Questions with... our Kaley

0:06Elliott:Hello and welcome to To Be A Boy with me, Joeli Brilly. And me, Elliott Ray. We are back. We're going to be spending this episode talking. Just me and Elliott and our Kaylee, who you haven't all met before, but is our brilliant behind the scenes producer, is going to be asking us questions. It's question time with Kaylee. question time with Kaylee this is the most special guest I think we've ever had I am so excited about questions with Kaylee like I literally last night I was up thinking about it at 11pm trying to go to sleep and I was so excited about Kaylee asking us random questions well that's going to make my day taking up your headspace like that

0:53I'm very excited I'm always here but I'm excited to be here

0:56Elliott:here today thank you guys If anybody has an idea for a jingle for Question Time with Kayleigh, then let us know. Send us a little voice note or send us a little email saying you've got an idea for a jingle because the best we've come up with is Question Time with Kayleigh. It saves me a job, so I'd be really up for lots of people sending voice notes. Then we could, yeah. Cool. We can play them and pick the best one live on air. Maybe listen to the episode because question time, I think maybe sounds like it could be quite smart and intelligent. So maybe listen to this episode before you come up with the jingle because it might not be that much like actual question time.

1:44Elliott:I did promise no bodily fluids. It's all going to be based on the topic, isn't it? We're not like veering wildly off topic. we're gonna focus on boys and men no yeah focus on boys and men um don't worry I'm not I really am not gonna bring up bodily fluids so I promise okay we're going straight in my first question is is I think maybe deep end-ish I'm gonna go straight in with the ick I want to talk about the ick because we've touched on it a couple of times we I think we've only named it as the ick once um in previous podcasts um talking about how there's this sort of difference between we really want men to open up and be more emotional and sometimes women say that actually turns the mask um so I think maybe this first question might be for you Jolie maybe you Elliot um but how much do you think this ick culture is confusing the dating landscape for men when we're asking them to be more emotionally available but signs from women are maybe saying otherwise I mean that's a great question I feel really old when people ask me questions like this because it's such a that's such a modern phenomenon there was never the ick when I was dating when I was younger it does feel very uh an ease like people are very easily turned off and actually every single person if we define the ick as something that irritates you people are gonna irritate you of course they are I mean I get irritated by everybody I get irritated by my own kids who I adore I get irritated by my partner I get irritated by my mother a lot and you know so you you just uh I think we need to stop being so fickle and we need to accept that irritation comes a part and parcel of any healthy relationship and that you have to find ways of of dealing with that rather than just casting somebody out because they may have eaten with their mouth open or although that is a bad ick though that's actually one of my icks oh yeah it's one of it's tom can't bear it and he doesn't like the way i eat so he won't look at me when i meet when i eat that is actually you've named my one ick that is like the one ick i have like just close your mouth please but that's it that's that's an okay that's different uh oh you cried a movie now i don't fancy you because you're not a man like i think that do people call that an ick is that an echo oh you know there's a program called pop the balloon and i love it it's it's kind of it's american and it is on youtube and it's kind of trashy but also quite a good social experiment so what it is you'll have like a group of men or a group of women lining up with a balloon and then someone from the opposite sex comes out and they ask them a series of questions and if they don't like them the way they look or what they say they pop the balloon and then whoever has their balloon at the end they match and they go and date sometimes they get married and have babies And it's actually a very interesting social experiment.

5:11And yesterday I was watching it and this guy came out and it was funny because he was, he's quite built. He was quite tall. He looked quite, quote unquote, what you would describe as traditionally masculine and whatnot. He had a calm voice and he's quite softly spoken. And he got to the end and there were three women with their balloons unpopped. And then one of the women said, oh, I love everything about you. You've got a good career. you're in shape you seem polite you're looking for love but you're too softly spoken and then they they all pop their balloons i looked at the comments and the comments were like yeah this is why you're all single because what the hell yeah but it was that kind of okay so he's clearly what you would what we would call like you know traditionally man's man he's from what i'm looking at he's got all those attributes that we would associate with that but the fact that he spoke a bit soft put you off and it's like he's not in a threatening environment he's talking to women he's being recorded on on a tv show that's going to get millions of views like do you want him to come out and start screaming and shouting like what i didn't understand what they wanted from him and it was just so interesting to see because he looked like a good man to me and he looked like someone that would be calm that would work through problems that would you know not overreact to stuff but because he's too softly spoken you're going to pop the balloon on him so I think it's tough I think it's really difficult and I think for a lot of younger men that I speak to they do feel like in the dating market they they they do need to be buff they do need to be assertive they do need to make loads of money they still feel judged by those standards but at the same time society is saying to them be gentle be emotionally available etc and it's hard and I feel like you can do both I feel like as a man you can be both it just is maybe not completely natural for some people and I think does take work and I think we need to be graceful when people are on their journey of getting there because I think being both is actually really important I think

7:22Elliott:it's important to be both and the most women should appreciate emotionally available men because in a few years time you're really going to appreciate an emotionally available man you may not appreciate it initially but trust me you really need that yeah have time progresses in a relationship and that's what i was thinking when they popped the balloon i was like it might be okay now 10 years later do you know what i mean when shit hits the fan and you go through something serious in life and you've got a couple kids and your parents are aging and it's like things are happening you're going to really appreciate this softly spoken calm man maybe right now he's not as exciting for you but I just couldn't couldn't get out of my head that that's a really kind of bad choice you're making and how do we then how do we educate each other about like growth and what actually does make a good partner there was I was speaking to somebody at a man the other day who's a lawyer and she was mentoring two young women and she said she took them to one side sat them down and said right you're in your early 20s do you want kids and they said yes and she was like right I need you to think about the person that you're with at the moment are you gonna properly split the domestic labor are you gonna have a conversation with them about how who's gonna do the caring how are you gonna progress your career when you have kids who is gonna do the cooking the cleaning the washing do you have a fair split of the domestic like all of these things that you actually really women are not taught to think about and then they get in a relationship and they have a child and they realize they have to make all of these sacrifices because a limiter for the biggest limiter for a woman is the man that she is with he can make her life incredibly difficult if she wants to continue her career after having a child and I think we need to have more open honest conversations with men and women from an earlier stage about what healthy relationships look like not just in terms of sex but in terms of actual partnerships and and having conversations about what you both want at an earlier stage and I think then women might start to cotton on too because I know so many women who feel like they made a massive mistake with the man that they chose because they didn't know this stuff up front and so there's you know a high divorce rate later on because women are like this just isn't working for me i feel like i've missed out on my life and actually if we started to have those conversations much earlier with girls in particular but also with boys then i think we could really start to change those dynamics and dilute this ick issue because you'd be looking for different characteristics well said jolie yeah i agree i support your manifesto i big time support that you want to be able to say it to the balloon softly spoken guy as well don't you want to be like you should carry on being you don't don't change be be softly spoken and be an emotionally available man yeah because you're actually what women in their 30s want i thought do i just jump in your dms and tell you that i genuinely was going to do that and i thought that might be a bit weird i didn't um i might jump in his dms and be like you go carry on man you're a good guy do it next question okay let's go next question okay this is a quick one and it plays off of you just you said a good man Elliot um I want to go back to Sarah Ockwell Smith and we talked about love songs and you got you got quite passionate about your love songs I want to know who you think is a good man of music I thought you were going to ask me to sing a love song which I haven't prepared for of course um okay what's a good man of music I don't think you you would know who I'm going to talk about but there's a guy um and anyone that does know hit me up email us he's a grime mc called jme um his brother's more famous than him his brother's called skeptar but jme so he's from north london he's from tottenham black guy grew up in a quite rough area and the reason why I respect jme so much is because well a couple of reasons he's always stuck to his like ethics when it comes to the music he makes so he does grind music he emcees he's only done that he's believed in that he's invested in himself he's completely independent and he talks a lot about being independent and the business behind it and he educates a lot of people so I love that I also love the fact that from very young he never felt like he had to cave in and talk about violence unnecessarily so in a quite violent genre you're around people who are saying certain lyrics and he never felt like he had to conform to that because that wasn't who he was he went to university he's a bit of a geek he likes tech so he kind of just rapped about what he liked and he was just rapping about his life in the midst of a room of people rapping about various other things and so I really respect that about him but the most important thing is that you know he's a family man he's married he's got two kids he talks about that in his raps he talks about the value of like his relationship to his stability in his his career and I think just those things maybe in isolation aren't remarkable but I think him doing that in the environment that he's in it takes a lot of strength to do that and a lot of knowing of self and character and belief in who you are and just not being willing to cave to the peer pressure and so Jamie absolute legend I would actually love to get him on the podcast to be honest like he's like famous in in in the scene of black British music he's a legend and he is my musical good guy okay j me i want to write that down i'm going to listen and do my job as a producer and maybe write right um okay so i've got a question now that's for both of you but i think maybe there's a tweaked version i'm going to give you so um thinking about the manosphere jolie your question is do you think or do you perceive there to be a difference in the manosphere in the north of England to the south of England?

13:48Like the sort of, is there a northern version of a manosphere? And I think the kind of version for you, Elliot, is can you see a difference in the manosphere on an intersectional basis?

13:59Elliott:Ooh, I mean, I don't feel qualified really enough to answer that, partly because, I mean, I don't know what the experience is in the south, so I don't know if it's different in the north to the south, but also like I don't have direct experience in that my kids are not really there yet like my eldest is 11 but I do think there is a big difference there is differences between upbringing of kids in the north and in the south I feel like there's this poverty in the north feels much deeper than it does to me in the south and I say that probably because I spent a lot of years in Newcastle where there's deep deep poverty in the northeast I would say there's more racism in the north and in the south partly because there's pockets of the north that are so white where I live there are flags everywhere so it's like a hotbed for the manosphere to come and just pluck men yeah I mean yeah I suppose it is although we know that um we know that people that are more attracted to the manosphere are middle class kids that's what the data says um that actually it's not who you would think it is it's not 14 year old working class kids middle class men in the young men in their 20s that are more attracted to it but i don't know i suppose you know there's the thing that i see a lot of for 14 15 year old kids around where i live boys they hang around in gangs they all look the same they all want to be hard um uh there's quite a lot of violence and i have seen signs of racism really bubbling away around where i live and i'm finding it all quite terrifying i don't know if that's the same in the south because i'm not i don't live there it's not part of my community um but you know i do feel that kids are really disenfranchised at the moment around here for sure.

16:03I can't talk for the whole of the South because I'm a London boy really but I can talk for London yet I don't think you're going to get the levels of racism in London that you would in the North you know you go to Brixton or Hackney or Tottenham, Walthamstow it's predominantly black and brown areas you know so it'll still be there but I don't think to the point of it being an issue where you're outnumbered by racists for example but in the question in terms of the manosphere and intersectionality it's a tough one I feel like the young black boys that I speak to and I'm around don't necessarily feel like the the manosphere is maybe the main point of reference in their life you know I think there's there's a lot more other factors I think there's so it exists from my why I see it exists but I think maybe the bigger influence is like your who your who your environment your friends like how much money your parents have um whether your parents are able to be there when you get home and make food for you or take you to various activities uh what your friends are up to the amount of freedom you get in in your house I don't know if a young black boy who's 12 years old from Wembley is as entrenched in the manosphere as a white middle-class boy who's 19 and stays at home and doesn't work but that's just my opinion I don't know again I'm not necessarily an expert in that particular area so it's hard to say but just my feeling of what I see I guess I feel like this is something we want to unpick a bit more in the podcast maybe i'm really yeah get an expert on i think i'd love to

17:49Elliott:interview some like teachers from second across the uk because they they will know much better than we do what exactly is going on for boys yeah exactly yeah email us listening teachers

18:06hey it's kelly roland you may not know this but i have eczema so i get how it can steal your time But why let eczema take over when you can talk to your doctor about ebglis?

18:43Reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with EpGliss. Before starting EpGliss, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Paid partnership with Lilly. Respect your time. Ask your doctor about EpGliss and visit epgliss.com. Or call 1-800-LILLY-RX or 1-800-545-5979. Okay, I want to go behind the scenes now. not to mention the NBA again but you know you've obviously done a lot together you can mention the NBA again it's fine but you've you've done you've got your NBA together you've got a show together um I know you do a lot of live stuff together so I want to know what sort of joint your like collective biggest wow moment has been whether it's meeting someone or you've come off the stage together or you've met the king when you're getting said mbe what what where you don't mine is jody asking me to do this podcast that was the biggest point of my life i was like i've made it the jody brilly is asking elliot ray to do i can share that i can share that no that's it that's that's my answer what's yours she's sitting to the dms and we were like yeah She sent into my DMs, yeah, into my email, I think it was.

20:08Elliott:Doing this podcast is the joy of my week, like genuinely, because I love working with you two and not to have a total loving, but it's such a – you two are colleagues. I don't have any other colleagues. Like your colleagues are mates. Shout out to producer James at the moment. He's on Fat League as well. And James, of course, we're going to have a Christmas party out with the four of us. and and but we had a funny moment didn't we at wow festival where i was about to leave and then bumped into elliot who was coming in and elliot persuaded me to stay for a bit and then we started drinking pints at the bar with stella creasy the three of us we were noticed because we were just propping up the bar putting the world to rights and then um i suddenly was like oh my god is that the time had to leg it out absolutely blotted uh that was one of my favorite times and then your event Elliot which I know we've mentioned before on the podcast but what a joy that was and genuinely did give me hope in for the future which I felt there's been very little of recently but that the atmosphere the people there the conversation all of it was such it was just all so hopeful and And I don't think I know anybody else that could have done that besides you.

21:31Elliott:Because those, you know, you are a glue. You are the sort of person that good people are attracted to. And everybody there was there for you. But you made it into something big and important and good conversations that just felt so hopeful. Are you trying to make me cry? no and I got to meet Wyatt finally yeah I love yeah yeah that was nice seeing you guys hugging was really really that was really nice I do you know what I think that that event was incredible I want to relive that day yeah because it took so much planning and so much organization and I don't really get nervous like I'm not a nervous person when I'm doing my speaking I don't I get excited I don't really get nervous but the week before the summit I was like shitting myself off to be honest I was pretty nervous and I understood the gravity of the day and what I wanted to get across was the tone and reflect that yes this is a celebration it's a working dad's summit we're all here it's all great fine there's going to be champagne and wine afterwards fantastic but things are shit and it's like how do we kind of get that balance at the same time and so I was just so glad that I feel like we achieved that um and it was an incredible day It was so good.

22:52And I've been thinking quite a lot about in-person stuff. And I feel like I need more in-person experiences. I don't need to be speaking or organizing. I actually need to go and meet people in person a little bit more. But yeah, that day was incredible. The MBE day was all good. But for me, you know, I don't think there's any just one day. I think sometimes I just wake up like I did today with just a load of gratitude. and I think sometimes it's very easy to think about like oh what's not working or what you know what rejection came through or how the progression of what we're campaigning for hasn't moved as far as we want and you know there's there's there's all that but at the same time I think oh my gosh I'm able to do the stuff I love every day I can work with people that I really really like and enjoy enjoy spending time with I get to make money doing what I love I get to have ideas and just implement them straight away um i get to like go to the gym with suella braverman at 2 p.m on a tuesday afternoon i think you need to give that some context for anybody listening no i'm not going to give any context i'm just going to leave it out there you can think what you want to think okay we'll clarify we're going to put a pin and i will ask about that in the next question so um yeah just gratitude i just i just i'm just i just feel very lucky i I know I've worked hard, but I feel very, very lucky to have the life that I have.

24:20And I just want to continue to work hard, love the people around me and just like look after my well-being and my mental health and just carry on. I love that. This next question kind of relates to that, because I know that, Jolie, you said on the live episode, actually, what one thing can we do to move the dial for women? um and you said six weeks parental leave I wanted to bring that around and say what do we think six weeks parental leave is going to do for men um I know what it does for women because I've experienced it twice and I think it is amazing like I think you should yeah men should be there at the first six weeks it makes me a happy well-rounded person to have had that happen but yeah I wondered what you guys thought how we can sell it in if because sometimes you need to say what it's going to do for men that's how businesses buy things sometimes yeah yeah I don't want to kind of run through all the benefits in in the way I normally would when I'm kind of proving the business case but what I will say is yesterday I spoke to some doctors that work in NICU um so neonatal intensive care unit down in basing stoke and i did i did a session for them it was a big annual conference and it was doctors and nurses that work in niku and we spoke about the fact that you know they will have so many parents um and it's particularly around dads that will spend time in niku and then like i did after you leave niku you go back to work straight away and they were speaking about the fact that they have loads of mums with their babies in the coup and the dads just can't be there because after two weeks they have to go back to work often even beforehand and so for the for the average person who has a stable jobs who have healthy incomes and a okay birth and their baby is healthy obviously paternity leave is a game changer it supports dads to bond with their child supports gender equality the motherhood penalties that start around how we share the care going forward all that sort of stuff but when shit gets tough and your baby's sick when they are born they're premature or they've got an infection or heart condition and you have to go back to work and leave your your your partner and your baby in that hospital I can't put into words like what that is and so I think thinking about the people who have it worse off in that moment what paternity leave does for them is like the difference between I'm good I'm well I'm gonna get through this and I've got postnatal depression I've got PTSD I've got suicidal ideation I can't go on and it's that serious so I think yeah yesterday it was amazing like talking to the NICU doctors them telling me their stories me talking about my story like 10 years after my daughter's birth exactly from the time paternity leave is really important for those reasons as well yeah I mean the stories are really

27:23Elliott:powerful and the two men uh closest to me in my life so my partner and my dad it would have been a game changer for both of them and if cultural norms had been different my dad went back to work after like a day of me being born and then I barely saw him again till like probably like in my 40s like he just you know he just worked and that was because it was he was so conditioned that that was his role his role was breadwinner and he just wasn't involved in doing it very much with us at all um and he regrets that enormously and it's it's really sad knowing the difference that would have made to his life had he been had he had cultural norms been different and he'd been more involved with raising us because he's a he's a good man uh you know he him and my mum split up because they didn't understand each other anymore she was the main carer he was out working all the time there was just you know this division um a chasm that opened up between them and could never be repaired so um and he sort of you know at one point like really lost his mind and off he went and I think had he been had things been different he would have had a better life um and then for my partner when my first was born we found a lump on his head and we didn't know what it was and we to the doctors and the doctors were like don't we don't know what it is let's give it a couple of days and see if the lump grows we went back two days later and they're like oh the lump has grown you need to go to A &E immediately I fell apart because at this point I was like six days postpartum I just completely fell apart and we took him to A &E and we were in A &E all night and they did all these tests on him they were like we still can't figure out what it is but we'll run all these different tests and and then you need to come back in a few days and we'll see what what it is we went back a few days later the doctor told us that he had a severe disability and that he was gonna have to have a metal plate on his head when he was seven years old he was going to be physically and mentally disabled and then asked us to leave and told us to cut that we get a letter sent through the post about next stages um and it was like it was awful it was horrendous because we were just we just didn't know what to do and we had no support at all and we just were you know I've been that a week postpartum I just couldn't function I couldn't cope with any of it um and then eventually thankfully Tom's brother is a doctor and he helped us think about what to do next and we ended up seeing a consultant um and we had all these other new tests and long story short it was because he was forceps delivery and it was it was from the forceps there was nothing wrong with him but so the two weeks of his paternity leave was taken up with that like severe stress and panic and worry and so we got them we got the phone call to say he's fine there's nothing wrong with him and the next day he went back to work and as you can imagine he was just like he went back to work and he said he just cried for days going back and people were talking to him about work and he was like none of this matters i don't care i'm not interested um and so that was it was so just felt so futile to force him to go back and because he wasn't functioning thankfully he did you know his mental health was okay eventually but what a cruel system to do that to somebody and so and those are the two direct experiences I have and both of them would have benefited so much from six weeks paternity leave.

31:06And you feel like the productivity in all of those stories is so low. It's like the exponential benefit of giving someone a break to come back. We need to look at the data, maybe look at how effective it is on people's productivity of how much money they can make for a business if they're well-rested and they're not stressed with those things. Yeah. You could start a campaign. time oh I've got a couple in my back pocket as you know um but yeah someone's someone's fully signed a campaign about six weeks paternity leave that sounds familiar okay we're nearly at time I want to ask you both if you weren't doing this you weren't doing this thing that you love um thinking back to before culture change was a massive part of your life what would you be doing what would you want to do ideally as a job so I know what I would do and it's it's not completely different but I always say if I have ever have to go back into full-time employment I'm working in football and I'm doing community work in a football club um I I so we partner with quite a few clubs when we do our events and I speak to a lot of people who do those kind of jobs obviously I love football I am a football fan I literally like that is my passion and music as well so I love being in the environment of football then you get to do really cool stuff in community you get to go into schools you get to go into prisons you get to like do stuff around mental health and general quality and racism um so yeah if I ever have to get a job if this shit goes to fan the fan and I'm broke I will be getting a job as a community lead

32:46Elliott:at my local football team great I love that you know that I have no idea I think I am one of like out of everybody I know and talk to I'm one of very few people that is that feels content in what they're doing everybody I know says they're just sort of treading water they're just doing it because they have to actually they wish they were doing something completely different why did they end up doing this job I am one of very few people that has found work has got work that they feel is meaningful and that they're enjoying and I just feel really grateful for that and actually feel grateful for the fact that I got shafted and pushed out of my job when I was warm and was pregnant because I would still be doing something where yeah it was okay but it didn't light my fire like this does do you know what my wife really thought I'd get an astronaut there and she and she always says your mess is your message which i think may be a biblical quote don't quote me it may be i don't know maybe god said it who knows but i even yesterday doing that nicky talk i really appreciate it sounds so crazy but i really really appreciate like our birth story because it gave me the fuel and the fire to do what i do and i think like you jolie if i hadn't gone through that i probably still we would be working in this award service like doing risk registers no offense to anyone that does risk registers someone's got to do the risk register right but as i was saying earlier that's just so grateful we get to come in and talk and get to interview great guests and great to like mobilize people and spread our message and this is just incredible i'm so grateful yeah you too that was a lovely place to end yeah yeah thank you kaylee we need to do this again we need to make this a feature because oh yeah my whatsapp my mom's whatsapp group's now full of questions i've got a lot got a lot thanks everyone see you later