Modern Wisdom - #576 - Dr John Barry - Does Psychology Have A Negative View Of Masculinity?

Episode Date: January 14, 2023

Dr John Barry is a Chartered Psychologist and Professional Researcher, Co-Founder of The Centre for Male Psychology and a leading expert in men’s mental health. Men and women both need help with their mental wellbeing, now more than ever. Yet there seems to be a particular blindness when it comes to men's psychology and how to treat it, plus how to effectively communicate with men about their issues. Expect to learn why traditional masculinity is seen as problematic by the American Psychological Association, the most important factors that impact the wellbeing of a sample of over 4,000 men, the unique challenges that male psychology poses, how important it is for men to have a partner in life, whether men staring at women should be made illegal and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Check out The Centre For Male Psychology - https://www.centreformalepsychology.com/ Follow Dr Barry on Twitter - https://twitter.com/MalePsychology  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 Dr. John Barry. He's a chartered psychologist and professional researcher co-founder of the Centre for Male Psychology and the leading expert in men's mental health. Men and women both need help with their mental wellbeing, now more than ever, yet there seems to be a particular blindness when it comes to men's psychology and how to treat it, plus how to effectively communicate with men about their issues. Expect to learn why traditional masculinity is seen as problematic by the American Psychological Association, the most important factors that impact the well-being for example of over 4,000 men, the unique challenges that male psychology poses, how important it is for men

to have a partner in life, whether men staring at women should be made illegal and much more. This Monday, the David Goggins episode goes live, so make sure you hit subscribe and make sure that you have got your popcorn and your running shoes and your swear counter. Are we ready to go? I can't wait to release this. I'm so ready to go. I can't wait to release this. I'm so so excited. But now, ladies and gentlemen, Why did you found the Centre for Male Psychology? There's a couple of reasons. One is that the general need for more accurate information on men's psychology. And the other was because we had already got a myosycology section of the British

psychological society that was facing the professional people dealing with psychology and mental health. But we also needed to have something that was more public facing because I found over the years I've been doing this about 10 years, 12 years now, that there's actually a lot more interest and awareness, funnily enough, about men's psychology in the general public than there is within the professional psychology. I was quite surprised when I started to understand this, but not only are people outside psychology more interested in male psychology or mental health, but there seem to have more insights than a lot of people who are in psychology. I say that and I feel a bit embarrassed for my profession. Why do you think that is? Well, I think that it's a lot of it is

the education in a third of the commas that we get about gender, especially in psychology. Part of it is that we, there's a bit of a blind spot and that we don't really even focus on men as a topic of interest at any level of psychology education. The one exception now is the University of Sunderland has got a module, an undergraduate module on male psychology, which gets brilliant feedback, but it's the one piece of a module in the world that focuses on male psychology. So we have on one side of blind spot to even looking in that direction, but also when we do look in that direction, we often have a kind of see it through a particular lens that sort of distorts what people see. So we tend to see men as being really the architects of our own problems. There's a fair bit of what you could call victim blaming that happens. So if men have mental health problems and they fail to seek therapy

or any kind of help and they don't speak to people because they're too banally and stoical. Well, as they're on fault kind of if they end up, you know, ending their own lives. And there's that kind of, I mean, I actually, on my undergraduates degree back in the 90s, when we were discussing male suicide, which was discussed in the space of about two minutes compared to talking about lots of other topics in mental health, including women's depression, which we just really went into to quite some detail. When it came to explaining male suicide, given that women are twice as likely to have severe depression than men are, but men are three times more likely to commit suicide than women are.

But the explanation given was that men are better at DIY, so they just construct better methods of getting rid of themselves. And in my seminar group, that got a little ripple of laughter. And I was kind of, I was sitting there thinking, well, you know, I'm not, I'm here to learn. But I'm just, I'm not really sure I'm learning anything very good here. There's no theory behind here.

It's almost like we've just had a little bit of standup. And outside afterwards, we had a break and someone came up to and said it was a woman said you know well done I don't know how you managed to sit there through that and saying nothing. And I mean I just as I said like you know and lots of students would I think the same you know you're there to learn and you're you absorb this information you think that as a professor telling me this it must be true.

And so we just don't get enough accurate information about men's psychology. We hear especially when it comes to medicine and vaccines and such like that the male default, that there is a form which is used, most drugs are optimized for the male body, most vaccines are optimized for the male body, most vaccines are optimized for the male body, we have different immune responses, so on and so forth. Are you saying that this male default or whatever hasn't been ported across when it looks, it comes to studying psychology? Oh, yeah, most definitely. I especially when it comes to therapy, then you very much get a female default. But in terms of examining men at all, no,

it doesn't, and in terms of medicine, I mean, I think it's, it's sometimes unfairly characterized as being, well, it's a man's world, so, you know, it's medicine for men by man, it's everything, which is not really true. I think that when it comes to testing experimental medication, it's a bit like being an experimental pilot, an experimental fighter plane or something like that.

You know, it's a dangerous thing. You don't know what's going to happen. There's some horror stories like recently, or well, 10 years ago, there was what they called the guy who's, I think they called him the elephant man because he took some experimental drug that was supposedly okay, but his head kind of expanded up to some very terrifying shape. Now, men go in for lots of dirty, dangerous jobs and I think being the guinea pigs is one of them. And there's a good reason for that too. I mean like nobody, I mean, I think men tend to be protective of women, so there's that. But there's a good reason. I mean, it's very often a woman who's a child-bearing age doesn't necessarily know when she's pregnant. If she's taking a medication that no one really knows what the effects are, that might damage the fetus.

And we have no idea what the consequence of that might be. So there's very good reasons why women should be protected and they're unborn children protected from that sort of process. Why is there a difference in psychology studying the female brain when medicine appears to be studying the male form? Like what's the reason for it being that way round? Well, I don't mean we're studying the female brain. It's not so much a biological thing. It's a lot of bad behaviors more than brain. I mean, if you're trying to go on a fishing exposition

to find all the differences between men and women in their brain, that can be a really subtle and controversial trip. But what we're looking at more is the way that, for example, in terms of therapy, the ways men and women tend to respond differently to stressful situations. And that's a really key thing. So we have the, we've got the, the model that really applies quite well for women. So when we think about somebody who's depressed, we think about somebody who's maybe cries and they feel sad and down and they might want to talk to people about how they're feeling. And that applies more so to men than women. And of course, we have to do the caveat here of there's different distributions of behaviors

and things and types, and not all women are the same and not all men are the same. But by and large, I think it's important to recognize that what we do when we're dealing with patients in therapy tends to be more about what women like and respond to than what men do. And so women do tend to fit into this and it could be, you know, some people suggested might go back to say went Freud, who his client group were almost all women. And that kind of model has sort of just become the default from there. I mean, how true that is, I don't know, but it's certainly one that we have to this day. Is this what you call the male gender bias? have to this day. Is this what you call the male gender bias? Yeah, this is, this is part of male gender blindness is something that Martin Seeger consult and clinical psychologists who really started the male psychology movement in

in the UK. He coined this phrase male gender blinds, which it tells you about just this cognitive distortion really that we have. Like it's not something that people do intentionally and people might be very fond of men in general, but they tend to have a sort of a blind spot to be able to see when men are having problems or even when boys are having problems. We see it much more readily when it's problems are happening to women and girls than we do men or boys. And I think this is born out quite a bit actually. And this is, as a psychologist, I'm obviously I'm interested in psychology and where male gender blindness tends to be most obvious is in the therapy room.

What's beta bias and gamma bias? Right. So I'll start with alpha bias. Alpha bias is something related a bit to what we were talking about with trials of medicines. It has been has been said, and it is still said quite a lot, that there's a bias in favor of looking at stuff from a men's perspective. And alpha bias in research and psychology was said to be the tendency to look for sex differences in any research that you do.

This was a focus of interest and magnifying differences between a man and woman under male rats and female rats. That was a big thing. Then beta bias is the opposite, really, it's minimizing differences between men and women. That's what we've got really, and it's another way of expressing male gender blindness, is we have a tendency to minimize any differences that we see between men and women. So when we have a therapy and it works well for women,

we don't really question whether it might not work for men because we're saying, well, there's no real differences between men and women. And in fact, the saying about this is, there are more similarities than differences between men and women, which is absolutely true, and absolutely true. But then again, you could say that genetically,

there's more similarities between men and, or humans and mice. There are. There's like, we shared 95% of genes. But there are differences differences and those differences make all the difference. And I think that's what it's missed with this. This, I think in many ways, many ways are well-meaning a view of people like there's a

men or women are more or less the same, so we shouldn't treat them differently. And the fear is that if you do treat men and women differently, that you're going to, you know, you're going to lead people back to the days of patriarchy and things, ideas like this is going to end up disadvantaging women. And I just don't think that's true at all. And I think that we've come to the point when we have to discuss things in terms of the fact that men are committing suicide three times the rate that women are and also to other problems that suggest that men are having unresolved mental health issues like men. homelessness, much, you know, rough sleeping, much more, the prison population, you know, 95%

well, there's there's many ways in which you see that men are having issues that are being dealt with by psychologists or therapists, they're going, they're being overlooked and a lot of this is male gender blindness and this beta bias that we have and gamma bias is then a lot of us is male gender blindness and this beta bias that we have. And gamma bias is then a kind of an elaboration of the idea of beta bias. And again, Martin Seeger is the person that identified gamma bias. And this is the tendency to, for example, when people do things that are good,

sort of things that you would normally applaud and think that they might get prize and exit that. We tend to, when it's done by a woman, we tend to emphasize the fact that this is a woman achieving this award or doing this great thing. But if a man does it, we tend to not emphasize his gender so much, it's just kind of like it kind of goes in the background. It's a woman though, it's all like a Desperate Woman. And this, it becomes more of a serious issue when it happens

in terms of negative things. Like for example, a topical thing is violence. When violence is done by men, we tend to emphasize the fact that it's a man, it's a violent man, but if violence is done by one, we tend to play down that, like somebody got stabbed or something like that. The fact that it's a woman might kind of disappear to the end of the story if it appears at all. And this is quite important, I think, in many different ways, but because we then, I think as therapists, we, one very important thing in therapy

is to have empathy for your client. And if we basically don't like our client all that much, because we're presuming really negative things about them, I think that's very likely to interfere with what's called the therapeutic alliance. And one of the things that makes a difference between therapy being successful or not is therapeutic alliance.

It's the thing that most consistently explains the difference between therapy, the work's admin therapy that fails. And if you have people who presume that they, if your client is male, they've got male privilege, they might have had an easy life, much easier than women, if they, and if they say something, and this is not uncommon, if there, if this reply says that the reason he's there is because he's depressed, and why depressed, well, you know, I get into fights with my wife. Well, it's very easy to presume these days that, but well, you know, he's,

the guy who starts the fights or if she's hit him, why, what did he do to deserve it? You know, what's he done? People fall into this mindset. And I think it's really important that, especially for therapists, if we're supposed to be trying to understand people, meet them where they're at, not trying impose the idea that they should be able to talk about their feelings more than they might want to. For therapists, we should be able to make a much better day's work out of dealing with men than I think that we do.

I think it's not surprising that men don't turn up for therapy because lots of men just, they understand this. It's fairly obvious to them. Is that the gender empathy gap? Is that another way of describing it? Yeah, gender empathy. All of these ideas are kind of overlapping. I mean, it's one of these sorts of things where you've had different people in different places come up with a similar sort of idea and they get a slightly different, but the gender empathy gap is a very good book, but also describes this kind of condition that we tend to sympathize with women when they have problems more than we sympathize with men.

Yeah, I mean, it's a difficult one because we want to try and get to encourage men to open up. You want to try and give women the opportunity to achieve parity in education and employment and independence and financial achievement and so on and so forth. And it's difficult to not have that done at the cost of accusing males of tyranny and patriarchal oppression and stuff. And I saw you share something about the guidelines from the APA and dangers of traditional masculinity. Yeah, so that is the one of the things that's been quite controversial recent years is the American

Psychological Association released guidelines on doing therapy with boys and men. And a lot of people were very pleased that these came out until they read them. And then there's, I mean, broadly speaking, they're quite good. There's 10 guidelines in there. Most of them are good. Guideline number nine, which is about

how to do therapy with men. It's actually really good. I mean, I would stand by that. But there are a couple of guidelines there that really mess up the rest, the whole of the guidelines. It's one of these things where, you know, it, it, it, it, it, okay, so I've described them. So guideline one is about, it makes the presumption that, that masculinity is, is a social construct, which is a very popular idea and it seems to make sense if you look at the way men behave and dress around the world,

that men behave and dress and talk differently. On the other hand, there are some commonalities there which tend to get overlooked. So we're told that the reason man or any differences between man and the world are due to socialization. So if you're in a country that tells that man that they should have long hair, well then they have long hair. And because they're socialized to have long hair. And if it's short hair, a culture that tells them a short hair, well, you know, people just fit into those certain things. But there's a lot of evidence. I mean, and it's very unpopular to bring this up in social sciences these days,

mainly because we've spent about the last 30, 40 years talking about all the ways in which socialization of men has been bad for men and bad for women. But we overlooked, you know, some really obvious evidence, very hard evidence, actually, that there's biological correlates to lots of things about men's behavior. So there's things about masculinity that are hard to get away from the biological influence of. So if we take something like the impact of testosterone on fetal development,

this completely, a week 13, the Y chromosome triggers the release of surge of testosterone. So the fetus will experience a similar levels of testosterone to an adolescent boy. So high levels of testosterone. And this changes the fetus entirely. So they are programmed then for the development of things like different bone structure, larger muscle mass. And then I mean there's other psychological things that are kind of more controversial but may well be true, like they may well be programmed for

better ability at mental rotation of things. In other words, a kind of ability to see things in three-dimensional space a bit better than women. Certainly in adults, there seems to be some differences there, and some studies of fan correlations with testosterone and adults. I found from a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with David Putts, at the age of three, there is a 50% accuracy disparity in throwing precision at the age of three Yeah, so if you get toddlers boys and girls you split them into two groups and get them to throw this isn't to do with power this is before test us our own from Puberty's kicked in this is exclusively due to that and it seems like this predisposition towards

Mental rotation now what women seem to be better at was Remembering the location of things within a smaller area. So this would have made sense. This would have been adaptive, right? If you're a forager and you need to know, let's say you've got a one kilometer radius around wherever the current tribe is situated and you need to remember where the good route, where's the bad route, where's fresh water, where's bad water, where's the bush that's got lots of berries, whether the bush that's got less. And it kind of plays into the trope, but like lots of cliches are born out of genuine biological predispositions. It's why guys always lose their keys, but women can't remember the directions to get to their office or whatever. It's like when you're talking about a broader range of things, a broader distance, men appear to have a better ability at being able to remember

that. But when you're looking in a smaller area, like around the house, perhaps, they seem to be pretty useless, and the converse is true for women. Interesting, yeah. I mean, the throwing thing, I mean, there's the prenatal surge at 13 weeks that goes on for several weeks.

Then there's a postnatal surge, too, in boys. Again, for another very high surge of testosterone that happens in the months after they're born, I don't know how much that has an effect on throwing ability. But there's loads of these things that we think of as being stereotypes and tropes that are, in fact, true, they're real. I mean, the stereotype comes about for a reason in lots of cases. And so like people, I mean, I hate to say that you use the term, you probably didn't use throwing like a girl. I mean, did that, did that, did anybody? Because instantly, now, loads of people just turned off, they've just stopped watching the video. But there's something

to that. I mean, you know, and people shouldn't get worked up or feel bad about it, unless they want men or women just to be exactly the same for some reason. I don't have any problem with just people valuing differences completely, totally no problem. Also, no problem at all with everybody being allowed given opportunities to do whatever they can do in their life. So if a girl wants to be a picture in the New York Yankees or something like that, she should absolutely have every opportunity to do that. What do you think about the term toxic masculinity?

Obviously, well, not obviously, okay, because a lot of people think that's perfectly reasonable to use this term. There is some sense to it, but I think what's happened is a term that was originally used by some mythopaletic type of guys back in the 80s and 90s, they started using this term to describe young men who had not been initiated into the tribe. And if for whatever reason, a young man was not, didn't go through the initiation ceremonies, which would help them to become a member of the tribe, they would kind of go off and kind of go a bit wild. They wouldn't kind of feel any affiliation with the tribe. They'd be in

nuisance. And so this was called toxic masculinity. And you know, there's, you know, different suggestions of how to, to rein them back in. But basically, they were, um, there was, it kind of made some sort of sense. However, this, this term has been used out of context, and it just becomes like it gets thrown right in the media, um, quite a bit. And it just gets used in a generic way to describe any behavior that men do, like, you know, so-called man spreading or whatever it might be, or even men staring at women on the tube, which is now legal in London. And staring at women on the tube is illegal in London. Okay, so we need to do, we need to dig into this, John. Yeah, if you actually it's one of the

articles in the male psychology magazine, which is on the the center for male psychology website, a very good article written recently by Jenny Cummings Knight. She's psychotherapist over here in England and she's written a very good piece. Lots of people have lighted it's it's pointing out the the the the the idiocy really of having a law and actual law the component man in prison for us looking at women in a way that's interpreted as being a sexual harassment. Now this is a very subjective thing obviously like it and so Jenny points out all the different ways in which a man might be staring at a woman

or apparently staring at them. He might be blind. Actually, somebody came up with an example of this where a blind guy was in the gym. And he suddenly found some woman was shouting in his face about to stop staring at him and he's saying, look, I'm blind, you know, I'm not staring at you. He's just, stop staring. You know, he stops and she bought the manager over and he said, look, I'm blind. I'm not staring.

I can't show them his card. And still, you know, people just presume that that he was doing something bad because he was apparently saying this one. Well, in London, the London Underground and other public transport, you can now go to jail if you're a man and you do that. A senior police officer has urged everyone who witnesses intense staring on the London Underground to report it amid concerns it could be an early sign of unhealthy sexual behavior.

Postes have now been placed in the tube train stations across the capital, stating intrusive staring of a sexual nature is sexual harassment and is not tolerated. Yeah, I mean, the thing is, I mean, there's so many ways in which you can go wrong. For example, I mean, I'd someone from Spain saying I actually genuinely wrote about it in the article that in Spain, you can go wrong. For example, I mean, I'd someone from Spain saying, I actually Jenny wrote about it in the article, that in Spain, you can stare at people. It's not

considered to be threatening or sexual harassment at all. People just stare at each other all the time. It's just eye contact is not a bad thing. On the London Underground, I mean, of course, you know, probably the same. lots of confined spaces. It does feel a bit more intense and intrusive if people look at each other, especially if they're looking at writing directly in somebody's face. So I can understand that people would feel uncomfortable about it. But in the current climate, I think that of really,

I think there's a lot of just, you know, this idea of toxic masculinity. All men, and this is one of the problems with the term toxic masculinity is that it's, it's, it's sort of tar as all men with the same brush. And although people say, oh no, we don't mean all men, we just mean the men who do these things. Well, when you use a term like toxic masculinity, it's when you tag toxic onto masculinity, it inevitably just poisons the whole, anybody who's possessing masculinity gets poisoned, which is man-based. Well, by design, it's a catch-all term, right? It's a catch-all term for any behavior by

a man that you deem to find distasteful or affectionable. So Richard Reeves was on the show a little while ago and the school that his kids went to in Washington, DC, there was a, um, an incident that occurred where some of the boys in class had created a ranking system of all of the girls in class, from most attractive to least attractive. And that had been deemed as something that was toxic masculinity. You go, I mean, it's distasteful, but let's not forget that that's literally the website that Facebook was built off of the back of.

Like, Facebook was that very website in Carnot, and now it's one of the biggest companies in the entire world. Like, is it toxic masculinity for boys to... If girls did it, would that be toxic femininity? I don't think it would be. But yeah, I understand the concept creep of wanting to create a label that desire to memify anything in the modern world

and be able to bring it under an umbrella. Because it makes it sound more official. It makes it sound like something that's got legitimate, scientific, rigorous, intellectual, academic backing. You got to say, it's not, it's just a term that you've decided to use to smear any behavior from guys that you don't like. Yeah. And I mean, I think one of the problems with this is that we don't know what the impact

is on boys growing up of hearing about these sorts of labels and this general narrative about a man being bad or at least potentially bad. Didn't you do, you did a new report about the factors that predict well-being and 4,000 men, and that had some tie-ins with their views of masculinity? What did you learn from that? Yeah, so this was on men rather than boys. I mean, I am more concerned about the effect on boys because I think it might be more have a more powerful negative impact. But this was on, 2000 men in the UK, 2000 men in Germany, very similar results in both countries.

in both countries and we found that or I found that some of the most significant predictors of their mental well-being were how they thought that masculinity affected their behavior. So the men who thought that masculinity made them recycle less and be less environmentally friendly. This sounds silly but men who thought that masculinely made them inclined to be more violent to women and made them less inclined to talk about the feelings. These men, this kind of set of ideas was strongly correlated with them being having a less positive mindset. And this, when I say less positive mindset, this, this, this question that I used to positive mindset index is, is itself strongly correlated inversely with them, suicidality. So when you say somebody is lower, a lower positive

mindset, you're saying that they're probably going to be more suicidal in their thinking. So, basically, men who think that masculinity has a bad effect on their behavior are, have worse mental health, you could say, in a nutshell. We found the converse was true, but only in the German sample, significantly, that men who thought that masculinity was good for their behavior, so made them more protective of women, made them want to be better dads and you know better providers in their home. These men had better mental health. So I think you know, although we're talking about a correlational design here, there is some reasonably good smoking gun evidence that having been exposed to a negative narrative about masculinity and internalizing that then thinking that masculinity is a bad thing is going to make you feel worse.

Well, why wouldn't that be the case? You know, you're kind of born. It's like that it's basically the same as original sin. It's the same concept as original sin. You know, you're born as this fallen creature. There is something innate in you that is a part of you that you didn't choose, but is also somehow toxic or damaged or insufficient. Yeah. I mean, at least with the original sin there's redemption, you know, I mean I guess certain therapists might think that they can redeem you but I'm not sure. I just I'm very worried about

the impact on boys. A lot of people are too. We did a survey a couple of years ago that found that I think 80 to 85% of people thought that we're concerned that that's the narrative around toxic masculinity would have a negative impact on boys. We really like getting back to psychology as a profession. We need to be more interested in this. We're not even a little bit interested in this. This is this is one of the terrible things. We're interested in finding out all the ways in which masculinity is bad for man and bad for society. We're not interested in really examining that idea and seeing whether this idea of toxic masculinity or hegemonic

masculinity, any of these ideas are really just social constructs that psychologists and sociologists have come up with that we impose on people's behavior and then all we see is evidence that confirms our preconception about them being bad and having this masculine original sin. We really need to be more like scientists and investigate these things, challenge hypotheses, look outside our usual, what's called a kind of narrow paradigm fixation, which has been used to describe the way that a lot of research in masculinity has been for the last 30-odd years. You also found personal growth, age, and health satisfaction as some of the other most important factors that impacted the well-being of men in that sample. Just what's what's that as a high level? What are those things? Well, so personal growth is just an interest in your own personal development.

Was the strongest predictor of mental men's mental well-being? Wow. That seems, I mean, I know that is that kind of like being your own doctor in a way? Is that you're taking a greater appreciation for the fact that you should be improving your more of a self-assessor when it comes to what are the areas of my psychology, my health, my relationships that are insufficient and that I need to work on? Yeah, basically, yeah. So it's kind of, I mean, I'm overlooking this.

I mean, there's lots of things in this report that suggest that the man or anything but toxic. Like, I think the Meg's man happiest is when they're satisfied with their own personal development. Another thing we did in that survey was ask man, what core values they thought were most important. So the core values of being adventurous and being athletic were at the bottom of the list of things that they thought were most important. The things that were most important

were being honest, reliable, dependable, and this was the same across UK and Germany. We asked men previously in the States, five thousand men, the States exactly the same result. I mean, this is talk about curing the replication crisis, exactly the same results when we, and again, when we asked two thousand and the UK in 2017, the same results. These are the things, men are not, men are, then desperately trying to be the best that they can be, which is actually fully enough as tagline for a Gillidad back in the day. The best that a man can get. But it's, I think men are shockingly misrepresented in the media and academia and the way that people presume that men are, I think, is a million miles from it.

We take the examples of the worst possible men, the worst possible behavior. And we generalize it to all men. And then we go around to school's warning boys to not be that guy. And not realizing that these sorts of campaigns are very easily backfired. Like the psychology is full of these unintended consequences. What I would

say is half-baked idea, an idea that's not properly researched, you've got the best of intentions, everyone says, hooray, sounds like a great idea, let's go out there and do it. You do it, and actually you find that in student populations and the states that've tried these these sorts of things where you like don't be that guy don't be the guy goes and sort of harassing women and being nasty and what they found is that overall it seems to work yeah overall it's an average it seems to work but actually if you look down drill down into the deity a bit you find that the guys who already were the nice guys are just as nice as they were before,

maybe a bit nicer. The guys who weren't impressed with any of this stuff in the first place have now got worse. So you've just made the problem worse. You've just, you've, you've, maybe, how would it be the case that you would get good outcomes from this kind of a campaign if the good guys got better and the bad guys got worse. If the good guys weren't going to do anything in any case, how do you get better outcomes? Because 95% of the people in that study are good guys. So when they all improve, these guys kind of get worse. The bad guys get kind of, you know, they disappear in the data because on average, everybody is improved to be. Well, I mean, this was the insight from David Busse's men behaving badly, right? That was one of the big insights from that, which is that almost all sexual assaults that are

conducted by men perpetrated by men are done by a very small number that are repeat offenders. You know, you have a small number of guys that are complete arseholes. And then you have this big wealth of guys that behave in a perfectly acceptable manner toward women. And the problem is that when you do take this broad strokes brush, you end up causing most men, most of whom are well behavingbehaving, to feel fearful, ashamed, guilty, disgusted, whatever about their own masculinity. I remember I was reading an article that you shared a little while ago, and this I think was in Ian Browell College in Australia. Parents and male students were left mortified after the school forced them to stand in assembly and apologize to their female classmates for sexual assaults committed by males.

Broward College in southwestern Victorian town of Warnan Bull, I'm not even going to try and say that properly. At Held in Assembly on Wednesday, where boys were told to stand up in a symbolic gesture of apology to girls and women. My 12-year-old has no idea about rape and sexual assault, and he was made to apologize and he doesn't understand why. Earlier 12 year old Levi, who had only been at the college since the start of the year, said he was forced to apologize to many of his classmates who he hadn't even met. They told us to stand up and turn to a girl in

our class and say, sorry, Levi told current affair. I don't think it's okay to be sexually assaulted. I felt a bit under pressure to stand up, and if I didn't feel like I was a bad person Another student named Vinny said that there were several girls in the assembly hall that began crying because they'd been revealed in Front of everyone as having been victims I had girls behind me crying because they'd basically been exposed to the entire school And we had to apologize for stuff we didn't actually do What a mess. I mean, what an absolute mess. And this behind it, I mean, so the Mayor London is rolling out workshops to sort of help boys be better people around women of B-last sex and other than that. I mean, I don't know what's in these workshops, but if it's anything like what

you just described, who's it going to help? I mean, who's going to benefit from any of that? Nobody. It's public struggle session. Exactly. And the worst thing is, of course, the guys who are already going in that direction, they've just justified them being, you know, as bad as they want to be, they just, they hate the whole thing. I mean, you see this, you know, this is an end of one, but I see this online on the internet. The guys that spend the most amount of time learning about gender dynamics are the ones that want to push back hardest against this sort of, whatever you want to call it, like hyper egalitarian or hyper sort of equal view of the world, because they do, they feel like they're being preached to, they feel like they're being told how to behave.

And if in that cohort of people, you have some people that were already some men that were already going to be our souls, they're going to feel, I don't know, like, virtuous backlash, or that you're gonna have that sort of rebound effect, so to speak. Well, when did this negative view of masculinity start in psychology? Is it always been there? No, not at all. I mean, it used to be, like, as I said,

men that haven't really appeared very much in psychology over the years, until around the 80s and 90s. And then from sociology really came this idea of hegemonic masculinity, I'm started up in the 70s, which psychology around the 80s and 90s. And hegemonic masculinity kind of cast men has been very competitive, very aggressive, kind of domineering, oh, you know, sojournistic, homophobic. And this was adopted in by some people in the states. And we developed them, you know, just snowball from there. So men

went from being considered as being athletic and energetic and and domineering and and aggressive, you know, physically aggressive, too being then all these things like they became homophobic and and sexist and things. And so we we have definitions of masculine that are useful psychology. Now not not everyone's psychology uses because it's still sort of a, it's not a mainstream part of psychology. At the media's picked up on it a lot more. Governments have picked up, and unfortunately, they, you know, including the UN and the society organizations, like the World Health, Health organizations, they tend to have adopted this negative view of man. And because the media have rumored that people, like it's just a general thing. It's part of our atmosphere that we tend to think of

that there's something wrong with men. There's at the very least privileged, if they've got wealth, they haven't really earned it. They've had a head start over women. I mean, it's a recipe for just poisoning, um, people against each other, which I think is awful. And another bad thing is that, that of course, it's, you know, for these guys who do engage in these horrible, uh, sexual behaviors and, uh, bad behaviors, um, it doesn't solve that problem by just saying that, that, that it's caused

by masculinity. You're not going to solve the problem by, by that it's caused by masculinity. You're not going to solve the problem by saying it's masculinity. You don't want to solve the problem by actually getting to the roots of the problem. And the roots of the problem are usually for people like this early trauma, childhood trauma, sometimes sexual trauma, like sex offenders, sexual trauma. And there has been some research by Naomi Murphy who was a Clinical psychologist worked with person populations with some very serious offenders That's some of the very worse sex offenders

They did have as their their the kind of They did have as their kind of the background to the defending being sexually abused by female adults when they were children. So you have the so but who wants to look at that? I mean, you know, we're so far away from being able to deal with that reality with much rather, and I guess if you're a politician, how are you going to change somebody's childhood like that? It's so difficult, and the therapy takes an awful long time. But how are you going to change the circumstances which could involve social deprivation? What Warren Farrell calls dad deprivation, like lacking a father figure, to steer people so that they're kind of, you know, they're socialised more easily. What are the outcomes of fatherlessness? Because obviously, I can hear all of the wives' tales and myths that I want.

But what are the kind of outcome changes that you get for boys when they grow up in a fatherless home? Again, so we have to say, not everyone is affected in the same way, everyone's different. Some people might thrive from that and lots of people will have very good experiences with positive, you know, role models who are women and analyze. But if there's, there's certainly things to be evidence that if you don't have some sort of like Not having a father actually research is interesting because they never make a distinction between Fathers and step-fathers don't father figures, but if you if you don't have a a useful sort of father figure

Absent father absent families basically have more likelihood of having delinquency. And this applies to women to some extent too, but certainly for a man it can be something that you, people drift into a life of crime, well, it's often not a life of crime, it's often a decade of crime or up until there are 20s before they grow out of it and start learning to control themselves a bit more. But yeah, the risk, I mean, there's plenty of evidence that the risk of boys and families that don't have dads are more likely to drift into delimacy. And loads of them don't. But unfortunately, it's true. to drift into to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to to in the UK, the States, Australia, Canada these days, is the worst most useless organization ever,

because I mean, I'm not sure what the advantages are that men have these days, so like, with boys seem to be failing in education at a terrifying rate, I mean, men are kind of, you know, drifting, you know, into homelessness, you know, into prisons you know, into homelessness, you know, into into prisons, I had an alarm and right, suicide levels, drinking themselves to death, you know, the patriarchy doesn't seem to have done very much good for anybody.

So when you're talking about smashing the patriarchy, you know, who is the target? I mean, I know that people are saying smash the dad and your family, but I think that's the only patriarch that's really left. And I think a lot of dads, I mean, they get depicted in the media as being silly or pointless and things like that. I think that there's just so much that's kind of, I guess I say, I worry about children growing up with dads or without dads in a culture that really is so happy to mean anything that's kind of, again, as I say, but I worry about children growing up, with dads and with our dads in a culture

that really is so happy to mean anything to do with men. What challenges are particularly unique to men when it comes to managing mental health? I don't know if anything would be particularly unique, but there's barriers that men have to overcome a bit more than women. So I think a lot of men already, they, we've done some research on this and it's borne out by other people's research too. Men when they got mental health issues or they feel distressed, the first thing that they want to do is not

necessarily talk to somebody about how they feel about it. In fact, they might not really feel very much like doing that. They want to fix the problem. So if it's that they're depressed because they haven't got work, they want to find money somehow or other. They want to fix the problem. They want them to fix their depression about not having work. They want to go out and get money somehow or other. And whereas women, and we're back to the way that the therapy, our style of therapy that's an offer for people these days is more suited to them. Because in general, when women are stressed,

they want to talk about their feelings. They'll want to do that. And they will help them. And actually men can be helped a great deal by talking about their feelings too, but it's not the first thing that they want to do. And when they look around for somebody to talk to, you know, it's not hard for them to realize to realize that it's them, you know, they can't just talk to anybody. For example, getting back to, um, and nail victim with domestic violence and about a third of victims of domestic violence or man, um, who is he going to talk to about this? I mean, a lot of of therapists, unless they have knowledge or experience of this, might

presume that if he's involved in domestic violence, then he started it, you know, that he's the problem. And of course, the police traditionally are very similar. Actually, this is starting to change, thanks to people like Mark Brooks and the Mankan Initiative and other people who are, you know, spreading a better information, like Mark Brooks is very good at getting onto the television and telling people about the facts about domestic violence. And so if a man is suffering from domestic violence,

he knows that he can go to the mankind initiative and he can fund their hope line. And he knows that he's not gonna be presumed to be an offender. He knows that when he talks to somebody there, they will accept that he may, you know, they will not presume that he's doing anything other than telling the truth about his experience. But a lot of other places that men can go,

they can't necessarily make that assumption. And lots of men know this. I mean, I have to say, I'm a bit embarrassed. I have tended over the years to end up doing research on things that actually most of the general public already knew about. So when I did my research finding that that when when distressed, when the one talk about the feelings and men want to fix the problem, no one was about the feelings and man want to fix the problem, no one was surprised except psychologists who I talked to. And there's so many other things. But, but, uh, it's strange, isn't it strange that you're having to reverse engineer an ideology

out of the discipline, which is supposed to know what the public is already aware of? the discipline, which is supposed to know what the public is already aware of. I, I, I, again, it's, it's, uh, you know, it's terrifying in one way. I mean, we're supposed to be the ones who kind of know, aren't we? Really, you know, yeah, you're supposed to be the tip of the tip of the spear and downstream from that is a general public that are learning off the back of, I mean, yeah, I, it's, it's a, it's a strange one. I suppose, especially when we're talking about men getting into therapy, I had this guy Adam Lane Smith on the show Psychotherapist from the Midwest.

And he really sort of read-pilled me about this, but saying, look, men want to be able to fix the problem. Men want to be able to feel capable and in control, and you want to give them the path out of it. Now, women are happy to talk about their emotions, but that doesn't really make men feel any more capable. You know, it might make them help them to open up and understand what's going on, but it doesn't fix the fundamentals sort of listlessness, vulnerability that is, I guess, a cause of a lot of shame. And around

this, you see, I don't know if a, if a guy is to open up about something that he's struggling with, a man who is going through a difficult breakup, let's say, is sort of told that they should get on with things. A woman that's going through a difficult breakup is deserving of sympathy. Now, that's not to say that again, on average, blah, blah, blah. But it doesn't seem to help the situation. It doesn't seem to help the situation massively. No, it doesn't. And it's, I mean, again, like when you mentioned the Red Pill community, I mean, there's all

sorts of places online that are, you know, they're ahead of psychologists in this, that they know it and guys know it, like they will gravitate to these places. And they might not always get the best help that they need, you know, from these places. I mean, that's so what we need, we need some sort of combination of what a psychologist can offer in terms of of the years of, because psychologists are usually very good at dealing with a lot of issues. I have to say just when it comes to men these days, it's not worked out so well, but they do need to be more open to what they're hearing from the internet, not just missing it has been

the manosphere and things like that. What the problem that you have, if you don't have a, an authority, which is not necessarily regulated, but is more rigorous with its methods and stuff, if you don't have that available for men to go to, they will go to Reddit communities and discord servers and YouTube channels and stuff like that. And that's great. Up until the point at which audience capture and the incentives of audience capture encourage those creators to make ever more outlandish claims that can become toxic in

their own right. There are 100% incredibly toxic, negative areas of the Red Pill, Manusphere, Black Pill, in cell community online that are, the world would be better if they didn't exist, right? Now, the problem is, and it's the same reason as to why when people ask about how come the right appears to have captured most of the conversations around men, it's like, well, because the left doesn't care. The left isn't having a conversation with men about what it means to be a man. They're not presenting any positive role models

for either men to grow up into or for masculinity as a concept generally. So you've just left this world open and it's the exact same dynamic that I'm seeing with regards to psychology and the manosphere, as if you wanna call it, is like one just big group. Psychology and psychologists haven't spoken to men in a way that gives them a firm footing for them to stand on, that helps them to understand their

own programming, their own nature. So I'm going to go somewhere. I go to this place on the internet, but then we have a lot more perverse and contra-incentives that are going to cause those people to take information and run, play liberties with what it is that they can say, they're not beholden to any rigors of academia or anything. There's no regulations at all. And that is how you end up with this sort of intensity spiral that creates an ever more aggressive and sometimes negative community. Yeah, absolutely. And psychology has failed there. I mean, we should have never adopted this negative view

of masculinity. We should have been always more open to what men need when they've got mental health issues. For some reason, we've just, I mean, as Martin Seagard described it, male gender blindness, we've just not been able to see it. We still, even though we have a male psychology section of the British Psychological Society

and it's out there and it's giving the right messages. I mean, who's listening? I mean, I just really, really wish that more people within psychology would pay attention and be open. I mean, I'm fortunate. And I know there's a lot of people who will just as soon as you mention helping men, they switch off. They think that that's, you know, it's like you're certainly going to go back to K-Manday's when men fragged women around by the hair or whatever cavemen

supposedly did. But it's not about that. If you leave men who are mentally on well to their own devices, they're going to be not very productive members of the community to say the least. So the cure for toxic masculinity, if you want to call it that, is to actually listen to guys to help these guys to be open to these guys to understand what the cause of their problems is and not be afraid to do that. I mean, because it's a big challenge, a big challenge, like your peers might reject you for wanting to help men, but also it's a big challenge. Like when you face to face with with some guy who's angry, who's who's heard he might want to hurt you He might reject you entirely. That's a big challenge Like forensic psychology is one of the the the biggest challenges that anyone can get involved with I have huge respect for people who are working in these areas

But we really need to to to get real be realistic that not fall for For the the the narrative and the ideology that we've been farmed off for too long. How worried are you on this rise of sexlessness and loneliness, a lonely single man? Yeah, it's not going to go anywhere good. I mean, so a couple of the previous reports that have done have looked at have found that that men who are in stable relationships are much happier than men who are single. Okay, so this is this is borne out by lots of different studies. So being in a stable relationship makes you happier, whether that's marriage or just being a going study over period of time. that's marriage or just being going steady over period of time. So being single, I mean, it gives you some opportunities for dating, but I mean actually most guys don't do that well on dating apps

and things like that, it can be pretty tough. So what you turn to, I mean, that there's porn and stuff like that, I mean, a lot of men turn to porn when they're distressed. We've done some research on this too. It's a way of coping. Like women tend to comfort eat more and men tend to go to a porn more to relieve stress. And no, it's not going to go anywhere good. I mean, we as a society are stupid to think that this isn't something that we should be paying more attention to and not in a punitive way, but actually just help these guys a little bit. And let's say one of the first things we can do is recognize that a lot of the messages that we're

sending to men through are, you know, through things like laws like about men staring at women on the London transport or things like talking about toxic masculinity or headlines like why it's okay to hate men or on the internet, this idea of like kill all men like this bit, you know, kind of phrase that flies around. I mean, it's ridiculous to think that this is not gonna have a bad effect on men. And it's also naive to think that this is not going to have a bad effect on men. And it's also naive to think that this is not going to rebound on all of us at some point.

Well, it'll rebound on women as well, because fundamentally women require a partner who is worthy of them. Women 50.1% of women for the first time in history are childless by 30. A report that came up by Reuters a couple of months ago said that for the first time ever 45% of prime working aged women between the ages of 22 and 45 will be single and childless by 2030. All of these stats suggest that women are struggling to find a mate that they can contend with and are attracted to. And I went out maybe a year and a half ago with a friend and we were in a bar in London and he's single and I sort of nudged him and pointed to a group of girls over the far side near the bar and I was like,

what, what, what do you go over and talk to one of those? And he looked like I'd suggested that we go and dismember one of them. He's like, I've been told that I should never approach a woman in a bar that's incredibly dangerous for me to do. And he's Gen Z. So he's what, maybe 12 years younger than I am. And for me, coming from the background that I had, which is like, pot, the back end of loud era, like Larry British Lad culture in sort of 2006, 2010, that would be just unheard of. Right. There was no absolutely no concern because he didn't have this panopticon of technology constantly

surveilling you. But then on the other side of this, I can see why. You could say that era that I was in, where men were going up to women would have meant that women had more approaches for men, that they had more opportunities to find a good mate. Evidence seems to suggest that women want to be approached by a man. But then you also get negative externalities. A woman that says no, that above some man,

one times in X, many hundred or thousand, is going to end up in a situation that she feels very uncomfortable. And then you have the Me Too Renaissance that was absolutely needed. But then what happens when you overshoot? And it's this very black and white sort of

Mono view of the world that it everything is good or everything is bad It's significantly easier to see people in those regards one of the things I wanted to actually mention that I've come to realize or believe over This year that was kind of interesting is There's often stories about how when you have societies with a high preponderance of single men, men without partners, that that is just before some huge instability that causes its downfall, right? And there's some evidence throughout history that seems to suggest, men get into relationship testosterone drops, men get into relationship testosterone drops, men have a child testosterone drops again, they are part of a community blah, blah, blah.

They're domesticated essentially by their partner and their family. One of the questions that I was toying with for the backend of this year is where are all of the in-sell killings? If it is the case that we have the highest rates of sexlessness amongst men aged 18 to 30 ever in history, why aren't there roving bands of miscreants outside pushing over granny and spray painting stuff and causing havoc?

And I've come to believe that what's happening is that rather than those men going out with a bang, they're going out with a whimper, they are being sedated through porn and video games into retreating away from that state of seeking behavior that may have got them a little bit of attention, which ultimately could have led them to get a partner or raise up in their standing within the community. And I don't think, you know, whatever, five years ago or so, some of the concerns, the Elliott Rodgers of the world, you know, we're going to see this happening more and more

and more. We just haven't. You know, it is not going up in line with the rates of sexlessness and singleness amongst men. So you have to presume that something else is happening in order to be able to sedate men out of that behavior. And I think that it is this porn and video games thing. Now if you were to give me two worlds, one in which you have constant mass shootings done by disaffected guys and another in which that doesn't happen.

Like, I'll take the one that it doesn't happen, but you can't say that the number of men playing Call of Duty and Smoking weed is in any way also useful. That's still not good. It's just less bad than them taking the gun from the video game into the real world. Yeah, as I said, it's not going to end up well for anybody. You love these guys who will have unfulfilled lives. People who would have been their partners will have unfulfilled lives.

I have worked in the field of women's mental health too. And one of the things that I saw a lot of was how distressing it is for women. Men also, but how distressing it is for women to have problems with conceiving a child. I mean, I like the amount of money that's spent on IVF and how much stress they will go through is unbelievable.

And I mean, it's hard to appreciate when you're younger, how much stress you're going to have when you get older, because it's, I mean, again, we're back to tropes and stereotypes, but like this, it's the idea of the biological clock for women is, I mean, in my experience of dealing with women in these situations, it's true. And it's a tragedy. We should be tried to help everybody, I think, to... I mean, in the ideal world, we would have people meeting up in an effortless way and matching off with each other and having happy, lives and happy families. I think that would be a good result for everyone. But we're I think we're we're scaring women away from from men these days and and manage a sort of feeling rejected and backing into a corner and that's not good. No, and I wonder whether a world in which most of your

experiences of the real world can be mediated by social media and news, you actually end up experiencing many other lives, right? The stories that you hear about other people's lives as opposed to your own. And if we've got a world in which remote work and more socialized salation comes through, what you actually end up doing is getting your model of the world, especially relationships between the sexes, and you take that from news, but news isn't a representative sample of the things that are happening by design. The news articles that come out are the ones that are the most egregious. It's the woman

that divorces the man and takes his brother and leaves him for dead and all of his money's gone and she's taking the dog and the dog won't even see him again. The reverse, you know, a woman says no to a guy in a, the copy room at work and she ends up being chopped up and put in the freezer and eats her for chilean stuff. Those are the sorts of stories that you hear, and if you have fewer and fewer interactions in the real world that can disprove that, what you end up with? Well, you end up with that being your model of the world, which feeds into the anxiety, which makes you less social, which means that you've got less real world experience

to disprove the stories, and the cycle just continues. Yeah. I mean, in a way, everyone needs to get out more, you could say, and talk to each other more too, but there's some really good things happening, like in terms of mental health, mental shared, really good ideas, just getting men together, part around two, XYZ activity. It doesn't really matter what it is. And they get to just chattel it a bit, and that's brilliant for the mental health. And there's sort of Andy's man club and things like that where men get together. And these things, you know, kind of getting outside, being out of the real world, finding out the reality is not as bad as it is. And

the same for women too, like man, really not as bad as you might think, there's loads of brilliant guys out there. They might be stuck under Xbox at the moment, but you know, just dust them off a little bit. Dr. John, I really appreciate you. Where should people go if they want to check out the stuff that you do online? Best place is probably the Centre for Mail Psychology.com. They can sign up to our newsletter, which is free and they get the monthly magazine and which you've talked about a couple of the articles in there. Yeah, we get they're very popular, very good. If you're a psychologist, go to the the male psychology section website on the British psychological society and you'll find that there's some. Oh, they sent from a psychology to a great place. We got loads articles, academic articles too, as well as sort of more general magazine articles. So, and we have questionnaires

that you can use like the positive mindset, insects and things like that. So yeah, go to those places. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,