Modern Wisdom - #537 - Richard Reeves - Does Anyone Care About Men's Struggles?

Episode Date: October 10, 2022

Richard V. Reeves is a writer, scholar and a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. Men are falling behind in education, employment and family life. They're underachieving in school, dropping out of the labour market and being less useful around the house more than ever. And this isn't simply cultural as it's happening all over the world, the problem is deeper than that - it's structural. Expect to learn why there are twice as many female fighter pilots compared with male kindergarten teachers, why a male needs to be 24 to have the same impulse control as a 10 year old girl, where the term toxic masculinity actually came from, whether a man's gain is actually woman's loss, the problem of promoting men's issues in the press and much more... Sponsors: Get 7 days free access and 25% discount from Blinkist at https://blinkist.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 20% discount & free shipping on your Lawnmower 4.0 at https://www.manscaped.com/ (use code MODERNWISDOM) Get 15% discount on all VERSO’s products at https://ver.so/modernwisdom (use code: MW15) Extra Stuff: Buy Of Boys & Men - https://amzn.to/3eb6so6  Follow Richard on Twitter - https://mobile.twitter.com/richardvreeves  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Richard Reeves, he's a scholar, writer and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Men are falling behind in education, employment and family life. They're underachieving in school, dropping out of the labour market and being less useful around the house, more than ever. And this isn't simply cultural as it's happening all over the world. The problem is deeper than that. It's structural. I expect to learn why there are twice as many female fighter pilots compared with male kindergarten teachers.

Why a male needs to be 24 to have the same impulse control as a 10-year-old girl? Where the term toxic masculinity actually came from, whether a man's gain is genuinely a woman's loss, the problem of promoting men's issues in the press, and much more. This conversation is pretty scary. The evolutionary psychology stuff is interesting, but I don't think it feels quite as tangible or as real as learning about genuine structural problems that are holding back anybody in society. Very much appreciate

that Richard, someone who has a background in policy making and research, has really dug into all of this and is coming at it without over-blowing it, without accusing women of keeping men down, without accusing men of making the world worse. It's a conversation that I think is going to become absolutely massive over the next few years and I really hope that you take as much away from this as I did. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Richard Reeves, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Chris. What do you think about the term toxic masculinity? I think it's a toxic term. It escaped from the margins of academia in 2016, not coincidentally,

and just became a term that was used to apply, essentially to any behavior by boys and men that the user disapproved of. It's rarely defined without any specificity at all. And so it's in a sense, it's a completely vacuous term, but it's worse than that because by putting those two words right next to each other, it actually repels a lot of boys and then from a conversation about what it means to be a man, what it means to be, particularly mature,

I think to talk about mature masculinity, and immature masculinity is quite useful, but the idea of toxic, it's like Puritan, it's like it's an idea, it's not easy, the idea of original sin in Christian theology, right? And you need these exorcisms, you need someone to come on exercise, if you just weren't so male, you'd be okay. And having raised three boys to adulthood, I got to tell you, that idea that there's something toxic in them has to be expunged is not a helpful way to raise them. So if we could just

consign that particular term back to the obscurity of academic journals, that would be great. Where did it come from? It was originally from work that was being done with very violent incarcerated prisoners. And so there are a couple of academics that were using it to talk about ways in which very violent men who were serving long prison sentences, how their views of masculinity had become intertwined with ideas of expressed violence and dominance and so on too. And so it was a concept that was being used by a few psychologists, but I think it was mentioned five times a year in academic journals until 2016, and then overnight, it was on the front page of every newspaper, and so it, it's kept, so, you know, I think it did have some value

in the sense that there may be a group, very small group of men for whom actually their sense of what it means to be male has in some ways become toxic, but it was always this tiny minority of men for whom it was ever useful to apply and then suddenly Donald Trump got elected, need to, etc. and, you know, there you go. I've heard you say that it's a catch-all term to use when one finds the behavior of any man offensive or unpleasant, and that's so correct, it's gone from being something that's an aberration, a complete outlier, to anything which is just slightly objectionable.

Yeah, that's the problem with it. There are many problems with it, but like any of these terms, if it just expands and expands and expands. So, everything, I think, I just did a quick search around and discovered that everything from climate change to COVID, to war, to, you, it is the result of toxic masculinity. And, you know, if there was resistance to getting vaccinated, it was toxic masculinity. If you make a pass, it's toxic masculinity. And it was just like being, and actually there's, I talk about this in my book, there was an incident at my kids high school that got international attention as an expression of toxic masculinity, which really woke me up to the way this term is being thrown around and used indiscriminately.

But as I say, it's not just vacuous, it's actively harmful. And interesting, a lot of feminists will say that now, too. There's a lot of people like Helen Lewis who writes the Atlantic and so on. They're just saying, look, this term is not helping us. It's actually pushing men away from a conversation about masculinity and can be please stop using it. And so this is not a right wing view at all. It's actually one that a lot of feminists are just looking at the data and saying,

if the goal here is to have a good conversation with boys and men about what it means to boys and men, this is not the way in. It's a terrible frame for that conversation. It seems strange to me. There's something odd happening in the modern world at the moment because the male default it looks like has become sort of the preferential life path that's being pushed onto, especially women, that sort of lean in, boss bitch, career woman with the ability to have no strings

attached, casual sex and high financial independence without a family. But this is also while typically masculine values of things like aggression or emotional control or conchery or mastery have also become demonized. So it is this very strange situation that's going on at the moment. And I've been asking a lot of people about why it is that women are being told to be more masculine in a way. Why would that be seen as something that's preferential? Why is that something that's that's pedestalized in a way? Well, I think that there are certain virtues or traits or strengths that are maybe traditionally

associated with one sex or the other. And to make the boring social science point up front, these are averages. The distributions overlap. Can we just edit that into every, pretty much every sentence we're going to use because otherwise people think that it's a dimorphic distribution, not a binary one. And I do think there are some elements of this that like to the extent the kind the aspiration leadership ambitions on it, to the extent that those are previously seen as quotes masculine, if women are now being encouraged to express those, that's a good thing. I mean, that's what liberation is about. That's what equality is about. Without

anybody, male or female being forced into a box, whether that's the old box of stay at home-wide, don't trouble yourself with a labor market love approach or a new box, which is this is how you must be. Everyone has to be like Jeff Bezos. Instead, we want a world that allows us to flourish in our own way. I will say some of those terms you've just used about sort of female aspiration are

important not to kind of misunderstand because they are against the course of history of lots of women being told the opposite, right? So there is something empowering about women saying you can be everything. And it's also important to note that whilst there is a bit of a panic about fertility in a lot of countries right now, I don't share that panic really. Most women are having children, most women do want children, and so if you look beyond the pages of a few elite media outlets, the catering to a very small group of highly educated 30-something men and women, most people are having kids. The 35-year-old in New York or London, or wherever, is not necessarily

the median person we should be worried about. I don't share this view that all of a sudden we're surrounded by childless women. That's just not true. There is a rise in childlessness, but we shouldn't freak out about it in the way that I see some social conservatives doing. Interesting. That's an interesting input. I think one of the things that I found very interesting after I spoke to a friend, he said, my current belief is that male self improvement sees the person as mutable and the world as immutable. So you need to be the best person possible

while accepting the rules and environment you are in. This is in contrast with female self improvement, which sees the person as immutable and the world as mutable, so women are taught to accept yourself and try to change the support structures and society that's around you. I'm not sure that that's true across every situation, but there's something similar where you talk about the problems of boys and men are structural in nature rather than individual, but are rarely treated as such. The problem of men is typically framed as a problem of man. It is men who must be fixed,

one man or boy at time. Yeah, and I think it's a really interesting and well observation, but I think in some ways it's important to get a bit of a history here. So I think right now there is a focus within the women's movement using that term broadly around structures. So I think right now there is a focus within the women's movement using that term broadly around structures. So structures of care, child care, health care, workplace, flexibility and so on. But it wasn't that long ago that it really was much more individualized. It was about empowerment. Remember assertiveness training? I mean, that was a huge thing in the women's movement for a while. What women need to do is be more assertive, so we can just send it from assertiveness

training. If you're not getting a pay rise, it's because you're not being assertive enough. Even today, you've got the whole power stance thing, which I think is now completely debunked. The Revocation Crisis came and decapitated. I'm now completely debunked. It's the Revocation Crisis game and decapitated. I've just completely debunked. But like all things that get headlines and then get debunked, no one knows about the debunking. We could have a long list of everyone's still believe.

Everyone's stood like this. I've been doing it. And then you read the debunking. It's like, God, I just wasted, you know, a year of my life standing like an idiot. But so I do think like this, this balance between is this about you or is it about society isn't important when your friend really kind of captures that well. And I do think the women's movement has moved on towards more structure, but I also think

that it's true to say, and you just kind of quoted me on this, that as far as men are concerned, pretty much everyone seems to agree that it's about the individual, that men need to fix themselves in a way, in a way that kind of older-style feminism did for women, and not try and change the world around it. And what that results in is a sort of unholy alliance between a progressive left that says it's toxic masculinity that's to blame for all men's problems or no regard misogyny. And a populist right that says it's because men aren't manly enough anymore.

And so the left essentially says, you just need to be like your sister and you'll be okay. And the right says you need to be like your dad and you'll be okay. And meanwhile, us men in this world of more gender equality are trying to figure this out. And neither of those messages are very helpful. So the structure of the education system, which we might get to, is definitely less friendly to males, structurally. The labor market has changed in ways that structurally about a disproportionate effect on men.

It's not de-industrialization, free trade, automation, etc. Those are gender-neutral changes on their face, but they've had a much bigger impact on men. And that's just a fact. And then the shift in the economic relationship between men and women has significantly changed family structures in a way that's challenged what it means to be a father. So in various ways, those are structural chants. Those are the environment, to use your friends terms. The environment isn't immutable. In fact, the environment's been, I mean, it's just been like a kaleidoscope around men and women for the last few years. It's just been this dizzying cultural change. And so recognizing that is part of it, I think, is a necessary step to making progress, which is not to absolve individuals of responsibility

for what they do with their lives. So you know, the message I've sent to my boys, I do want them to be counted and be responsible, but it's crazy to imagine that people are learning, working and living in some kind of vacuum. What's happened to males in education then? What's happened is that males have fallen rapidly behind females at every stage of the education system and in every advanced economy in the world.

So if you just take all the OECD countries, which is pretty good proxy for decently, economically advanced, there are more young women with a college degree than young men. In both the UK and the US, it's of 60, 40 now, college campuses. And that's happened incredibly quickly. When I was born in 1969, it was about, college campuses were about 70% male, 30% female. By the time I went to college in the late 80s,

it was about 50-50 and now it's flipped to 60-40 the other way. And so I'm pretty much every measure you can look at, girls are ahead of boys and that's increasingly true even if it's like math and science. So one of the ideas people have in their head is like, oh, we always knew girls are better in English and women are better at English and those sorts of subjects, but aren't boys much better at math and science. But the answer is not really anymore. In most places now, the girls and women have caught up

in math and science as well, and in some cases, overtaken and still have this huge lead in literacy in English. And literacy in English turn out to be more important for what happens to you after that. So there's been this huge overtaking, which by the way, no one predicted. There's really energy to go back and you read the stuff from the 70s when we were really pushing for gender equality in education to get more women into college, and especially into more male dominated subjects. And everybody was pushing forward's parity, nobody predicted that the lines would keep going. Nobody predicted that once girls and women caught up with boys and men, that they would keep going and that we would now have a big agenda gap in higher

education than we did 50 years ago, just the other way around. So we flipped the inequality now and it's actually wider now than it was on high school almost. And certainly, US is wider and I think in the, it's getting close. So that's an extraordinary fact that no one predicted. And can only be the result of structural factors. If it's happening everywhere and every level, it's not the kid, right? It's not Chris's problem in secondary school, in a particular education system, you know, or my son's problem in the US K-12.

It's, it's a structural problem with the education system that's know, or my son's problem in the US K-12. It's, it's a structural problem with the education system that's just not male-friendly enough. Structurally, what's changed then? Because just that more women are going to college and more women are performing better doesn't mean that men should be doing worse. No, and it's important to distinguish, of course, as you imply there between relative and absolute, right? So if one group is doing better than another, then by definition, the other group is doing relatively less well. It's like a gender pay gap, right?

So the fact that women are earning a huge ton more than they were 50 years ago, but it doesn't mean they're caught up with men yet. So absolutely, you wait just a minute. But in some cases, the absolute educational performance of boys has flattened or has dropped. And so if you look at white working class boys in the UK, for example, or black boys in the US, actually, in many areas, they're actually sliding backwards.

But you're right to point to the distinction between relative and absolute. What I think has happened is that the education system is just structured in favor of women and girls because it rewards certain kinds of behaviors at critical ages, in particular, turning your homework in, being planful, being organized, being committed, sticking on the task, being future-oriented about the age of 16, which is when the gender gap in those skills is at its widest. And so what happens is that girls' brains

just develop early-than-boys, it's just a biological fact. And in particular, in the prefrontal cortex, there's a bit of the brain, there's the CEO of the brain. It is the bit that turns your homework in, that says, it's the bit of your brain that stops you going to the party and makes you stay in studying chemistry. Right.

It's the bit of the brain that every parent waits to develop in their sons. Basically parenting is like a ten-year process of being the substitute prefrontal cortex for your boy. Have you got kids? Have you got sons? No, not yet. Well, trust me, that's what it is. You're basically just going to be there prefrontal cortex until it, but I'm saying, when is it coming? When is it coming? And the answer is much later than in

girls. And so it's no surprise that girls are doing better. The surprises that they weren't doing better before. Why weren't you doing better before? Because of sexism. The truth is that girls were always at a structural advantage in education, but we couldn't see it because it was never expressed in things like college going, exam taking and so on, because they were preparing for a life of being a wife and mother. As soon as we took the braver woman, the structural advantage that women had was exposed. So, in a sense, by leveling, apparently leveling the playing field in education, what we revealed was that the women are much better players. And they are, as a result, largely in my view of development. It's also true that we don't have enough male teachers, that the pedagoggy is not male

friendly and so on too. There's a whole bunch of things going on, but taken as a whole, you look at the school system, it's impossible to come to any conclusion other than that this suits girls better than it does boys. That's fascinating, the fact that this has always been looking below the surface, this has always been the way that the population within schools has been performing, but because of lack of access, lack of encouragement, gendered discrimination that has restricted women from being able to reach their full potential in the education system. It's only when you've been able to open up those doors that the underlying. Um, disparity has been able to fully show itself and I suppose that.

It's difficult because. If that was the case previously. The assumption now is that the only reason there could be a disparity between boys and girls performance is now due to some other type of restriction or sexism. It's by boys being told something restricted in some way. So using the previous model of what was the solution to the problem for women and now mapping that onto the issue that

manifacing, or boys. So it seems like it's more deep rooted than that. This isn't the sort of thing that is occurring in the culture. This is something which is occurring in biology from a very early age. Yeah, it's happening in the system itself. That's a great distinction. So I think that the main problem that the women and girls face before was that just had breaks on there, just had barriers. system itself. That's a great distinction. So I think that the main problem that women and girls face before was that just had breaks on there, just had barriers. It was like, didn't go to college. Like my dad went to college because that was where he was going to hopefully earn more money and be able to raise a family. My mum was basically, you

encouraged her to leave high school at 17 and said, do you want to be a nurse? And the idea that you would have gone to, I just didn't happen. And so you don't have to, and it's so quick this change that's taken place, but you're exactly right. And it's hard, I think, for people to get the head around that because it's happens so quickly that the idea, that people, it's tough to get people to get the head around the idea

that boys could be a structural disadvantage in the education system, which until incredibly recently seemed to be serving boys and men much better than girls and women, like literally in the blink of an eye. And then there's a mistake that's made along exactly the lines that you've just identified, which is that some people say, oh, there must be discrimination against boys in education. And then you get books like The War Against Boys, The War on Man, et cetera, which is that there is intentional discrimination against boys, and there's almost no evidence. There's no evidence of that.

No one is saying to, no one said to my boys when they're going through a high school, I don't you worry about college, just find yourself a nice wife and settle down. No one was saying that. They were saying, for God's sake, turn your homework in so that you stand a chance of going to college, you idiot. So it isn't discrimination, but it is instead the mixture of the difference between a chronological age and developmental age of the average boy

and girl, especially in adolescence, has been revealed by the women's movement. And also progressively teaching as a profession has become more and more female over time. And so we're a few and fewer male teachers in schools and that does seem to affect male performance for reasons that are complex and so on too. And there's been a bit of a shift away from styles of learning that seem a bit more more more friendly and male-friendly like vocational education, for example, which does seem to suit on average overlapping distributions, seem to suit males more than females. And so there's been a series of trends in education

that have I think exacerbated this underlying structural problem, which is a 16 year old girl is older than a 16 year old boy in terms of her developmental abilities. Just how big is the, did I hear you say that it was 2% of kindergarten teachers in America or a male, some insanely small proportion? Yes, it's about 2%. Yeah, and it's not going up either.

It's a similar in the UK. These numbers actually do map pretty well across U.S. and U.K. I won in 10 elementary school teachers, a primary school teacher's male. And in one of my sons actually works in earlier as education. So I get this, a lot of this through him. And he's one of the very few males, of course, working in that space.

And so when you dig into numbers here, it's about 2%, which is very low number and to put it in perspective, as a share of the profession, there are twice as many, or even three times as many women flying US military planes, as there are men teaching kindergarten and pre-k-class. So we have about three times as many as three times, it's about 7% of US military pilots now women. Now, I'm happy to have a conversation about whether that's too low. What should that number be? And what's actually happening, of course, is that most of the air forces are doing this. The US have redesigning the cockpit subplanes so they're not designed anymore around a presumed kind of male hide,

which will allow shorter men to be pilots to do, but it's also most important to allow more. So they're actively recruiting, they're changing the designer fighter planes to get more women. Great. What's happening to get more men into early education? Answer nothing. And so there isn't even seen as a problem to be addressed, let alone one that we're properly solutions for. And so it's one of the reasons I'm really emphasising this point. Why would that matter? Why would it matter to have male teachers in schools? There's two big reasons. One is because the evidence suggests that when there are male teachers in schools, especially

in subjects like English, but even in early years, the boys seem to do a bit better. In just the same way that girls seem to have a better, when there are female teachers, especially when it's in subjects that go against the sort of stereotypical grain. So girls do especially well when they have the female science teachers, but boys do especially when they have male English teachers. And in the early years, there's some evidence that a bigger mix will be good for boys in the long run.

As to why, we don't really know. This whole series of theories could be role models. It could be that male teachers have a more intuitive understanding of male behavior. So we do know, for example, that male teachers, and this is through all levels, they're less likely to see a boy's behavior as problematic, kind of prior to a female teacher. They're more likely to understand it for what it is, perhaps, as intuitive we've done. But the other reason I think is that if we're trying to change gender stereotypes, you know, there's a nice line from the women's movement, which is you have to see it

to be it. Well, I gotta tell you, if boys don't see any men in any of those roles, then it's not surprising that it's tough to get men to think about changing their lives so that they feel more of those roles. Glorious Steinem said that the idea we get about what it means to email a female comes in our earliest years. And so you'd think in some ways that feminists should be leading the charge for more men in those professions because it helps to break down, reduce the power of gender stereotypes. I'm not suggesting for a moment we're going to get to 50% early years teachers are male. Any more than we're going to get to 50% fighter pilots of female. There are some differences that are not going to disappear, not everything we see in the labour market as a result of socialisation, but 2% is definitely fewer than

the number of men who both could and would be willing to do those kinds of jobs. There was a reply to an article I think you wrote in the Atlantic by Catherine Page Harden page has been on the show before and she linked to a study sex differences in the developmental trajectories of impulse control and Sensation seeking from early adolescence to early adulthood. They really know how to name these journal publications. They really do. They really do. You're just saying stuff. But the graph will be upon screen. And basically, it shows that the age that boys or men have to be before they have the same average level of impulse control as a 10 to 11 year old girl is age 24 to 25.

Now, that's like, it does. It does it does it does it dip a little bit during puberty to to give it its tools as well. Yes, it does. Yeah, it's interesting. Of course, you know, again, all the caveats about means and so on to these are these are are producers. But for sure, there's a huge difference in the development of impulse control. And that's really this this concern about this prefrontal cortex. So the way that psychologists talk about impulse control and the other side, it's in the same paper actually. So if we link to the paper, the other side of it is sensation seeking.

So you've got impulse control and sensation seeking. And the way to think about that is, and this is how psychologists almost talk about it, it's like the gas, or the accelerator and the brake, right? And during adolescence, you get a whole lot more accelerator and a bit, not enough brake, and so that's when you do the crazy stuff. There's an impact, and then gradually the two start to balance out a bit more. But two things, one is, the gap is much much bigger as that chart suggests. If you add sensation seeking to it too, it's just this huge gap for boys and for girls. So it's bigger in adolescence for both. Much bigger for boys than girls. There's difference.

Boys are just all, they're just all, all go very little break for a few years. Like tell me something, again, these falls into the category of, you know, tell my mum something she didn't know, right? She didn't need to read the journal of adolescence, whatever it is. But also, the impulse control development does come much later for boys as that chart shows on average. And that's the kind of skill that does allow you, as I said, to study chemistry rather than go out. It's a kind of thing that allows you to just, you know, work on your GPA, etc. Or your practice for your exams at 16 or so on. And so it's just that, you know, there's sometimes called soft skills or non cognitive skills or whatever you want to call them. That's where the gap is. It's really important. Some people misunderstand my argument here. In terms of smarts, there's not that much difference in development in boys and girls, but what really counts

is actually it is those skills. It is organization, impulse control, and so on too. And that paper that Captain Page Harden did with Elizabeth Schumann and Larry Steinberg, I had quite a big influence on me. Something that I've just considered there, I think that on average, girls are more conscientious than boys. Females are more than men. Now that is something that you can't, that isn't going to change no matter what you do with regards to the time that people begin school, any structural issues that you've got going on in there.

That is a gendered skew like men tend to be stronger than women. But what you can look at doing is where are the areas where we can begin to close this gap, what are the sort of tools that we can use, what are the elements of this that are more mutable rather than immutable. So given the current nightmare of trying to improve men's males successes in school while not rolling back the progress that we've made for girls. What's the solution? Well one headline solution is the headline of the Atlantic article just referred to that Katherine Page Harden responded to is to start boys in school a year later than girls.

So in the US, I referred to as red-shirting as a term for athletics. Because of this developmental gap, age is a very crude proxy for development. And it turns out that it's the difference for boys and girls. And so my proposal is that whatever the school starting age is, that it should be staggered. And so the boys should be going in chronologically a year older than girls. And I think that that will really

start to pay dividends for the boys in adolescence, because they will have developed a bit more prefrontal cortex, a bit more impulse control, a little bit at a time to mature a little bit more. And so actually will create more of a level playing field developmentally. And so that's one proposal. We've already touched on the need to get

many more male teachers, especially in early years in English, and the need to do much more vocational training. But I think all of those reforms share is the characteristic of structural reforms. The other thing I will say is, there is some quite good evidence that there are programs that can help to develop those sorts of skills. It's not like the chart that we just showed at level impulse control is somehow, it's not fixed.

It is true that on average, it's going to be harder for boys to develop that skill. They don't, it's not as innately strong impulse control in boys and men actually, as it is in girls and women. But we can learn. And you know, we can learn to be more confident and assertive. Maybe if you like that, we can also learn impulse control. There's a very good study that just came out that looked at five-year-olds and it was specifically targeted on disadvantaged boys, teaching them these skills. These, exactly the skills you just talked about. And it paid,

it paid dividends in terms of lifelong learning. There are programs like boys, boys to men in Chicago, which works predominantly with black boys, and I'm sure you know about it, and it's all about these skills. It's not math, it's how to keep your act together, how to be in the world, how to organize yourself, and how to control some of your impulses about behavior control. That's just harder for boys. And so there are also programs that we could invest in much more and it would be specifically targeted at boys. So that would be a gendered curriculum, almost, in certain elements. It would be a gender sensitive curriculum almost in certain elements. It would be a gender sensitive thing.

I mean, there's an argument for saying, look, some of these you might just say, we'll give it to the kids that most need it, and it will turn out to be mostly boys, depending on the nature of the program, but not entirely. But that's okay. We have programs that do the opposite. And it may also be that there are bits of the curriculum bits of pedagogy and I know that you've you've talked to people like Have you had Louise Perron? Yes

Yeah And I think this whole area of sex and the need for porn education in schools Is actually one where I think I'd make quite a strong argument for separating the sexes. When you're doing that bit of the curriculum, I think that's a bit of sex ed, I think porn ed is what we would call it, is actually going to, that's going to go much better if you're going to do that just with the boys because the relationship of boys and men to pornography is very different to the relationship of women and girls and that's a a distribution, by the way, that doesn't overlap very much. So some of the distributions we're talking about, they're pretty conscientious and it's

you're right, but the distribution's overlap quite a lot there, right? This one doesn't overlap very much. It's not that it doesn't overlap at all, but it's a very blind-modal distribution when it comes to porn use. And sex generally is one of the areas where we see quite a bit of evidence in the book, a big difference between men and women and boys and girls. What has been the change in the labor market then? The big change over the last 40, 50 years has been, and this won't be a breaking news

to you or to anybody listening probably, has been a big shift away from heavy industry manufacturing. That's a result of two, particularly in advanced economies, and that's the result of two big forces. One is more competition from overseas. The introduction of China into the world trade organization was a big deal in terms of what it did to manufacturing jobs in the West, just because of price competition. Straight forwardly, it's not that I'm not clear, it's not that I'm arguing against that. I'm talking about what the consequences of it were.

And the other is automation. Some of these, some of the roles that were perhaps have been traditionally performed by men, factory work, et cetera, been automated. My dad's first job out of college, he actually got on the Ford Graduate Training Scheme and was, but he had to do some time on the floor. And I tell you what, the Ford factories look a lot different today than they did in the

60s and they needed a lot fewer men in there putting the doors on and stuff, it's basically been done by robots now. And so those trends have particularly affected male employment and the result has been a drop in male labor force participation and a stagnation in male wages. The first true in every OECD country and the second true in most OECD countries. In the US, actually, male wages have gone backwards. So most men in the US actually earn less today than most men did in 79. That's not quite as sharp in most other countries. In most other countries, it's just been very slow wage growth for men, especially in the bottom half of the distribution. The top men have seen wage growth as a result. So this is all against the backdrop of rising economic

inequality generally. So automation, globalization has meant that the typical, brawn based economy that we used to have has now been replaced with a more brain based economy, what's happened that caused men to not adapt to this? I mean, women were not working at all. They were in the house, and then they just got dumped into the labor force, and they seemed to adapt. They weren't doing washing machines and cleaning up the house tasks around the domestic area, what caused men to not be quite some malleable given that they were already in the workforce? Well, I think there's a few things. One is that for a lot of the women, of course, a lot of it seemed like pretty much all upside in terms of the economics of it. So

for women, it was getting to labour market and earning money for themselves. I think it was important even in my own life, my mum worked part-time, she was an industrial nurse and so on, but actually even though she wasn't my end breadwinner, it was important to have some sort of, you know, degree of economic independence. And then you just multiply that by a factor of a hundred for the next generation, which is, no, no, no, you're going to be economically independent, and why shouldn't we have better wages? Why shouldn't we earn more? Why shouldn't? Those are incentives that should apply to everybody. And it has been striking just the movement of women into higher-end male dominated occupations, in the professions especially, much less so in lower-end.

So if you look at things like construction, for example, that remains very male dominated. There are not many women on construction sites, but there are a lot of women in law offices and hospitals and so on too. And so it's important because that tells you some of the incentives, they're just about economic upward mobility for women, which is like, don't particularly want to be a laborer, but I'd very much like to be a lawyer, because of just the obviously huge rewards you get from that. But there has been this really interesting shift in women's identity,

and the way that women can take on a lot of these roles, and including like if you do become a, firewoman or a construction, but people are gonna celebrate that. Very few people are gonna think I'm not wrong with you anymore. If you become a women engineer or a woman construction, whereas for men, the identity cost, Rachel Krantin, George Ackle, had an article in 2000 called Identity Economics.

The basic said was, when people make an economic decision, they're making an identity decision. What kind of person am I? What does this decision say about me? What does it signal about my identity? And up until this point, many of the areas of strong growth have remained very female in orientation, very, very gender segregated, and men have not yet, by and large, been able to adjust to a world in which you're going to have a better chance of making a good living as a nurse, or some kind of living as a social care assistant than you are as a factory worker or a laborer. And so that's one of the big parts of my argument is that it really need a kind of cultural transformation around a lot of those jobs so that they do become more accessible to men and they don't seem as female.

Because the more accessible to men and they don't seem as female because the demasculinization, if I can put it that way, some of those other professions I just talked about didn't just happen by itself. It happened as a result of concerted intentional policy effort, massive campaigning on the part of lots of well-funded organizations to really kind of batter the doors down on behalf of women, but there's no equivalent on the other side. We haven't really tried yet to help men make that transition, which means that for a lot of men, especially working class men, that's a pretty tough transition for a lot of them to make. They don't see them as male jobs.

So you've got the male jobs disappearing, the female jobs rising, and men stuck between the two, and the worst thing that can happen is for politicians to come along and promise that they can bring back those old male jobs, because a lot of men want to hear that. But that's an incredibly dangerous message because we can't bring those male jobs back. And all you're doing is selling a dream, selling a nostalgic dream, rather than helping men adjust to the world as it is, rather than the world as it used to be. And I think a lot of men are just stuck in the vice between those two right now. That's fascinating. The fact that politicians are running on a lap.

Basically, there's no way that this is going to happen. Well, you're going to do you're going to roll back automation. Is everyone going to start paying more for their? No, no one's going to do that. You want cost of living to go up even more than it already is. And then on the flip side, I agree that you know, talking about getting more women and girls into STEM fields and getting them to do more of those sort of subjects in school and college, but there hasn't been the equivalent push for men to become carers, or nurses, or to work in HR, or to workers' teachers. And I imagine

that if you were, this isn't just from a, we need to find a place for men in the workforce. This is how much better could the service be for the users of that service? If you are a guy that needs care because you have some disability or perhaps you're elderly, I would imagine it is significantly better for you to be locked after in some of your more intimate moments by a male than by a female and there are no males around and that to me. Is it a typically masculine job not culturally, but I mean you've had medics on the battlefield for a very long time you've had the doctors this is you helping your fellow man to you've had the doctors, this is you helping your fellow man to retain some of his dignity. This doesn't feel like a step down. I don't think it would be too far of a jump culturally

to be able to make this pedestalized again and something that's praised and applauded for men to go into. And it would be great for the users of it, but it hasn't been. Correct. And of course, historically, I mean, Florence Nightingale turned nursing into female profession. She said she actually, men were banned. Men were not allowed to be nurses after Florence Nightingale got her way, because she just said they are not equipped for it. They can't do it. And so she feminized the nursing profession. She also professionalized it to be fair to her. But yeah, you're exactly right. That's the dilemma is that we haven't really done very much to change these roles. I'm glad you mentioned the point about uses because when I talk about this,

the need to get me into what I call healed professions, health education, administration and literacy. So there's the acronym to match STEM, to mirror STEM. You have to have an acronym, you know that. Everyone knows that. So I'm in the US especially. And so, well, we actually see fewer men in heal, declining numbers of men in psychology, social work, et cetera, tiny increases in nursing.

And right now, only about 15% of care workers are male. David Goodheart had a very good piece actually in I think in the London Times about this, where this is discussion about immigration, how we're gonna need more immigrants to fill these care roles. And his point, and he's much more skeptical about immigration than I am, but his point was, well, how about trying to get more men to do these jobs?

And that again, from a sort a work force point of view. But if I was making this argument again, I'd lead with the argument you just made, which is the uses of the services. If you're a guy in a care home and you need to go to the bathroom and you need help or you need, or even if you're, let's say you're a guy struggling with porn addiction. Yeah, I was literally about to say therapy. We're trying to get more men into therapy to have conversations. What is it? Two percent of men is like a 10 X difference between the number of men in therapy and women in therapy. You get to fix the labor force issue. You get to give men jobs.

You get to make the users of that service have a better experience because the people they're speaking to, they can resonate more with. And downstream from that, those people are more well balanced, which means that they become better members of society, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, did, all the way down. Exactly. And when you, when you see such a strong set of arguments for something, then I think it's really hard not to come to conclusion

that we shouldn't do stuff about that, that we shouldn't have like concerted efforts. And I, you know, I want male-only scholarships to encourage men into those sorts of professions, I want subsidies to employ us that hire more men into those roles, I want diversity. All the things we've done to get women into STEM we should be doing the same. Right now it's quite quite hard even to get past the only men who are going

to benefit from this scholarship. And like, yeah, you betcha, because that's what we need. For all the reasons you've just said, if we agree that that's important, so we realize as a society, we need to do more to help women break some of these barriers down. So we've to grow money and political capital and institutional power at that problem. And it's been great. We need to do exactly the same and we think exactly the same at a level of intention and force to try and help men get into these jobs. And there's ways you can describe these jobs

that are actually just much more appealing to men. You know, without indulging in, you know, create the simplest, exterior types, there are lots of aspects of these jobs that actually actually are quite male, quite physical in many cases as you talked about dignity and so on too. And so without leaning too hard in stereotypes, you can definitely describe these jobs in ways that are more appealing to men than we currently do.

What about when it comes to family life? What's happening with men as fathers and husbands and stuff? In some ways, I think this is the deepest problem of all, the biggest challenge, and it may run beneath some of the others, or overlap, or with some of those others too, which is the primary goal of the women's movement, second wave, I guess, I'm not very good at my waves, but certainly the kind of Steinem wave was economic independence. Post-war, especially with the say, women needed to become economically independent, needed to break the chain of dependency that women had on men. That would make marriage a choice rather than economic necessity and rebalance power

relationships. So it's all about material stuff. Obviously, since then, feminism has become much more cultural and ideological. But that has been secured to a very large extent in two ways, one, by massively increased employment and earnings for women, and two, by the expansion of the welfare state, especially to help mothers with children.

So those two things have basically broken the chain of dependency that women used to have with men in the blink of an eye, almost in my lifetime. I mean, it's incredibly short period of time. You know, 10,000 years of some kind of patriarchy, 50 years, to do a huge amount of demolition of that institution. Amazing. I mean, just extraordinary revolution that we've seen.

So they were right, feminists were right, they've been largely successful. The big question is, what does that mean for dad? If the previous role for dad was breadwinner, largely, did other things as well, but it was kind of provider. And that was the relationship he had with the woman and then he had kids together. What if she's now a provider?

Doesn't need him as a provider, but she's also still the main character. The risk is that dads become redundant, they're just not needed anymore. And I think that's the world we're living in now, especially for unmarried fathers, especially for those who are out of work or who are struggling in the labour market. Actually, they basically get benched, like who needs them anymore, because we're in this cultural lag moment now, whereas actually fathers matter hugely as fathers, but there's a real problem of fatherlessness in many parts of the Western world now, particularly in less affluent areas, working class.

And it is, I think it's because of this profound shock that has hollowed out the basis for the traditional family, which was economic dependency, and great except now what? So I think I have a responsibility to deal with some of the consequences of even very positive social changes. And to be clear, I think we agree that the women's movement has been by and large and incredibly positive change, but it has had a bunch of side effects. And one of them has been to ask real questions about the role of fathers and the role of men. And unless we repetized, repedustalized to borrow some language from you, fatherhood as an institution in and of itself, I think

a lot of men are going to feel like they're failing. Well, think about how strange it is that men working less has made them worse fathers. Men being in the workforce lesson lesson potentially spending more time in the home has somehow made them into less of the father figure that they wanted to be. Yeah, that's because we haven't expanded the role of fathers enough into that more direct kind of caring role. And so it is just got a sense of, well, you know, one or the other. I know, I know, I say again, from personal experience, like just comparing my father with my brother. So my dad

lost his job in the recession of the 80s, so obviously we're doing manufacturing. And he got up every morning and put his tie on and had breakfast with us. And I asked him, why are you wearing a tie? He said, because I have to get another job. And he'd go and sit and he's a resume. And so his way of signaling to himself, he was still working. The idea that he would sort of take some time out of the labor market while my mum took the economic load was unthinkable at the time. Whereas my brother, he's a doctor, and he's taking his parental leave as kids are in adolescence, because their mum is also a doctor.

And so they have that kind of flexibility, right? Doctor Doctor is a very, very different world. And he is able to step into that role much more easily than in the past. But by and large, that's not happening because all of us have failed to update our models of fatherhood for a world of gender equality and failed to honor and valorize the role of fathers as fathers period. Dad's matter, period. Not just as breadwinners, not just a period. And in some ways, if you're not a breadwinner, you matter even more, perhaps, until you're

kids' lives, because you're going to be more involved in their care and so on too. Well, that's the counter-insuitive example that I just thought of that. When you think about what a father is, at least a little bit more archaic, most of the 1900s, it's the one that's setting the rules, perhaps the taskmaster, the one that goes to work and comes home. They are creating a role model that's hard work and conscientiousness and discipline and motivation and all this sort of stuff. Okay, assessing my own assumptions around that particular stereotype, which part of that

involves fathering? Not much of that actually has anything to do with you being a father. It's to do with your economic utility, how you contribute to the family, and some byproducts of it. What are the values of someone that would be a good economic utility creator? They would be disciplined. They would be disciplinary and they would be aspirational, so on and so forth. Okay, well, what does it mean? Adding another element in that I'd love to get your thoughts on.

I spoke to Roy, Royamasa not long ago. And Roy was talking about the fact that there seems to be a bit of a question about why men were needed other than as sperm donors, ancestrally. And after a long diatribe about what it's not, it's not this, it's not that, it's not the other. He said it's a high-dgun problem. He said that men, it seemed mostly were there to protect. They were there to enforce norms within the group.

They were also there as security from either other tribes or from animals or from elements to go out and do things. It seems like even the big game hunting that men went to go and do netted an energy loss. So the lack of likelihood of them bringing it down, the amount of time that someone got injured or killed, and the amount of energy that you got back, if you did finally take down the woolly mammoth or whatever, was almost always a negative, however it was great mate signaling. So it was fantastic as a peacocks tail that look at how competent I am that I've brought this down. But as women could have absolutely

survived on berries and nuts and things that they pulled out of the ground. So my question as he went through all of this was, well, okay, well, what is the role of men? If that's the case, if we didn't need them to go and hunt and women, they do alloparenting. You've got the grandmother hypothesis now for why men oppose occurses. So it seems like women stick about and they do this sort of shared parenting thing unbelievably rare, even in other primates, allo parenting very, very rare. Like the mother takes care of her child, not in humans. It's the mother and the grandmother and some of the aunties and sisters and maybe a friend.

That's and that's this big, big group. Okay, so what's the use of men? I wonder whether we are seeing again in the same way that women or females having equal access to education unearthed some of the underlying disparities within the system, I'm wondering whether the same thing has occurred within the family that with women no longer needing men around, that the surplusness of men within the family has now finally been revealed. So interesting. I mean, I love a lover-oy stuff.

I cite him quite a bit. But I've been quite influenced by the work of Sarah Herdy and Anna Machen. Anna Machen has a book that I think you'd be very interested in. It's called The Life of Dad. She's an Oxford evolutionary psychologist and talks about how father had developed precisely for the reasons that you just hinted at, which is the increased calorific requirements of raising kids, because our brains grew,

we needed a lot more calories. So it went to a botched the number, but you know, suddenly it was 13 million calories or whatever to raise a kid. And actually that was impossible. Her view was, it was impossible for moms to provide that on their own. And so that's why you, that's when fatherhood became a social institution, about 10,000

years ago, because the dad, if the dad wanted his kids to survive, they needed more calories and mom could provide. And so he had to get, he had to create some surplus calories for the kid. And that's the creation of fatherhood and her view, which sounds like it's a different view to the one the Roy had which is actually she could have done fine and so it was just basically It's like a sport Right big game hunting big game hunting was the sport and the other element was the bodyguard hypothesis

Okay, so he could protect you so it's a way you could show that you could protect So it wasn't about calories. Okay, so it's more about the protector than the provider side of it seems like Yeah, well that's very interesting and credibly depressing if true I think about the think about the fact that everything that we've spoken about so far the Changing education has unearthed some disparity that very much pulls the floor out from under where men thought their position was in society. And this family thing, it's the first time I've thought

about it, I didn't even think about it while I was reading the book. And as I'm trying to join these dots now, I'm gonna have to email Roy about it and see what he thinks, but it's, dude, it feels like a vacuum. It feels like a hole being pulled out. You should have aneuron as well, I think,

because that would be useful exchange definitely. I mean, it's hard for me just to believe, just what little I know from Joe Henrich's work and you know, and Catherine Page Harden's work and Anna's work and so on too, that it can all be, but it's all protected. I'm pretty sure that we guy in an element in this, it's how much of that is the case. And in a world which has been nerfed from the protector role, if the protector's been removed

away from it a little bit more, what happens then? Yeah, well, the protector role is kind of, it's certainly a matter of practice become there significantly less important. In fact, a lot of women's rights groups would say actually the man in the house is more It's certainly a much practice become there significantly less important. In fact, a lot of women's rights groups would say actually the man in the house is more dangerous than the man outside the house. So you don't want your protecting in terms of a protector role. You see the good police force and good domestic violence policies and laws. The provision thing is interesting.

I mean, my view, but this is again going back to this sense that men did provide, they generated a surplus for the family, for the kin, for whatever the group was, that they had to generate some kind of surplus calorifically or whatever. And very often risk their lives doing so. That's why Roy's very fond of this stat that we have twice as many female ancestors as male ancestors, because men only have a 50% chance of reproducing,

which is why they're more risk taking suit too. But if I bring it up to just what I know from the contemporary social science, actually the evidence is quite good that engaged dads are good for the dads. Importantly, and that's very often not said enough. And I don't think I say that enough in the book, honestly, but also good for the kids.

You see these long run outcomes, and it can last a long time. So like girls who have a good relationship with a dad at 16 have better mental health when they're 33. But especially for boys, I mean, the performance of boys at school and some of the acting out stuff we alluded to earlier, just much better with engaged fathers. Just that's just true. And so what kind of provisioning is going on there? Is a different thing. I think so, I think the idea that dads are providing and protecting and teaching is still all true. It's just the nature of that provision

and protect, is very different in the world today. So the way we express what I would argue, let's say there are only 10,000 years old, but it's still a long time, 10,000 year old fathering roles and instincts. They're still applicable, especially to adolescents. I think that's really, and Anna's work is influenced on me. There's two animations. Actually, turns out that kind of learning, teaching, and pushing the lines a little bit,

helping adolescents to navigate risk and learn how to manage themselves. But dads seem to be a little bit better at that on average. Mums tend to be a little bit better in the very early years when it's much more up your nurturing. And just like everything you do to just keep the baby safe. But actually when it's time for the, when it's time for baby to start riding a bike and jumping off walls and whatever it is, actually dads turn out to be a little bit strong on that front too. So there's a complementarity I think to the roles of mothers and fathers. But look, conservatives are worrying for a long time about this. Jeff Dench has this book back from the 90s now when he said, the family is a myth, but it is a myth

that makes men tolerably useful. And so if bound ises right, if bound ises right, then it is a myth. It's always been a myth, and there's game acting and whatever, but it's a myth that we have to sustain to keep men tolerably useful. If the myth is no longer, if the myth dies, then what are we gonna do to make men tolerably useful? The thing that conservatives like Guilder and Dension,

all that are worried about in the 70s was, we're going to make men, they're not going to be, we're going to make them irrelevant for the reasons we've already discussed. And they're going to form marauding bands of violent male syndrome. Yeah, they'll have your surplus males, all the Henrik stuff too. And it's going to be like Mad Max basically. With all these guys, it's going to be like Mad Max basically. With all these guys, they're going to be full of testosterone because marriage and kids are lower your testosterone levels. So they're going to have like hyped on testosterone.

They're not going to be economically useful anymore. We don't need them. And so they're just going to form these. And society is going to get ravaged by, as I said, this kind of Mad Max apocalypse. The opposite has happened. Rates of violent crime have halved in the last few decades, including sexual assault and so on too.

Our societies has become progressively more peaceful as men have become less required to use some language in the before. So their nightmare scenario is absolutely not played out. I'm much more worried about the men who are checking out, not the men who are acting out. I think that the checking out of men is a much bigger problem. There's a retreat of males into basements to indulge in stereotypes,

rather than madmax style marauding on the streets. Men are not marauding around on the streets. They're retreating instead. An interesting consideration here that I learned about from Diana Fleischmann's paper, Uncanny Volvers, which is much more interesting than it comes to paper titles. Not a reference, I'm across my desk

at the Brickings Institution, but you're right. It's a better reading the right things Richard you're not reading the right things and she makes a hypothesis that men who utilize porn and are not going out to seek partners are getting simulacrum fitness cues that they are being successful

from using porn. And you could roll that thought process forward for what are computer games? What's a computer game? Well, that's progress over time. That's conscientiousness. It's a band of brothers. You've got community, you've got belonging,

you've got a sense of all of this stuff. Okay, so if you are able to provide proxy fitness cues that manage to keep men going and you can basically sedate them out of being the roving band of miscreants, causing trouble and pushing over granny that we were concerned about originally. But now you've which is less tumultuous, but even more sort of nihilistic, which is this group of sedate and checked out men. The checked out thing. Yeah. Yeah. The checked out rather than acting out. Yeah, I mean, I think that if we pursue this thought a bit further, the argument, very often, is made that the internet, particularly video games, the technology in the form of video games, especially in pornography, have been, you know, this is horrible thing, right?

And, you know, Jonathan Hyte, very well, and we're with him, and I think there are a lot of issues there. But you could flip it on its head and say, given what we've seen about the declining marginal utility of males, actually, those things came along just in time to save us. And even if it's not optimal, and we can get into some of the claims that you've just made, some of which I'm more skeptical about than you are, I think, it's certainly better than the alternative. That's very interesting. It's so, so will we, will we actually be saved by games and porn?

We're now, we're so focused on the problems that there might be with those that we'd like, what's the counterfactual? Imagine that we'd had none of those technological changes at all, right? There were no video games for men to play there was no porn for men to look at and they were increasingly out of work dislocated etc. Maybe some of the things that conservatives want to be a bit more true maybe we wouldn't see this incredible declining crime. There's a company no no again nobody predicted. That the falling employment of prime age men. that the falling employment of prime age men and the growing detachment of men from their families, et cetera, would be accompanied by historic decline

in crime. No one predicted that. Everybody would have predicted the opposite of that. And so I think that's important. So why? And maybe you've got this escape valve in a way. Now, how bad are those problems? I'm not convinced that they're that bad. Actually, I looked at the video gaming evidence and I just like, I don't, I don't think as much

going on there. I looked at the evidence on porn. I was going to have a whole chapter on sex. It's still there, but I cut it out because there's only so many things you can, you know, and I prefer anyone said, like, if you have a chapter on sex, you'll never get people to talk about education or a labor market. And that's probably good advice. But I do think that some of you've mentioned some people like Louise and their Christine Ember and so on too,

that I think you're talking interestingly about sex. I'm not convinced for hugely negative effects from porn, either. To the extent, except for the minority who are highly addicted, that is a problem as it is for alcohol or anything else. I think the issue with things like games and porn, you've hinted at this, is less what boys and men are doing when they're doing those things. It's more what they're not doing.

It's the displacement of other activities that's the problem, not the activity itself. And it could be that it displaces, say, going out. So I'm old enough to know that if you wanted to get any kind of action at all with a girl, you had to go through various phases. You had to shower. You had to dress properly. You had to go out.

You had to risk multiple rejections until perhaps finally something happened that broke in your favor. It was humiliating, it was exhausting, and you had to do every Friday and Saturday night from the age of 15 to whatever it was. Okay, so that's not the world that my boys grew up in because there's porn and there's games and there's weed in it.

I'm not even necessarily sure that my world was better, but I do know that it was riskier. And I do know that you had to put yourself out there a lot more. And I do know that you had to make much more of an effort. And so I worry a little bit about the ease with which you can opt out of some of those difficult things, like a mature mating strategy. And that might be de-skilling some young men in ways that are quite important. But I honestly think it's a bit too early

to tell. And I'm again a bit worried about the stereotyping here, the stereotype. Well, guys, just lie around smoking weed and looking at porn and playing video games. And I have three sons in their 20s. I can assure you that young men do lie around in the basement doing all of those things, but they don't do that all the time. They also have jobs and girlfriends and college studies and tennis coaching and job. So I'm just, it veers a bit closer to toxic masculinity stuff we started with, actually, if we're not careful there, there are some quite penicious stereotypes about men that I think can get in the way of a better conversation, and these get close to those for me. It seems to me that this debate about men's and women's rights

is being treated as a zero-sum game. That seems to be one of the fundamental issues that were butting heads against. And you say that people believe arguing for the rights of men and boys would automatically mean rolling back women's rights or denying the existence of misogyny. That has to be probably one of the prime flashpoints when it comes to putting this forward and how it's going to be received culturally.

Yeah, I think that's a big part of the problem on both sides. I think sometimes the opposite is true, perhaps on the other side of the political spectrum. It depends for you're talking talking to. But for sure, I think that one of the problems is that even conceding that we should do some stuff for boys and men, that there is a problem for them is seen as even if not necessarily diverting resources away from things for girls and women, although it could mean that, it's much more about the distraction of attention. It's more the, are you kidding me? Problem, right? It's more the, you want me to talk about boys and men when, you know, six percent of companies are met by women when, on your core of parliamentarians, you know, and I have my, my wife actually is in the, in the process of raising money

for a startup business. So I know that only two percent of venture capital money goes to female founders. I'm reminded of that on a nightly basis, Chris. So I'm acutely aware that there's still a lot of work to do for women in many areas, especially at the top of society. And so just a sense of like, no, no, no, no, we've, is unfinished business over here, a lot of unfinished business over here. And it's really difficult right now, the current environment, to get people to think two thoughts at once. It's really hard to break

away from this sense of like, can I still care about that and care about this or am I having to choose? And unfortunately where it's framed is it very often is a choice. So even if it's not as resource zero sum, and let's be clear, sometimes it could be, right? If there's only so much money to spend on education, say say and some of it does go for policies that are pro-male which I would argue for you could argue that that means less money is going into some of the money for women scholarships and to stem or whatever it is. Okay so I think you have to be honest about that I would argue that that's now justified but it's a deeper problem than that it's more more just almost in the conversation. You've got to pick sides. And that merely saying, boys and men are in trouble.

We need to help boys and men is to betray any commitment to the needs of women and girls. And that false binary is really crippling the conversation I think around this. I've just one of the reasons I wrote the book honestly, is because I just didn't see that many good faith attempts to try and do this, to try and think two thoughts at once and say, okay, create a permission space for a conversation around this, which does not require people to give up previous commitments, but also opens their eyes to the fact.

There are some pretty big gender and inequalities running the other way now. And so, you have to decide, are you interested in inequality? Are you interested in girls and women? And if you're interested in girls and women, because that's what you care about, or that's what your institution does fine. But then we do need counter-vailing institutions or policies that take the other gender inequalities seriously. We can't just look through one eye. I think this very much has a social signaling stated preferences thing going on as well that

a lot of women at the moment, a lot of people that are pushing for the upholding of women and the pushing forward for the progression that they can have in terms of access to education, employment, family support, so on, are not thinking sufficiently deeply about the problem. Do you not want your daughters to grow up in a school where they have strong male role models so that they actually understand that they don't need to fear men, perhaps they come from a fatherless home? Let's remember as well that a lot of the policies are chosen by people in the upper elites and yet they most harshly impact the people that are poverty-stricken. It's very much a disparity between those that make the rules and those that follow the rules.

Would it not be better for your sons that you have to be able to grow up with good examples, good role models in and around school? The grandfather that you've got that you care about that's going to be looked after, would it not be better for the daughters that you have that you say that you're trying to make the world better for to have some partners that they can actually respect and contend with someone that's going to be a competent caring, well respected, well contributing, father figure partner in life bread winner, whatever it might be it seems like not understanding the challenges that are facing men and boys is putting women into disadvantage. Do you really want your daughters to be in school with boys that can't sit still and are so disruptive

that that must lead to worse education outcomes for the girls that are in class with them as well? That's why I think that's why I think red-shirting, you know, boys or starting boys will be good for girls actually. It's one of the reasons parents very often put their girls into single-sex schools if they get the option to is to get them away from the disruptions that boys have. But I think you're raising quite a deep point here, which is how we think about human flourishing across different groups. And outside of a very small separatist part of the feminist movement, I don't think many women would disagree with pretty much everything you've just said, including those who would consider themselves card-carrying

feminists. Do they want boys and men to flourish? Do they want their husbands to be doing well? Do they want their brothers to be doing what they want? Yes, they would say yes, he's yes to all of the above. The question then is, do you agree that some of them are struggling? Okay, do you agree that some of the reasons they're struggling are not just their own individual frailties, like some, like as we discussed, it's not just a psychological problem with your son. It's a problem with the school system. Do you agree with that? There are structural things here. Okay. Thirdly, do you agree we should do something about those in order to try and help boys and men succeed? We've got to go through all three of those stages. I think a lot of people are at stage one, some are at stage two. I'm hoping to get people

to stage three, which is, okay, let's do some stuff about this. Let's do some stuff to help if we agree. There is this strand of utopian feminism, which has always been about female-only societies. And you see it back from Charlotte, Perkins, Herland, all the way through to that Rick and Morty episode. What's it, raising gazes of thought or something? I know the one, I don't know. Yeah, where the guys are all living as barbequers on the planet and then there's this kind of serene society above and they kind of brutally kill them.

They throw the males out and they just get into inseminating stuff. But there's actually, there's a lot of literature around this. And of course, you know, one to woman from an all female island, the Amazon's and so on to. And it's really speaking to something, I think, which is this idea that you could create this perfect society phone you could kind of get rid of all the men or some cordon them off or put them on a different planet or something like that. And it's always been an interesting strand. There's been much less of it lately. And of course, the real world that women want to live in is not a world like that.

If you spoke to most women, they don't want to live in a world without men. They want to live in a world where men are doing well and when treat them well and they treat men well. The world you just described so well. And so assuming that men and women are going to continue to live together and that there are going to be lots of men and women around, then helping each other to flourish is surely the project here. And for a very long time, that has meant paying a lot more attention to women and girls. And in lots of the world, that is still true. I wouldn't want to be misunderstood here. I don't think there's a big market for my argument in Afghanistan. But in many parts of the world, it's absolutely true now that to help women flourish and kids to flourish, we need to help men to flourish as well. Richard Reeves, ladies and gentlemen,

if people want to check out what you do and keep up to date with your work, where should they go? As you get to my website, which is RichardV Reeves.com. I have a substack, which is called Off Boys and Men, where I post weekly on these particular themes, check out the Brookings website, where my scholarship is on Twitter, same Richard V Reeves. And it's been a great conversation Chris, I really appreciate this. Thank you. I appreciate you too. Thanks for watching.