Offline with Jon Favreau - Raising Boys in the Era of Incels, MAGA, and the Manosphere

Episode Date: July 17, 2025

Boys today are being told to man up by the right and sit down by the left. Coming of age in the shadow of #MeToo and wading through algorithms rife with manosphere content, many young men are accepting the far right’s simple answers and leaning into traditional masculinity…without realizing it’s stunting their emotional development. Others are letting technology isolate and depress them. What is it about boys' psychology that makes them so vulnerable to the Internet Age? How does patriarchy lead well-intentioned parents to treat their sons less affectionately? When will men have a liberation movement—and do they deserve one? Ruth Whippman, author of BoyMom, sits down with BoyDad Jon to unpack it all.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

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That's q-u-i-n-c-e dot com slash offline to get free shipping and 365-day returns. quince.com slash offline. We never really fixed all the old problems of masculinity. So all these like old pressures that mean that boys are sort of shut down and not allowed to express their feelings and not allowed to be vulnerable and aren't really taught those skills of friendship. But then there's this kind of newer narrative that comes mainly from the left, which is like, you know, shut

up, you're so privileged, you don't really have any problems, like, time for you to pipe down and everyone else to have a voice, which I think comes from a good place. But I think that boys now, this sort of generation of boys just feel very shut down from all sides. It's like man up on the one hand, shut up on the other hand, and they just don't really know how to be. You can see the downstream effects of that night. ["The Last Supper"] ["The Last Supper"] All right, I'm here with Austin and Emma.

Howdy, John. For another episode. Hello, John. Hello. How you doing? I'm good. So we just got out For another episode. Hello, John. Hello. How you doing? I'm good. So we just got out of taping with Ruth Whitman.

Can you talk about who she is and why we had her on today? Ruth Whitman is the author of Boy Mom. Ruth is the mother of three boys. And basically the book is about as she's having her third child around 2017, and she has always, she's raised a feminist by feminist parents, and she's a feminist, and she felt her sort of feminist principles collide with being the mother of three boys in the middle of the MeToo era. And then she went on this research project that ended up being this book,

where she talked to boys all over the country. Young boys of all ages, all different walks of life, all different political persuasions, everyone. You've been talking about this book in our meetings for months at this point. I know you have boys yourself, two young boys. Can you talk about why this book resonated so much with you and why you wanted to have this conversation?

So the recommendation came from Emily, who read this book a long time ago. And like every time I went to bed and she was reading the book, she was like, I want to read you more about this book. And this is great. And I had been, since the boys were born, since Charlie was born,

like looking for good parenting books because you just, you know, have no fucking idea what you're doing. And so you want these, and there's a lot of bad parenting books out there. Can imagine. And there's almost no good parenting books for dads. And so I had been sort of like,

oh, parenting book, really? And I was like, no, this is a good one. I'm like, even though it's boy mom, but I picked it up, read it, and it's the best parenting book that I've read. And it also doubled that, like I thought I was just getting into best parenting book that I've read. And it also doubled that. Like, I thought I was just getting into a parenting book, but it sort of doubles as a book about masculinity.

And it really connects to so many of the conversations we've been having both on this show and on Pod Save America and everywhere else about, like, young men and their drifts away from the Democratic Party and towards Donald Trump and why? It really connects so many of the things we talked about on the show. It's like incels, it's screen time, it's interpersonal relationships. It's so much more than just parenting. Yeah. No, I thought it was...

What did you think of the book? Because I knew. I am not a boy mom. I'm not a mom. And I love this book. I mean, it starts out in a way that I found deeply challenging because it injects nuance into the Me Too movement, which I like really just wanted to see in black and white for a really long time. And it just gets more complex and more interesting from there. And the statistics that it cites are just staggering. The way that self-proclaimed liberals, like well-intentioned people, progressives, are socializing their boys to live by these like toxically masculine ideals is really

upsetting and concerning and totally subconscious. So I think it is an important read, not just for people who are interested in offline themes, but also like dismantling the patriarchy. Yeah, right. And basically, you know, the argument is that dismantling the patriarchy helps men a lot. And that's like something, you know, and Ruth says this, like that's something she's like, you learn in college, right, that the patriarchy hurts men and women. She's like, but people don't really take the men part seriously because then the men become like bad and the women are like, you know, the misogyny is real, so we're focused

on misogyny, which is as we should. But there's also, now that we're dealing with this sort of crisis among men, like maybe we should think about that. Yeah. Yeah. How did it make you feel as the parent of two young boys? Did it reassure you or did it make you more anxious for raising them? It is the first thing that has reassured me more. Really? Yes, because like when we watched social studies, that did not reassure me. It was very well done, but it sort of scared me about what's going to happen in high school. It reassured me because it both reinforced

some of the kind of parenting Emily and I are already doing, but then sort of guided me towards doing even more of it. And it's like what we talk about in the show, which is the fundamentally most important thing to do with other people and especially your children, is to form connections with them, to encourage them to have connection with everyone else, with friends in their life, and to also be willing to be vulnerable,

talk about your feelings. If you raise boys like that, then some of the more ephemeral parts of masculinity or surface level parts of masculinity, like are they gonna be tough, are they not, are they gonna get girl, you know, all that kind of stuff is secondary to are these people going to feel comfortable

having open, honest conversations with other people in their life that they're close to. Starting with their parents, but then moving on to their friends. And if they are comfortable, that's not going to fix all of their problems in life, or lead them to be the perfect boys who have the right feminist principles and aren't misogynistic. Like, it's no assurance. But it's the best sort of... best gift you can give them is raising them that way. That sounds like a good place to take us into the show. Yeah, well, this is my conversation with Ruth Whitman.

Ruth Whitman, welcome to Offline. Thank you so much for having me. I love your book, Boy Mom. Thank you. I picked it up because my wife Emily kept talking about how much she loved it, and I read it, and I think it's the best parenting book that I've read. Wanted to talk about it with you on this show for two reasons.

Most important, I'm a father of two boys, five and one. And also, since the election, I think we've been having a lot of conversations on this show and elsewhere about the shifting politics of young men. And so, wanted to cover that as well. But I know you started this book shortly after your third son was born, I believe around 2017. What made you want to write about the challenges boys are facing today? And how did you go about conducting

the research for people who haven't read it that you needed to answer all the questions that you had? Yeah. So my third boy was born just right as the Me Too movement was just kind of exploding. And we were like a year into the second Trump, sorry, a year into the first Trump administration, groundhog day here. And it really actually does feel like the same kind of moment now. And we were just kind of launched into this global reckoning around toxic masculinity. It was this phrase that you'd never really heard much before, and then suddenly it's everywhere.

And it was this really conflicted space for me. I'm a feminist, I've spent all this time and work in my career sort of advocating for the rights of women and girls. And then suddenly, like, the whole feminist discourse is quite negative about boys and men are terrible. And, you know, every time I look at my phone, there's another terrible thing that another terrible man has done. And it just felt like such a fraught time to be raising boys. I just had all these questions about, you know, how did we get here?

Where have we gone wrong, like, at a systemic level in how we're raising boys that this kind of thing has become so normalized? And, you know, how can we do better? And also just, you know, I felt like psychologically, I had this real unease about the way that the conversation was unfolding because I thought, you know, being a boy growing up like in the shadow of this conversation, hearing this felt like such a sort of psychologically unhealthy environment for boys in a way. And you know, I felt very conflicted as a feminist, as a mom. So I just sort of wanted to unpack it all. And you know,

I spent several years reporting the book. I went all over the country talking to boys of really very different backgrounds, different political affiliations, different geographic locations, different economic backgrounds, racial backgrounds. You know, just finding out about their lives. I went to all kinds of spaces where boys hang out. I went to schools. I went to therapy groups. I went to online spaces, you know, some really pretty toxic online spaces. And I just tried to listen to what they were saying and what they were telling me.

And you mentioned that, you know, a big theme of this book is sort of you being the mother of three boys sort of colliding with your feminist principles. Right. And at one point you wrote, you felt like you had walked into your own ideological trap. Right. And at one point you wrote, you felt like you had walked into your own ideological trap.

Right, absolutely. What did you mean by that? Yeah, it was a really sort of awful feeling. So I had grown up with a version of feminism that like gender is entirely socialized. So, you know, the reason why boys and men behave badly is because we kind of socialize them into it and we enable it. We let them get away with things.

You know, all these stories like boys will be boys. You know, it's just like this kind of weird coddling that we allow boys to kind of get away with things and then that continues. And so, you know, by that logic, you know, that we have a lot of control over, you know, what our kids do, what they're like. And I do believe that we do have some control, but then as soon as I had three boys, I went in with all this hubris and I was like,

my boys are going to be different. They're going to be these like feminist, sensitive, thoughtful. They're going to read bell hooks and they're going to... And then of course, obviously that was proved to be complete rubbish. And they were the wildest, the most like nerf gun loving, hitting, like every form of kind of junior toxic masculinity was unfolding in our home. And I think the ideological trap was that,

if gender is all socialized and if we do have that much control, then this kind of shit show that's involving in my house must be my fault. Right. Well, you found that, like, contrary to your prior belief and the belief of many, there are hardwired gender differences between boys and girls that aren't necessarily connected to how each individual child is raised, that come through at a very early age.

Yeah. What are some of those differences? Okay, so I want to be clear that these are group level differences. You know, this is like statistical distribution rather than any individual. And people always say, well, my girl is just as wild as any boy, or my boy is, you know, whatever. And that's all true. But at a group level, so boys are in general more active,

they play more physically, they're more prone to like rough and tumble kind of play, and you see that in other species as well. But one of the things that really shocked me when I started digging into the research on like hardwired gender differences or biologically rooted gender differences was actually almost like the opposite of the story that we tell about masculinity. We sort of see boys as these like rough and tumble little kind of tough, aggressive little beasties. But actually, what the research shows is that they're actually more fragile and

vulnerable and emotionally sensitive, you know, biologically innately, than same-aged girls are. And that was a real shock to me. That is wild. Yeah. I mean, I get it because our eldest, Charlie, who's about to be five next week, he is a very sweet boy. And so we're feeling very, for now, we're very lucky.

But like, very active, very physical. And also, like, Emily and I noticed that at such a young age, you know, we did not want to, like, push him into, like, Emily and I noticed that at such a young age, you know, we did not want to like push him into like play with trucks or don't play with... Like, we sort of gave him everything. Right. Yeah. It is fun. We're like, wait, he's gravitating towards the boys stuff, even though we have done nothing.

I know. And like one of the academics that I interviewed for this book, she said, you know, parenting turns everybody into this like rabid gender essentialist. Yes. Because it just sort of happens and it's unclear. And a lot of the time I was like, you know, am I socializing my boys into this? I feel like I'm trying to socialize them away from all this. Right. You know, and if I am socializing them into it, it must be happening at this very like

unconscious level. So at some point, girls also get social and cultural messages that reinforce what women are supposed to be. Boys get messages that reinforce what men are supposed to be. So this happens very early too. I think that's why, at least in my view, it's hard to sort of unpack what is hardwired in a biological way and what is just you are socialized with cues that we might not even see at such a young age, like which is which.

But at some point, you know, they do get socialized into certain gender roles. What are some examples and like how does this socialization affect boys and girls differently? Yeah, so I think some of the things that I picked out with boys, I think what ends up happening is there's this weird kind of double whammy that happens because there's this, you know, as I mentioned there's this innate sort of vulnerability. A baby boy's brain is born, when he's born, is about a month to six weeks behind a girl's brain in right brain development, so the kind of social emotional center. So they need a lot of nurture, a lot of caretaking from parents. But our kind of stories about masculinity are such that we kind of see them as like tougher and

angrier and more robust and we treat them that way. And there's lots of studies that show that there's like a gap in the way that we nurture boys and we nurture girls in the Western world. It's different, you know different in different cultures. But broadly speaking, we kind of handle baby boys differently. We roughhouse with boys right from babyhood. And you can almost see it. If you think about this, you can play it out in your mind that a man gets hold of a baby boy or even a woman, and they're like, hey there, buddy, and throwing him up, and hey there, little man. It's a different tone of voice. But there's lots of psychological research

that supports this. And then girls, we call them sweetheart. We talk in a tender tone of voice. Girls receive around twice as much of this caretaking touch as boys who receive much more roughhousing type touch. We talk to girls more about emotions. There's all this research that shows that parents use almost,

well, actually subtly different vocabularies when they talk to girls and they talk to boys. So they use more emotion related words when they talk to girls than they do with boys. And we give girls all these stories and books and movies about things like friendship and connection and kindness. And they all wear these T-shirts that say, be kind and be loving. Whereas boys, we're sort of giving them this message of, be a battle hero, be a monster, be a vehicle lover. And gendered toys, the list goes on.

So gendered socialization is very real. And if anything, it's getting more and more separated and extreme. You mentioned the battlefication of content and cultural things that our kids consume. And I totally have noticed that. Which was like, you know, he's into Legos, and so we do Legos, but then all of the Lego shows on television are suddenly about like, you know, battling. And I'm just like, how did we get here so fast?

Right. And that's changed. There was this research that showed that in the 70s, I think a negligible number of LEGO sets had weapons in them. And the ones that they did were these obscure medieval weapons that you couldn't even recognize. And now, well over a third of sets have weapons, and they are almost all guns.

Yeah. So you know, and I think it's sort of a trend that parallels the sort of princessification of girl childhood. You know, that girl childhood has got so pink and so princessy and so sparkly and so gendered, but the same process has kind of been happening with always. For sure. You cited a study that I found fascinating and worrisome. It's from Judy Chu, who's at Stanford.

And she conducted a study of four and five-year-old boys. She found that they were as capable as girls as reading emotions and forming close friendships. But by the time they reached first grade, they started to subscribe to more classic notions of masculinity and become more emotionally distant from friends. And interestingly, it applied only when they were around their peers and not necessarily with their parents. What do you think happens between four and five

and first grade? Well, I think kids go to school. So their peers become much bigger influence than they had been previously. And I think what happens is two things. It's about both what we do teach boys and the messages that we give them, and also all the things that we fail to teach them,

that we're not kind of teaching them. So I have this example, when my boys were quite small, we were in the bookstore and I saw this magazine that was so clearly coded for girls. It was like, you know, pink sparkly cover and like a friendship bracelet giveaway and all the rest of it. And I took it down. It was for tween girls. And the first story was about this girl. She's been invited to these two birthday parties

and they're happening at the same time. And she's really worried. She doesn't want to let down either of her friends. So she said, does this elaborate ruse where she like shuttles between the two parties and she like runs out the back door to the other party, has the cake there, runs back to the other one. You know, this is like very extreme emotional labor that this like seven year old girl is performing. And I read this story in astonishment, you know, I've got three boys and I was like, my boys will never see a story like this. There will never be like a story about some boy who's so worried about disappointing his friend that he's going between two birthday parties. And I realized

that in some ways we talk about emotional labor that we put on women as this real burden or this real bad thing, but it is actually those skills about tracking other people's feelings, seeing it as your responsibility to like enter into those kind of emotionally intimate friendships and see other people's experiences your responsibility. Those are the real like fundamentals of human connection and we're not really teaching them to boys. Yeah. So I think, you know, they do lose out on these skills.

This influenced me in that at Charlie's school, some of the parents come in like once a month and read a book to the class. And I had been talking to his teachers and they're like, yeah, we'd love you to have you come in. And I was like, should I read a book about like age-appropriate book about civics or getting involved? And Emily made fun of me instantly in the parent-teacher conference. She's like, that's boring, we're not doing that. But I was like thinking about it. And so so I ended up reading,

because we like, The Rabbit Listened, which is this book about this kid who like, his tower of blocks comes down, and all these animals come up to him, and one of them's like yelling, and the other one's like, let's knock someone else's down. And then finally the rabbit just shows up,

and the rabbit just sits there and listens to the kid. Oh, I love that. And it's like, just shows up and the rabbit just sits there and like listens to the kid. Oh, I love that. And it's like, and he just gets to unload on him and it's like about emotion. And it is, it's funny because it is, it's like a, it's a book that I never would have read. Would have child-sent, right. Yeah, or like read myself as a child, right?

Like there's just, the fact that that book exists is like, you know, proves the point that there's so few books. So few of them. And what's interesting is it's an animal, right? Because whenever a boy is either an animal or a digger, like you can only have an emotional life if you're a bulldozer or a dog. But the ones with real boys, I mean, there's almost none.

And the ones that you see with like real boys, and my kid's a bit older than yours, and you see all these sort of like middle grade boots, like, you know, the wimpy kid or whatever whatever and they're almost like, there's no sort of, it's not really, when friendship comes up, it's almost like coded as this girly thing that we don't really want to acknowledge or like, you know, storylines about, oh, how embarrassing it is that we have like a best friend's bracelet or whatever and it's like really lame. And so, you know, there's a lot of subtle messaging in there.

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Our kind of current micro generation of young men are the ones that were kind of going through puberty, coming of age, during the explosion of the Me Too movement, which was when I started writing this book. And they have spent their entire adolescence, really, in the shadow of this conversation about toxic masculinity, about male harm, and these kind of messages from

the left. So in some ways this is really important and really good. So this generation of boys are like very informed about things like consent and sexual violence in a way that previous generations just never really considered or thought about. So there are positive developments, but I think they're kind of caught in the middle of these two things. Like, we never really fixed all the old problems of masculinity. So all these, like, old pressures and old kind of prohibitions that mean that boys are sort of shut down and not allowed to express their feelings and not allowed to be vulnerable and aren't really taught those skills of friendship. So they're sort of shut down emotionally in that way. But then there's also this kind of newer narrative that comes mainly from the left, which is like, you know, shut up, you're so privileged,

you don't really have any problems, like don't take up too much space, you know, time for you to pipe down and everyone else to have a voice, which I think comes from a good place. But I think that boys now, this sort of generation of boys just feel very shut down from all sides. It's like man up on the one hand,

shut up on the other hand, and they just don't really know how to be. And I think it's, you can see the downstream effects of that now. You can see that this generation of boys is, you know, they're moving rightward, they're very susceptible to these kind of bad actors, they're resentful, they're angry inward, they're very susceptible to these kind of bad actors, they're resentful,

they're angry in a lot of ways, and they feel, and they're very avoidant as well of real life. Yeah, I've talked about this as the messages can be past the mic and also silence is complicity. Right, it's so true. It's like what do you do? And you do get a second, you're like, okay, I'm not the right person to talk about this, but also

I should say something. I should say something, but I don't know what. How do I say? And it's tough because there's not a lot of- It's so hard. And I also think just the social media environment, the way the information environment is now, is that there was a time when even if this reckoning was happening, you could work it out and talk about it

in these smaller spaces with people that you know and trust. And now, people are working it out in public with very little room for mistake. Yeah, very little room for mistake or empathy. And I think it's sort of become very politically coded. It's almost like, if you are on the left, you are on the side of women and girls. And like being advocating for boys and men has become this like right-coded activity.

So this is like part of the tension that I really felt around this. It's like, I'm a feminist. Of course I support women and girls, but like I want to advocate for men and boys, but somehow you have to be so careful because it starts to sound like this other sort of similar but quite different thing, which is just like sounding like this rabid like men's rights activist who sort of hates women and blames them for like all the problems that men are facing. So it's a fine line. Did you get criticism from the left? From like feminists or progressives? A little bit. So not actually as much as I thought. I sort of anticipated getting criticism

from both the left and the right. And it's been far more from the right, obviously, which is very validating and good. Excellent. Right. I have had a little bit, like sometimes people sort of really buy into this narrative of like, you know, it's sort of as, it's almost the same narrative that you see on both the left and the right, which is this zero sum game, you know, whatever, you, whatever men and boys gain, women and girls lose, and vice versa. So I have had pockets of that,

but not too much, thankfully. I mean, what I found fascinating is that by calling out sort of masculinity itself as the issue, right? And you kind of talk about how toxic masculinity isn't very helpful as a way to talk about all this. Yeah. But also positive masculinity or aspirational masculinity isn't helpful either.

And you sort of land on a term impossible masculinity. Right. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. So I think the phrase impossible masculinity I use to kind of capture this idea that it's almost impossible from all sides. You know, as I was saying, it's sort of the expectations of masculinity in and of themselves, which are like, be tough, be strong, be a man, but never be weak, never show vulnerability, never, you know, never slip up, be a superhero. That's

impossible. You know, obviously, just by definition, no real human is like that or can be like that. But then also, there's this sort of impossible from the other side, which is like, you're a predator, you're toxic, you're terrible. And I think boys, and also I think they're sort of held to account for these two different ways of being in the world.

So it's like, they're still very much held to these old school masculine expectations. Like those have not gone away. You still have to be a man. You still have to be tough. You still have to be strong. You still can't really show weakness, but you also have to be sensitive and cautious

and like never overstep and never be a creep. And it's just, so that was where the impossible thing came from. The reason, to your other point, the reason why the positive masculinity, honestly, this is the thing, I published a piece about this for the New York Times and I thought it was this incredibly minor semantic point

that like nobody would care about. And I was amazed they went for the article. And this has got me more abuse and criticism and death threats and rape threats and God knows what, than anything that I've ever written in my life. Which was, I was saying, when we say to, like, in these kinds of programs that we have for boys, where we just sort of say,

okay, it's time for some positive masculinity, these boys are already under a lot of pressure to be masculine anyway. So it's just sort of like, well, we can't possibly like call it femininity. And we can't possibly just be human, because that would be like emasculating. So, you know, we've got to say that everything,

you know, whether it's friendships or being emotionally vulnerable, that's masculine too. But it sort of ends up reinforcing the idea that you have to be masculine. That you need that frame. Right, that it just sort of becomes so self-reinforcing. So I was like, you know, can we just like talk about humanity? Which is not to say that there is anything wrong

with any of the, you know, with being masculine, with appearing masculine, with any of those like masculine coded traits, great. But like let's just stop reinforcing those pressures. Well, it's also interesting how the difference between how we talk about feminism and how we talk about masculinity or being fem, like you know, mostly the discussion around feminism

is having feminist principles and beliefs, and it's related to politics a lot. And masculinity is not related to your beliefs about, and gender and all that kind of stuff, it's about how you are involved. How you behave in the world. Your characteristics, how you behave, how you look, like all that.

And even, I think you wrote that New York Times piece right before the election, and you talked about Tim Walz. And it was like Tim Walz to be a guys guy had to be like, okay, I'm going to be nicer and kinder than the Republicans, but I'm going to do it by showing like how much I still like sports even if he doesn't really like sports. Right, right. It's just like you have to, and it was And it was just overstating it all the time. And you can see why, you know, poor Tim Watts, and I don't want to make him,

but it was like every other sentence, it's your guns or your sports or your whatever, and it just became slight caricature. Whereas, I think that we give boys so little space to be fully human, like all of the best things in life, like friendships, relationships, emotions, being vulnerable, they're all sort of slightly feminine coded and sort of boys see them as being slightly gay or a bit... So it's just like we're narrowing the frame

in which boys operate. And I think positive masculinity just sort of... We wouldn't talk about... If I had a daughter and someone was offering her a program in positive femininity instead of feminism, I'd just be like, oh, honestly, you know. You mentioned being gay, and I remember there's one part in your book where I think a young man told you like, if my friends or if I was gay, that'd be fine,

but if you're gonna be straight, you can't act gay. Right, right, right, and even if you're gay, that's worse. Right, right, it. That's the worst. Right, right. It was that. It was like, if you like guys, great. So they're not homophobic. So I realized that this fear of being emasculated is actually more rooted in misogyny than it is in homophobia.

That was the test. No, it's true. Because it was like, actually they were like, you like guys, fine, just don't be gay-ish. Don't be a woman. Don't be a pussy. Well, and back to, again, not picking on Tim Wells, but back to the politics conversation, one takeaway from the election is, well,

we need democratic politicians who can go on all these, on sport shows, and talk about sports and drink beer and all that stuff. And it's like, yeah, except what if you don't like beer, or what if you don't like sports? You can still hang out with men. Right, exactly. And you can still reach young men, like sports and drinking and guns.

Those aren't the only ways to reach young men. And in fact, if we push people to do that, they are going, and they don't actually like those things, they're gonna come off as inauthentic. Right, that's true. And I think there is this like really false note to it. There's sort of like this, you know, blend the broccoli into the cake kind of thing.

There's just something like really patronizing about it. Yeah. And I think we're not used to seeing masculinity as something limiting. We're used to seeing it as something sort of that gives you agency and power and all the rest of it, which is great. But I think it can really put these huge limitations on boys and men's ability to be like fully

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Again, that's promo code OFFLINE for 60% off your first order plus free shipping at Smalls.com. I want to talk more about the friendship part of this because I think it's really important. You write about the decline of socializing among kids in general, especially boys, who just have a harder time developing friendships where they can let their guard down, be vulnerable, talk about what they're feeling. I feel like this is also a problem that stretches deep into adulthood with men.

Why do you think that is, and why don't we pay enough attention to it or value it enough? Yeah, it's a really interesting point. So this was one thing. So I interviewed many, many boys and young men, many different situations. And this was like something that I think pretty much every single one of them mentioned to me at some point in slightly different ways. And some of these people were genuinely really isolated. And that's a real problem as well, the growing material isolation of many young men and sort of this kind of migration online.

But a lot of them did have buddies to hang out with. They were like, you know, social, they saw people. But it was this idea that they couldn't really speak very honestly with their buddies. It was like this idea that they had to kind of perform this masculinity. It was like bulletproof. It was like banter. It was trash talk. It was, you know, and I think there's lots of reasons for it. I mean, it's cultural messaging. It's like, it was this weird thing that like everybody wanted to break out of it, but nobody felt they could.

You know, nobody, like every single one of them, I think, wanted something different. I had imagined that they'd all be like, well, this is just the way we like it. You won't understand you're a woman, you know, we're different. But they were like, I would love to have these emotionally intimate friendships, but no one wants to kind of make the first move. They feel like they don't have the skill set, which goes back to what we were talking about, they're just not really taught it. And they have all this cultural messaging about, you know, being strong and being tough and having agency and, you know, being an individual and not sort of working in a community in that way. So I think there's a lot of like very subtle messaging around that that boys get. It is interesting because I think boys and young men,

especially as you're going through high school and college, you're almost around so many people, and maybe you have friends who are girls, and you're still talking to your parents, stuff like that, that you can kind of get through that. Like, you are just playing around with your friends. You start to notice it more as you get older, and you have your own family, and like anyone else, like a lot of moms do, you want to, like,

talk to other people in the same situation about what they're facing, and talk about, like, like how it's challenging and how you're, you know, it's tiring or this or the stresses that you're under and it, you just have fewer male friends that you can really connect with like that. Like I'm lucky I've had, I've had like, I have a few really good friends so I can just talk to about whatever, but it's, it's not as many as I used to. Right. It's hard. And I think that, you know, in order to have those kind of

conversations, everyone needs to know what they're doing. Like, the person revealing the information needs to know how to reveal it, and the person sort of receiving it needs to know how to receive it. And I think that mentors haven't really been taught that skill set, and these are very real things. And I think it is seen as kind of emasculating. There's always this idea that we don't want to be girly or, you know, that sort of specter lurking around. think it is seen as kind of emasculating. There's always this idea that we don't want to be girly or that sort of specter lurking around. But it is also just like a basic skills problem. I know that I had this book group, like every mom, I was in a book group.

We talk about the book for five minutes and then it was all like, our marriages and our relationships and whatever. And then my husband was like, I want to have a book group. Maybe I'll ask some dads. And the dads all kind of got together, but they just didn't, they couldn't cook it. They just couldn't get that. They didn't know how to do it.

And it's really strange. And he's like, well, how do you get into those conversations? And I'm like, it's so intuitive. I don't even know. I couldn't break it down at this point. I say this to Emily all the time because she's like, well, now Charlie's going to school, there's a bunch of dads in the class,

and I'm like, I don't want to be friends with new dads. I don't know how to be friends with new dads. I have my friends. Right, and it feels weird. I'm 44 years old, how am I going to make new friends and then also have, talk to them about vulnerable things? That's a really hard thing to do. There's a lot of barriers, there really are.

So one thing you said, I think because of sort of the lack of friendships and connection that way, one place that young kids are going is online. Right. And you know, this is a topic near and dear to this show, which is how much time kids are spending with their screen. What's the difference between boys and girls here? And can you talk about,

you see the problem as less about what they're watching and more about how much they're watching and what they're missing out on while they're watching. Right. I mean, I think it is both. But so this, I think in the sort of debate about teens and screen time, the sort of gendered piece of it has got really lost in a way. But actually, you know, all teenagers are spending way more time online, obviously, and way less time socializing in person. And those are trends that are kind of across the board and have been, you know, happening for a long time. But this problem is significant. They call this displacement. So time that you would have spent socializing or sleeping

or doing something else, but especially socializing, people are now spending on a screen. But that displacement problem is significantly worse for boys than it is for girls. Boys are spending around five hours more per week on a screen than girls. Oh, wow. And it depends how you count it, because they sometimes

count sports as socializing. But if you take sports out of the equation, teenage boys are now spending less than an hour socializing in person per week, so 42 minutes, whereas girls are spending six hours socializing. So it's a really big difference. And then also, boys and girls are using screens in different ways.

I think for boys, a lot of social life has just kind of migrated online. So it's like these big online video games, you know, and those are kind of the new male social spaces. Also, these kind of places like Discord, you know, where some quite toxic stuff happens. YouTube is huge, you know, watching YouTube. And then also these kind of like, you know, when we're talking about what they're watching, I mean, I think there are real problems with like toxic

masculinity influences and all these bad actors, grifters, et cetera, online that are very influential with young men at the moment. But yeah, I think it's both problems. I worry a lot about how AI is going to supercharge that. Oh, yeah. Because if you can start having relationships or the illusion of a relationship or a friendship with a chatbot that's getting back to you all the time, and it's frictionless. Yeah.

Right? And that's easy. And it sort of, you don't have to then do the sometimes uncomfortable clumsy work of meeting someone in person. Right. And even without chatbots, that's already happening. I mean, I think like what happens, you know, we talked about impossible masculinity and it's so hard to be, it's so hard to be a person, but I think it's very specifically hard to be a young man right now in like how you're supposed to act in the real world. So all of those like, and they don't have the skills to kind of meet that challenge, you know, this particularly hard challenge.

So it's so easy to avoid it. And you know, online life is frictionless in that way. You know, you don't really have to do that like hard emotional and social work. And so they're kind of becoming more and more avoidant this generation. And then the benefits are immediate. You get the quick dopamine hit and the drawbacks and the harms are sort of subtler and like just sort of build up over time. Much more long term. Yeah, right, exactly. You spent some time with some incels.

Yes, I did. And I think you came away with the reaction that sort of challenged your priors. Yeah. You wrote, I'd spent all this time searching for a space in which boys and young men felt they could disregard masculine norms, take off the mask, and be vulnerable with each other. I thought I might find it in some kind of feminist affinity circle or a therapy group run by a soft-spoken vegan, but instead I had found it right here at the heart of the

Manosphere in Toxic Masculinity Central. Why did those boys feel and men feel like they could be vulnerable with each other in that space? So this was one of the really biggest surprises, as you can see. So to be clear, there is a lot of like extremely toxic stuff in these spaces, you know, there's extreme misogyny, racism, white supremacy, antisemitism, like every horrible thing. It's all there. It's all there and it's all very obvious. But what I hadn't anticipated was just this like level

of emotional vulnerability and they talk about their mental health, they talk about their feelings, they talk about suicidal thoughts, they talk about, and what, so several people have written about this as well and it's just this idea that I think in cells, the rest of the manuscript is all about kind of this idea that there's this kind of alpha male

and it's sort of holding out this hope, this like false hope to boys that they can kind of somehow get there. So like, Andrew Tay and his kind of ilk are like, if you just do these 10 things and take these supplements and lift these weights and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and you know, whatever, then you too can become an alpha male. Whereas the incels have just kind of given up.

Like that is their whole founding philosophy. It's like they believe in this hierarchy of masculinity. They believe in this alpha male, they call them chads. They believe this thing exists, but they've given up any hope of ever getting there themselves. And in a weird sort of way, it's like oddly freeing for them. So they've got nothing to prove. So, you know, I went very deep with these two characters, one of whom was actually very sweet, the other of whom was quite hard to like, to say the least.

But they both said the same thing, which was just like, in real life, they always felt they had to kind of perform masculinity and appear tough. And then suddenly it's like, there's nothing to lose. We can just be vulnerable with each other. We can just like say it like it is. And that was, you know, being out of that like hierarchy of masculinity was actually really sort of weirdly for them. It is funny because just from a political standpoint, there are so many times when Donald Trump has done something

or then Elon Musk or any of these people, and I'm like, you know, they could have just used a hug. A couple more hugs at various points in their lives. It's so true. Like that seems like what's missing. It's so true. And it seems like everything in your book points in that direction. Yeah, I mean, it's just this kind of undernurture.

And these guys, it was just really sad, because you talk to them, and they have these toxic opinions that would last for about three seconds. And I hate women, and they're to blame. And you just scratch the surface, and it's just this well of pain and trauma and loneliness and sadness and feelings of inadequacy and all the rest of it. And it was just like, it takes five minutes of listening for the tone to change, you know.

Yeah. And it's, I mean, I think you wrote about this as well. It's, we talk a lot about, rightly so, about like these impossible beauty standards for women and what women have to do. And I think for the, especially for the incels, they're like, well, in this world where, you know, you have to be a Chad to get women, and when we look like this, what the hell? And they don't know what to do about that. Right, and that was a huge thing.

I hadn't, this was a surprise to me, I hadn't realized just like how much body image issues and like pressure on how you look has like really sort of ratcheted up for men and boys and you know all these like fitness influencers and this like you know just body shape I think you know you can chart it with like CGI and Marvel superheroes and they're just like the ideal body shape for men is like growing and growing and growing as the ideal body shape for women is like shrinking and shrinking and shrinking. And that's tough. And I think these guys were like, you know, and they felt that it was like very acceptable

to like body shame men in a way that it is no longer quite so socially acceptable to body shame women. So like a lot of them were short. That was a huge thing. And they're like, there's not much you can do about that. And it's totally fine for women to be like, kill all short men, or I would never date a short guy, or, you know. And, like, why is this different? Right, right.

You had some pretty honest conversations with young men about sex. Yes. Good for you. Good for them, too. Not an easy thing to do. I had two reactions to that part of the book. One, thank God I didn't grow up in the 2010s and 2020s. But then two, I was like, oh shit,

my kids will have to navigate this increasingly fraught environment. What did you learn, what were your main takeaways from your conversations about sex and relationships? So lots of different ones. So boys are having less sex than ever before. And that's pertaining to some of the things we've already talked about, about this very fraught world

where they're very, like, I hadn't realized how fearful boys were of like cancel culture, of like me too culture, of this idea of being accused of something. And I think that it's been, it's really hard to date in real life and have sex in real life for boys right now. And it's very, very easy for them to watch porn. So I think that has shifted, you know, if this trend of like displacement is happening anywhere, you know, its most extreme manifestation is in the world of sex and dating, you know,

the replacement of real life relationships and sex with porn. So that was huge. And I think boys felt a lot of pressure around masculinity and sex in both directions. So this was like the impossible thing that they still felt that girls held them to this standard, which is like, be very masculine, like be dominant, be aggressive, you know. And weird things like, you know, the trend for choking. Have you come across this? I had not until I mean, I sort of knew about it in the background, but until I read the book, I was like, oh, yeah.

Right. And so I'd always heard, you know, I'd heard about this trend towards choking, but the way that I'd always seen it framed was that, you know, it's something that boys are like inflicting on girls against their will or they don't really want it or girls kind of go along with it. But in the research and Debbie Herbenik, who's this great like researcher on like college kids and sex, she interviewed tons of college students about their sexual lives. And she found that these kinds of rough sex practices are very, very normal, but they're as much coming from girls as they are from boys, you know, and it's almost like the girls are expecting this from the boys.

They're holding them to these standards, like, if he doesn't do this, he's not, like, masculine. He's not a real man, you know. And I think a lot of the boys were like, oh, God, I don't know how to how to be, you know, do you want me to be dominant and aggressive? But like, if I overstep by just a tiny smidge, then I could get, like, canceled and isolated. It really does seem like a common theme here is that patriarchy and masculinity don't just harm women, though they do. They also harm men. Harm men, yeah, absolutely.

In a way, and it's not the men necessarily that are bad, or maybe they become that way, but it's not the men necessarily that we should better, that are bad, or maybe they become that way. But it's these structures, these social structures that we've had for way too long. Right. And I think people like often, like feminists have done a gender studies class in college and they learn like patriarchy harms men too. And they're like, great. And then they kind of forget about it. It's just like, that's gone. And so, you know, and they don't really have any empathy about how that actually feels in real life

and what it's like. I mean, I write this line in the book, which is like under patriarchy, boys and men get everything except the thing that's most worth having. Yeah. Which is like intimate human connection. Yeah.

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I thought that was a very insightful description of our politics over the last ten years. Specifically about incels, but it is. It's bigger than that. Let's talk about the impact of Trump and Trumpism on men and boys. So demographic group that swung the most towards Trump in the last election was Gen Z men.

There's even some evidence that it was younger Gen Z men who had their high school or college years interrupted by the pandemic. And that some of the older Gen Z men were still voting more Democrat. Yeah. I've always thought this made sense. Now having read your book, I think it makes even more sense. But I'd love to hear your thoughts on why young men might have drifted towards Trump

in the last election. Right. I think it's a few things. So I think it is kind of failures of the left to kind of engage young men and to listen to young men. And I think there has been this like, slightly misandry's tone to the rhetoric of the, you know, not coming from the actual Democratic Party, but like from the kind of left broadly, I think there is this sort of normalization of misand Andrew, which I think is hard on boys and men, you know, and it's, you know, it's not the same as misogyny.

And, you know, we understand why this has happened and this like, but I think boys are feeling very shut down and unheard on the left and they're feeling like they've been kind of demonized. And so they're quite vulnerable to these bad actors. And I think that we didn't fix those old problems. So they're sort of already like from childhood prime to believe that their worth lies in their masculinity.

They're being shut down from the left. And so then someone comes along and says, I'm a strong man, I can make you masculine. Let's go back. It's all women's fault. It's all immigrants fault. That message becomes, you know, they're already kind of primed to receive it and to blame, you know, or to sort of look for problems outside themselves that, you know, of their own feelings of inadequacy and lack of self-worth in this moment. So I think it's coming from both directions. And I think those messages are like really appealing. And somebody

who's just talking simply and listening to them and telling them that they don't suck, you know, I think is a huge. And your point about this sort of like hyper-individualized culture as well, because we've been talking so much about the value and need for connection and relationships. And I think that in some ways, whether it's certain podcasts or Manosphere spaces or Donald Trump's movement,

it's given people in general, and I think young men too, the sense of community and belonging. And it's like every human, everywhere, is looking for belonging and connection. That is just a fundamental human need. And if you don't get it, you're going to look for it, and you could be looking for it in some pretty toxic places, but you'd rather that than just be alone.

Right, absolutely. I mean, I think this is like wellspring of loneliness and sort of reclusivity and sort of feelings of isolation and being politically isolated. And then, yes, they do find belonging and they find a narrative like a Positive story about themselves. However, like flawed and toxic that story is at least it's not like you're terrible You're the problem and your problems don't matter you know if you were in charge of the Democratic Party's strategic outreach to young men and Believe it or not. There are quite a few people working on that these days

Degrees of success and silliness. What would you do? So I think the most important thing is to listen. I was really surprised. When I first started interviewing teenage boys and young men, I imagined that these conversations would be utterly monosyllabic. They wouldn't want to talk. They wouldn't want to open up.

But what I found was there were these tightly coiled springs. It just came out. Thankfully somebody is listening to me and it's not judging me and it's not telling me I'm terrible and just wants to hear what I actually have to say. So it's very simple. And they just talked and talked and talked and talked. And they were actually really thoughtful, really articulate, really great. Even the incels. Maybe not that one

guy. But like in general. So I think listening is a huge thing. I think this sort of positive masculinity direction, you know, we talked about this, I think it's just a bit kind of cringy and obvious. I mean, one thing that I've been thinking recently is like, young men love a conspiracy theory, you know, we know this and they love this feeling of sort of power and knowing something that other people don't know. So I think there's ways that the left could leverage that because there are real conspiracies happening like right now for real. So if they were able to sort of articulate that in a more direct way,

I think that would be really helpful. I've been thinking about this for a while because I do think like the last sort of male role model that young men liked in politics was like, you know, Barack Obama. Right, right. And I was thinking, I know, I worked for him so I was thinking about like, what did he do? What did he do? It was almost just like he didn't, he was comfortable in his own skin and he was welcoming.

Right, and he was listening. Yeah, and he sort of brought change and hope and I think there's this so many feelings of hopelessness. Right. Yeah. And I think being willing to be hopeful and wear that proudly and not have it seem like it's not a masculine thing. Or the truism in politics is like, strong always wins, right? You got to be strong.

Right, right. Yeah, double down. Hillary Clinton had to show she was strong because she was a woman, but then also Trump is strong. So a Democrat, even a man that tries to go after Trump has to be strong. And everything's around strong. And I think if you just, you must have to like redefine what is valuable.

It's like, does everything need to be strong? Right, and it's just sort of, it loses its power after a while, you know, if everyone's, I think, you know, young men love Bernie Sanders, for example. And that's just like clarity and like this sort of, you know, no bullshit and just kind of clear messaging. And I think there's something about that. And Bernie Sanders is not out there talking about sports or shooting guns.

Right, exactly. I don't think I've ever heard him say the word masculinity. But he can go on Joe Rogan for a couple of hours. Right. And I think that was another thing as well. I think that authenticity and the Rogan thing, you know, that they want to hear people who are real and authentic and they have a really good radar for bullshit, like teenage boys. Yes, for sure. How has the research you've done and the book sort of changed your parenting?

Oh, yeah. It's changed a lot, actually, and it's almost something quite fundamental. People always want my, like, five tips and tricks to get their, like, feminists on. You want... And it's sort of not really like that. I think it's something about just like a very basic reorientation in my relationship towards them, which is just this like coming from a place of empathy and listening. You know, I think all the research about kind of under nurture and the ways that society holds them to these like really rigid and high standards, you know, when it comes to, you know,

like not giving them this sort of very sweet, loving nurture as a general thing. I feel like I have to compensate for that. So I think that the, when you talk about raising boys, people often tell you that you need to be like tougher and more disciplined and more sticker charts and more like, you know, wrestling. It's always like, you've got to wrestle with them.

And I'm like, they get so much of that stuff from the world already. You know, my job is to fill in the gaps when it comes to empathy and nurture. You know, the friendship thing, I think it's like coaching them on their skills about, you know, how to have a friendship, like how to talk to another person, realizing that those skills aren't necessarily intuitive, you know, how to have a friendship, like how to talk to another person, realizing that those skills aren't necessarily intuitive, you know, they're not getting them from the environment. So, like, trying to break it down with them, trying to get them to be interested in other people's emotions.

How has your husband changed his parenting, if at all? So, actually, he has been the biggest convert to all this. It's been really lovely to see. I think that he sort of, you know, as you were talking about this idea of like male friendships being really hard in your like forties, I think he realized and he sort of, it helped him like trace the lines back to some of this parenting stuff in his own childhood. So I think he's really determined to change it. So actually he's been the one who's done a

lot of this like social coaching and saying to like, you know, my middle son had this like conflict with a friend at school. And he was the one who was like saying, well, why don't you listen to what he has to say? And you know, why don't you do this? Or why don't you ask him about his grandma dying? Or why don't you, you know, and he's done a lot of that as well, because he, I think he really feels it very intensely, like what can be lost without it. It's funny because the biggest change I've made, even when I had a great relationship with my dad, still do,

but I cuddle the boys and hug them and give them kisses and just talk to them, like so much more than I ever got from my dad. Because that's just not what people did back then. That's what people did, yeah. Like if you were a dad and a son, you wouldn't do that kind of stuff. But I'm like, and I also know that I'm, you know, at first it was like awkward for me to do this,

but I'd be like, how are you feeling about this, Charlie? And now he's like, I'm feeling a little sad today. But also a little angry. And now he just goes off. Now yeah, now he's plenty of feelings everywhere. But I was just like, and it he just goes off. Now he has plenty of feelings everywhere. But it does feel weird to do it first, because it's not like I had that childhood, right? Right, and so you haven't had it modeled in that way.

Even in adulthood, not a lot of people are asking you, like, how do you feel? Right, right, and it can feel really kind of cringe. It's really excruciating sometimes to do. You feel like you're going off a script. But I think if you if people can do it in the way that feels like as authentic as possible without like, you know, that helps. It is, it's funny when I, when I, when Emily first had Charlie, and I was texting all my friends, and I was like, I am so fucked. This is going to be so hard.

And my friend who has two boys who were like a couple years older than ours, he just said to me something that still stuck with me. He goes, it is hard now, but pretty soon, you're going to have a best friend for life. He's just going to be your pal, he's going to be with you everywhere. And it's funny, I started thinking about it like that. Like, this is a very important relationship, not just me as a father, but like, try to form a connection with your kids. Which I feel like you came to the conclusion to as well,

is like, the more as parents we can just connect with our kids and raise them as adults, like they're about to be adults anyway, like, that is gonna be... be adults anyway. Like that is going to be... Right, it's absolutely that. I think it's just like forming the most authentic connection you can with the actual child that you have in front of you. Not the one that you think you want or the one that you're trying to shape. It's like the actual one that's right there in the most authentic way.

And it sounds, you know, really simple and it's the hardest thing to do sometimes, but it's worth it. It is, but it's rewarding. Ruth Whitman, thank you so much. Such a pleasure. The book is Boy Mom, Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity. It is a fantastic book. Everyone who's a parent should pick it up. Even if you're not a parent, you should pick it up because it tells you a lot about sort of what we're dealing with today in society and especially what young men're dealing with today in society, and especially what young men are dealing with.

So thanks for coming on. It was great to talk to you. Thank you. It was a real pleasure. One quick note before we go. Great new episode of Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams this week. We've always believed that laughing through the pain of American politics is the only way to survive it. And this week, Stacey sits down with someone who understands that better than most, Amber Ruffin, comedian, writer for Late Night with Seth Meyers, and host of the Amber Ruffin show and Have I Got News for You. They talk about how humor helps us navigate Trump's America, why cracking jokes in dark

times isn't just escapism. It's a small way to fight back and remind us of our shared humanity. So tune into this episode and all episodes of Assembly Required Now wherever you get your podcasts. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Emma Illich-Frank. Austin Fisher is our senior producer. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics.

Evan Sutton is our sound editor. And Charlotte Landis is our engineer. And we're also joined by our co-host, Emma Favreau. She's the director of the It's produced by Emma Illich-Frank. Austin Fisher is our senior producer. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. Evan Sutton is our sound editor, and Charlotte Landis is our engineer. Audio support from Kyle Seglen.

Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Dilan Villanueva and our digital team, who film and share our episodes as videos every week. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.