Giving Boys a Better Story with Andrew 'Bernie' Bernard

0:00This episode is supported by Movember, the leading charity changing the face of men's health.

0:13Welcome back to the To Be A Boy podcast with me, Elliott Ray. Jodie's taking a week off today. So we have a special co-host guest. We have Rachel Carrell, CEO and founder of Coral Kids. Welcome Rachel. Hello, thank you. I have been given, although I mean I have voluntarily stepped into an absolutely impossible role of trying to somehow replace Tully for a week. I'm super excited about the whole theme of this podcast and particularly the discussion we're going to be having today. I've just, by way of very quick introduction, I've got three kids, two of them girls they're they're a girl sandwich um with a boy in the middle uh so I've got a boy who's eight um and so I think about this issue these issues I'm talking about all the time uh and then my day job if that's my night job my day job is um running Cory Kids which I founded 10 years ago and we look after thousands of kids a day and I'm always thinking about how we can do that better take it to the next level, prepare our nannies even better for the job ahead of them.

1:22So I'm kind of thinking about these issues from all of those perspectives. Yeah, lovely to have you here, Rachel. And Choral Kids has been a supporter, sponsor of the podcast. So yes, great to have you here. Thank you so much. We're also joined by another special guest. We have Andrew Bernie Bernard. Loving the t-shirt, dad, husband, feminist. Fantastic. Bernie's an educator, speaker and campaigner working to tackle violence against women and girls, challenge misogyny, and help boys navigate masculinity in the modern world. Through his work in schools and online, Bernie has become a powerful voice speaking directly to boys and men about relationships, respect, online influence, and the rise of the manosphere culture.

2:04So in this conversation, we're going to explore what drives his work, why these issues have become so urgent, and what parents, schools, and society need to do to raise healthier, safer and more emotionally connected boys. Welcome to the podcast Bernie. Thank you I am so delighted since your podcast came out last year or the year before I've listened to every episode absolutely love it and it's a complete honour to be here I'm delighted to be here. Amazing thank you Bernie let's get straight into it you know your work is is very personal you know when you see activists when you see people speaking out um often we wonder why what's what's the origin story and knowing what i do about you the reason you're doing this is is from the heart it is deeply personal and i see that coming out in your passion and how much you care about these issues so talk to us about the experiences of you and your family and like why you do this work to you know prevent violence against women and girls yeah um trigger warning I'm going to be talking about femicide.

3:07I'm also going to be talking about uncomfortable versions of masculinity. So, I mean, just to take it right back to my kind of teenage years, which, as you can tell, was quite a long time ago. I went to a grammar school, didn't really like it. I went to a boys' grammar school, and when I was told as a primary student, the primary pupil, that I was going to a grammar school with this nerdy kid I didn't really like, this other boy that I didn't really get on with, I was thinking, well, what about my real friends? Where are Diane and Lorraine? Where are they going to go? And where is Peter and David going to go?

3:35so I started with a pretty bad attitude then when it came to sixth form I did okay at O-level GCSE I've got eight and they were all absolutely average and at sixth form all my friends were going to the local college where you could wear your own clothes where there were going to be girls where you could you know call the lecturers by their first name but my parents thought it'd be better if I stayed at the grammar school and during that two-year period of sixth form I I basically was angry because they'd said no to me so I was like I spent the whole year two years spiraling getting into trouble with the police i got arrested for shoplifting me and some friends decided to nick a thousand pounds worth of clothes in london we got arrested at about 500 quid on oxford street you know think of it with the kings of london then all of a sudden oh oh we're in court okay um so that i was getting in trouble with fighting at the police the football so i go to football matches on a regular basis got heavily involved in kind of 80s football hooliganism and it's where in order to wear the right clothes i started nicking clothes because i couldn't afford to buy them and then um also I was pretty horrible to girls and so at the end of that two-year period when I opened my exam results and realized I'd got an E and a U from my A levels I cried my eyes out for two years and what I realized was I'd been so deep into this kind of constructed image of what I thought manhood should be that I'd lost who I was I was brought up my dad was an ex-policeman you So I created this kind of toxic vortex around myself.

4:59And also during that period, I had an older girlfriend. We were going to go on holiday during term time. During that incident, I was chipping away at my mum to get my birth certificate so I could get a passport. One day she just said, well, we don't want any more like you, do we? And I said, what are you on about? And she said, well, you were adopted, weren't you? And I was already volatile. I was 17. I kicked off and I just thought, what? How come you've not? and I did that whole flouncy thing I've been living a lie and I you know marched off to my friends and stayed there for three nights but before I did that my mum said whatever you do don't tell your sister because she's adopted too by now you can probably imagine what the first thing was that I did I knocked on the bedroom door and I said I'm adopted and so are you I was horrible I was absolutely horrific so after I knackered my a-levels up I asked my mum for help and to her great credit she said yes and I ended up going to Northeast Wales Institute of Higher Education which no one's ever heard of on the North Wales coast because I needed to get out of Aylesbury the town I was living in because I just created this toxic environment around myself all the time I couldn't go out the house couldn't go into a pub couldn't go to a nightclub couldn't go to a disco anywhere without getting into a fight and we'd created this image of ourselves and it was really self kind of self-replicating by the time you think you're a hard man everyone else thinks you're a hard man and then you get into a fight and then if either win or lose someone else wants to have a go so I call it dominance-based masculinity that I was involved with because I always wanted to be better than everybody else and however that manifests itself it's you know at school it's backpacks trainers haircuts then you know out in public it's kind of having the nicest looking girlfriend or the best trainers or the as you get older having the nicest car and as you get older still it's private number plates golf club membership platinum cards it it never stops this kind of struts this kind of striving to be better than everybody else and I think so that's been really weaponized over the last kind of 10 years with with the rise of the manosphere and the other reason I talk and campaign and work with young people in schools on violence against women and girls is that my sister Sarah was fatally stabbed in 2012 by her partner um she'd left her husband and kids a couple of years ago by this guy that we now realized had kind of love bombed her online on facebook and um she moved in with him she'd never met him before apart from the night that she actually decided to leave after a number of months of kind of chatting online he basically said i can't live without you come and live with me she went to live with him in newcastle and um sarah and i didn't get on if i'm completely honest We, as, as you know, you can tell by the way I was as a young person, we were constantly butting heads.

7:45So when we were adults, we went in completely different directions of the country. She went to Norfolk and I went to Northeast Wales and the Northwest. And we would send each other's kids birthday and Christmas cards, but that was about it. We weren't the kind of siblings that would text each other jokes and that kind of stuff. So it wasn't unusual that Sarah and I weren't talking very much. So the fact that she'd moved to Newcastle, I knew she had, we weren't in contact. But then one day I received a phone call from my mum one Sunday morning in February, 2012. And she said, there's been an accident.

8:15Sarah's dead. And I said, what are you on about? Because that was kind of where I was. I had no concept of, well, you know, your sister's 41. I think she was at the time. I just thought, well, how? What, you know, what are you on about? There's been an accident. My mum said, Sarah's called Sarah Gosling and he was called Ian Hope. you can still google what happened when he went to court but um and ian's being ian's talking to the helping the police is is how my mum put it if you can imagine a mother she was about 70 at the time finding out that your daughter had been killed fatally stabbed by a guy that she'd left the family for she i think my mum couldn't compute it she just couldn't get her head around it so um about an hour later northumberland police called me and said that what had happened was she'd been fatally stabbed that he was likely to be charged with murder they'd kind of got the evidence from the scene and um so I just kind of walked around in a daze for a while like I said even though Sarah and I weren't close I was just I couldn't kind of compute what happened I went up the following week to identify her body which was one of the most horrific experiences of my life and then I spoke to the police and they were really amazing, to be perfectly honest.

9:36I mean, you hear a lot of bad stories about the police, particularly in relation to domestic violence and domestic abuse, but they were very, very clear that they were treating this as intentional and they weren't going to go for manslaughter. They were going to go for murder because of the way that he had actually attacked her. So during the course of that year, we were waiting for court. court came and in November 2012 he was convicted of murder and well unanimously after a two-week court case it took the jury less than two hours to unanimously convict him of of murder and he was given life with a minimum of 17 years so he's in until at least 2029 and so well as you can imagine I didn't really know what to do I didn't think it was my story to tell I didn't I didn't didn't know anything about coercive control and domestic violence.

10:31I didn't know anything about the scale and frequency of violence against women and girls, how domestic abuse works and how little we know about it. I mean, most people won't know that between two and three women a week are killed by a man that they know in England and Wales alone, because of the way it's reported, because of the way it's discussed, because of the way we don't really connect the dots and we don't see the patterns that lead to it so after a couple of years I thought I just would not leave me alone I was already working in schools doing enterprise and business workshops so I asked a school that I was friendly with I said I've got an idea young people need to know about healthy relationships young people need to know about domestic violence because if you don't know the patterns if you don't know the behaviors then before you realize it you might be in a relationship like that so I did a couple of test sessions with some year 10s in Manchester gave me some feedback and since then i've spoken to about 60 000 young people about domestic abuse and coercive control using what happened to sarah as a start point but kind of then to unravel narratives and control which we're seeing more and more through manosphere influence so to want to honor sarah's legacy but also i think what what's happening at the moment is the influences from the manosphere um influences of control and behavior that are facilitated by technology leads to a whole rash of young people which i'll talk about in a minute i'll talk about the statistics behind it a whole rash of young people who are experiencing abuse and um kind of violence in their relationships which is also kind of fueled in with sexual violence as well so we're in a really really unhealthy position for teen relationships right now so that's really that's why i do what i do so i hope that's a really long explanation but i hope it kind of gives an idea about why i do what i do and what's what's happening at the moment and why i almost feel like my kind of life stories and Sarah's life story and what's happened to me in my kind of journey has kind of led to to knowing what I'm talking about right now why I see it as so vital to talk about it I mean when I asked that question I didn't know what you're gonna say and I think what you've just said there has just blown my mind and I feel speechless which is not great for a podcast you know powerful I could feel myself getting emotional as you were talking you know so many things in regards to what you were saying there as the the competitive nature of some kind of masculinity in regards to we have to compete with each other we have to have the stuff we have to be better you know I've seen that and battled with it and still battle with it if I'm completely honest you know I think we have to work really hard not to be we have to things we say the things thinking the things that we know the way we look at other men the way we look at our relationship to other men and stuff i think we it's a lifetime's effort to unpick those man box thinkings that we none of us choose it is it's it's ongoing work you know there's not just you have one therapy session or one podcast and it's done it's like this is this is everyday stuff you know because existing in this world it encourages us to to be competitive and we get rewarded for that so what you're saying there is so powerful your upbringing um the football and your sister are so powerful.

13:41So I just want to, first of all, thank you and acknowledge that you have an incredible story. And I think, you know, there's people in this earth who find their purpose and you can see that you're doing work that's impacting so many people. And from what you said, I actually believe this is your purpose in the world and you're definitely fulfilling that and doing amazing work. I also just find it actually a really hopeful story. I know we're going to get onto some really dire statistics, but your personal journey, I've never spoken to a football hooligan before. This is an exciting moment for me.

14:15But one of those I was reflecting on when you were talking is you're obviously a super smart, deeply compassionate, incredibly thoughtful, very purpose-driven person. And that coexists like you're still the same soul that you were when you were doing all that stuff that you told us about. and so for me that's actually a really hopeful thing that it was always there um and and so you you what that tells me is people you know people can change people people are so capable of change you've changed unrecognizably yeah oh yeah absolutely in fact that you're absolutely right i was brought up in a loving but quite dysfunctional family my mum once said that her and my dad got divorced accidentally.

15:04So how does that work? I was sharing bunk beds in a room with my dad because they'd kind of had a, they've had a tiff and he came to, he basically stayed in my room for a night and then that became four years. So then once one, apparently what, what, what happened was my dad said, I think my mom said, I think we should get divorced, hoping that my dad would say, no, no, I think we should work it out. And she just went, yeah, all right. hi guys i mean it was i think my mum had been depressed for years and i think my mum was a very stiff upper lip type of person she was one of seven sisters and her her dad only ever wanted a boy so they couldn't have boys so i was kind of almost like the golden child when they adopted me my parents couldn't have children so i was like this golden child and i was put on a pedestal against my sister i think they kind of they're all we have to balance it out i never spoke to either of my parents about this because it was kind of least said soonest mended type thing but i i grew up with a dad who was loving a proud scotsman who was loving who wore his heart on his sleeve who would cry at the drop of a hat who cooked a lot he was a chef in the raf for national service and all this kind of stuff but he and my mum were kind of a really weird they were they grew apart but they didn't actually take any action about it so it was all of those kind of loads of unsaid stuff in our family so it was it was quite weird and i think what i've learned from that is that it didn't help me and it's taken me getting married having a family of my own we had some therapy i had some therapy and i think it took a really long time for me to kind of deconstruct the stuff that you um you know philip larkin said it well didn't he they f you up your mom and dad they don't mean to but they do and i think unless you're actively taking chances to try and create an environment where your kids are not necessarily the center of your world because then you get massive headed kids who think they can do no wrong but this kind of idea that they're loved unconditionally and i think just to kind of finish on this sorry i've gone off on another tangent but there's all good for the two elements that a teacher once said to me i've been working in schools for 20 years now and about for the last 12 years i've been i've been working on domestic violence and you know masculinity stuff but before that i was doing enterprise and stuff and I was chatting to a woman in a school on the south coast and she said the things that children need mainly that we provide as teachers that we provide as parents this is what we expect from you and they can be boundaries that push you know improvement or they can be boundaries that crush those kids so you know boundaries are important it allows young people to make decisions and care they're the two things she said boundaries and care and care means unconditional love unconditional support but also holding them accountable i would add sarcasm to that as that's been our kind of parenting toolkit boundaries care and sarcasm because if you don't expose children to humor and laughing and being able to laugh at themselves particularly boys they're gonna have a really rough time if you take yourself too seriously as a boy you get you end up in loads of fights and loads of trouble because you're being disrespected and that goes back to what we were just saying about that old man box stuff, Elliot.

18:19If someone looks at you the wrong way for more than a second or if someone looks at something you own, someone you think you own, like your girlfriend or your partner, then there's always room for a fight. And I think if you take yourself too seriously as a boy, and I think this is why humor is so important, then you get yourself into loads more fights, into loads more trouble. So they're my three, I suppose, my parenting recipe, if you like. boundaries care sarcasm or humor if you want but you know and i think the sarcasm comes out in your instagram content you see it there it is there on full display it's hilarious there well that's right let's talk about you know you mentioned two to three women will get killed by someone they know every week in the uk and you know the rates of how many women will get sexually abused and domestically abused in their life is i think it's three out of four it's crazy right and this is a widespread issue but as you said why the population doesn't know enough about this i think there's the the idea that this is caused by like bad individuals but you argue it's cultural it's bigger than just bad individuals this is something that's seeping through our culture in the uk and across the world what is it about society that what we're failing to understand about why this is so widespread it's always been there for a start i mean if you look at patriarchal structures they depend on the suppression of women and that was a lot easier when birth control didn't exist when women couldn't have access to bank accounts when women weren't allowed to buy a house or get a mortgage unless they had a male signatory so i think and that kind of idea and then we had you know we had evolution we had evolution in the in the kind of 60s and 70s where we had kind of sexual freedoms we also had kind of feminism feminism let's talk about what feminism actually means because it doesn't mean kill all men which i'm often told that fifth wave seventh wave, fourth wave, 973rd wave feminism, all this nonsense.

20:29The original aims of feminism are equality in society, politics, and economics. That's it. That's it. Similar, you know, access to those things. And by any objective measure, none of those things are equal anywhere in the world. There is not a single country on earth where equality has been achieved. So that's why I'm a feminists because why should men because they have used force in the past maintain this dominance and we don't even create life so i mean but to answer your question have you have have you seen um the pyramid of sexual violence because if you come across if you haven't i suggest you know listeners look it up well there's a thing called the continuum of harm which are very very similar concepts and they came from work done by liz kelly who was a woman that was a sociologist who worked in a woman's refuge in the 70s 80s and 90s in london and she created this this idea of a continuum of harm which what she said was she met she worked with a lot of perpetrators of violence against women and girls network experience and domestic abuse but she also worked with perpetrators and And when she interviewed, she interviewed 50 or 60 perpetrators of violence.

21:51And what she realized was that these were not outliers. These are not monsters. What she realized was that within the spheres of influence of all of these men, the people around them, they didn't call them out for sexist jokes. They didn't call them out for inappropriate behavior. They had that kind of bro code thing, that kind of what goes on tour stays on tour, that kind of thing where men were cheating on their wives or kind of you know talking about violence against their wives no one was jumping and saying oh you're wrong there hang on a minute let's have a chat about that no one was doing that so there's a kind of there's a systemic scaffold that allows abusive people to continue to get away with it and what we're seeing now is a load of a load of kind of i suppose influence online which doesn't really look that harmful but it spuffles this kind of behavior so this kind of idea that get her passwords don't let her have male friends um make sure she doesn't post provocative images who decides what provocative is you know so this kind of idea that if you have a partner then you should not allow her to do this kind of stuff because if someone thinks they're allowed to allow you to do something that also means that they feel they're allowed to stop you doing things so i think what we're seeing right now and again this is a long answer but i think it's worth kind of looking at the history of it where it came from this kind of idea that sharp the sexual harassment and reporting process in the american army have allowed me to use their continuum of harm which was adapted from liz kelly's from my book which i'm currently editing at the moment um but it basically starts with the behaviors we want so they're the kind of ones that are enshrined in enshrined in mottos and in you know kind of mission statements and the names that you know we want this place to be a safe workplace for everyone or we want this school to be a safe place for everybody so that's the kind of gluing zone and then we move into the kind of yellow and amber areas which might be things like sexualized innuendo and jokes and rape jokes and those kind of things well they're more of a kind of red amber red but if you've got in schools things like flicking brass straps that would be a kind of yellow that would be a warning sign or sending each other inappropriate jokes or inappropriate pictures or requesting inappropriate pictures that would be a kind of oh hang on a minute we're moving towards a slightly more harmful way of being and then the the amber might be actively sharing intimate images of other people to your friends so you know you ask a a girl for a nude we can look at the way language has adapted the fact their intimate images of minors if you're under 18 and called them nudes we've kind of sanitized the kind of you know the kind of pervy porno nature of that and the kind of illegal nature of that we've called them nudes in the same way that beige was suddenly nude you know about 15 years ago when I mean, we made beige sexy.

24:50We used nudes to kind of balance and kind of reduce the impact of intimate image abuse and, you know, intimate images of minors. When you share those with your friends, that would be a kind of amber or a red. And then red is into kind of illegal behaviors. So making AI deepfakes, actual sexual harassment, sexual harm. So we all live within somewhere along that continuum. And the same is true of a rape pyramid. and that kind of pyramid of rape and sexual harassment. Right at the very top is rape and serious sexual assault, but below that you've got people that touch people inappropriately without any comeback.

25:28You've got those kind of, you know, the kind of way we talk about women and girls online, you know, the way that we casually use the word ho and bitch and those kind of things. And if you don't call those things in when your friends are saying them, then that gives them permission. And if someone is going to push the boundaries, if they think they can get away with a bit more, they will push the boundaries further. and i think that that's that's why none of us are an island we are all connected to other people and i think the thing that we forget there's a brilliant quote but basically the kind of culture is defined by the worst behavior we tolerate which is a john amici quote which is a brilliant quote that basically says if we are okay with that then chances are we'll be okay with this and then we let it slip a bit further and the chances are we're okay with that as well and then all of a sudden the people that are going to push boundaries all the way are right over here doing whatever they want becoming president um but without ever being held accountable so i think that that's why it's really important that we as men stand up not only for women but also stand up to challenge the men around us to to be better to be more respectful to be less misogynistic to be less sexist and i think that gets me a lot of pushback online because they call me a white knight they call me a simp Someone called me a disgrace to my chromosomes the other day, which I thought was actually quite a good creative.

26:50That's the new one. Is that Barclay? I don't know. Anyway. So it takes bravery to do it. And about a year and a half ago, I only had about 1 ,500 followers on Instagram, and I was coming off Twitter because it's just become a toxic swamp. And also after Elan's sign and the way Grok was undressing children, and I just thought I can't be part of this it became more and more poisonous and then because I talk about violence against women and girls I got more views on there than anything but then I started talking about during 16 days of activism about like I say about 18 months ago and I started talking about it I thought well if I don't talk about it who does and if I don't use 16 days of activism or other instances like you know International Men's Day International Women's day other other days that allow me to be vocal about changing men's behavior then what am I going to do it and if I don't do it who's going to do it so that that was that that was the kind of decision making process I cannot remain quiet if this is what I want to happen so I will take I will take that pushback I will take those red pill insults because they're the same every time none of them are original none of them are remotely going to stop me doing what I'm doing and unless we as men stand up and go this is out of order then misogynistic men don't listen to women anyway and women have been talking about this stuff for years and it's not changing so unless men get involved unless we realize the impact that we have you know war was told men are natural leaders well do it yeah and the work you do is important and i think for all the people that are like the naysayers you'll have so many more supporting and cheering you on you know and I think it is difficult as as as a man stepping out of the norm um and you have to be willing to to to face abuse and whatnot but it's worth it and you can see that your your cause is worth it 100 % and all that all those people talking nonsense it's like whatever I've got a bigger purpose a bigger cause say whatever you want the mission the mission is way bigger than that you I think it's so important who you surround yourself with as well.

29:04You know, what you're saying there in regards to the John Amici quote with, the culture is the worst behavior we accept. I think surrounding yourself with good people who hold you to account, who have good morals, good standards, not perfect by any means, but you're all trying your best to do better and you're working on yourselves. And I found out as I've got older, just the importance of surrounding myself with good people is so important. This episode is brought to you by State Farm. You know those friends who support your preference for podcasts over music on road trips? That's the energy State Farm brings to insurance.

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30:19Learn more at windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th. Terms at aka.ms slash college PC. so what you're saying there in regards to the schools you know i spoke to um a friend of mine's wife who is a pastor lead in a school in north london she's been there for about 20 years and she was saying recently of the last four or five years she's seen so many young girls who are about 15 16 coming to her saying they are in controlling relationships their their boyfriends are tracking their phones they want passwords to their instagram accounts they want to know where they're going they want to control who they're talking to what they're wearing and she was saying that wasn't the case 10 years ago you know it's always happened but there's a bit of spike in the last few years you go into schools and you talk to to boys about this stuff kind of what what what works how do we approach this if you know there's a 15 year old boy in a school he's in a you know friendship groups that maybe aren't the best he's watching some of the Manosphere content how do you get through to him in a way that's relatable that actually gets the message across and ultimately you know changes his behavior and his perspective yeah just to go back a little bit on what you've just said the Youth Endowment Fund did a every year they do a kind of state of the nation's kids thing they ask 10 ,000 young people anonymously to to fill out a survey online and then they kind of compile reports the third report every year is called Children of vulnerability and violence.

31:51And what they found is that of the young people aged 13 to 17, out of those 10 ,000 that were in relationships, it was 29%, so 27%. So 2 ,700 of those young people were in relationships. Of those, 49%, so half, said they'd experienced violent or controlling behaviour from their partners. So once a young person is in a relationship, they have a one in two chance of being controlled or violently treated or sexually assaulted or you know experience sexual violence in their relationships now the interesting thing about that is that it includes things like going through messages it includes things like checking who you're talking to it includes things like getting passwords it also includes things like 30 of those 50 had experienced sexual violence and intimate image sharing so this kind of idea that if you don't do this then i'll share those those images if all my friends are doing this so coercion you know all my friends girlfriends are doing this and they let them video them and they they like this so why why don't you um in a weird way though technology has kind of democratize control and behavior and what we've what what the what the report found is that boys were more likely to perpetrate violence but they were also more likely to experience violence so that's across the piece but within relationships they found that the way young people were using technology to monitor and track one another was about the same level so boys and girls are both perpetrating controlling and manipulative behavior using technology at similar rates now if you think back current of control is frequently backed up by the threat of violence so traditionally it was more men that would do it but technology is kind of in a weird way democratized kind of controlling behaviors what that's meaning is that it's now become normalized so i was working with some year sevens in a school in northwest london so these were year seven girls in july so we're talking about 12 year olds in the main.

34:00And this girl just said, location is normal. And I said, what do you mean by that? She said, location is normal. If you have got a partner, then you have to have location on. So this is like the, you know, 10 years ago, it was Facebook official. Well, this is the kind of updated version of that. If you are in a relationship, you have to have your location switch on. I said, why? And she said, in case they cheat. And I said, well, you don't know what they're doing. You just know where they are. and she said yeah but you need to know so i said so when you're not with your partner what are you doing should i just watch what so i said your entire life then is watching so you've turned yourself into we've got a generation of basically amateur detectives it's bizarre it's normal so it's become normalized and this kind of behavior and these memes that say you've got to get her passwords you shouldn't have male friends don't wear provocative clothes not allowed to drink not allowed to go to clubs that's that's the kind of the kind of light version of the manosphere so we see a lot of kind of red pill content which is women are stupid they shouldn't have the vote and this kind of stuff which is which is massive and horrific anyway but what we're also seeing is these more subtle kind of b b rolls of young men with face pictures driving on driving in ferraris which they've obviously rented for the day from a kind of content house and over the top of it it'll say things like if it's not a crippling attachment attachment if she you know these larger things that are really quite controlling if you've never been called toxic are you even a man if you've never if you've never tracked or monitored her behavior are you even a man so this kind of idea of venerating and promoting this idea about what men should be back to this kind of old version of kind of controlling kind of traditional masculinity is a really poisonous narrative because i think that that that's that's the biggest issue with it is because it's often cloaked as care yeah this kind of idea you need to know where she is so you can keep her safe no you want to keep tracks on where she is but very often they'll say get her passwords but not let's share passwords which is really interesting it's much more about you knowing where she is as a man which is really fascinating isn't it and it's I'm going to tune into it and when you understand how coercive control works this kind of gradual reduction in confidence, reduction in agency, in increasing tracking, increasing monitoring, that you actually then start to see these B-rolls and these narratives for what they are.

36:28And it's a really straight line from there to kind of male supremacy and white supremacy, which we're seeing this kind of idea that the trad wives, this kind of stuff. You know, 15 years ago, men were interested in carrying man bags and skincare regimes. We've gone, you know, we've absolutely flipped that on his head now right back to keep her barefoot and pregnant we need to increase the birth rate the white birth rate and all this there's quite a lot of really kind of unsavoury messages this kind of anti-empathy stuff anti-reading there's quite a lot of stuff around that as well go to the gym don't serve god you know this comes only in christianity that a lot of people seem to have found particularly when they're accused of lots of heinous crimes against women and but you know that's another side.

37:11I think just go back to that in terms of what you said there it just shows how how this is seeped into culture you know how this is becoming so normalized that unless you have someone a parent or someone like yourself in the school or you know someone in your family that's going to come across and say actually they're going to grab you out of it it's very easy just to go in with what is normal and actually it's normal to track each other's phones in year seven and we don't question that and that's what we do and as you said the pipeline from there you go up the pyramid so yeah i think it's it's what you've done is really help people to explain how this is a cultural thing and it's becoming so normalized and there's loads of peer pressure in schools to do the same thing as everybody else regardless of the fact that everyone said be an individual it's not that easy i think a lot of parents forget what it was like being a teenager it's horrible at school sometimes there's so much pressure and now they can't get away from that pressure 24 7 because if someone videos you crying or whatever or videos you're doing something or getting rejected by a girl then everyone knows about it and i think that's one of the things that i think was so powerful about adolescence last year that kind of first 10 minutes where he's going he's there he's in his room you know he's safe and i think i think what that showed us is is a real mirror on how many parents have not got the first idea what their kids are looking at or the way they're behaving or the way that they're using technology to monitor track and control each other and the power of technology which most parents didn't have because you know parents who have kids that are teenagers now they probably grew up just on the cusp of or before technology was there so i think a lot of parents i forget what it was like being a teenager and also have not got a clue what their kids are seeing i love how you identify all these different strands of culture and bring them into that which you might think are unrelated but show how it's all really actually related and I wonder one bit that I wanted to bring in and I'd love to know if you have any thoughts is I spend my life thinking about kids age 0 to 10 so I'm thinking about where's the root causes of all this stuff happening earlier in the pipeline and uh what some of the research I've been looking at is about what what they call the cuddle gap so there's a body of research showing we start withdrawing physical affection from boys when they're babies we actually treat boys and girls as babies differently we cuddle girls a lot more and that by but and that gets more and more as they get older and older and if by the time or the girls are getting loads of cuddling loads of nice touching and the boys are getting rough and tumble which is also really important but that's all we're getting and the research shows it's the mums and the dads that are doing this and and and so that then causes less oxytocin some of these you know these great hormones that we get when we get positive touch and and cuddles that's associated with weaker attachment that is associated with fewer tools for emotional regulation and then so you grow up with these these these lesser ability to emotionally regulate you then hit adolescence and the manosphere is right there with the answers for loneliness and frustration yeah you're absolutely right and the the other thing i mean look at the very socialized boys and girls i mean And not everyone will do this, but I think we still have.

40:22I use a series of T-shirts that I put up, and one of them says, Here Comes Trouble. It's a green T-shirt with blue rye in. Here Comes Trouble. Who has that? Boys. Could a girl wear that? Yeah. Would many parents put a girl in that? Probably not. Next one says, Always be kind in a rainbow. I said, Who is that for? Girls. And then I ask this question. I say, What's the most sinister word on that T-shirt? And the amount of times boys particularly shout out the word kind. Wow. It's really fascinating. Always is the correct answer, by the way. Ben grooms girls for compliance. They groom girls to be nice and palatable and lovely.

41:01And then I share a T-shirt that says, no rules. A camo T-shirt with bright, big wears, I say, no rules. And that's where we get to. And we get to the stage where if we were drawing cuddles and then almost we see cuddles as things that girls do. and you know boys are taught to be everything that isn't girly so we you know don't throw like a girl don't run like a girl so and again not every parent is going to do this but this is constant messages that comes to us your granddad might say get up son you don't want to be seen crying like a girl and then you might get a brief hug but that's it then you're kind of back on your own again and we are taught that well let's face it this is old man box thinking this is the idea that we're only allowed, we shouldn't be emotional, we should be strong, we should be brave, and all this kind of stuff.

41:49And then we redefine anger as not an emotion. We even redefine that as justifiable rage. We say, they made me like this. So we don't even take responsibility for the one emotion that men are allowed to have, because we blame someone else for it. I mean, imagine, think about how many films wouldn't exist if men didn't want to get revenge, or men didn't feel slighted or men didn't feel like someone had been bad to them. Half the action films wouldn't exist because of this narrow idea about what male emotions are. So they are systemically removed from us. We all have the ability to feel. But, I mean, I hate to say this, but I am 60 this year.

42:37so I grew up in the 60s and 70s when emotions in young men were not encouraged and it's taken me a lifetime to unlearn that stuff having daughters really helped I didn't want boys because I was an arsehole as a boy as I've told you and I'm blessed to have two daughters and I learned a lot about emotional regulation through having daughters um and i think we miss men could learn a lot from from women and i think what what we're seeing now is is this massive polarity between men should women should don't be don't be like a woman you've got to be like this is a man and that man box is getting almost more and more strong than it ever was it's been weaponized now and so i think what we're getting is this kind of idea that you know if she's too emotional don't don't go with if she's had lots of partners before don't go with them and all these kind of things are basically leading us to to men to be told they should look for young women who are inexperienced which actually means they're easier to manipulate and control so there's loads of narratives that lead us to this but you're absolutely right that kind of cuddle gap i've never heard it called that but i think that's that's a really important thing because also I guess some dads are quite uncomfortable cuddling their sons, let alone their mums, their grands, their aunties, their sisters.

44:01We're quite uncomfortable because we've never had touch before. So it absolutely is a generational challenge for us, I think. Yeah, I've seen how it, I've got two daughters, three and ten, and what really I've seen, it kind of really annoys me, is that there's lots of parents of boys who are maybe like eight, nine years old and they really celebrate their romantic pursuits. And they'll really be like, well, I've said my daughter's on holiday and there's parents of boys who'd be like, oh yeah, she's nice. Why don't you go and talk to her? Yeah, you go, you go, you go. And they're kind of priming their sons to be these hunters and really celebrating them as like, they're going to go and get the girl.

44:45They're eight years old and that is my daughter, please. Don't chat completely. and it's together that's lovely go and be friends yeah exactly why are you why are you coupling their their interaction as romantic as he is pursuing her they are children let them just be friends but what you notice is that parents of girls don't do that right i'm not demonizing parents of boys and girls not about that i think it's about how we internalize what a boy should be and a lot of parents mums and dads want their sons to be these kind of you know going out there in hunting and and attractive and and getting the girls and whatnot don't get me wrong i i get it to a certain extent but i think at the same time they're just kids and there's no need to put that on an eight-year-old your idea of what you want your son to grow up to be attractive and have a have you know a relationship i understand that but they're children so let's calm down um but you can kind of see from that how it starts our ideas of gender roles we put that onto our children at that age 100 we do that and i think that that takes some unlearning like i was just saying it takes some unlearning particularly as pets as dads i think we we have to kind of unlearn some of that just what when you said the word prey just then uh like predators the hunters you said a lot of t-shirts that i take a lot of photos of t-shirts of t-shirts in in shops like primark and stuff and i was watching someone and i can't remember who it was but there were two women been talking on the podcast and they said what you what you can't unsee once you see it is that a lot of boys t-shirts feature animals that are like lions or dinosaurs they're t-rexes they're predators girls t-shirts tend to feature things like unicorns or horses or rabbits which are all prey animals but she said once you see that you can't unsee it and you know i've never seen a girls t-shirt that says be kind on it and i've never seen a girls t-shirt that says little heartbreaker you know so what messaging from corporate organizations that know this stuff's going to sell i mean lego used to have a little note in it that said in the 70s it was a little typed out note on a piece of paper that said you might want to encourage your boys to build trucks and stuff and you might want to build you know encourage girls to do stuff with kids and what have you but they basically says let kids just play let them play and do what they want because you know some girls like the idea of being a spacer or an astronaut and some boys might like the idea of being a teacher so don't kind of knock that out and then when you look now at Lego it's so gendered they've obviously thought yeah that's nice but yeah we can make loads more money if we kind of do gender splits do partner up with Harry Potter or partner up with whatever it is, partner up with whatever to sell more stuff.

47:48So I think it's become – it's sad that because I really like Lego for that when it started out. But then they've kind of gone the way of all corporate. It's taking more money by gender in it. So one of the things I think about a lot is I run Quarry Kids, which picks kids up from school and takes them home and looks after them there. I've got lots of nannies. And I think, firstly, that's an interesting age group. We don't have kids aged 0 to 10. But I think even more, I think about that time of the day as being a really powerful and actually really neglected time of the day because that 3 to 6 p.m., I actually think it's a really magical time.

48:28It's when you digest what just happened and it's when you decide what the narrative is that you're going to tell yourself and maybe other people about what just happened during the day. yeah and so I think when we're forming our identity and we're figuring out our place in the world and all the things that the kids are doing as they're you know seven eight nine ten I just think that time's really really important so one of the things I'm thinking about as I'm listening to you is how can I what how can I give nannies something really practical or it might be parents picking up their kids from school do you have any kind of takeaways for how parents, nanies, whoever can start to influence kids for the better in all of this terrible mire of things that you've just mentioned.

49:14Yeah. You almost kind of want pre-reinforcement of critical thinking, I guess. I think that that's the kind of thing that I think. And you're right about that time. When our kids were young, which is the reason I'm still poor now, now we had horses and when we would go into the horses it was about kind of 15 minutes away and we'd have a chat in the car about this that and the other then the kids would be mucking out and then we'd come back home we'd have dinner together and we would just be chatting about you know is slightly older and she was kind of maybe 14 or 15 at the time and she how was your day all right what did you do nothing much was it good yeah it was a bit boring and ruby would say what happened to you today and she said well i got up early and i had a piece of toast and you know you get the whole thing so they were very different but we kind of got to the point where we would say what was the best thing that happened today and what what could have been what could have been nicer two things and we had a kind of policy where we would always sit down for dinner so i think that's a really important thing so just have that chat and when they tell you things that happened at school they'll probably tell you the bad stuff that happens oh this happened in class and that well what what do you think about that how did the teacher cope with it or and you have the chance then i think in that window to go i think that was fair what do you think it would have happened if you were a boy the boys have that kind of stuff as well the boys get told to do this and that so i suppose you've got that time to kind of open up those discussions and i think when it's snap time sitting around when you're doing something i i'm a massive fan of task and talk because i think if you say right we need to have a chat and you sit down and say what's going on then immediately you just get i'm not talking about this and in fact there was a really good thing i saw on i think it's called man up australia or something the other day and they were saying you know if my dad my parents ever want to sit down and go we need to have a chat they just go i just give them one word answers and get out of there as quickly as i can and i think that was the same again with teenagers we were the same we did not want our parents into our worlds and kind of mithering with us especially some of the stuff that we did that we weren't that proud of or we didn't want them to find out about so i think tasking and talking is really good can you help me just wash some salad or can you help me chop up some veg or can you help me do this and so while they're learning to cook as well which is a valuable skill for both boys and girls um you could be saying you know what happened today do you think you know just kind of unpick some of this stuff and just give me a hand with the laundry and you can kind of inculcate these sneaky gender role destruction tools without them even realizing they're doing it and i think that that's the way of doing it so your nannies could have a i don't know a series of kind of games or play cards or or something or just kind of have a way of kind of going about things that opens up questions or, you know, you create a kind of little dress-up kind of game and say, well, why don't you think boys wear skirts?

52:06Or why do you think it, you know, just open up these discussions. And I think it has to be intentional because otherwise the world has a way of manipulating us to be stereotypical. Oh, no, I don't like that. That's girls' stuff. Girls shouldn't play football because they're rubbish at it. You know, that kind of stuff. men are more to play football because they're better. Well, do you know about the history of men's football, you know, women's football, when it was banned in 1921 because the FA said that it was not suitable for females, except it'd been okay when they get hundreds of thousands of crowds during the war, when the men were off at war.

52:42So that might be a reason why women's football is so far behind. So should we talk about that? Do you want to look at the documentary about it? You know, just open up stuff and just, I think one of the things is to tune into those stereotypical things that they say. But I think that's, I think we have to be intentional in dismantling some of the stereotypes that we see. Yeah, amazing advice, Bernie. And what would you say to parents of boys who are slightly older? So, you know, secondary school and maybe they're concerned, they're watching some of this content, they're having overhearing conversations with their friends that they're worried about.

53:15What would your advice be for those parents? I think the advice is kind of pretty similar, I would say. I mean, with young kids, it's a bit more easy because they're a bit more malleable. But I think going for walks, doing tasks together, come on, help me. If you want to kind of maintain the stereotypes a little bit, help me do a bit of gardening, help me kind of wash the car. We'll wash the car and then I'll take you out for a drive and we'll go and get a milkshake or whatever. and just as a dad I think that that's part of your role I think to just kind of open up those discussions and say well what happened at school today oh thingy god they you know Toby got in trouble today oh how come he said oh well he told the teacher she was an idiot oh okay well how did that come about and then then you can kind of unpick the kind of stuff but I think as those lads were saying I think there's a brilliant Hugo by Loyal Karnas one of the best albums I've ever listened to and um particularly the reimagined at uh albert hall is the best i'm repeat for me for about the last three years but in it he talks about getting to know his dad he didn't know his dad growing up and his dad said i'd like to teach you to drive and he said during those driving lessons when he was learning in his dad's crappy old polo he stopped talking and started listening and i think that's a really good example of looking ahead not staring into someone's eyes and waiting for a response and just kind of being able to just go with the flow and encourage us to kind of connect a bit more boys are not taught empathy girls are given toys like prams and mini kitchens and stuff boys are given toys that kill each other you know so and boys are told that they have to win sports so empathy is i think a massive dearth in young men because we're not really taught it and when you've got america talking about the sin of empathy and kind of suicidal empathy as musk said then it's seen as a really bad thing for men to care so i think we have to be the kind of i suppose the bulkhead against that and say not everyone's as lucky as you are how would you help people that are not as lucky as you and why do you think they said that where do you think they got their ideas from and just i suppose help them with a bit of critical thinking because it's very easy in kind of social media land to go oh well it's all the you know stop the boats means hate those people or you know women are stupid and you know we're talking about single single mothers bringing up to well what about fatherlessness let's look at that let's look at the cause of single mothers it's fatherlessness and why is that you know so just look at the two sides of things and just kind of open it up and if you might have to do some homework as a parent to kind of know what you're talking about and dig down a little bit and go on to their what there might be their algorithm and understand where they're coming I think that's that's another thing and my book is called masculinity relationships and respecting schools and it's about helping teachers and parents to unpick some of the stuff I've been talking about today so it's a kind of like a manual on how to kind of understand I suppose your teenage boy's language and where it's come from and how you can help them to kind of unpick some of that stuff so I think that's that would be my advice task and talk you know and try not to be too judgmental because i think we were constantly moved from empathy to judgment that's that's the way the world works it always has and i think if we can kind of encourage more people to move towards empathy and away from judgment or immediate judgment or just because that's what you've heard judgment then i think that allows us to open up the door for a bit more male empathy because i think that would make the world a bit a bit of a bit of a happy and more comfortable less conflict filled place but i feel like this has been an hour free therapy thank you it's gone sit in a dark room i'm gonna go and sit in a dark room and just kind of download this but nice it's it's you're incredible seriously um we've got a lot of guests on this amazing guests and i think this is one of those conversations that's gonna stick with me that's that's i think change the way i operate and think um and see the world and you're doing amazing work keep doing it forget the naysayers right we don't care what they say you've got hundreds of thousands of people supporting you.

57:27The naysayers are funny. They give me more content. Okay, cool. But you have a great way of combating against them. You're amazing. You're amazing. So where can people find you on Instagram, the work you do in schools? How should people find you and find more of your work? If you find me at at underscore what makes a man underscore. That's me. What makes a man on Instagram. That's probably the best place to find me. I've got loads of links in my bio up there. I've also got lots of kind of highlight reels where I've been on. But I sometimes want some positive stuff. So I'm about to do a review of this beautiful book called Small Worlds, which is absolutely beautiful.