Modern Wisdom - #760 - George TheTinMen - Why Does No One Care About Men’s Mental Health?

Episode Date: March 21, 2024

George TheTinMen is a content creator, a writer and a pro-men’s advocate. Men's mental health is in the toilet. 80% of 18-24 year old suicides are men and 15% of men say they have 0 close friends to... call on in an emergency. So why does it seem like the world doesn't care and just thinks that men are still the benefactors of a patriarchy they no longer feel a part of? Expect to learn why Drake's dick pic leak was such an important cultural moment, whether Billie Eilish is right that men don't receive criticism for their bodies, the reaction online to a new study saying that men need 2 guys' nights per week, what Are We Dating The Same Guy is, whether men have reproductive rights and much more... Sponsors: See discounts for all the products I use and recommend: https://chriswillx.com/deals Get 10% discount on all Gymshark’s products at https://bit.ly/sharkwisdom (use code MW10) Sign up for a one-dollar-per-month trial period from Shopify at https://www.shopify.com/modernwisdom (automatically applied at checkout) Get 60% off an annual plan of Incogni at https://incogni.com/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM) Extra Stuff: Get my free reading list of 100 books to read before you die: https://chriswillx.com/books Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic: https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom Episodes You Might Enjoy: #577 - David Goggins - This Is How To Master Your Life: http://tinyurl.com/43hv6y59 #712 - Dr Jordan Peterson - How To Destroy Your Negative Beliefs: http://tinyurl.com/2rtz7avf #700 - Dr Andrew Huberman - The Secret Tools To Hack Your Brain: http://tinyurl.com/3ccn5vkp - 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

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is George from the Tin Men. He's a content creator, a writer, and a pro-men's advocate. Men's mental health is in the toilet. 80% of 18 to 24 year old suicides are men, and 15% of men say that they have zero close friends to call on in an emergency. So why does it seem like the world doesn't care
Starting point is 00:00:21 and just thinks that men are still the benefactors of a patriarchy they no longer feel a part of? Expect to learn why Drake's dick pic leak was such an important cultural moment, whether Billie Eilish is right that men don't receive criticism for their bodies, the reaction online to a new study saying that men need two guys' nights per week, what are we dating the same guy is, whether men have reproductive rights and much more George is phenomenal. He is one of my favorite Instagram accounts. He is one of my favorite humans He's a good friend and I love his insights. He is ardently from the left. He is ardently pro men and
Starting point is 00:00:57 I think he's an important voice and you should all go and follow his Instagram account and This episode has got so much to take away from. I really, really hope that you enjoy this one. Over the next few weeks, we have got some of the biggest guests that we've ever had on Modern Wisdom, plus a world first, literally the first time this has ever been done
Starting point is 00:01:16 in the history, I think, of podcasting, definitely in the history of Modern Wisdom. And I'm super excited to release this. It's gonna be happening over the next couple of weeks. And the only way that you can make sure you don't miss that is by hitting the subscribe button. Also, it supports the show and it makes me very happy. So please navigate to Apple podcasts or Spotify
Starting point is 00:01:34 or wherever else you are listening and hit the follow button or the plus in the top right-hand corner. I thank you. This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. You want to look good and feel good when you're in the gym and Gymshark make the best men's and girls gym wear on the planet.
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Starting point is 00:02:16 If you want to see everything that I wear and recommend for guys and girls, head to bit.ly slash shark wisdom that takes you to my super secret product page and you can use the code MW10 at checkout for a 10% discount plus that 30 day free returns. That's bit.ly slash shark wisdom and MW10 at checkout. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you sell at every stage of your business from the launch your online shop stage to the first real life store stage all the way to the did we just hit a million orders stage Shopify is there to help you grow whether you're selling scented soap or offering outdoor outfits Shopify helps you sell everywhere from that all-in-one
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Starting point is 00:03:36 at Shopify.com slash modern wisdom all lowercase that's Shopify.com slash modern wisdom to grow your business no matter what stage you're in If you keep getting tons of spam phone calls and have an inbox that's filled with junk your information might be spread all over The internet which is pretty terrifying to think about this is why i've partnered with incogni incogni help prevent scam attacks By automatically opting you out of shady databases They scrape the entire internet to make sure that your name is taken off dozens of data broker lists so that your phone will become strangely quiet and your inbox will no longer feel like a hornet's nest. You can cancel at any time plus they offer a free 30-day money back guarantee so you can buy it completely risk-free, use
Starting point is 00:04:19 it for 29 days and if you do not like it for any reason, they will give you your money back right now You can get a 60% discount off their annual plan by going to incognito.com Slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom a checkout. That's Inc o g ni dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout But now ladies and gentlemen, please welcome George from the Tin Man. What happened when Robin Dunbar's new study came out about men needing two guy nights per week in order to stay healthy? I saw it mentioned a bunch of times on various social media channels and it was basically
Starting point is 00:05:16 saying that men need two guy nights a week for their health and their mental health. Obviously male suicide is a massive issue, especially in Western society. And one of the most sort of key factors of male suicide is male loneliness, male isolation. So he was looking into that and he found that two nights a week for guys is sort of the ample amount. And then as social media normally does, it sort of kicks off. Everyone goes crazy. You know, everyone's whining, making it about themselves.
Starting point is 00:05:43 And everyone found the idea of two guy nights a week for men, just too intolerable and then they want to know how many nights for women, it's got to be seven at least and all I want is time alone and maybe it's great if they go so they don't have to spend time with them and honestly the comments on each of those posts are all the same, just a bunch of whiny narcissists making it about themselves and just totally ignoring the fact that a male suicide is a massive issue. Male loneliness is a key part of that. And, um, I'm sure you've seen the comments for yourself, Chris. Yeah, some of my favorites.
Starting point is 00:06:13 And this is why women don't want to have their babies. This article was written by a man child. Everyone caters to men enough as it is. We're tired of hearing you whining. The world is your playground and you still cry all the time. This is, this is like really great sort of self-selects because those women are all taking themselves out of men's lives. And we all appreciate that too.
Starting point is 00:06:35 Like we, I do like those, they all sound really horrible people and people will just sort of, they painted in a picture of their own creation. They were like, Oh, you don't want to spend time with your children or your wives and no one said anything about children not talking about fathers talking about men as a general group and the point was lost completely of male isolation and loneliness is a massive issue right now and there's nothing wrong with wanting to spend a bit of time with your mates doesn't necessarily mean have to be at a pub could be playing computer games it could be like this it's just the idea of men talking and sharing time together. It's a really, really important issue.
Starting point is 00:07:07 And unfortunately, just a mere mention of that is too much for some people to handle. Can you steel man the other side? What's the best interpretation of why people had a problem with men getting two nights a week to themselves? Uh, I I've learned about a meme called is it Saturdays are for the boys? Which became like a toxic meme where the idea was that Saturday was supposed to be the boys night. And I know I've dated quite a few women that have had really fair complaints about men that they've dated, where they play
Starting point is 00:07:38 Xbox every single night, or they do go and see the boys every single, every night and get drunk and hung over the next day. And like, like all things, if you, if you peel back all the outrage and hysteria, there is actually a fair point. And I do feel like there are some valid criticisms of men spending too much time together. I don't bind to the whole toxicity of male-only spaces. I think male-only spaces are really important part of men understand each other, male bonding, male socialization. I feel the exact same way about women's spaces, but I feel like there's a lot of women out there who have a very, have had a very negative set of experiences of sort of dating men who are not given the time they didn't want or deserve.
Starting point is 00:08:16 Uh, so I see, I think there's probably a fair reason behind it. I just wish they would tone it down a little bit. Why is it? Why, what, what do you think triggered that issue? Is it just more sort of low resolution thinking about male privilege? Oh, well, they've already got it easy in the office and then they're not going to contribute to the housework and they're going to go out with their friends. Is it a threat somehow that spending time with the boys is a
Starting point is 00:08:40 threat to the relationship? I just think it seems to stem from a very fundamental misunderstanding of male loneliness and a set of experiences that I don't think women can quite understand what it is like to be a lonely man and the unique sense of isolation many men feel and how that links to male suicide. I think I just don't think they can quite understand the same experience and also people just struggle to comprehend of the idea of men having issues inflicted upon them. People are happy to talk about male suffering, but only in the context of it's the man doing it to himself,
Starting point is 00:09:12 it's his toxic masculinity, or it's the bloody patriarchy backfiring. People struggle or are just totally disinterested in the idea that something is happening to men that they do not have control over, they do not have agency, autonomy over, and they are the victims in their own right. And male isolation is not a self-inflicted problem. Part of it surely is, but it's a much wider issue. And one of those issues is people would not want to talk about male guys nights and thinking it's inherently a bad thing,
Starting point is 00:09:41 which it isn't. I mean, I went to one house party once ago, well, ages ago at uni went to house party and no women turned up. No, not single women turned, one woman turned up and then left. And it was just the ultimate sausage fest. And I tell you, it was the best house party I've ever been to. It was just like everyone's, everyone stopped trying to like, just like basically fuck women. Everyone's not trying to impress women and out for each other. And it was just the lads.
Starting point is 00:10:07 We had like arm wrestle tournaments. We had like, um, it's massive giant banana hanging from the ceiling. Everyone's trying to kick. It was just like the most amazing, amazing house fight I've ever been to. And it was like, it was almost like it was spiritual almost. And I'm just like, I really believe in it. And it's, I guess it paints a wider problem. The wider problem is a lack of male spaces and how society is impacted and damaged as a result of that, like youth clubs, for example, and the closing of youth clubs in
Starting point is 00:10:37 London and how that impacts knife crime going up. Because closing these male spaces, like boy scouts, for example, like the boys and men go elsewhere and often they're taken to gangs. Uh, and then you obviously got to look at that within the context of like fatherlessness and the lack of male role models in schools and the lack of male role models in TV overall, I would just losing these male spaces and these conversations for men. Uh, and that's, yeah, that's my, my perspective of it. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:11:04 It's strange. I wonder how much of it is that women don't know what guys get up to when it's just them and their guy friends. I wonder whether they think that it's, you know, that this is finally the patriarchy getting their opportunity to plot the downfall it's that I wonder if he's thinking of me, me all over. And it's always like a dude thinking that if he doesn't do this next deadlift, his whole family's going to die.
Starting point is 00:11:30 Or him and his friends, like seeing who can do the loudest fart using a decibel meter that someone's brought in from work. Like. Yeah. I mean, I mean, I don't think women quite understand what it is to be with the boys. It's interesting. It's all that classic story you hear where, you know, husband goes out, spends the night with the lads, comes home and the next day his wife or girlfriend is asking him all about
Starting point is 00:11:54 it. And what's so and so up to and how are the children? And he knows none of it. Like he's not asked anything about your family or friends or what you're doing. We just talk about, you know, it's random and say who's going to win a fight between King Kong and Godzilla, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that's like, I feel like that's great. Like it's a chance to like unwind and not talk about really intense things
Starting point is 00:12:12 and like relax, I think. And it's an interesting, uh, it's an interesting duality, right? Because on one side, uh, there is this push for men to open up and, and talk about their feelings more for them to, uh, get in touch with their feelings, to be emotionally more mature, uh, to be more well-balanced members of society. But this requirement of men to be with other men, like if you were to say that, uh, brunch with the girls is, girls is like part of a misandrist conspiracy theory to keep men out from bottomless Prosecco meetings or something,
Starting point is 00:12:53 it would be ridiculous. But because for a long time, some male-only spaces were vaulted positions of power in which there were meetings going on where, you know, how the high powered lawyers and the people that were doing investments and so on and so forth. But in January of last year, the highest number of female CEOs ever were recruited. And it was like over a third of CEOs were women. I don't know how many women want to be CEOs.
Starting point is 00:13:23 My point being that a lot of male spaces have been destroyed and a lot of the upper echelons that were gendered spaces have also been cut down for precisely that reason. But it's also caused all of the stuff at the bottom end of the funnel to get destroyed too. Like boys night got that puberty post got thousands and thousands of comments from people,
Starting point is 00:13:46 mostly women, almost exclusively women who had problems with it. Yeah. I mean, yes, I just don't want to get distracted by that. The one single post, it's sort of, it's just a much wider problem and it doesn't go both ways, although we are closing down these male spaces. We're not, we're not doing the same to women's spaces. Women's spaces are held up and protected and funded and set up in more or less every corner of society.
Starting point is 00:14:09 And like quite rightly so, there's like, even like Boy Scouts does accept girls, but Girl Scouts doesn't accept boys. That was one of the first conversations I had with someone. And by conversation, I mean someone shouting in my face and they were like, oh, it was a friend of mine. It was a woman and she was like, I went to Boy Scouts. I really enjoyed it. And I was like, Oh, it was a friend of mine. It was a woman and she was, I went to boy scouts. I really enjoyed it. And I was like, that's great.
Starting point is 00:14:26 I really think girls should have the opportunity to learn these skills. I went to boy scouts and it's amazing, like learning to tie knots and like have kayaks and stuff. And then I asked her like, what can boys go to girl scouts? And then she was like, I knew you were going to say that finger in face shouting. I'm like, no, it's just like, wow. Okay. And the answer was no.
Starting point is 00:14:44 And then you ruined Christmas. Yeah., it's just like, wow. Okay. And the answer is no. And then you ruined Christmas. Yeah. And there's just so many examples. Well, what about international men's day? That didn't have a good run either last year. It's getting better. It's getting better and better. So like every year, I mean, I do the same thing every now, every year I check out
Starting point is 00:14:58 Google and I really hope for like a bespoke Google doodle, you know, every year you have like international women's day, of course, gets one gets one. There's even international bobblehead dog day. And I'm not joking. There's actual day for bobblehead dogs and they've got a fucking Google doodle. And I'm like, are you telling me men do not matter as much as a plastic dog that sits on your dashboard? And clearly they don't. But people talk about international men's day and they put it within the context of it, oh, that sounds like white people day or straight pride day or able-bodied
Starting point is 00:15:31 day. And I'm like, I always find those are such false equivalences to say being a man is the same as being white or the same as being able-bodied. I'm like, well, being, that's good, anyway. I don't think being a woman is the same as being black. I don't think being a woman is the same as being black, and I don't think being a woman is the same as being disabled. I find those concepts so offensive. As a white person, I'm happy to say being white in the West is more or less excellent
Starting point is 00:15:52 in every single possible way, but being a man comes with a mixed bag of advantages, disadvantages, so it's not the same as being white. Everyone says that to wave away international Wednesday as unnecessary. And I think it's really necessary because it actually allows us to talk about some of the issues that are quietly damaging men and boys from sort of birth right to sort of later life and death. And there needs to be a space for these discussions, either a space for discussion online or actual physical spaces for men to talk or house parties or kicking a banana on the ceiling.
Starting point is 00:16:28 Honestly, I was the first person to kick the banana by the way. And I became like, I was like a king. I got carried, I got carried, I got carried out of the house. Honestly. Amazing. So I first learned about, are we dating the same guy on your Instagram account? And then since then I've seen it trending more online. What is, are we dating the same guy for the people who aren't familiar with it?
Starting point is 00:16:53 Are we dating the same guy is a series of private Facebook groups all over the world. So if you live in a major city in the West, especially America, Canada, UK, Australia, mostly all the major cities have them. They have about 10,000 to over a hundred, 150,000 members UK, Australia, mostly. All the major cities have them. They have about 10,000 to over 100, 150,000 members and they're all private. You can't join unless you're a woman. And they're basically, they started off well-intended. They were about helping women make good decisions
Starting point is 00:17:15 whilst dating and sort of checking out for red flags of sort of men. And then it sort of changed. It became a bit more, a lot more toxic, a lot more nefarious. It became a space where then it sort of changed. It became a lot more toxic, got more nefarious. It became a space where women were sort of sharing photos and names and workplaces of where these men worked, and basically doxing them and then humiliating them, talking about their bodies in horrific ways. And then it got worse. And it was women talking about their husbands and their long-term partners and how to sort of track them. I saw one story about how to unlock your husband's phone when he's asleep using sort of facial recognition.
Starting point is 00:17:51 One of them was about I've bought my boyfriend these blue reflective glasses for light, but I bought them so I could see what he was doing on his phone in the reflection of his glasses. One was trying to find out the identification number of the car her husband was in. Another was how to plant apple tags on your husband on his car. And it's just like, what started off as what seemed like a well-intended set of groups for women's safety became very much the opposite. And it became like a threat to men's safety. And it's led to suicides.
Starting point is 00:18:19 It's led to a man being killed by his partner. And it's like, it's gone so out of hand as it always does. And there's so many men that have messaged me being like, I've been brought off in these groups, I can't get a photo taken down. I've talked to Facebook, they don't do anything. I've done nothing wrong. Like everything that's been said is not true. And yeah, are we dating the same guy?
Starting point is 00:18:37 It's a terrifying phenomenon. So it's not just about women working out whether or not they're dating the same guy. Um, no, it, I mean, that's how it started, but now it's just everything. There's like women offering like loyalty tests and stuff like, Oh, I'm going to talk to your boyfriend. I'm trying to get him to like flirt with me and hook up with me. Oh, like a honey trap thing. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:18:59 I can only, and it's just like, it's, it's not what it was if it, I'm not even sure if it ever was that, but it's just gone so out hand. Um, and they're all private. I've got a mole in a few of them. Uh, and you're the counter resistance. My, my girlfriend is in a few and it's just like, Oh, what's going on? And like, like some of them, some of the things you see in there are horrific. And if, if that was the inverse of like a group of hundreds of thousands of men sharing the
Starting point is 00:19:27 photos and names, like where they live of women, that would be outrageous. And it is outrageous. And it's just like a basic, a kangaroo court for a bunch of resentful single women to whine about men. But I mean, I thought this sounded like it had transitioned into a lot of women who had partners, but were just nervous about whether or not they were being faithful and truthful and honest. It's a many feathered bird.
Starting point is 00:19:57 I think it's a lot. It's just a big shit show. Uh, and it's just, yeah, it's all of those things plus many more and it's absolutely enormous and I just hear, I'm just hearing a lot of horrible things and, uh, it's just basically a way of bullying men and shaming men and humiliating them and just saying things about their bodies and just look at this pro for what do you think? And then it's just that honestly, some of the stuff you read is just horrific. Well, there was a, there was something similar like the pink pill on Reddit r slash the pink
Starting point is 00:20:28 pill and r slash female dating strategy. Do you remember that? Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yes, that's the same. It's, it's just basically another group of angry women, uh, ranting about men and just hating men as a generalized group, not, not any specific
Starting point is 00:20:46 men, just men as a concept. And it's, it's dehumanizing. They have their own set of languages and they call men like misters and it's, it's just a very sorry size. That doesn't sound too bad. Mr. doesn't sound too bad. I don't think I've been there. I'm not sure what the concept is behind it, but I'm sure it's offensive.
Starting point is 00:21:02 And, um, it's just like, I guess these to me feel like the female equivalent of incels like angry, bitter, lonely women who need help, probably have a very difficult set of experiences involving men. And they've decided to take it out on the online world through these groups and others, and it's a very interesting thing. It's an interesting point about women's spaces and men's spaces and how, how, how do they become toxic? And they certainly do.
Starting point is 00:21:29 And we need to be careful around it. Um, I wonder if the descent into toxicity happens differently for women than it does for men. I wonder if you, you know, William Costello is doing a lot of work at the moment, tracking the, uh, in cellosphere, what's going on, what the, what the constituent members are, uh, over-representations of autism, over-representations of disability, over-representations of, uh, people with left leaning ideology, with people who are non-white. Um, so that's interesting, but I'd love, I'd love for there to be a study to look at
Starting point is 00:22:05 what causes a disgruntled woman, because, you know, in some ways you need to do it because you say, this is not good for the people that are the members of it or for the people that are the victims on the other side of it. Like I wouldn't say that there are any women that would be like, oh, I feel very enthused to know that the incel movement is gaining steam or that they've got, you know, a virulent fucking forum or something like that in the same way that men aren't going to say the same thing about women. But the other thing is it also kind of creates a list of risk factors that people who are
Starting point is 00:22:38 currently feeling healthy about whatever it is that they're doing in their life can say, oh, well, actually X percent of people that are a member of this group, which I don't want to fall into are they spend less than five hours with friends per week, or they had an undiagnosed psychiatric disorder, or they had like something in their childhood that came up. So what you see is these different way markers that other people can use to avoid tumbling down the same rabbit hole. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:23:08 I mean, I, I, one of my fundamental concepts on the Tin Men is not to see people as sort of static endpoints. They're not, no one's born bad. People are the sort of the product of their life experiences. Um, and I like one way of seeing it is like, um, there's no such thing as abnormal behavior. There's only a normal response to an abnormal set of experiences. That's what it is. So it's like the idea is that anything can be seen as normal if you can understand a wider context
Starting point is 00:23:38 of the person making that decision and those behaviors. And like in sales, for example, they are so widely misunderstood in the ways he described. They are majority according to Williams research, which is amazing. Like mostly left leaning, mostly incels of color. And the funny thing is about looking at incels who are black, for example, is that people and Williams said this as well, like people are a lot more compassionate, but a lot more willing to talk about lonely, isolated, depressed, anxious black men. But when you talk about that as white men, that's when everyone starts throwing around in so labels and starts losing their mind. But you are right is that we are all the product of our experiences and
Starting point is 00:24:19 the women in these groups, they didn't arrive there for no reason. They've been on their own journey and they probably have met a bunch of shitty guys and they probably have some horrific in these groups, they didn't arrive there for no reason. They'd be on their own journey and they probably have met a bunch of shitty guys and they probably had some horrific dates. When I was dating, I always used to ask the women I was dating about, like, what's your worst date? Like, tell me about your nightmare. And some of the stories I heard were horrific. And I'm happy to say I didn't have many to share. On my side, I've been very lucky, but you are right in the sense that we are all formed from our experiences.
Starting point is 00:24:46 We need to not see men, for example, as a static endpoint and ask ourselves, what has he been through to become this way in the same way as we asked that of women in the way described. And incels, for example, exactly, we need to grow up about incels. People keep talking about being mental health advocates and I'm like, great. Well, the incel problem is that the extreme form of that, that is the men's, the men's mental health crisis, like on steroids. And if you're not willing to talk about them in a way that isn't so dehumanizing
Starting point is 00:25:13 and perhaps looks at what they've been through and then maybe it has a bit of compassion, then I don't know if you really are a mental health advocate at all. So yeah, I know a lot to be said. What was bad girls advice and Jezebel? I learned about both of those. I feel like I get a window into subcultures of the internet just through your Instagram account. Yeah, it's terrifying.
Starting point is 00:25:35 Bad girls advice was the same again. Both of them are the same in the sense that it was a bunch of women bragging about physically abusing their sort of partners, their male partners, beating them up and basically sharing stories and below all these comments about, yeah, screen, you're getting them, great job. And Jezebel in particular, who have now gone bankrupt, which is great news. A few months ago, they've just closed their doors. They no longer exist. But they put that article. And the thing that's interesting about this article is that a piece of research I'm familiar with by Daniel Whitaker came out that found that half of domestic abuse is bilateral, meaning half of domestic abusive relationships, both partners are doing it.
Starting point is 00:26:14 And then of the other half, where it's non-reciprocal, women are 70% of non-reciprocal abusive relationships. So this idea of male-only abuse is the third most popular form of abuse. That's a really interesting piece of research. But Jezebel decided to do their own thing. And for them it became an opportunity for their editors and writers to basically again compare notes about boys they've dated, men they're partnered with, about beating them up, like physically abusing men in their lives with, uh, but beating them up, like physically abusing men in their lives, like punching them, smashing their
Starting point is 00:26:49 glasses, hitting them. And it was like, again, not, not through shame, not through like a sense of admission, but bragging about it. Why would you bring in? Because there's a clear double standard between men who are violent to women and women who are violent to men. Like one is seen as a joke. The other one is seen as a national epidemic. But what was the justification? I still, you know, I don't see, I can't imagine a woman who would say congratulations, you hit your boyfriend.
Starting point is 00:27:17 Is it, was this like righteous retribution for the entire male sex and its misgivings against women? Is that what was happening? I think it's just like a massive bastardization, contortion of this sort of boss bitch queen, go get your bad girl, your powerful woman sort of archetype. And this is pushed to its like 150% where we were actually somehow they're praising violent women and they seem to think that to be a strong woman is about being a complete dickhead. Those two are not the same thing. I honestly do not know. I see that article and I'm horrified. I can't even begin to get my head around why a bunch of women would brag about physically abusing men. I don't think we'd see that article written in GQ
Starting point is 00:28:04 or FHM about their male journalists being like, yeah I went home and punched my wife right in the face. And the article's still up, like they've had so long to like take it down and they haven't, it's still there. They don't seem to understand the double standard that they're sort of involved in. But I haven't really got a good enough answer for you, but I do feel like some women think that to be violent or to be a dickhead is somehow a sign of a strong woman or an empowered woman. And it obviously isn't.
Starting point is 00:28:33 In fact, that's wild. That's wild. Talk to me about the social psychology of Drake's dick pic. This is, this is, this happened hours ago, but from what I understand is that Drake, Drake's dick has now been leaked online, not seen it, not interested in seeing it. But it has brought up an interesting double standard where there's a lot of women on Twitter right now sort of melting over these images over a well endowed Drake, let's put it that away. And it's just everywhere. It's just been thrown around, flinging around,, let's put it that way.
Starting point is 00:29:06 And it's just everywhere. It's just being thrown around, flinging around, like everyone's just talking about it, like how great, and I'm just like, no respect for his privacy or his body. And it's difficult not to compare it to what's happening to Taylor Swift and how she had that AI generated image of her not real at all. I haven't seen it either. And I was like, everyone's outraged over that and they're bringing in the changing laws to stop that from happening, which is fair enough. But Drake's actual dick has been leaked and it's like quite explicit. And I imagine the people that were kicking off over Taylor Swift are now the ones sharing
Starting point is 00:29:37 it and tweeting about how great it is. And it's a developing story for sure, but a definite double standard about how we seem to respect women's privacy more when it comes to these sort of things than men's. And again, that's not to say women having their nudes leaked, celebrity women is not a massive issue. Of course it is, but it's still an interesting double standard about how when it happens to a man, it's sort of a fair game. Like it's open season. Uh, but yeah.
Starting point is 00:30:00 I wonder how many men come out in sort of defense. It seems like guys lose on both sides that women will come out in defense of women who've had their nudes leaked and men will probably feel at least a little bit reticent about publicly talking about them, maybe in WhatsApp, it'll get forwarded quite a lot, but, uh, publicly they're not going to talk about it. And the reverse seems to be true. If it's a guys, I don't think, I don't know, like, they're not going to talk about it. And the reverse seems to be true if it's a guy's, I don't think, I don't know. Like, unless I was feeling particularly like a paragony that day, I don't know
Starting point is 00:30:33 whether I would shout up as a normal person who didn't have a platform and just be like, this is ridiculous. Like all of these people, like that's just not the guy impulse to kind of step in, in, in that way. There's something kind of a bit icky about it being a guy's nudity in any case that guys do sort of kind of lean away from a little bit. There is, there is a weird unexpected sense of respect that a lot of men have for their partners, especially around sex.
Starting point is 00:31:00 And this is another double standard I've noticed a lot. And so what I personally associate with is that I hear a lot of, I hear a lot about women who are sleeping with men and they talk openly and in detail about these sexual experiences, about the guy's dick, about his body and it's just like, you know, girl banter. And then women tell me this like, it's normal. And then like, you must talk about it with guys and we're like, we never talk about it. Like, maybe we'll confirm the the actors happened and that is it. We don't go into detail. We don't talk about their bodies We don't go into sort of step by step guard of exactly what happened And like I've I've been on dates of women and like we've stepped together
Starting point is 00:31:36 And then the next day like one of her friends comes over and like pats me on the back like good job You're no my what and then she just basically saying like good job for you know, great sex and I'm. And I'm like, what? And then she just basically saying like, good job for, you know, great sex. And I'm just like, I'm like, that is crazy how you've already had that conversation and like no consideration of my privacy. So I think there was a very interesting, fast and loose style to discourse around women talking about men's bodies in that context that surprisingly men don't seem to have. There's a weird sense of respect that men have for their partners' bodies and sex. And I think it's certainly the case in long-term relationships.
Starting point is 00:32:10 I would be tempted to say that it may be switches at least a little bit in short-term relationships, but a good chunk of that is because of the incentives, because guys see a short-term casual hookup as a badge of honor. Whereas girls probably want to talk about it a little bit less depending on the kind of girl that it is, depending on her psychology. But yeah, I mean, dude, if I was to say, I mean, I don't know, would girls ask another girl, Oh, what's George like in bed? Like what's your boyfriend like in bed?
Starting point is 00:32:39 I have no idea. That seemed even to me, that seems a little bit too far. But if I was to ask my like married or engaged or longterm bro friends, Oh dude, does such and such like, does she give good head? What's that like? Yeah, yeah. It's, I mean, that is crossing a huge line and they're never going to tell you. No, I know it's yeah. I don't, I think a lot of men don't have those conversations.
Starting point is 00:33:03 I don't think they're interested. I think that's more of what women talk about. I bet. And then again, I've never been in those conversations either. Um, I don't know, but it's definitely an example of what, what can become quite toxic. You can see the remnants of like, what could become female dating strategy or what could become, are we dating the same guy?
Starting point is 00:33:21 And I just think that's women as the guardians and masters of language. That makes a lot of sense. They are the innovators of language. They are so much better than men at building relationships and coalitions and groups and networking and yeah, language especially. And it makes sense that has its pros and it has its cons. And this whole like gossiping, relational aggression style of discourse as mostly women is a very interesting thing that also we're not talking about, especially in bullying, like the bullying between girls. This is something that Jonathan Haidt talks about a lot and it's very interesting. That's never framed as toxic femininity, like gossip culture culture, whispering campaigns, cancel, canceling people.
Starting point is 00:34:06 And I think that's a very interesting insight into what can become from like quite toxic women only groups. I had a conversation with frayer India earlier this week. Uh, while I'm for the people who are watching on YouTube, uh, and for people who are just listening, I'm in a slightly different location at the moment, which I've been fighting to get the internet to work for two hours and still in Honduras in Rotan. Uh, so third world country, but second world internet. So we've been able to make it work.
Starting point is 00:34:33 Um, but I had a conversation with Freya while I was out here and she was telling me that the deft, nuanced, venting, intersexual competitiveness, the use of exclusion and kind of soft cancellation of friendships and all this stuff. For girls, it's fucking brutal. Like it's so ruthless. And I don't want to do the reversal of the common trope, which is like women harmed, men most affected,
Starting point is 00:34:58 which is often like the reverse is talked about. But if you think about the tools that women wield, uh, emotionally, linguistically, that is a fight that many men are unarmed to be able to compete with. It's the same, you know, a woman's, um, emotional ability and that coalitional relational aggression thing is their specific strength when it comes, especially within small groups in the same way as a man's is his physical power or a group's would be the physical threat that they're able to bestow.
Starting point is 00:35:39 So if you have this sort of back and forth, if you have a group of women that are able to castigate or direct their eye and the eye of Sauron towards men or a man or whatever. That man is hopelessly outgunned in that particular arena because his ability to do the same is the same inversion as a woman's ability to fight back physically. Yeah. So, I mean, everyone talks about how men have an advantage in women's sports in terms of trans women, trans women in women's sports and the physical advantage males have over women.
Starting point is 00:36:10 And that's a very interesting conversation. But no one ever talks about how like women, for example, are a generation ahead of men in terms of innovating within language. That there's like, they're so far ahead of men in terms of the ability to speak and communicate. It's partly biological, partly socialized. That doesn't really matter. But no one really talks about how does that give them an advantage in these spaces? Like how does that allow that give them power? The power of like soft power, for example, the power of persuasion and influence. I haven't got the numbers exactly, but I know
Starting point is 00:36:38 everyone talks about power dynamics in terms of hard power, presidents, congressmen, politicians, CEOs, all men having hard power. But if you actually look at the normal day-to-day decisions men and women have, especially in relationships like what watching TV, what we're eating for dinner, when are we going on holiday, those are decisions made by women. And of about 15 biggest questions in a normal person's life, about 13 of them are made by women, the female partner, and they do have more soft power. But no one ever seems to want to talk about that. And why not? It's a show of women's superiority over men in their own domain. And you're right, men in many ways are dominant in the physical realm because of our greater physical strength, but women have their own dominance in this
Starting point is 00:37:23 sort of linguistic and relational realm. And women are hurt by that, like I said, of bullying. Like girls bullying girls in America, massive problem, especially when you're bringing things like social media, where girls can bully other girls 24 hours a day with anonymity. And it's leading to a massive peak, a massive rise in suicide in young girls. So this unspoken about form of aggression, relational aggression, which has been seen in girls as young as two is not being discussed and it's hurting women most of all. Well, an inability to see women as anything other than pure and perfect and good and gracious and angelic is it. It denies other women the ability to accuse the female perpetrators of meanness against them.
Starting point is 00:38:17 You know, it's the same with, I've said this a million times, but so many of the movies at the moment have perfect female protagonists. They don't have to overcome anything. They never get anything wrong. The only challenge that they ever face is that the world doesn't believe in them or that there's some man that holds a position of power who's trying to get in the way and. Fucking going back and re-gendering or resexing all of your favorite movies so that it's got some like brave new woman female lead. I mean, it's not working at the box office, but I don't think that it's an empowering message to send to women either.
Starting point is 00:38:52 I think it's patronizing and I think that it makes them fragile and it makes them, uh, narcissistic. And if it doesn't make them narcissistic, it makes their friends more likely to be narcissistic. Even if you're the sort of girl who's been able to like, you know, I was raised well and I understand that I need to work hard and I shouldn't expect narcissistic, it makes their friends more likely to be narcissistic. Even if you're the sort of girl who's been able to like, you know, I was raised well and I understand that I need to work hard and I shouldn't expect the world to give me anything.
Starting point is 00:39:09 So yeah, but what's the message that's being sent to other girls who don't have that same robust background that they're coming out of, who are the people that you're going to have to try and be fucking friends with? They're not going to be good. They're not going to be balanced. They're not going to be balanced. No, well, yeah, there's like a plethora of really dull, two dimensional female superheroes, for example. And like you're right in the sense that the reason that what makes the male
Starting point is 00:39:37 superheroes great is not their strength, but their weaknesses. So it's like you have Thor who becomes an alcoholic and gains weight. You have Iron Man who's sort of constantly living under the shadow of his dad. You have the Hulk who's suffering very complex mental health problems. And that's what makes them human and relatable. Otherwise, there's people flying around in capes that we don't know really who they are. But with the women, within this new generation of superheroes, they don't have any of those weaknesses.
Starting point is 00:40:04 They're just 10 out of 10 in strength on every single possible way. They don't have any sort of weaknesses, no vulnerability there. And I feel like the writers are just afraid to make them vulnerable because it will just lead to outrage. And again, you're creating a very narrow, two-dimensional set of characters. It's a bit like Captain Marvel. I remember watching that film and it was like building up to the final fight scene between her and Jude Law and he's just like, come on, let's fight. Come on, prove yourself to me, prove yourself. And she's like, I don't need to prove myself to anyone. And then she walks off. And I'm like, that was, I was like, that was the final fight. That was like, I've been sat here waiting for that and she walks off. And I was just like, how boring, how cliche. And, um, I just think that explains partly in my opinion, why Marvel is falling apart.
Starting point is 00:40:51 Cause this stuck in this sort of political dogma where they don't want to actually write human beings as characters. They just want to write these very cartoonish infantile style of women. I think there's definitely going to be a gap in the market, both for media and entertainment and messaging and community and all of that stuff, but also for. Women who are able to be more forthcoming than that and more resilient than that. Because you have to think if almost everybody is being fed one type of message, if you're able to
Starting point is 00:41:28 move back against that, that puts you into a very rarefied fucking cohort of a very small number of women. It's like, look, if you're able to overcome difficult things, and this is, you know, what we want, we want robust, resilient people in the world. That sounds great.
Starting point is 00:41:42 We do not want people that see victimhood where there isn't none and have this narcissistic entitlement about the things that they think that they deserve. That is not the world that anybody wants to live in. Even the people who are a part of it. The only reason that they're part of it is that they're the only reason they're complicit is because they're benefactors. And if they weren't benefactors, they wouldn't be complicit.
Starting point is 00:42:01 Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's not, but it's not just cultural. Like that's, it's in our legal system. It's not political system where we just constantly see women as victims only. They're not, they can't be violent. They can't be toxic. They can't be dangerous.
Starting point is 00:42:15 They can't do anything wrong. They can't be criminals. And I feel like that's a massive disservice to the autonomy of women. That's what autonomy is. Autonomy is to do good or bad. It's their choice. That's what autonomy is. And it's amazing how people or bad. It's their choice. That's what autonomy is. And it's amazing how people support women's autonomy, but never the autonomy to
Starting point is 00:42:29 do things that they don't like, like women to be violent in a relationship. Right. And when I say they're erased within like the legal and political system, I do mean quite literally, like in the UK, women can't even commit rape. Like there's no possible way for women to rape men. I saw you do a carousel about this. What's the word on sexual assault for women? So, well, it's controversial, but in the sexual offence of acts, um, it basically defines
Starting point is 00:42:56 what rape is and rape is basically the penetration of a penis. And if you don't have a penis, you can't commit rape. It doesn't matter what you do. It doesn't matter if you use drugs or assault a man while he's sleeping or use a penis. And if you don't have a penis, you can't commit rape. It doesn't matter what you do. It doesn't matter if you use drugs or assault a man while he's sleeping or use a weapon. It's not rape and it can never be rape. So whenever people present these stats saying 99% of rapists are men, what they don't tell you is that women can't perpetrate rape at all and nothing a woman does will ever constitute as rape. So that 1% is interesting. That 1% is women, but that's only a joint venture. That's when a woman helps a man rape another man. So that 1% is interesting, that 1% is women, but that's only a joint venture.
Starting point is 00:43:25 That's when a woman helps a man rape another man. And that's when a woman can legally be held responsible for rape. But in the UK, it's not possible. And also our academic definitions of rape are based on that, which leads to very misleading statistics around sexual violence. And in America, it's interesting because they changed it.
Starting point is 00:43:43 They had the same laws and the CDC about 10 years ago, changed it where it turned a neutral, because they found out 40% of, of rapes were not being captured in FBI statistics. And there was, there was the rapes of women onto men. And it's how does that happen for the people that would say that there's no such thing as that, what's she doing putting her finger inside of him? What would, what, what, what does that look like?
Starting point is 00:44:04 Well, it's, it's, it's classified as being forced to penetrate. So it has to be called something and it's called forced to penetrate and it's, it's captured in data, but it's always at the bottom if captured at all. Uh, very complicated. Everyone falls back to have quite an antiquated view of sexual violence and rape where it has to use physical force. That of course does happen. I know friends that have been raped by women in their sleep whilst they're drunk and capacitated. Uh more often use weapons and there's also coercion. So we're going back to the whole women having the power of language and they're using that physical, that psychological, emotional pressure, making threats. I heard one story about a woman
Starting point is 00:44:37 that basically told her boyfriend if she, if he didn't have sex with her, she's going to call 999 and then accuse him of rape and she put 9-9 on the sex with her, she's going to call 999, uh, and then accuse him of rape. And she put 9-9 on the phone and the third nine was about to press call and basically forced him to have sex with her. So coercion. So rape in its sort of the horrific detail of its full picture, it's not, it's not just about physical power. It's about much more than that. And the advantages that men have physically are not enough to stop from happening. And it's a massive issue. And no one talks about it.
Starting point is 00:45:11 Thankfully the Americans have led the way in changing the laws to make it gender neutral. And they've revealed this massive cohort of men that are being raped by women and someone we can do something about, but that hasn't happened in the UK. A lot of petitions have tried to change the law, but it's, it's still yet to happen. What is the balance if you change the definition and if you begin to include in a different way, your definition, how does that adjust the numbers? Because, you know, we've heard for a very long time and even me, like all I've ever heard is that guys sexually assault girls. Like that's it.
Starting point is 00:45:45 Um, so what, how egalitarian is the world of sexual assault? A lot more than people are willing to admit. So it's interesting cause they changed it. They were basically capturing data and like the number of men, the number of male rape victims is very low. It was like less than 7%, 8%. And then next year it was like 36%, 37%. And then a few researchers, Laura Stempel, for example, excellent researcher, she was like, why has it suddenly gone from 7% to 36%, 37%? And she looked into it and
Starting point is 00:46:16 she realized it's because the definition of rape had been changed and they'd introduced the men that were raped by women. So like I said, 40% of rapes were not being captured by FBI statistics because they were using a gendered definition of rape. And yeah, we don't know. In the UK, we just don't know. We do not know how many men have been raped. Especially if you're talking about, you know, rape crisis centers or justice for victims and things like that.
Starting point is 00:46:39 You know, I've seen, I've seen those graphs where it says, this is how many sexual assaults occur and of those, this is how many are reported and of those, this is how many are investigated and of those, this is how many are prosecuting and of those, this is how many are convicted. And it's basically like, don't get it wrong. It might as well be the male to female rape is legal with how rare the offense to conviction ratio is. Now there's a whole bunch of ways that you can have
Starting point is 00:47:10 false allegations and all the rest of the things. But this is Jimmy Carr's point. Jimmy Carr taught me this and he was like, it's fucking atrocious. But if you are, again, the same thing, if feminists are for equality, they should be campaigning as much for the things that boys and men don't have as they do for the things that girls and women don't have.
Starting point is 00:47:28 And the same thing true here. Like if you're saying that, you know, one third of victims are guys in one form or another, and we already know about the male proclivity to not ask for help, to not admit medical problems, to not admit if they've been domestically abused by their significant other, because it seems even more on top of all of the other things and the trauma and everything else, it's emasculating. And they're going to be scared that they're going to be seen as weak or a pussy, you know, there's all of the problems that you have for women get
Starting point is 00:48:00 pivoted in different ways for men too. But you know, there's not, I mean, dude, you're, you're big on trying to be early on these trends and advocating for the problems of men and boys. If you want this as a men can be sexually assaulted to dot dot dot by women dot dot dot, and yes, it's a big problem. You are going to be waiting. I mean, that is a, that is, that is a cruise ship sized culture because there's still this sort of pervasive idea that we haven't had the reckoning around male to female sexual assault fully yet.
Starting point is 00:48:32 So going like, oh, I have another, what about this idea? That is going to take, it's going to take a very long time. I mean, you can't deny the fact that violence against women, sexual violence against women is a horrific epidemic problem. I have people very close to me that have just have experienced all these things and it is brutal. I really, really do think I understand that problem and I'm no way trying to diminish it. I'm always trying to add to the conversation, always trying to broaden perspectives and say, yes, and not, not either or.
Starting point is 00:49:06 It's one part of a big problem. And again, like if refusing to talk about violent women does hurt women too, the most violent relationships are lesbian relationships, the least violent are gay relationships. It makes no sense in terms of like the fewer the men, the least violent relationship becomes. And if you don't talk about violence, women, then you're only going to hurt lesbian women too. Is that actually true? Because I'd seen, I'd seen a rebuttal to the, the most violent relationships
Starting point is 00:49:34 are the ones that don't have any men in it's lesbians that commit the most. And then I saw a rebuttal that was like, this is midwit thinking. The data doesn't back this up at all. So I stopped citing that. I stopped talking about that on the show. Maybe not that it's a common, I wasn't like citing it all the time, but I stopped believing it about six months ago. What's, what's the truth about domestic violence?
Starting point is 00:49:52 It's a toss up between bisexual women and lesbian women. That they're the top two. It goes between the two and it's, it is, it's this fair, fair criticism. We could say that, uh, women are more likely to report abuse than men are. So if there's two women more likely to report than two men, and because that data is based on reporting. And I'm like, yeah, these are, these are really fair criticisms to make at that point. But my, my, my point is that our view of domestic violence is wrong in three ways.
Starting point is 00:50:22 And that is first of all, bilateral abuse needs to be talked about. Like I said, half of domestic abuse is bilateral both partners are doing it the second is there's a multiplicity of causes of domestic violence not just male power and control that's one one cause and that is also reflected by women too and the third is it's not a gendered issue like men and women both do it we can we can nitpick over lesbian women versus gay men and I'm sure we'll never come to any sort of conclusion, but the point is it's not gendered and women can be violent, just as violent as men. And another thing I keep seeing, and this is what
Starting point is 00:50:57 Sadiq Khan did in London, who I'm losing faith in and I did actually file a complaint. He was talking about violence against women and he said, although men can experience violence, this is mostly from other men. And I had the data and 1% of domestic violence against men is by other men. Was he referring to domestic violence? Because it sounds to me from that quote,
Starting point is 00:51:18 like he was just talking about violence generally. And I would guess that if you take violent into, right. No, yeah, but still, but I still, even though you're right in terms of violence more broadly, like terms of street violence, stranger, stranger violence, so we'd call it that is men doing it to other men. And I'm like, so what? Like that is the exact signed, that's the exact same bigoted rhetoric that diminished black and black crime for ages. Cause it's back to doing to other black people. Therefore it doesn't matter. And I'm just like okay well then let's apply that to other crimes like FGM which we all hate that's mostly done by elder women so what is it by the women
Starting point is 00:51:53 are we going to say that too? And it's just like if you are more interested in pointing out the genitals of the assailant then I would say you don't really give a shit about violence against women or men you're just interested in neck agenda war. And just because of violence by men doesn't mean it hurts any less or matters any less and doesn't mean we can not help that man. And, um, you're right. But in terms of what I was talking about, I've talked specifically about domestic violence and everyone seems to think it's mending to the men, which does happen,
Starting point is 00:52:21 but it's a very, very small part of the pie. Okay. So what's this, what else is missing from the relational aggression standpoint? What's missing around the discussion to do with domestic violence? I think male suicides as a result, suicides in general, as a result of domestic violence needs to be talked about big time. Like that is like the constant bombardment and pressure of psychological abuse by both men and women is horrific and not discussed. Again, everyone talks about domestic homicide, which is a partner killing
Starting point is 00:52:53 their other partner. It's mostly talked about, pretty much exclusively talked about as men doing it to women. It is mostly men doing it to women. About 77% of domestic homicides are men killing women. That doesn't mean we can't talk about the final quarter, but it is mostly women. But no one talks about suicides that are caused by domestic violence, which are overwhelmingly male. And if you actually bring in suicides as a result of abuse, there are more male deaths as a result of domestic violence than female. And that again, a massive, massive half the pie chart that's just ignored because it's unpopular. And again, that would be it.
Starting point is 00:53:30 So what would you, is that a guy is in a relationship with a woman and the pressure of that interpersonal sort of toxicity and stuff causes him to take his online. And yeah, and more so that abuse by proxy, using children, taking children away, using the court system to destroy a man's life. to take his online. And yeah, and more so abuse by proxy using children, taking children away, using a court system to destroy a man's life. Like there were so many amazing, incredibly smart things that women are
Starting point is 00:53:52 doing to men and men doing it to women. But like parental alienation, for example, is when one parent turns the child against the other parent. So you're basically telling your child that your dad's deadbeat or your mom's a piece of shit. And like over time you basically turn the child against the other parent. So you're basically telling your child that your dad's a dead bee or your mom's a piece of shit. And like over time, you basically turn the child against the parent. So you drop the child off and you come and pick the child up a week later and it hates you and you don't know why. And it's because the other partner has been turning against you. That's parental alienation. No one talks about that. And that is abuse.
Starting point is 00:54:20 And that can and does lead to suicides and we need to talk about. Domestic violence in, in this detail, we need to have a much higher resolution discussion around domestic violence. That isn't just this trope of male violence, because that is just a small, small wedge of the problem. I suppose the, the issue you have around this conversation is the impacts of male domestic violence are very plain and present, right? You know, guys are able to enact more damage. That's stronger.
Starting point is 00:54:50 Therefore it looks significantly more bad on a evidence photograph, real, the gallery of problems, you know, the list of things that somebody's been admitted to hospital for. Dude, I watched, um, I watched this documentary about, I think he was called the machine or the juggernaut or something. He was a UFC, he was briefly in the UFC and then got let out, got, um, released and was a MMA guy and he was in a relationship with this adult actress. And they'd been broken up for quite a while.
Starting point is 00:55:25 He came around and found her in bed. This is like a good while after they'd split up. He came around and found her in bed with another man. And this dude's, you know, he's trained. He's beyond hard and psychopathic and masochistic and narcissistic. He was trained and he, you know, got on top of this guy and like just fucking destroyed him.
Starting point is 00:55:49 Meanwhile, the girl was trying to, I think she tried to call 9-9-9 and she tried to do something like that. Uh, and he made the man promise that he was never going to touch, never going to be around the woman again. And the guy obviously just said like, whatever, like anything, got, got dressed and left because he presumed that his ire had been directed just at the guy. And then this UFC fight, it was all over the news a few years ago, this UFC fighter, uh, MMA guy just like brutalized this, uh, girl and it was awful.
Starting point is 00:56:22 Like it was really difficult to watch. And her mother gives this testimony. The only way, the only reason that she managed to escape, I think and it was awful. Like it was really difficult to watch. And her mother gives this testimony. The only way, the only reason that she managed to escape, I think he got a knife. He got a knife and started hurting her with the knife and stuff. And, uh, she ran away by like bloody feet sprinting down the street, like something out of a horror movie and the neighbor found her and called the police and did whatever, and, uh, the most chilling thing, there's a really interesting breakdown of it on, uh, some like criminal psychology, YouTube channel, people can go and watch.
Starting point is 00:56:50 And the most interesting thing is when the mother gives her. Testimony about what she'd seen and about, you know, character witness and all the rest of it for both the daughter and the ex-partner. And this luck that she gives the guy from the stand is terrifying. Like so just the degree, you know, mother's love mother to daughter is the tightest genetic bond that you're going to have of any two people except for twins. And yeah, dude, it's, it's ruthless, but yeah, you know, you have that, but it's so, uh, the photos of faces just ballooned up and there's cuts everywhere and all the rest of it. But the guy that takes his own life because the female partner has detached him from his friends
Starting point is 00:57:37 or has been using his kids as a cudgel or has been derogating the relationship between his children and him or whatever, whatever. And, you know, I understand that this, it's probably really uncomfortable for both guys and girls to hear. Like, you know, seeing the sour side of what your sex can do, seeing your gender at its worst is not very pretty. But if you deny the fact that those things exist, you're not, it's not helping anybody. You're not breaking the cycle of violence. That's what's important. It's not about pointing fingers, it's about breaking the cycle of violence, because violence is reciprocal and generational, and it's passed down through families from childhood.
Starting point is 00:58:21 And I was like, unless you're going to look at both sides of the equation, you'll never solve it. And we need to break the cycle of violence to which women contribute. I read a similar story, but inverted, the 2012, which is heartbreaking. And I hope it sounds like there was some sort of justice. But here's a story where there was no justice. And this was only a few weeks ago. A woman stabbed her boyfriend to death. I think she stabbed him 108 times and he died. And do you know what sentence she got? She was let out. She got.
Starting point is 00:58:53 I know. Sentence. Yeah. No, no, she got a hundred hours of community service. That's why I, because apparently she was in some cannabis infused stupor and she was in control of her, what she was doing. And I'm just like, I don't think that's quite how cannabis works. And she was in some sort of cannabis rage.
Starting point is 00:59:13 And that's what I mean. Like we're depriving women of autonomy of their own decisions and their own actions. And like she killed her husband who killed her partner and she did a hundred hours community service. That's less than one hour per stab. And because, because, because, and like, we just completely absolved her of autonomy of that. And like, if, if it's true that she did that through a psychiatric break, then
Starting point is 00:59:38 she should be in some sort of getting help somewhere, she shouldn't be out doing community service, like she's unsafe one way or another, and it's. I don't think you'd have that if it was the other way around. If a man stabbed his wife or girlfriend to death that many times, I don't think he would get 100 hours community service and a slap on the wrist and let out. He shouldn't be. Again, we by no means talk about violence against women in enough detail and every, every crime and death is heartbreaking and deserving of attention, but we just need to talk about when it happens to men, which we don't. Do you think that men have reproductive rights?
Starting point is 01:00:16 Um, not in the context of the way we discuss like pro-choice, like I'm pro-choice. I believe a woman should have the choice of what she does have a body. If or when she has a child, I feel like not only does she benefit from that, but why does society benefits in the sense that we're not forcing women to have children they don't want. And if you look at the data, unwantedness causes a huge amount of issues later in life. A child born to unwanted mom, for example, is more likely to be a criminal. Um, I like to apply that to men too, who don't have the same choice. So after conception,
Starting point is 01:00:50 a man's choice to be a father is gone. He's beholden to the woman's wishes, which is quite right. He should not be able to choose if she keeps or has an abortion, in my opinion. But he's coming along for the ride whether he likes it or not. He has no choice. His choice was to wear a condom or not. And whatever reason, maybe he did, if she becomes pregnant, there's no choice left. She can have a morning after pill. She can have an abortion. She has safe haven laws, which basically mean that up to three weeks after birth, a woman can give a baby to a police station or fire station and they'll take it. No questions asked, no name, no nothing. And as a man does not have that choice and he's basically forced to finance a decision he has no choice in. And this is something that's called a paper abortion or more recently called voluntary parental surrender, which is a hypothetical
Starting point is 01:01:37 right which doesn't exist for a man to forfeit all privileges and responsibility to a child he doesn't want as long as A, he tells the mom to be early in the pregnancy so she can make an informed choice. B, he contributes to the medical fees of childbirth. It doesn't exist. A lot of pro-choice feminists support it at Karen DeCrowe and she is saying like an autonomous woman making a unilateral decision should not expect a man to finance that choice. And I get it, it's a very controversial thing. People think it gives men the ability to be sort of deadbeats and step out of childhood. And there are some fair criticisms. I don't necessarily think I support or unsupport it.
Starting point is 01:02:16 I want to have that discussion. I want to know what might these rights look like for men? Can we give men more choice? And is forcing men to be dads to children they don't want going to have the exact same problem as the same one to women where it was causing like a generation of unwanted more likely to be criminal children? And we all know the links between fatherlessness and crime, juvenile crime in boys. And I want to know, will is giving choice to men and fathers going to help them make that choice to become, to be a committed parent?
Starting point is 01:02:49 Uh, as I feel like a parent that's chosen to be one is more likely to raise a child that is happy and healthy. And, uh, that's why I'm pro choice for both men and women. Yeah. What do you say to the people who would claim if you didn't want to be a father, you shouldn't have had sex. I mean, there's a feminist slogan that says consenting to sex is not consenting to parenthood and I agree.
Starting point is 01:03:14 And that applies to men and women. Like you'll see that sign on placards outside, um, in protests held by feminists, consenting to sex, not consenting to parenthood. Some people disagree. That's why I asked my personal belief and I like to extend that. I feel like, I think like one in 10 men in America have been forced or had a partner try to trick them into getting pregnant when they didn't want to. One in 10. So that's like the classic thing of like, Oh, I'm on a pill. Oh, no, I'm not a baby trapping. I suppose you'd call
Starting point is 01:03:42 it that. And I'm like, well, they They should have a choice There are men who have been raped that have been legally compelled to pay child support They didn't have a choice either and boys They're bring boys that have been raped by babysitters teachers and they grow up like four or five years later And then they're served court documents saying you owe this much money in child support and I'm like they didn't have a choice either So again, it's very complicated And I'm like, they didn't have a choice either. So again, it's very complicated. Um, and I just don't think this meme of, well, you shouldn't have had sex is picturely and on a modern perspective, in my opinion, and it certainly doesn't
Starting point is 01:04:12 apply to women unless you're of course pro-life. I suppose this tumbles down from reproductive rights into custody rights as well. I haven't actually seen you write much about this. Uh, although you post a lot on your Instagram, so I very well may have missed it. What's the TLDR of, uh, fatherhood custody rights? Um, um, in America, probably best talk about it. Um, so what a lot of people want is called a presumption of joint child custody.
Starting point is 01:04:45 I think I got that right. And what that means is that the father and mother who are fighting for custody enter court on a level playing field. It's a presumption that we're going to have a shared child custody here. Currently that doesn't exist. That only exists in two states. I think one of them is Kansas. Florida was going to bring it in, but it got thrown out because of so much campaigning against it by, ironically, the National Organization for Women, which is the biggest feminist group in America. They were the ones that were campaigning against equality, which just doesn't make any sense.
Starting point is 01:05:14 So presumption of shared custody basically allows both parents to go in, level playing field, and they basically build their case from there. They say, well, I earn this much, I have this much free time. And then obviously people start making accusations of abuse and it becomes very messy in family court. But like I said, that presumption of shared child custody only exists in maybe two, perhaps three States. It's increasing, but not all of them. And in America, in England, in the UK, it's even worse. Like in the UK, if you're not married, you are screwed.
Starting point is 01:05:42 Like if you're not married or named on the birth certificate as a father, you have no rights to that child. Oh yeah. You, um, you said this about this was your justification for why men should get married. Or this is part of your justification for why men should get married. I mean, I don't know if I made that argument, but if you want to keep, if you want to have equal rights to your child, you should be married. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:06:03 And I don't think that's, I mean, imagine a woman not having rights to something unless she was married to a man. That is ultimate. That is like the ultimate patriarchy definition that you have to be married if you want equal rights. That's exactly how it exists in the UK for fathers. You have to be married or named on the birth certificate. And in both instances, the mother can just be like, no, I'm not going to marry you.
Starting point is 01:06:24 I'm not going to name you. And then she she has all she has full control of that child's life you have none and she'll have full rights no matter what she doesn't have to be married she can be single divorced separated or married doesn't matter she has full rights to the child not in the UK and not for men and it's not much better in America, but if you want to see serious systemic, um, sexism, then just go and spend a few hours outside of family court and talk to some of the fathers coming out and you'll hear some stories that will change your mind. I think, yeah. How right do you think Billie Eilish was when she spoke about men not facing criticism for
Starting point is 01:07:03 their bodies because women are nice? Well, she's just, I like really Eilish was when she spoke about men not facing criticism for their bodies because women are nice. Well, she's just, I like really Eilish. I like her music, but that was so stupid. Like I'm like some celebrities just stick to what they're good at, which is singing and leave the politics to grownups. Basically what she said was men don't experience criticism for their bodies because women are nice and I'm like, what? Like it doesn't make any sense.
Starting point is 01:07:24 Men get huge amount of criticism for their bodies like so much including from women like men in some data I've seen have show more signs of body dysmorphic disorder than women now they're more self-conscious about their body and not in the same way that's what's interesting not so much weight but height hairlines facial hair penis size, different things that they're self conscious about. And for Billie Eilish to say that is so stupid. And also in the context of the fact that she has herself shamed men's bodies. She talks horribly about ugly men and how entitled they are and just horrible, horrible
Starting point is 01:07:58 stuff. And it's interesting as it brings into light some of the horrible operations and bat shit crazy procedures that men are willing to undergo to alleviate these issues. Like we're talking about leg breaking surgery, which is where a man pays thousands of pounds and they'll surgically break his femurs. They'll insert titanium rods and over the course of months the titanium rods will extend about six inches and he gains about six inches in height. Excruciatingly painful, very dangerous and expensive and it's becoming more and more
Starting point is 01:08:32 popular for sort of non-medical reasons, for men doing it for aesthetic reasons and then you have like these horrible penis implants and pumps and tablets and like the fact that someone could think that men don't face criticism for their bodies is just reveals a breathtaking sense of ignorance. And for someone at video, Eilish who has learned a lot about being shamed and being objectified for her body, like she should know better and, um, I just think she's ignorant. She's just wrong, just wrong academically. And I learned from you that it's not just leg breaking surgeries, but
Starting point is 01:09:06 there's penis surgeries now. Yeah, there's, uh, I think it's called a femina or something. It basically it's like a silicon spring roll that you just have inserted into your penis and unlike other cosmetic surgeries, like boobs and bum implants, which are dangerous too, penis is not the same because obviously it grows and shrinks and changes shape throughout the day and unlike your boobs they say more or less same size so it doesn't just doesn't work it's extremely dangerous and there's
Starting point is 01:09:36 very little like oversight over these sort of surgeries that men are undergoing and if you talk if you listen to the reason why men are getting them, they're not, they don't need them. They have perfectly functional, well sized penises, but a lot of the reasons that are, I felt like I wasn't satisfying her or, you know, I wanted to match up with her ex boyfriend. And it speaks to a very deep, much deeper, more candid insight into men's insecurities. And they're right across the board and we should be talking about them too. And we're not. Yeah. Scott Griffiths, uh, from Australia was on the show and he was talking about how
Starting point is 01:10:14 male body dysmorphia is on track to overtake female body dysmorphia. I think that the, the future of the issues between the sexes is going to be mental health for women and a lack of role models for them and body image for men and their insecurity. I think that we're going to see a crisis of femininity, but a male body dysmorphia epidemic. I think that that may be where 10 years time, five years time, I think that may be where we end up. I think the cry, I mean, if I want to put my piece of, piece of bet cap on, I think the crisis of femininity is going to be when they finally reach the end of the road of being, you know, fortune 500 CEO and finally realize that is not the key to happiness. Like it's not like, dude, I got it. I got to tell you about this. It's a Will Smith in his biography written by Mark Manson says.
Starting point is 01:11:11 When I was broken, miserable, I had hope because I could become rich and it would make me happy, but when I was rich and miserable, I was despondent because I had nowhere else to go. Yeah. Like I spent the first 10 years of my adult life building a fair amount of success and it didn't make me happy. My dad did the same, spent his whole career doing it. I don't think it made him happy.
Starting point is 01:11:31 It made him very lonely and isolated and me as well. And if you just look at fundamental sense of meaning, like if they asked men and women, where do you find happiness in life? And women have far more sources of happiness than men. They have like friends and family and hobbies, interests and work. But men just have work, work and money. That's where they find happiness. And I feel like too many women are trying to replicate that idea of if you're successful, you will be happy. And I promise you, men have bought a ticket to that raffle many, many years ago, and it's
Starting point is 01:12:06 a many-feathered bird. It is not quite as simple as it seems. It probably will not make you happy. And I feel like women in many ways have the winning ticket already. They have amazing networks of friends. They have a really strong connection with the family. They are entering the workplace. And I don't think they should trade that in to follow men down the road that has led to so much
Starting point is 01:12:25 misery for men later in life. And I, that's why I think the crisis femininity might be in 10 years, but that realization hits and a bit of surrounded by a bunch of miserable boss bitch CEOs. According to the biggest study of its kind, men are more likely to face hiring discrimination than women now. Yeah. I mean, you're really racking up the controversial claims. Like this is, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 01:12:50 Basically biggest study ever done into hiring bias. I think it was over 40 years, maybe 18 studies, hundreds of thousands of applicants studied and what they do is they basically look at female male applicants for jobs in female and male dominated industries. So for women it's like teaching, healthcare, psychology, schooling and for men it's you know engineering, science, physics and stuff like that and they basically manipulate the CVs of equally qualified men and women and they measure sort of callback rates and they found that the bias against women in male dominated industries has disappeared
Starting point is 01:13:26 and in some cases reversed slightly. But the bias of men experience in female dominated industries remains consistent. So that was the first set of findings. The second set of findings was probably even more important. And our perspectives of hiring bias is completely wrong. We just totally misinterpreted it. So they asked sort of the average American member of public and academics, what do you think the bias is going wrong. We just totally misinterpret it So they asked sort of average American member public and academics what do you think the bias is going to be and they were just way out way out like three or four times out and Again, we need to reset our perspective of hiring bias It's interesting because they had the exact same conclusion in Australia because they were trying to get more women into governmental positions conclusion in Australia because they were trying to get more women into governmental positions.
Starting point is 01:14:05 So they decided to hire blind, they decided to take gender off CVs and just hire based on merit, which I'm like, that's great. But what they found is they ended up hiring more men, so more men based on merit. And then it was such an unpopular thing that they decided to scrap it. So then they went back to putting names on CVs and then they were like, well, this is the kind of discrimination we like, we're going to discriminate and get more women into positions of power. So yes, biggest study ever done into hiring bias has found that men are the ones being discriminated against. Of course, that's
Starting point is 01:14:34 changed over time. 20 years ago, it wasn't the case, but now it is. And I don't know why we cannot keep like our finger on the pulse of sexism and constantly shape, like reform our opinion, reform our opinion. Because that is a sign of progress. We should be happy about how we've eliminated bias against women in male industries and give ourselves a pat on the back and now do the same for men trying to get into nursing or healthcare or teaching. And also like men, like just being dads in playgrounds for children and stuff. And there was a, that's like the old girls club. I think, I mean, I know so many fathers who are looked at as pedophiles or
Starting point is 01:15:12 predators, babysitters when they're waiting for the child at the playground. I saw, I read one story about a guy got pepper sprayed for taking a photo of his own kid and I'm like, we need to, we need to do a lot more to bring men into those spaces. And then I guess you have to further down the chain, you have like, there just aren't baby changing tables in men's changing rooms. So then men have to either go into women's changing rooms or change a baby somewhere else. And it's like, it's touristry.
Starting point is 01:15:39 Well, I think not the baby changing thing. That's insane. I didn't even know about that. And it makes complete sense. I, yeah, sometimes it's the disabled changes, but I guess. Not the baby changing thing. That's insane. I didn't even know about that. And it makes complete sense. I, yeah, sometimes it's the disabled changes, but I guess I have seen, I don't think I've ever seen it in the men's. No.
Starting point is 01:15:54 And it's annoying because this happens alongside a separate conversation where we're constantly demanding fathers take equal responsibility for childcare. And I'm like, well, how about equal respect first? And how about equal rights? Like that's how it works. Like if you want equal responsibility, you need to give equal rights. That's how it works. And no one is doing that.
Starting point is 01:16:11 Everyone just turns more fathers was constantly humiliating them. Yeah. I suppose the interesting element of the guy getting pepper sprayed at the playground element of the guy getting pepper sprayed at the playground because he was taking a photo of his own kid is that that is almost surely a product of what the culture and the memes have sort of pushed forward and quite rightly, stranger danger, all of that, you know, like do not get into a car with somebody that you do not know. I remember the hedgehog from the green crosscode. You remember that guy?
Starting point is 01:16:48 Yeah, I'm now, I've not thought about hedgehog in many years, but thanks for bringing it right back. I mean, that's a great campaign. The fact that I'm like, oh yeah, the hedgehog. I think the Americans won't know what we're talking about. Maybe they had their own. They would have had a very patriotic hedgehog 20 years ago. But no one talks about women that way. Like if anything, when women who spend more time with children and mothers are
Starting point is 01:17:08 the number one abuser of children, which is also unpopular, but albeit true, no one talks about women that same way. There's so many headlines of like teachers, female teachers that are basically raping boys and it's like saucy teacher has fling with 14 year old. I'm like, she raped him. Like stop this lucky boy phenomenon of like a boy's lucky to have sex with his teacher. I'm like, what? That she's a pedophile and he's a victim of rape.
Starting point is 01:17:32 And we don't have that same perspective. Whilst, whilst a man taking a photo of his own child, pepper sprayed, he has another one. And I saw another one. It was like a man waving at a child and the police got involved and the police went and found the man, investigated because they thought he was a paedophile. Turns out he was just waving the child across the road. He was like, yep, you can cross. And they were like, paedophile.
Starting point is 01:17:53 And it was a whole police investigation. And it's just, it's gone too far. Like, it was part of it is being mindful of your safety and we should all be mindful of our safety. But when it becomes this hysterical fear mongering of men that stokes a cultural fear, it's gone way too far. When men are getting pepper sprayed like that or being investigated by police or waving a child across the road, we can all agree that is too much, too much vilification, too much hysteria. This cultural panic has just gone way too far.
Starting point is 01:18:27 Well, I suppose the reason for this is there are still reports and stories of men misbehaving in ways that are awful and newsworthy. And the solution to that is, okay, well, let's be, let's just continue. It's like there's one solution to it. And the only solution is vigilance and you just have one dial and you just continue to turn up vigilance more and more and more, let's just continue to scrutinize and be vigilant and be aware and make sure and so on and so forth. And that's it. That's the only button that there is to press.
Starting point is 01:19:05 And the issue is that I don't think that necessarily gets rid of the problem. No, I don't think it makes, everything it makes people more afraid in many ways. It's have all we hear are these stories of like vigilance and fear and, you know, horrible crimes, uh, men behaving badly. Although I'd say that's an understatement. That's just going to create more fear. That's just going to... But what do you do?
Starting point is 01:19:29 You can't not report on it. Well, I mean, a man goes to work, has a sandwich, comes home and goes to bed. That is not interesting news, is it? But a man who assaults a woman, that is headline news all over the country. I'm not saying we shouldn't report it, but we should be, we should understand that we're, we're seeing a very small minority of men that are being hyper sort of amplified through social media and the news. We're getting a war perspective of what the world is really like. And we really, really are. Like put the number, everyone talks about all men, not all men. And I'm like that not all men
Starting point is 01:20:03 is a really important rebuke that we should be using because it is not all men. If you actually look at the data 0.2% of Americans are arrested for a violent crime each year. 0.2% Not all men a tiny tiny percentage of one tiny point of 1% are arrested for violent crime and like 1% of people Commit like 60% of crime 60% of crimes by 1% of people and it's not all men doing it. It's just not. Neither all men billionaires. Like that's what I'm sick and tired of.
Starting point is 01:20:32 Who has the most billionaires being used as a metric for gender equality? Like that has any sort of meaning to normal people. Like the chance of a man being a billionaire is like not.000004% and the chance of a woman being a billionaire is like 0.000005% and I was like yeah one of them is bigger but they're both fucking small. It's like you're comparing two grains of sand. Like yeah that's bigger but they're tiny. Like you're not going to be a billionaire whether you're a man or woman.
Starting point is 01:21:00 Sorry to break it to you. Meanwhile measures of equality such as education, health outcomes, life expectancy, which are applicable to everybody are not included at all. We can't see talking about murders, billionaires, and all these things, violent crime, like just like very, very rare instances. And meanwhile, men who die younger
Starting point is 01:21:19 in every single country in the world, and boys who are behind every stage of education in every single Western country, not talked about. And I'm like, the ability to decide how we measure equality is a privilege in its own right. And what the metrics we're using are just not, not inclusive enough. And they're just giving a very warped perspective. What was that thing you were, you were teaching me about like the minimization
Starting point is 01:21:44 of male suffering and kind of the like the minimization of male suffering and kind of the pedestalization of female victimhood or something, the Sarah, was it the Sarah Everard case was an example of that? Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, we're talking about gamma bias again, which is where we highlight certain elements of maleness. So we highlight, um, perpetration in that sense of men, men being violent, no
Starting point is 01:22:07 knife man, gun man, con man, henchman, you know, it's very much part of it, of the naming. So Sarah Everard was killed by Wayne Cousins, who was a human piece of filth. He's a police officer who basically killed her in London a few years ago. And again, that sparked a huge outcry, understandably so, of violence against women. And a horrific crime was like a catalyst of that chain and anger, so much anger. And it went too far, in my opinion, it became too political. Even Sarah's own friends were saying, Sarah didn't hate men. Like this is just you're basically hijacking our grief and her death for your own political gain. And all you heard was male violence, male violence, male violence. This following week, also in London, a man dived into the
Starting point is 01:22:55 Thames to save a woman who tried to kill herself. So she jumped in, he had no idea who she was. He jumped straight in after her and he died. He gave his life trying to save a woman he never met. We never talked about male heroism or male sacrifice or male bravery. That's what I mean. That's where it's gamma biased because as we highlight perpetration, we minimise the celebration of men and the victimhood of men. Again, a very warped perspective of society that is systematically negative, especially towards men. And we need to recognize that the vast majority of women and men are good people and nothing like brain cousins. And until we do, this gender divide is going to get bigger and bigger, I think.
Starting point is 01:23:36 Does the world really judge women more harshly for their sexual history? No, I mean, not according to the data, no. That's not to say women aren't judged for their sexual history. It's just the argument is that they're not judged more harshly than men. I mean, I think in long-term relationships looking for a partner, they're judged equally well or equally negatively depending on who you are. When it comes to short-term relationships, there is a double standard, but against men. So men are treated more harshly, judged more harshly for their sort of sexual history. So there's a lot of data telling us that, lots and lots and lots. I put up a study of 2000 Norwegian men alongside four further studies all around the world and people became infatuated with the idea
Starting point is 01:24:20 that it was Norwegian men. And they're like, this is a very small selective study. And I was like, yeah, that's why I did four more studies and here's several more. Like it's a well established in the literature that this double standard of shaming women is folklore. It's not in the data and we treat men and women the same. And if anything, we treat men more harshly than women in that case. And yeah, it's like, that's just Instagram science, really. Like a bunch of armchair experts just making hypotheses and just drawing their own conclusions off based off anecdotal evidence, which certainly
Starting point is 01:24:57 exists, but it's not what's seen in the data and not, not at all. No. Well, we had a conversation last time for the people that missed it. They should go back and listen to that. Cause it's really great. Um, you're a guy who's ardently from the left. That's your political standpoint, but you're also very pro men, which is a relatively unique position, I think, at least to hold publicly.
Starting point is 01:25:20 And we had a discussion about what the problems were, what was wrong with the advice that the left were, what was wrong with the advice that the left were giving to men. We know that they treat men like defective women for the most part, or they just minimize their suffering or forget about them entirely. What do you think is wrong with the advice that the right gives to men? I mean, often it's the inverse of the problems that the left have, where like the left think gender's complete social construct, whereas the right often think it's biological and
Starting point is 01:25:50 socialization has no impact on gender at all. Personally, I think it's a bit of both. And the same like people think masculinity is the problem on the left, people on the right think it's the solution. And one of my big gripes of the right perspective of men's issues and masculinity and male suicide crisis and men's mental health is that they think the solution is to reinforce the antiquated models of manliness to help men become the breadwinner again and to find purpose and recapture their manhood.
Starting point is 01:26:17 And basically holding men to a very old archetype of masculinity, i.e. the sole breadwinner for the family coming you know, coming home in 1960s household, two and a half children and a lovely wife. That does not exist anymore. That does not exist. Women have entered the workplace, quite rightly so, and men can no longer take that position. It just doesn't exist. We can't all be Andrew Tate sort of Bugatti breadwinners. It's just not possible. So like I said, we need to help men find more strands of purpose, more sense of meaning in their life. Because simultaneously, I do
Starting point is 01:26:51 understand where the right is coming from. And I do think men get a lot of benefit mentally from being productive and being powerful and having a sense of purpose. But the problem is we need to find that purpose and meaning outside of these very narrow, breadwinner job, being rich, archetypes that are just increasingly unable to achieve. That's just, I mean, yeah, I mean, don't get me started, but I do think they're right and better, but they are no means perfect. Sometimes they get so close to talking about men's issues, but in a different format. I've been very interested in following the whole trans-affirming surgery on minors and
Starting point is 01:27:32 how the right hate it, and I'm apprehensive too. But I have no idea why circumcision has never been brought into discussion of surgeries, unelected, non-consenting surgeries of minors, medically unnecessary surgeries. I'm like, surely they are both surgeries on minors for ideological reasons. Well, that's a question. Why hasn't there been a reckoning around circumcision yet, especially given how much of a hot topic female genital mutilation is?
Starting point is 01:28:00 Oh, yeah. I do not know. I do not, it blows my mind how people think that the right people on the right, right wing pundits, especially don't seem to mind ideological altering of babies genitals. Um, and there is, there are almost no medical benefits for circumcision. Um, it's almost always done for cultural, ascetic, religious reasons. And it has done millions, millions and millions and millions, like 60% of baby boys, 80% of men in general in America.
Starting point is 01:28:33 We're talking billions actually, if you're looking worldwide, it is such a massive problem. And it's probably people listening to this right now that feel having circumcised, they feel very defensive. And it always comes up, always comes up in the work and I post about it. There's all the people in the comments that are pissed off at me. And I think that's the problem. The problem is it's so widespread, so normalized. What are people pissed off about?
Starting point is 01:28:54 They think that I'm, they think that they're being shamed. They think that, um, they've been used to political porn. They, they, they like their dicks the way they are, but they don't, they don't know any differently a lot of the time. And they don't quite understand that when you circumcise a baby, you're removing more than half of the nerve endings of the penis and the most sensitive part of the penis. And it's almost always not needed.
Starting point is 01:29:18 It leads to significant problems later in life, like rectal dysfunction. It can be traumatizing. Babies die from like infections and blood cuts. Over a hundred babies die every year in America, I think, from circumcision. And it's just totally not necessary. It's needed in a very small number of cases, but nowhere near the size at which it's being done. And again, it's double standard. People don't like comparing it to FGM. And FGM is a very complicated issue in its own right. But there are certain types of FGM and FGM is a very complicated issue in its own right but there are certain types of FGM specifically type 1a that are comparable to circumcision because they're basically removing
Starting point is 01:29:50 the same biological tissue so the clitoral hood or the prepuce is being removed in FGM type 1a dig into the nitty-gritty and that's the same as the male foreskin the same biological tissue one's illegal one's perfectly acceptable and I do not understand the hypocrisy there. I do not understand the double standards and I don't understand why circumcision isn't talked about within the context of trans affirming surgery. It's, it's, it's the same thing. Yeah. There is an awful lot of attention on the right around trans affirming
Starting point is 01:30:23 surgery and absolutely zero about circumcision. No, nothing, nothing. And, um, it's like, it doesn't matter. Like this thing is about 14 national health organizations, mostly in Europe, but I've come out against circumcision now saying it's an assault on boys. It's an invasion of his autonomy, his bodily autonomy and integrity being taken away from him and nothing. FGM, rightly so, one of the most horrific things that could
Starting point is 01:30:50 happen to a human, especially the latter stages, is outlawed, illegal, more or less everywhere now. It's doing a pretty good job, but there are no laws outlawing circumcision. None. And it's just like, it's totally acceptable. And you should, you should go and see if you don't, people say, Oh, it's just a snip. I'm sure people are saying that now, but you should go and watch a circumcision of a boy on YouTube. And you'll change your mind like that. Like it is not, there are some horrific things you can see.
Starting point is 01:31:21 And it's just, we have a very misguided perspective of circumcision. Meanwhile, Oprah Winfrey is putting creams made from foreskins on her face. Yeah. I put that post up and people are like, this sounds like an episode of black mirror. And I was like, yeah, except it's real. So what that is, is it's been revealed that a bunch of wealthy celebrity women are using a face cream that's formulated from the cloned foreskins of baby boys in Korea. So they're taking foreskins, they're cloning it, they're turning it into face cream and
Starting point is 01:31:56 they're slapping on their face and it costs like hundreds of dollars a pop. And Oprah Winfrey is interesting because she is a world renowned advocate against FGM and yet she goes home and slaps baby foreskins onto her face. And I'm like, I don't, it blows my mind reading that. And what happened to the sanctity of the human body? What happened to bodily autonomy and rights? And like, where did they go? And like I said, FGM is vilified, especially in the Western world, but
Starting point is 01:32:27 circumcision is a face cream. So is that, but they're cultured cells, right? They're duplicated. It's not actual, it's not original foreskin. It's carbon copy foreskin. No, it's not like this minced up foreskin. No, it's cloned. I mean, it's very secretive.
Starting point is 01:32:42 We don't really know, but I don't I wouldn't say it really matters How many foreskins are in a jar? It's still the same invasion of bodily autonomy and like we wouldn't we wouldn't have a bunch of Jim bros making like protein powders Of like female body parts would we and yet we've got a bunch of celebrity women making face cream out of male body parts So babies body parts But now I don't know how many foreskins go into a portion of open wind freeze face cream, hopefully not too many, but you're right. It is, it is cloned foreskin, but it's just, it's just.
Starting point is 01:33:13 Correct. It is barbaric. It's pretty grotesque. Yeah. It's like, it is like black mirror, like an Orwell film or story or yeah. What about, uh, sexual assault in American men's prisons? That seems to be something else that you've spoken about that the right probably should pay a bit more attention to.
Starting point is 01:33:32 Well, I mean, that was something I was going to bring up everyone's talk about that. They're not, they're also, we talked about how men are not captured in sexual assault data if they're raped by women, but men in men, men in prisons aren't captured either they're also that's another forgotten wedge of the pie chart. And the wedge is 900,000 more than 900,000 cases of sexual assault in American prisons. And again, if you factor that into that, that can't be every year. No, that's, I think that's over a basically over the course of the
Starting point is 01:33:59 study, so it must've been years and years and years. And that's instances, not, not individuals. That's Lara Stempel as well. Um, and it's a massive problem. Like physical violence, sexual violence in male prisons is literally seen as a joke. Like we literally laugh about it. Like even when we talk about rape cultures, I think male prisons in America are such a powerful example of that, but you're right. There is another, it's a bit like what I said of circumcision, where there's hypocrisy from the right, where again, around trans people, it's obsession of trans people. And a trans woman will go into a woman's prison and then suddenly the right becomes
Starting point is 01:34:38 massive ardent advocates of safety in prisons. And yet meanwhile, rival gangs are being mixed together in men's prisons and no one cares but one trans woman makes her way into a women's prison and everyone loses their mind and they all try and position it as oh we only care about you know women's safety or safety in prisons but i just don't think that's true because then they would be talking about the hundreds of thousands of cases of sexual assault in men's prisons that they probably write jokes about. So I don't believe they're being particularly, um, I think they've been quite disgenuous and I think it's a lot, it's about a lot more than prison safety.
Starting point is 01:35:20 And yeah, often transphobia. What else, what else is the right not paying sufficient attention to? Yeah. I mean, lots of things. I, again, a lot of it's about perpetuating a very old archetype of manliness. A lot of people talk about male disposability, which is a very interesting phenomenon where men and boys suffering against men and boys is not seen as important as towards women and girls that I guess that's been a running theme of this podcast and I think it's true.
Starting point is 01:35:49 It's impossible to deny it. And people ask about it, why do we not give a shit about men? And then I'm so sick of people on the right, right-wing pundits, bringing up this idea of reproductive value. Like the idea that women have greater reproductive value than men, therefore men's safety is not important and it shouldn't be important. Then often this is accompanied by some hypothetical story about tribes. The idea is that you have a tribe of women and men, the men go off the war, and even if 90 percent of those men die,
Starting point is 01:36:23 they can still repopulate the tribe. However, if 90% of the women are killed in that tribe, the tribe is wiped out. And that is basically how they justify male disposability because men have lesser reproductive value than women. And I think that's a fair point of view. If we lived in prehistoric tribes, if we were wandering in savannah and climbing trees and flinging shit at each other, but look at where we are like I'm sat with a 4k camera filming my face I'm talking to you the other side of the world I'm living in a beautiful flat I'm surrounded by modern technology and I'm like it's not right for these podcasters to bring up this fucking ridiculous tribe analogy and then
Starting point is 01:37:00 they leave the podcast they hop into an Uber and they just fuck off to London like I'm like unless you're willing to climb a tree and stop throwing shit around I don't think you can start basing your life on tribes and also like so what like Human beings are defined by their ability to surpass nature But the naturalistic fallacy is an interesting fallacy where people seem to think that what is set in nature is right And they can't be changed. And I'm like, look around us, we are defined as a species by outdoing nature. And when it comes to this trope of tribes and user justification for male disposability, I'm like, we can do better. We can overcome that too. And we need to, rather than reinforcing
Starting point is 01:37:40 it. That's something I keep seeing on the right And it is boring. And it's just, you just perpetrating and perpetuating the same problem. What would be, what would be an example of male disposability being shown in sort of recent history? Oh, I mean, one that everyone's familiar with is Boko Haram. So I think it was 2014, Boko Haram, who are a terrorist group in Nigeria, they infamously captured, I think, 273 Nigerian girls. Horrible, horrible, horrible crime. Kidnapped them, they disappeared, and the world erupted. Everyone, you must have seen Bring Back Our Girls.. Had the big signs, every celebrity on the red carpet
Starting point is 01:38:26 was having it. Michelle Obama had one, you had the Americans, King Sookie, had the Americans and the Chinese government sharing data for the first time in ages. I'm like, what, that is incredible. The whole world got together to bring back our girls, quite rightly so. And that was 273 girls.
Starting point is 01:38:44 Most of them were safely made at home. But in the following three or four years, 10,000 Nigerian boys were taken by Boko Haram, turning the child soldiers or worse. No one said anything. I didn't see any bring back our boys signs. And prior to the girls being taken, that had been happening all the time. Often, Boko Haram would take all children, release the girls, kill the boys. That's what they're doing for years. No one cared. But then one time they took the girls, it became a massive global cultural
Starting point is 01:39:12 movement and then they went back to taking boys, 10,000 boys gone in the following three years, didn't hear anything that to me is male disposability. Like we just do not see it. We just see men as more disposable. Women as more precious, I think. Didn't Jess Phillips put a foot in it recently? Yeah. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:39:32 I mean, not a week goes by about Jess Phillips putting a foot in it in some way or another. So the UK government currently are looking into sending UK prisoners abroad to international jails to help alleviate the crisis in prisons, overpopulated prisons. I didn't support that. I didn't support the prison system in general, but that's another conversation. But the idea is that we're going to start sending British prisoners to international jails and prisons. Jess Phillips has come in, probably the most famous feminist MP in the country, and she said, we should only send men. We shouldn't send men because women in prison are the product of abuse and sexual violence. And women in prison are actually victims in their own right, which they are. They are. And I agree.
Starting point is 01:40:15 But the same is true for men. The men in prisons share the same experiences of abuse. They have the same adolescent childhood experiences and same stories of pain and trauma. And that is just a fact. It's not like one in six men in prison have been sexually abused, 50% have been physically abused, 50% have been neglected in childhood. Again, we started a podcast talking about how men are not just some static object where they're just inherently bad, born bad. They are shaped by their experiences and where, where Jess Phillips can see that
Starting point is 01:40:47 for women and rightly so she is right. She fails to expand that same compassion, um, to men. And that is not, she does that a lot and it is stupid and it's embarrassing. But, um, yeah, she just wants to send men to these prisons, not women. Yeah. Well, it's the same with the same with the Iranian protests. It's the same in Gaza about who are the protesters that are being killed, who are the civilians that are being killed.
Starting point is 01:41:14 Hmm. Yeah. It's, we only have, we will hear like a headline, it'll be like 100 people killed, including 15 women and children. And no one ever asks, or who are the remaining 85? And the answer is men, men and boys. And we're just constantly saying women and children, women and children, as if women are children, and women are not children, women are adults. And not only that, but we exclude the men. So people don't realize in the Iranian revolution, the so-called women's led revolution, 90% of protestor deaths were men and
Starting point is 01:41:46 boys. 90%. Every single execution has been a man, from the last time I checked. And no mention of that is constantly seen as this movement for women, which is fair enough, but they're not alone. Right next to those women are men, and they are laying down their lives quite literally. And no one cares. They're so not mentioned in the headlines. No, no, that makes it back to us in your Gaza. You hear about these trustees in Palestine, Gaza, and it's always women and children, women and children, women and children. And, um, I feel like that's, it's insulting to women because it infantilizes them and
Starting point is 01:42:19 it's devastating to men because it was totally erases their pain and their, their deaths and their sacrifice. So yeah, it's kind of a bias again. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You taught me a new word this week, biphobia. What's biphobia? Well, I mean, I guess biphobia is basically the dislike or repulsion of people that are bisexual.
Starting point is 01:42:46 And it's interesting because this is a bit of a double standard where women have very different attitudes in general towards bisexual men than men have towards bisexual women. Like most men will date a bisexual woman. Like my girlfriend's bisexual and a lot of men think it's great, we don't really care. But there's an interesting sense of biphobia from some women including bisexual women that they will not sleep with a Bisexual man because they think they're dirty or secretly gay or liars And do you know that's what they think or is that you just postulating? Yeah. I mean, I've read the anecdotes I mean I've read a story about a bisexual man who
Starting point is 01:43:25 Yeah, I mean, I've read the anecdotes. I've read a story about a bisexual man who, the woman he was dating wanted to bleach him, like jokingly wanted to bleach him because she thought he was dirty because he'd slept with a man. And I posted this, those stats. I think it's something like only one in five women would have sex with a bisexual man. And a lot of the comments I got were like, yeah, I don't even tell women I've had sex with a man, I just think I'm straight. And this idea of being secretly gay, a lot of bisexual men, people think they're secretly gay when they're not. And ironically, a lot of women who are very much for gender equality and inclusivity in principle don't extend that to their personal life. That goes straight out the fucking window when it comes to dating because now suddenly
Starting point is 01:44:09 all these tropes on bisexual men to come out the woodwork and then they use the justification for not dating them. And I get it. I get it. There are things called preferences. I have preferences in dating. I find some people attractive, some people less attractive. But whilst we have preferences to not want to date a bisexual man because you think he's dirty, or a disease carrier, they're called often, that is biphobia. That is not preference, that is just biphobia. And I don't think that is a defense that can be used. But at the same time, I do recognize there are preferences and there's nothing wrong
Starting point is 01:44:44 with having a preference. And, uh, it's just a very difficult discussion to have. Yeah. Where do you think we're at with the state of men's and boys advocacy? Are we still early adopters, the fucking third wave manosphere or the holistic manhood or the integrated. Whatever. How early is this and how far off is the tipping point?
Starting point is 01:45:14 Well, what you're talking about there is the diffusion of innovation, which is like a really old theory in social science that talks about how does the idea become viral, how does something become adopted? It works in like the civil rights movement, but also works in terms of like iPhones, how, how many people want an iPhone? And basically it's a graph of slow progress, slow progress, and then suddenly it takes off, reaches mass market success, and that's how an idea becomes viral. But the thing about the fusion of innovation theory is that you have to reach a tipping point.
Starting point is 01:45:41 A tipping point where enough people have adopted an idea that the mass market feels safe to join them. They're a bit more apprehensive and they need those people making instinctive decisions to go first and then they'll follow. That's about 16%. So 16% of people need to adopt an idea to reach that tipping point. And yeah, it's an interesting conversation to have in the context of men and boys advocacy because we are very early on in that graph. We're sort of quite low down in the, well, you have the visionaries, which is at 2% and
Starting point is 01:46:13 the early adopters, which is about 12.5, 13.5%. And I reckon you're in a better position to talk about this because I get asked a lot about who are the ones that are making waves, breaking new ground. And I'm always like Chris Williamson, but he, you are the one that has been making these conversations mainstream and cool and intellectual and magnetic and shareable. And I'm like, for as long as you're involved, I'll be hopeful. I realize you talk more generally. I appreciate that.
Starting point is 01:46:40 Yeah. It's strange man, like threading the needle of having this sort of a conversation about the challenges that men and boys face about the realities and the uglier sides of both male behavior and female behavior. For a long time, I was so, I would, I would get, I remember the first time I ever had Carl Benjamin on the show, Sar going to have a cad and you know, you say, say about him what you will. Uh, I had a lot of fun, uh, the times that I spoke to him and, um, he's become a friend and I was so fucking nervous after I did it, I was so nervous cause
Starting point is 01:47:20 I was like, oh, we, we touched on some, some spicy topics here. We mentioned some things, but ultimately if the things that you're saying. Are backed up in evidence and then said with the goodwill of curiosity to try and find out more about what's going on or to understand the situation, I found that people seem to be, maybe it's just this audience. I don't know. Maybe I have an unreasonably reasonable audience and that might be, that genuinely might be the case.
Starting point is 01:47:44 Um, but people seem to be very understanding if you're like, look, I'm not trying to say this to blame or castigate or lay at the feet of someone, an error or an issue that wasn't theirs that they maybe even weren't aware of. People can usually tell if you're doing something with good intentions and if you're entering it in good faith, and if you're trying to improve the lives of everybody, or if you're trying to bring light to some topic and you're grappling with it, you know, there's some stuff, so much stuff that I read on your Instagram, uh, the Tin Men that everyone should go and follow. So much of the stuff, like I opened up Instagram to see golden retriever
Starting point is 01:48:30 videos and gym motivation stuff. I didn't necessarily always want to read about male genital mutilation or the number of guys. So there's a degree of discomfort that's in there, but you go, okay, well, what's the alternative? The alternative is that people don't get to know about this. And it just perpetuates this existing, like really. Unuseful balance of ignorance and.
Starting point is 01:49:10 Accusation and persecution, wrongful and misinformation and confusion and lack of communication. There is a massive branding identity crisis around men and boys advocacy. Everyone seems to think you're a piece of shit for caring about 50% of the world's population. Everyone talks about men's rights as if it's something to be spat upon. And I'm like, well, how about human rights? Are you for them? Like, because men are 50% of all human beings. And it's difficult. I find it very interesting because I like branding. I am a creative solution sort of expert. And I found it very interesting this space where there was so much compelling evidence about the disadvantage of men and boys that people are not willing to listen to. It is quite clearly a branded entity crisis.
Starting point is 01:49:45 If you can present these facts in a way that, in a way described, are compassionate and thoughtful and grown up and intelligent, maybe people will start to listen. People are listening, not as fast as I would have liked, but we need to get past this stigma and this very old idea of men cannot experience any sort of disadvantage. If they do do it's their own fault and we need to see men's issues as structural as women's are. And we also need to remind ourselves that anything we say about men and boys should not diminish what's happened to women and girls. I always sit down with people that disagree with me
Starting point is 01:50:18 in this sort of context and I say we can have a conversation with women and girls all day and we'll probably agree on everything. I also care about catcalling. I also hate sexual assault and am devastated by the same story as you've heard. I want to solve those problems as much as you, but I'm trying to add to that conversation. I'm trying to add the second half of the problem. I'm trying to widen the perspective. My politics are not dependent on denying what you're saying. Whereas people I'm talking to, their politics are often predicated on me being wrong.
Starting point is 01:50:50 And they have to basically deny that if you think patriarchy theory is the main cause of domestic violence, you need to now deny the fact that 3.9 million, 2.9 million men are victims of abuse, that they just have to disappear in the UK. And they don't, they're still here. So I'm far more in favor of inclusive stars of discourse that talks about men and boys. It's so, it's so fucking clunky to have to caveat every single discussion with. I'm not trying to minimize that, you know, you do this weird rain dance. It's like fucking ritual before you have the conversation to try and prove that you're
Starting point is 01:51:31 not, I don't know what, like some part of some enemies, some real or imagined enemies, some ancient or vestigial fucking bigot, you know, like, Oh, you're just one of dot, dot, dot. Yeah. And it goes, that goes right to the top. Like I'm working right now with someone that's very influential in politics, probably the most influential, uh, it's not politician, probably the most influential people in politics in regards to men and boys advocacy. And I'm talking to him about how do we actually get change off of Instagram and actually in courtrooms and across homes
Starting point is 01:52:09 and in the whole country. And I've shown him a campaign I'm doing that talks about all the different issues and makes them very, very visible in a way that politicians hopefully aren't able to deny for much longer. And he was going through the different points I want to make. And one of them was like the fact that women can't be held accountable, can't be charged with rape in the UK. And he was like, you can't say that. I was like, why not? It's true. And he was like, it's very politically popular. You will make enemies in politics. People will just throw out everything you said if you say that. And it's interesting because that is the game of politics. Like in the words of Stephen Fry, sometimes it's more, it's more important
Starting point is 01:52:47 to be effective than to be right. But I just feel very uncomfortable with the idea that I have to take away the fact that women cannot be held accountable for rape in the UK for the comfort of politicians. I'm like, that is your job to be a politician, to make change. And I'm not going to put those men at the back of the queue to help placate them and make them feel nice and happy. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:53:09 So what's the, uh, what's the state of advocacy? I know that you've been one of the, I think you are probably the leader that I've seen for the minister for men, um, like push. What's, what's going on with that? Are you going to be successful or are you just eating? This is great. Well, I bought the domain name, so I got that. That's great.
Starting point is 01:53:30 Um, yeah. Dot com and that could UK. Um, but that was a really interesting, I think quite positive view of progress. Cause I've been talking about the fact that we need a minister for men in the UK to work alongside a minister for women for years, for years and years and years. And people thought it was hilarious. People literally laughed at me when I said that. And now it's, it's in the news. It's on the streets outside. It's being discussed by politicians. It's everywhere. I mean, it's still not passed as a petition
Starting point is 01:54:00 right now. That's probably not going to be successful, but at least there is a petition now. Whilst 50% of the public are against it, that's less than it was five years ago. The pushback is getting less and the support is getting more. I feel like that's a really good insight into the changing tides and people are becoming a little bit more willing to dip their toes into these issues. It's about time, we need that mass support. We need signatures. We need to be able to make these demands and politicians and we need a minister for men. Yeah.
Starting point is 01:54:32 Would you do it? To be a minister from there? I, I am no politician, like to be a politician to be, I mean, I'll just get thrown out of parliament straight away. I'll just get into a massive argument and probably get arrested or something. Like I'd probably just start calling someone names and just shouting. Like honestly, I'm not, I'm just get triggered. I'll just be like, I just, I would speak my mind too much, which I think
Starting point is 01:54:56 would be quite refreshing, but I'd probably make my career very, very short. Well, you know, it's a, it's a shame that politics is, uh, besmirched so much by the political by the game playing and the fuckery and the what about ism and all the rest of the stuff. Politicking, you know that? No. Oh, I love that concept. When I read that, I didn't, I just knew what it meant.
Starting point is 01:55:19 Politician. And it's basically the idea of politicians campaigning for policy on the purely on the basis of getting the vote. So it's politic. Right. That's all you can. And that is you've captured my whole philosophy and politics in just one single word. And my whole thought on politicians is that they don't give a fuck about anyone over themselves.
Starting point is 01:55:39 All they care about is getting your vote and they'll say whatever they need to get your vote. And the people who vote most are women. Women are absolutely dominating men in terms of voter turnout every single year. So who do you think politicians are going to appeal to? It's obviously going to be women because they vote more. And that is politicking. And I find there's so many disingenuous politicians that do not care.
Starting point is 01:56:00 They do not care about you. They just want your vote. That's why I feel like if we make our votes dependent on these politicians talking about men and boys, that's how we get change. And that we need to start making these demands, writing to MPs, politicians, you know, rattling a few birdcages because otherwise they won't do it. They don't, they just don't care. And that's politicking.
Starting point is 01:56:19 I love it. Well, I'm glad that you are going off the iPhone and into the real world, at least in some way. I really mean it, man. Your work's very, very impactful. I know that people have told you this before, but you're working so hard to just try and wave this flag for like something that no one cares about. No one wants to give you, it's just a permanent fight in the comments. And yes, you've got your, you know, 60,000, 100,000
Starting point is 01:56:46 supporters, the people that like it, but you're swimming against the tide or pissing into the wind in many ways. Uh, but I, you know, I'm going to continue to try and shove you down people's throats as much as possible. Thank you. I love the work that you do. I mean, I have a slightly more positive view. I think people do care.
Starting point is 01:57:03 They just don't know. But I feel like people that do know, and I meet people every single day, like they're learning every single day, and they're like, I did not know that. And now that I do, everything's changed. And I think most people like that. They just do not know these things.
Starting point is 01:57:19 They do not know, you know, men lead in nine or top 10 cause of death in the USA. They do not know that boys are behind every stage of education. They do not know how devastating circumcision is. They do not know how many millions of men are being abused in relate. And when they do know, they care. So the issue is, I guess the ball is in my court now and people like me who are their job is to make people aware awareness raising campaigns.
Starting point is 01:57:43 And yeah, we need more people like me and yourself to make people aware. So they do discover their compassion for men, men and boys. Yeah. And thanks for shoving it down there for it. Appreciate it. One more time, dude. I'm going to keep on doing it. Every time that you post something, I find it fascinating.
Starting point is 01:57:58 I've got an archive of interesting carousels and stuff that I always want to talk to you about. And, uh, yeah, it's, uh, it's been great. It's been really, really great seeing you go on this little journey. So why should people go? They want to keep up to date with the stuff that you do? Uh, I mean, I'm dipping my toes in Twitter now, but still Instagram at the Tin Men, one word, uh, and everything you need is from there. I am, I am trying to get off the screen and into people's faces a bit more.
Starting point is 01:58:22 I'm going to be sharing more information on that soon. Very exciting campaign. And yeah, at the Tin Men on Instagram. Oh yeah. George, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Bye bye.

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