Office Hours Special: Algebra of Masculinity Part 1

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0:38Welcome to a special series of the Prop 2 Pod. If you've been following us for the past few years, then you hopefully register that we care deeply about changing the conversation around masculinity and failing young men. In fact, we believe this is a crisis and that in some we are producing too many of what are the most dangerous and unproductive citizens in the world, and that is lonely, broke young men. Why are we passionate about this? One, I relate to these young men. I was an unremarkable kid growing up in a single-parent household. My mother lived and died a secretary and could have easily come off the tracks.

1:21And as a matter of fact, it did come off the tracks a couple of times. And it was the generosity and vision of the University of California taxpayers. And what saved me was the big warm hand of America and government. Had it not been for the vision and generosity of the Regents of the University of California and California taxpayers, I just wouldn't be here right now speaking to you and have the opportunity to advocate for a group that I believe has fallen further faster than any group in recent history, specifically young men who are four times more likely to be addicted, three times more likely to kill themselves, 12 times more likely to be incarcerated.

2:00You've heard the stats before. I think this is an opportunity also to demonstrate that compassion is not a zero-sum game. Civil rights didn't hurt white people. Gay marriage didn't hurt heteronormative marriage. And a conversation around men is something that I think a lot of groups are engaged in. And who wants more economically and emotionally viable men? Women. And by far, with respect to this conversation, which I'll say has become a lot more positive over the last 24 or 36 months, as this conversation or this void was filled by some very unfortunate voices. And I think, understandably, a lot of people have a gag reflex when you start talking or advocating for young men.

2:39But by far, the cohort that has been most supportive of this conversation and us bringing up these issues, simply put, mothers. And it goes something like this. I have three kids, two daughters, one son. One daughter is at Penn, the other is in PR in Chicago and my son is in the basement playing video games and vaping. There really is a crisis here. What is the single point of failure when a boy starts to come off the track? Simple, when he loses a male role model. And what it ends up, the research shows, is that when the parents split up and you lose a male role model in a house of girls, the girls have similar outcomes.

3:21But it's much different when the boy loses a male role model, usually through divorce. As it ends up, the majority of research points to one thing, and that is boys are physically stronger, but girls are emotionally and mentally stronger. Over the past year, we've been asking our male guests how they think about masculinity and what it means to be a better father, husband, and partner. Being a man is to be a person that is in service to others and just ask yourself, like, how can you be in service? And just ask yourself, like, how you can be of value to others. There's a movement of more awakened manhood that's emerging.

4:05And it doesn't mean you can't be strong. It doesn't mean that there's no role for men and for women and people in between. it just means we've got to do a bit of a reset. I mean, I just try to model for them, you know, what a leader looks like. You know, what kindness and caring looks like. Sometimes you just have to be gentle. Just be gentle. The story that we tell about masculinity can be really dangerous. I think one of the things about masculinity which is different from femininity is that masculinity is seen as this kind of prize that's given to men. Like, you can be a man or you can not be a man.

4:45And there was an interesting study that was done a few years ago over here in the UK where they asked men and women, what does it mean to be a man? And answers were like, you've got to be a fighter, a winner, a provider, a protector. You've got to maintain mastery and control at all times. And if you fail to do any of these things, then you weren't a man. Which I think, that's a story about it. It's a very toxic one.

5:12Over the next three weeks on Office Hours, we're answering your questions on all things masculinity, from gender dynamics and adolescent development to the psychological and societal challenges that men face. We're also bringing on a few guests to paint a better picture of how we ended up here and what we can do about it or where we should go. So with that, in today's episode, we're speaking with Christine Emba, a columnist at The Washington Post and author of Rethinking Sex, to set the scene of where masculinity stands today, the role that women play in redefining masculinity, as well as what current dating dynamics look like.

5:45Christine, where does this podcast find you? I'm in Washington, D.C. Is that where you live? You live in D.C.? I do. I'm a sweetheart. I didn't know that. Nice. So let's bust right into it. Your blockbuster essay, and I don't use that word lightly for The Washington Post, titled Men Are Lost, Here's a Map Out of the Wilderness, catalyzed a lot of conversation regarding men in crisis, specifically young men. From your reporting, what surprised you? What are the attributes or the reasons for men struggling so much that you don't think people fully understand? Set some context for why young men are struggling.

6:23Yeah. So, I mean, first of all, I'll say that the first thing that surprised me in that essay was simply the response to it. Right now, it's reached over a million readers. We closed the comments at 10 ,000 comments. the number of people who have just reached out to me, men, parents, people from all over saying, oh, finally, someone is talking about this. I personally have found pretty overwhelming, which makes me think that this is a real problem that needs to be addressed. But, you know, context to the piece, I started thinking about this question of sort of what's going on with men, because as I said in the piece, just the men I saw around me were getting kind of weird.

7:07getting really into sort of these manosphere influencers, sort of trying on almost new what felt like dress-up practices that seemed focused on shoring up their masculinity, either getting really into weightlifting or getting really into the alt-right or both, perhaps, or just kind of disappearing from view, you know, spending all their time on the internet or maybe like watching porn and just not showing up. And I looked at the statistics because, you know, there's this idea that, oh no, American men are falling apart. The Republic is going to disintegrate has been a recurring theme in our public discourse.

7:48But the stats are really bearing out the idea that there has been a shift in how men feel about themselves and how they're acting in in our society as women have surged ahead you know at the workplace in education men are quite literally falling behind so on you know when it comes to college graduation rates for every 100 women who receives a bachelor's degree only 74 men do and that number is falling when it comes to people who are out of work or falling out of the labor market the biggest drop and employment has been among men aged 25 to 34, which you would think is kind of prime working age.

8:33But also when you talk to women, when I talk to my friends, when I think about my own dating life, there's a real and clear felt sense among women that the men who they thought would be their partners are just not there. I was thinking about you coming on the show and we've had kind of the Yodas of this issue on the show, or most of them, I think. And I was trying to think, well, what could we explore that would be different with Christine? And you wrote a book called Rethinking Sex, A Provocation. And what you just said about women, you know, where are all the good men is what I hear. Talk a little bit about the role of dating or the dynamic in dating and mating as it relates to this, I don't call it crisis, but the fact that men are declining, if you will.

9:25Chris Williams calls it the high heels effect that as women metaphorically get taller and taller and taller, men are getting shorter and shorter and shorter. And women, not all women, but a lot of women state that they won't date anyone shorter than them. We talk about mothers being concerned, parents being concerned, young men are obviously struggling. How do you think women perceive this issue? Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, I'll go back and give a little bit of context for the book you mentioned. Rethinking Sex, A Provocation is the title of my first book, which I started writing around the time of kind of the Me Too moment, crisis, revolution.

10:05and it was basically a look at whether you know the sexual revolution and the feminist movement had brought us to where we thought we were going to go had delivered the results that we wanted it was kind of a critique of our current sexual culture and I told the story through mainly through the lens of women as I interviewed just a ton of women about their dissatisfactions with the current dating scene, with the sexual culture, with what was expected of them and what they couldn't expect. But, you know, I spoke to men about this too. And I would say that while women's stories really informed the book, you know, I talk about how consent isn't enough to be a good sexual ethic, how men and women are actually different in their desires and how they want to form sexual relationships.

10:58Something that many women feel like a bad feminist or something for saying. I was struck by how the men I spoke to, again, intervening for this book, seemed more kind of confused than anything else. Like they didn't know what they were supposed to do, what they were allowed to do, how to just talk to a woman. Increasingly, they seemed to be socially falling behind. And I think that experience stuck with me and also pushed me towards thinking about the topic now. But when it comes to how this high heel situation, that's such a great analogy, is reflected in the dating market. I would say one place where you can see a really clear example is on college campuses and directly after college.

11:45The gender balance on many universities is shifting to be really like a high number of women, sometimes up to sort of 70 % women and 30 % men. And this is not a great thing. My competitor publication, the New York Times, actually had a piece about this a couple of weeks ago, about how many private colleges were kind of practicing sneak affirmative action to let men in because there just simply weren't enough men on campus to make it attractive. And you can think about how this plays out in a kind of relational stance. If women want to date men generally who are kind of at their level or or honestly above it in some ways.

12:31The height analogy is one thing, but you can also think of it in terms of educational achievement, of career achievement, of financial stability and emotional stability. If there are, you know, 70 women and only 30 men, then a lot of women are left without a partner. And, you know, the men who are present suddenly have perhaps too many options to choose from. Too much opportunity, yeah. Yeah, which makes the dynamic for mating and dating really skewed and unpleasant. And actually in that Times piece, the young women who are interviewed kind of talk about how they thought that this should be an empowering experience being at a university that has a surplus of women, where women feel confident talking in the classroom, where they have all of these opportunities.

13:27But actually, when it came to finding partners, dating, sort of all of the kind of outside life goals that one might achieve in college, they said they found the experience really humbling and kind of sad. Yeah, the term that I've heard that is sort of apt is this term of Porsche polygamy, that because of online dating where everyone has access to everyone, that the men who are in the top call it decile of attractiveness get 60, 80, 90 percent of the opportunities, which doesn't encourage good behavior. And I guess my question is, given that you kind of have written about the intersection or can talk about the intersection of mating or dating and sex and the crisis young men face, do you think that women expect or don't want men to be, I don't want to use the term aggressors, but the initiators of romantic contact?

14:23One of the things that I've observed in conversation and sort of candid discussions with women, and actually you and I talked about this, Scott, and I mentioned you in the piece, is that a lot of women, I think, feel like they should want to date, you know, a feminist, a guy who treats them as their exact equal, you know, a sensitive, emotional guy. Or, you know, either they feel this or they feel like they should feel it. to be sort of a good young modern who's progressive, et cetera. But in their real lives, often, that's not quite what they want. I think that most women actually do want to be asked out, would appreciate, in fact, a guy, you know, taking them on a date and offering to pay for drinks, sort of performing a little bit of a traditional masculinity while of course you know not being over aggressive or overly sexually aggressive or you know rude or sort of a neanderthal but I think a lot of women still appreciate a guy playing that role but it feels like a little bit anti-feminist I think to some women to say this and then I think men get the the message like, oh, well, women don't want me to walk up to them and approach them.

15:48Like, it would be rude to talk to women in public. It would be rude to go up to someone at a bar. And so they don't. It just shocks me. And I'm curious if you have found this. I have a lot of women in my life that would be very open to being set up. And then they sort of under their breath in a different way, oh, and by the way, I really like alpha males. And maybe I'm looking for shadows where there aren't any. But don't you think there's some dissonance here between, and you said this a little bit, between what maybe people state they want and what they're actually attracted to? And I guess the question is, have women's desires, have what they find attractive in a man actually evolved over the 20 or 30 years?

16:31Because I find it's loosely still pretty similar to what it was 20 or 30 years ago. I think that, first of all, people's stinted desires almost never match up with their actual desires. And that's the thing that sort of experts in dating and mating apps have seen for years, right? People may say that like, oh, I want to date someone who's six feet tall and has a six pack and like works an X job. But then they meet someone who is five foot nine and cool. And has the right pheromones. Yeah, and it's fine. And so I think sometimes both sides sort of deceive themselves by saying, well, I'll only go for this sort of person.

17:11and then discount everyone else who might be a good match. And I think in our current moment, our reliance on the internet and dating apps in particular really facilitates this because it's super easy for both men and women to just set some sort of arbitrary standard that aligns with what they think they want and filter out everyone else, what in fact, the other people might be great. You know, my sense is there's a lot of things that younger men can do, take responsibility for their lives, try and better themselves, get out of the house, find a job, work out, put on a clean shirt, whatever it might be, join an organization.

17:48There's a lot we can do as a society, third spaces, vocational opportunities and training, empathy. What do you think women's role in this is? Do you think that women, and I want to be clear, I don't think anyone has an obligation to service anybody or but what is the role of women in this in this problem this issue i do think that women would do well to be more honest uh with themselves and with others about sort of what they want like it's interesting that these women who you talk to are still willing to say to you albeit under their breath like oh actually i kind of go for this sort of alpha kind of guy you know then they're not lying to themselves or the guys that they date and they can sort of look for what they want.

18:36I also think that you mentioned third spaces. One of the real sort of failings of our current moment, and I think it's also affecting men and like leading or assisting in this sort of crisis of men, is that it's really easy to not go outside, not exist in real life, not talk to people, not talk to strangers. And I think for men who like actually want to meet someone also just want to be sort of good men good humans in the world you have to be forced to get up get dressed like work out so that you look decent work on your conversational skills go out in the world and talk to people and i think it's possible that women need to do that too get off the dating apps and like be open to meeting guys in you know maybe yeah at a bar or in your kickball league or whatever.

19:32But then as I think about this, I think that most of the women I know are willing to do this. And they're kind of just waiting for the people to show up or for someone to talk to them. In the past, I think you would see women date down or settle in a major way. I also think everybody kind of settles in some way because you're never gonna find like your twin, your perfect partner and everyone should be realistic about that. But women would, you know, date guys who weren't a good fit or who didn't bring that much to the table because they didn't have any other options. You know, if they wanted economic security, if they want to start a family, they just had to have a guy to do that.

20:15And in this moment, they don't have to. Women are making their own money. They actually can have families themselves with artificial reproductive technology. and they don't have to settle for a guy who's not on their level. And I'm not sure that I want to. I feel like a lot of conservatives are sort of trying to tell women that they need to get ready to date down and lower their standards. And I don't know that I want to tell women to do that, actually. But I think if this mismatch continues, a certain number of people will have to get comfortable with the idea of being on their own That is a scary thing to contemplate, and I'm not really sure what the advice is for that.

20:59And then actually, I will say one thought about what women maybe can do to help. Over the past, I would say, decade or two decades, there's been a tendency to talk and act as though men are kind of garbage. Like the phrase, men are trash, became just like a running joke in some progressive circles. even in you know sort of professional spaces we talk a lot about toxic masculinity and how men can be less toxic and there's not a lot of empathy there for men from not all women but some women and even women who like love men if they're kind of joking constantly about how much men suck all the time that is probably going to influence how they view the men in their lives um how easy they find it to be in a relationship, how they treat the men around them.

21:56And I think being sort of aware of our, both our internal and our external messaging towards men and about men, because at the end of the day, right, the sexes rise and fall together. I say this a lot. If men are trash, like women aren't going to have a great time either. So kind of, we need to help each other here. I think this is the kind of the, I don't know, the big, the big issue of our generation. But anyways, Christine Emba is a columnist at The Washington Post where she writes about ideas and society for the opinion section. Christine is the author of Rethinking Sex, A Provocation. She joins us from Washington, D.C.

22:34Congratulations on that landmark article. I heard from so many people. I'm so glad you reached out to me. Yeah. Thank you so much for being interviewed for it. All right, Christine. Thanks so much. Thank you. Bye.

22:50We'll take one quick break before we answer a few listener questions on relationships, porn, and masculinity. Stay with us.

23:16Washington to the rest of the globe. Expose corruption wherever we find it. And give fresh perspective on everything from wellness and soccer to culture, the climate and more. Read, watch and listen to The Guardian for free at theguardian.com. Welcome back. Let's bust into some questions. Question number one. Hello, Scott. My name is Gerardo. I live in Sydney, Australia, although I am originally from Bogota, Colombia. I moved to Australia 11 years ago and I am now married to Australian woman. We have a beautiful, smart, half Colombian, half Aussie girl. When I became a father almost four years ago, I started thinking about how to raise a kind, caring, smart woman.

23:55My biggest fear, however, was and still is how to make sure she makes the right decision when it comes to selecting a life partner. I know that will be here from now, but I want to make sure I give her the right tools starting early. Learning about this topic from multiple sources led me to create an interest in how boys are being raised today. I very quickly went down the rabbit hole of the current issue with boys and men and how much they're struggling, to the point where I've now started running an online men's group I called Menlightment, and I find this extremely fulfilling. Throughout this journey, however, I've received, let's call it, questioning, primarily from women about how much light I am shining on men in a world where women are still struggling with inequality.

24:42This questioning becomes even stronger when people realize I have a daughter. So here is my question for you. How do you think I should go about continuing to focus and helping men, but keeping women in mind? I often tell people that raising kind, caring, and compassionate boys is one of the best gifts we can give girls. Any ideas? Thank you. Gerardo, I think you're ahead of the game. With a one-year-old thinking about these questions, you're clearly very thoughtful. And I would argue that at this point, you just want to enjoy having a little girl and being really supportive of your partner and wrestle with these issues.

25:21I think you have a few years to figure this out. So, I mean, a few things. One, anyone who doesn't understand you advocating for men and has a gag reflex about it, you know, doesn't recognize that compassion and empathy are not zero-sum games. civil rights didn't hurt white people, gay marriage didn't hurt heteronormative marriage. And you advocating for men doesn't make you, you know, decrease the likelihood that your little girl isn't going to grow up to be a very confident woman. In terms of building confidence, I think this is, gosh, this is sort of the age-old question in parenting. And there's a lot of, the word you keep hearing is mattering, that you want your kid to know that he or she matters, regardless of whether or not they're achieving, you know, on the top, if they're a heads list, or whether or not they're a great athlete.

26:08I think in terms of modeling how to be a good man or, you know, a good person, being affectionate, supportive, thoughtful, treating your partner well, I think kids do mimic or model after the parents in terms of what they see in that dynamic with respect to the relationship. There is some evidence that when the mother works, the daughter is much more likely to work herself. So I've never bought into this notion. I think a lot of people decide that one partner, usually a woman, should stay at home, that it's good for the kids. I can understand the inclination, but the research shows that especially girls go on to have greater employment prospects and make more money when they grow up in a household where mom is working.

26:49So I don't – it sounds to me like you're sort of ahead of the game. And I think your question was, how do you think I should go about continuing to focus on helping men but keeping women in mind? And, you know, the one thing I can guarantee you will not work is trying to advise your daughter on what types of men to date or not date. I think that is likely to backfire in a pretty severe way. And to a certain extent, we as parents like to think that we're engineers, that we engineer this sheep. It doesn't. It comes to you. We're shepherds. We get to decide where the sheep grazes, point in the right direction, decide what food it eats.

27:27But, you know, we'd like to think because we're a narcissistic species that we have more impact on the child than we probably do. I do believe a bad parent can screw up a good kid, but I'm not sure a good parent can save a bad kid. I think a lot of it is you do your best. You create a loving support atmosphere for them. You model the types of behavior that you hope your boy and your girl mimic and you just do your best. But anyways, thanks for the question. Question number two. Hi, Scott. My name is Jake, and I live in Nashville working in the supply chain for a major retailer. I have found your material at just the right time as a younger parent of two under four with a few years left in my 30s.

28:09My new worry, like many, has been directed to parenting and setting my kids up for a successful and safe youth with the looming pros and cons of AI right around the corner. I have a two-pronged question that I do not think is discussed enough around the lack of emotional skills, respect, empathy, and affection that my generation of men faces when it comes to relationships and sexuality. I'm a millennial that hit adolescence during an explosive era of a sexualized MTV, Howard Stern, American Pie, etc., and when dial-up, internet, pornography went online. How much do you think this has had an effect on so many millennial males soon to be out of your figure-it-out stage?