like nobody really wants to take the risk. But actually one of my interview subjects made the point that I think is really important and really hard and one that I think we're going to have to think about for a while, which is that these problems didn't just start overnight. And so the solution is not going to be overnight. Like there's not just going to be a fix for this. You know, the problem of, or maybe not a problem, but just the fact of globalization and deindustrialization.

1:10:48Like that happened. It took years. And now like this has really shifted the economics of being a man, especially a working class man, to figure out what comes after that is a big question. You know, this question of single parent homes and fatherlessness or a lack of role models, you can't just grow a father overnight. You know, it's not as easy as just like, well, we're just going to plop a strange man in your community and now you have a role model. This is a problem where, you know, kids have grown up, fatherless and maybe their fathers who are now missing had negative father figures themselves who didn't really teach them how to be a man.

1:11:32And you know, it's kind of like we've cut off sort of patriarchy and these old norms off at the knees. And now they're sort of like an open field of what are we supposed to do, but growing back a tree in the field is not something that happens overnight. These are generational problems. And to come up with a better idea of masculinity, or even just an idea of what masculine in the video is period that fits in this moment, it's just going to be a norm shift, right? And norms are society -wide. And they take time. The women's movement achieved a ton. But the women's movement has also been sort of at work for the past 60 years, you know, and those gains have come over time, not overnight.

1:12:19So I think it's hard to prescribe. I mean, I think that the short term is that it's hard to prescribe because people are frankly scared to say and I write about this More broadly in my work I think people are really scared of norms of saying that like there is a right way to do something and there is a wrong way to do something Or there is a good there is a bad or there is male and there is female Because someone is always in between and nobody wants to hurt anyone's feelings But also it's just it's complicated and it's about relationships and you can't sort of you can't really policy fix relationships, you know, like Joe Biden isn't going to pass a law that suddenly fathers have to go back to their homes, relationships with things that you built from the bottom up.

1:13:06Yeah, the inclusivity definitely seems to be at odds with its instructionality in this regard, that the more inclusive you may, again, it's the man box you expanded out sufficiently and you you actually have nothing left. There are no guidelines at all. I do wonder about the cultural nudges, something that's really interesting is, if you look at what the feminist movement, first and second wave, were really trying to do, they were trying to change culture so that they could achieve something structurally, right? that we need women to be accepted in the workplace so that women can go to the workplace.

1:13:50What's happening with masculinity is that men have been displaced from the workplace and now need to find their place in the culture. Do you think this makes sense? It's almost like the reverse of what the civil rights movement. We want to have the equal rights for people of color so that they can work because that's the thing that we're trying to get. And they both occur at the same time, Whereas this conversation around masculinity is actually more like the broad -based to brain -based economy change the increase use of credentialism when it comes to jobs and boys disadvantage, predisposition disadvantage that they have around that means that culture is now trying to reverse engineer a reversion of masculinity to fit this new structure.

1:14:37To fit the change, yeah. Yeah. And I think we have a lot less experience with doing that. And also our culture continues to move super fast, actually. So almost as soon as we have identified one problem, like a new one crops up, like even if we were thinking of, okay, oh, here are men. They seem to have a lot of time on their hands because the economy has changed. What do we do with them? Then suddenly it's supercharged by like, oh, porn, it's everywhere. Video games, like the internet and new role models have also changed the way that we shake personalities and shape people. So like, what do we do with that?

1:15:11In addition to catching up with this old problem. So yeah, I think the roots towards, the routes towards teaching are different. Is it going to be through schools? We don't, I think, invest as much authority in our schools anymore. It used to be through perhaps religious institutions. People are increasingly becoming less religious and less involved in their community organization. So like, where do you even go to start? And I think those are questions that we'll be weighing in on to. One thing that I would definitely say is a starting point, you know, having spent a lot of time, a good chunk of the audience is male, a good chunk of them are in that age bracket who do still probably need a good chunk of guidance.

1:15:58The first thing I would say, the first prescription, is to stop talking about men and the problems of boys and men in a way that causes them to check out because regardless of what you try to do downstream from that, this is the gateway drug that opens all the rest of them up. If the cultural temperature is that men have always had it great, therefore the men of today need to pay for the sins and advantages of their fathers and grandfathers, basically you've had it good for so long that we don't really need to worry about you or anything that you do is toxic or any, which ever different permutation of that happens, it causes men to check out, so regardless of what you try to do in terms of structure.

1:16:42You know, we've got these interesting initiatives and we've got to so on and so forth. I don't think that's going to work. The second part is that when pretty much any group has a problem in society, we don't tell them that they fix it by trying to open up about their problems. We spend billions and billions of dollars in taxpayer money to try and work out what's going on to create initiatives and incentives and to change structure so that it actually warps the world around them. If any other group has a problem, we say, what can we do to change the world to fix it? But if men have a problem, we say, why aren't men fixing themselves?

1:17:19Pull yourself up by your bootstrapped bio. It's time to go and get it done. And the problem is that, you know, a lot of masculinity and a lot of men, that is an attractive proposition. You know, the sovereign, highly sovereign, agentic individual that can forge his own way. I'm a pioneer, I'm a lone ranger, I can go and do this. And you even see this get caricatured. You know, the sigma male lone wolf meme that's being the giga chance, like sigma male meme that floats around the internet is precisely that taken to its extreme, right? I'm going, that's what make towers, that's what men going their own ways.

1:17:54Its in cell is similar, but in reverse, where I'm just going to cast away from the world. That's still you going out on your own, but you're putting it into a direction that typically wouldn't have been seen as productive. So yeah, I think we need to be very, very cautious around pointing the finger at men. In fact, men would be happy, I think, to have the finger pointed at them and say, you guys can do better. You can do better and we're going to help you do better. But if you say you can do better and you feel like you've been dispossessed and cast out from society, castigated from society, you're going to go, fuck you.

1:18:32Like, okay, yeah, I'm useless and toxic and cool. Whatever. Like, I'm just going to whank and smoke weed and play Call of Duty. Like, that's what the rest of my years got in store for me. Yeah, that's that's a really important distinction too. I think that a positive vision of masculinity has to be aspirational, right? Like, it has to be positive meaning it's something you're achieving, something that you like go out and find and that it's good for you to find. And I feel like one of the things that makes the Jordan Peterson's and Andrew takes the world feel sort of exciting and like people who you want to follow is that they actually make manhood feel like something good and achieving it is kind of like a quest that you go on.

1:19:16And at the end you have this good thing. It's not like like, fix what's broken about you. It's like, no, I'm calling you to more, I'm calling you to hire, and I have high expectations for you, and you're gonna meet them. And I think we need more of that, and our Gina and I are asking on the discourse, not like your toxic, stop being so toxic, but like actually men are good. Like a good man is a good thing, and like you can do that, go do that. One of the things that was really surprising about, or surprising to me in the response to my article was a number of people who described it as empathetic and were like, it kind of seems like you'd like like men.

1:19:58That's like, actually, I do. Yeah, like I like men. I want them to be better because I want people, all people, but my male friends, like romantic partners, family members to be happy. And I think just like the sheer impact having a piece that wasn't like men are terrible and here's why. But like framing it is like, what's the problem? How can we do better? Just like being even slightly like neutral to positive instead of neutral to negative seem to have a huge impact. Which shows how low the bar is for positive male discourse online for it to be, oh my god, like you didn't call me a piece of shit.

1:20:41I mean, I love with you. Thank you so much. Yeah. So talking about that, what we mentioned that your piece has gotten offered. It's only been out just over a week. It's got an awful lot of attention more after this episode as well. Thanks. What has been the feedback or the criticisms that you've got from the left or from the more progressive side of the aisle. Huh, I mean, again, this, this sort of like the boxes to narrow question has come up again and again, like, whoa, well, if you say that we have to be masculine or like manhood, what do you, what do you call a manhood? Maybe I don't fit. Maybe people don't fit.

1:21:24What about those people? Which I don't, on the one hand, like I get it, I get that as a pushback. But everything is it for everyone? Like there's no prescription that fits every single person. I'm sorry, that's just the world. So there's that. There are still a number of reflexive responses from I think people who didn't finish reading the piece or maybe haven't gotten to the section who are responding to. I know it's my fault. I'll self -blame. But who are like men, men again, we're still talking not men, screw men. You know, like the piece is kind of about how we need to stop doing that. And yet that is still a response and I'm getting to this piece.

1:22:10Like, oh, we've already talked about the crisis of masculinity. Like, we don't need to keep going there, but it's a real crisis. So we're going to keep going there until we figure out what's going on. For anyone that thinks that this isn't to Big Deal, please explain to me why this poster has had so much popularity. If it wasn't a big deal, why would anybody be bothered about reading it and sharing it? And yeah, I'm part way through this book writing process at the moment where I'm tackling an equally icky topic of the mating crisis. And we are, I'm finding myself falling over my own words in a desperate attempt to not try and trigger some of the antibody responses from different groups because I really think that it's an important discussion and I really want as many people as possible to have their eyes opened to what we're talking about.

1:23:07And yet there are upper bounds that I'm just unprepared to cross when it comes to writing the piece. So I know for a fact that there's going to be an awful lot of criticism and very, very upset news articles online because I can't warp the facts to suit everybody's world view. I can't change the reality around the situation. And this one of my friends said it to me the other day that basically, no matter what you say, it's impossible to please everybody. Regardless of what you try and put out, you can put out the most well -meaning, well -reasoned, heavily -caviated, and there are going to be a huge number of people, especially given a large enough audience, that are going to take massive offense to whatever it is that you've said.

1:23:50So I think that you've done a good job of really trying to dance through the minefield of tripwires on both of the different sides. You know, I definitely do think that the next stage for this will be making it culturally accepted to talk about the fact that men and boys are struggling. Once you do that, you can include them in the conversation. You then need to try and put forward something that looks like a positive vision. That includes actual role models, that includes famous people and people in positions of renown who have lifestyles that are both aspirational and inspirational that men can look up to that they can pedestalize and that they can try and follow.

1:24:28You don't need to love all of them You know, but you need to have at least a couple that you probably can afford to love and not everyone needs to agree But okay Again that conversation I had in Qatar. I asked the gentleman sat opposite me I know that you don't like Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan as examples of what you think a man should be Can you please give me an example of someone that you do and it took 10 seconds for him to say my brother -in -law And I said well, how about somebody that we all know and it it was a mean comment But I think it was important to really drive home the fact that it is difficult to If you are from a certain political leaning to put that point forward Yeah, no, that's something that I experienced too, actually.

1:25:12When I also sort of went out on the streets, there's a video that goes with the article and asks men about these questions and who is their role model. And so much of, so much more discourse is politicized that I think men who might objectively be good role models, whether it's like a Barack Obama or a Mitt Romney, people just don't wanna say that because it might be seen as rooting for the other team, somehow and that's not allowed. And also again, the specificity question. I do think that that, the sort of like, we don't need to be, we don't need a good masculine. We just need to be good people.

1:25:47There's pushback to the idea that like there are masculine traits. But again, we can't work the world to people's beliefs. Like unfortunately, I just do think that there are. And to be able to make a prescription, we have to recognize those facts and speak to them. Christine, Emma, ladies and gentlemen, Christine, I really appreciate you. Let's have another conversation at some point soon about rethinking sex as well I think that would be absolutely fascinating to talk about the fallout from me too and consent and ceilings and flaws and whatnot But if people want to check out more of the stuff that you do, where should they go?

1:26:22Alas, you can find me anywhere so you can follow me at the Washington Post I'm on Twitter, threads, Instagram as Christine Ember just my full name and I will shortly be launching a sub -stack so you can also follow that at christinemba .substack .com. Good stuff, Christine. I really appreciate you. Thank you so much for having me. Great conversation.

From the publisher

Christine Emba is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post, journalist, social commentator, and an author.
Christine wrote one of the best articles on modern masculinity that I've ever read and it absolutely broke the internet. But it begs the question of why it's come down to a woman to raise the topic of men's issues.
Expect to learn why making men and women equal is good but overreaching into making men and women the same is terrible, whether Christine thinks it is harder to be a man in 2023, the biggest issues that boys & men are facing, why it is women who are dominating the narrative on what it means to be masculine, why the only "non-toxic" suggestions for masculinity just look a lot like traditional femininity and much more...
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#664 - Christine Emba - Talking To A Feminist About Masculinity

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