Sex Talks With Emma-Louise Boynton - Why do (some) men hate women? With Laura Bates (Everyday Sexism Project) and Ben Hurst (Beyond Equality)

Episode Date: November 7, 2024

*Trigger warning* we discuss issues around sexual violence, rape and assault in this episode, so please take care while listening. As always, I’ve put resources in the show notes for anyone who has been affected by the topics discussed.  In this live recording of the Sex Talks podcast I wanted to address a question that has been on my mind a lot of late: why do men hate women?  It is provocative, I know, and intentionally so. But amidst the seemingly relentless series of news stories about male violence, It is a question I just can’t shake from my head.  After all, this conversation takes place against a backdrop of ongoing, high profile sexual abuse and rape cases with the likes of Dominuqe Pelicot; Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs; the late Mohammed Al Fayed; and the former CEO of Abercrombie & Fitch Mike Jeffries, amongst some of the high profile names currently under investigation for allegedly committing the most unimaginable crimes.   What’s more, the scale of violence against women and girls is so high police chiefs have declared it a National Emergency here in the UK. So, the purpose of this discussion was thus to try and better understand what is going on, why and what needs to be done now to end this epidemic of violence. I was joined by the brilliant Laura Bates - activist, writer, speaker and journalist. She is also the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, an ever-increasing collection of over 200,000 testimonies of gender inequality. Launched in 2012, the project raises awareness of sexism, provides a cathartic and empowering space for survivors’ stories to be heard and believed, and uses those stories to create real-world change in partnership with politicians, businesses and organisations from the United Nations to the Council of Europe.  She is currently writing her 11th book. I was also joined by Ben Hurst, Director of Facilitation at Beyond Equality, an organisation that is rethinking masculinity and engaging men and boys in the gender equality conversation. If you are affected by the issues discussed this please seek help via the below: Rape Crisis are open 24/7 for anyone who has experienced something sexual without their consent. Call free on 0808 500 2222 or visit their website here. Samaritans are open 24/7 for anyone who needs to talk. You can visit some Samaritans branches in person. Samaritans also have a Welsh Language Line on 0808 164 0123 (7pm–11pm every day). 116 123 (freephone) [e-mail] Freepost SAMARITANS LETTERS samaritans.org

Hello and welcome to the live version of the Sex Talks podcast with me, your host, Emma Louise Boynton. Sex Talks exists to engender more open, honest and vulnerable discussions around typically taboo topics, like sex and relationships, gender inequality, and the role technology is playing in changing the way we date, love and fuck. Our relationship to sex tells us so much about who we are and who we are. how we show up in the world, which is why I think it's a topic we ought to be talking about with a little more nuance and a lot more curiosity. So each week, I'm joined by new guest whose expertise on the topic I'd really like to mine, and do well just that. From writers, authors and therapists to actors, musicians and founders, we'll hear from a glorious array of

humans about the stuff that gets the heart of what it means to be human. If you want to attend a live recording of the podcast, click on the Eventbrite link in the show note. In this live recording of the Sex Sports podcast, I wanted to address a question that's been on my mind a lot of late. Why do men hate women? It's provocative, I know, and intentionally so. But amidst the seemingly relent a series of news stories about male violence, it's a question I just cannot shake from my head at the moment. After all, this conversation takes place against a backdrop of ongoing high-profile sexual abuse and rape cases, the likes of Dominique Pelicoe, Sean Diddy Combs, the late Mohammed al-Fayed, and the former CEO of Abercrombie and Fitch, Mike Jeffreys, amongst some of the few

high-profile names currently under investigation for allegedly committing the most unimaginable crimes. What's more, the scale of violence against women and girls is so high, police have declared it a national emergency here in the UK. So the purpose of this discussion was thus to try and better understand what is going on. Why? And what needs to be done to end this epidemic of violence now. And before we get into it and I introduce my guests, I do just want to say, well, the subject matter of today's episode is obviously really dark. My guest didn't just bring their unrivaled expertise and insights on the topic. They also brought hope and I think cause for optimism. They were also just really

bloody funny. And a quick trigger warning before we begin too. We discuss issues around sexual violence, rape and assault. So please take care while listening. As a always I'll put resources in the show notes for anyone who's been affected by the topics discussed. Okay, let me introduce my two brilliant guests. I was joined by Laura Bates, an activist, writer, speaker and journalist. She's also founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, an ever-increasing collection of over 200,000 testimonies of gender inequality. Launched in 2012, the project raises awareness of sexism, provides a cathartic and empowering space for survivor's stories to be heard and believed, and uses those stories to create real world change in partnership

with politicians, businesses and organisations from the United Nations to the Council of Europe. She was currently writing her 11th book. Honestly, Laura Bates is prolific. I was also joined by Ben Hurst, who is the director of facilitation at Beyond Equality, an organisation that is rethinking masculinity and engaging men and boys in the gender equality conversation. Now, we recorded on the day Giselle Pelico spoke for the first time in court as her husband Dominique Pelico stands trial. He is admitted to drugging and raping her for over a decade while enlisting over 50 other men to join him at various points. She told the court in Avignon, when you're raped, there is shame, and it's not for us to have shame, it's for them. I start this conversation by asking Laura and Ben what they made of this high profile case.

I found this story in particular really, really interesting. What I find generally is like in this gender equity space, in the space of feminist activism, in the space of commenting on acts of rape and sexual violence and sexual harassment, there aren't loads and loads of men who occupy or take up space in those conversations. And I have like a personal preference in terms of like an online profile. I don't really love existing online. I'm much rather like, number one, because I say like dumb shit all the time.

I make loads of mistakes. And like when you're in a room of people, people are much more gracious. They're much more forgiving. I think the learning goes a lot deeper. And I also don't like the pressure to like speak out on things in a way that's very public and very permanent. And so I don't often speak about things that happen like in the news. I'm not like a social commentator or any of that kind of stuff. but I did find when I read this story like quite compelled to say something and I didn't say anything of like loads of value it was basically just this is fucking crazy like can we see what's happening um I think I posted like a picture of the pyramid of men's violence or something that has like really heinous acts at the top and works down to like really small things like locker room chat and sexist jokes and all those kinds of things um

And I was so like, it was such a weird experience for me. I mean, it's not about me, but it was a weird experience for me. I think because I never really, on social media, get loads of traction, but I had hundreds and hundreds of women just saying, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you for saying something, thank you for speaking, thank you for using your platform, blah, all of that kind of stuff. And I think what I really took away from the conversation was just that there's,

For men, in general, there is no conversation about this, especially between men. I think loads of the men that I know, loads of the men, I imagine lots of the men who are in the room today, as like five guys, but the guys who are in the room today would have been having conversations about this kind of stuff with partners, with women in their lives, with daughters, with mothers, with sisters, because I think when you're in proximity to women, you can't escape these conversations. But for me, I think the big issue here is that we as men are not in communities. where we're having that conversation for ourselves

and so yeah for me it was like a I guess number one a feeling of like a necessity to say something and then a figuring out I think for us it always turns into like figuring out how we take that learning from those spaces and

into rooms with men so lots of conversations now about rehashing the man and the bear thing should you would a woman rather and loads of we're having a conversation about that today in a classroom actually but yeah I think for us it's kind of like the granular bit of like how do I take this thing that we can all see is really bad that we should all care about and realize that not everybody cares and then find a

way to have that conversation with them in a way that builds empathy for other people compassion understanding a feeling of duty maybe a movement towards allyship and turn that into action for for guys in our community and i think you've raised such important point ben in that Often in light of these sorts of stories, these sorts of cases, it does feel like women are very quick in our droves to speak up and to speak out and to organise and to protest. And you have always women standing outside the court. And Giselle has become kind of feminist icon in quite an amazing way.

But it does often feel like there's a deafening silence amongst men. And I know, Laura, you've done some interesting research actually online about the reaction, the gender split of people who have publicly said something online in reaction to this case. Can you tell us a little bit about what you found out there? Yeah, so I think lots of women anecdotally were saying it feels like the men in my life aren't commenting on this and all the women are horrified. And then lots of men were saying not all men.

As they do. So I actually thought let's like get the statistics on this, which is usually my go-to solution to everything. And I did a breakdown of like every tweet that had mentioned the word palico. And it was 75% women. The conversation was 75% women. So tangibly, statistically, it is true. And for me, what's really interesting about this

is that it's really this particular case, apart from just being utterly, utterly just flawed really by the courage and the generosity to other women of what Giselle Palico has done. Because I think some people don't realize that she has made a explicit choice for this to happen. She had the choice of having her trial behind closed doors so that nobody would know about it of retaining her anonymity. and she made this choice really such a self-sacrifice that must have taken for other women and other survivors, which is kind of unimaginably brave. But what's really interesting about this case is that it speaks directly to the not all men argument, because this case almost unlike any other is why we don't know which men, right?

There are women walking around that town now who still don't know which men, because we're talking about this small area. of France and if you look at the number of videos of men raping Giselle Pelico that they have and the number of men who are currently on trial those two numbers are not the same and the reason for that is because not all of the have been identified so it is literally the answer to that oh not all men which is of course not all men but we don't have any way of knowing and the other thing that I think this this particular case speaks to so pertinently is this myth of don't be in a short skirt in a dark alleyway because of strangers when this case perhaps more horrendously than

any other in my lifetime certainly shows us that we are not safe in our own beds it is literally the exemplification of a woman who was in her 70s who was in her pajamas who was in her own bed so I think it's quite it's an incredibly poignant case in that sense that it encapsulates many of the really important problems we have in our discourse but it also shows that even in a case like this where literally the perpetrators were local journalists, they were her neighbours, they were, you know, the butcher down the road. Even then, the media is splashing around headlines like the monster of Avignon, as if this was an individual aberration, as if her husband was somehow a man apart from other men who we couldn't possibly imagine

walking among us in society. And I think that's something very frustrating that is pertinent to everything you've talked about already. There's this kind of tension between seeing the reality of what is happening with violence gates, women and girls, and seeing how far behind we are as a society in naming it, in seeing it for what it is and in tackling it. And I think, Laurie, you also raised that this, or my mind's kind of fixating on this kind of not all men element of that and how this case just shows that to be such a ridiculous notion or kind of counter argument to women getting angry in the face of these things. What I found notable in reading through the Guardian's piece about the trial today,

is there was just one line in the piece that said, the people who are now, the men who are on trial with Dominique Pelico, their age between 26 and 74, and the accused include a nurse, a journalist, a prison officer, a local counsellor, a soldier, lorry drivers, farm workers. These are all different types of men. It doesn't, the misogyny embrace, it doesn't discriminate. It sort of reminds.

And I think what I found interesting about that is, with cases like this, we tend within our public discourse to see people like Dominique as monsters and we describe them as monsters. And I'm thinking about the same was true with Harvey Weinstein, with Epstein. We villainise these men and make them out to be this other, this other kind of monster. So far from us, we could never be like them. They are these absolute monsters.

And I think in doing that, we I think it's kind of mistakenly create this idea that these people are aberrower. from the norm, that they are exceptions to the rule. When the fact that you have men of all ages, of all professions, participating in this, I think showcases that to be such a folly. What do you think in the work that you've done, what do you think that kind of monster villain discourse does to our way of understanding violence against women and girls? I think it enables us to think of it as isolated incidents.

And we're encouraged to do that all the time. You will see a million press reports saying, but it was an isolated incident, but there is no wider threat unless you happen to be a woman in a society where this happens every three days. So I think, yeah, a big part of the issue there is that it enables us, it prevents us from joining the dots. And that is very much something that we like to do because as a society, we will twist ourselves into knots. We'll do almost anything to avoid dealing head on with the fact that there is a male violence epidemic. And we will call it violence against women and girls.

and we'll say that a woman is raped, but we won't say that a man has carried out a rape. And so we find it almost impossible to recognise that there is an epidemic. And for some reason, we don't seem to be able to recognise that you can acknowledge that while still acknowledging that that doesn't implicate every man.

And that's really interesting. But the problem is if we can't see, you know, the opposite of isolated incidents are a pattern. And if we can't see the pattern, we can't fix the pattern. And what you were saying earlier about it, feeling like there's been this horrendous, summer. I think the problem is that almost every year it feels like there's been this

absolutely horrendous. And we reached this point where we think, well, this must be a tipping point. We heard about Saville's crimes and everybody went, well, this is a tipping point in the entertainment industry. Never again could somebody, you know, so prolifically under so many people's blind eyes abuse. And then, of course, we had the story of Harvey Weinstein. You know, or Wayne Cousins happened and everyone went, well, this is a tipping point. Never again, surely. And then, of course, like a year later, David Carrick came along. And the problem is that as a society, we keep doing this. We keep saying, well, this is enormously horrendous and shocking.

And now we're going to confront it. And then we stop talking about it. And we kind of pretend that we've never heard it before every time it happens. And this is just enormously frustrating. You know, a great example of this, I think, is when everyone's invited to such a fantastically brilliant job of raising voices. Have the team here. Oh, they're here. Amazing. So what that campaign did so brilliantly was to very courageously raise the voices of so many particularly young women and girls about their experiences of sexual violence.

And the societal response was shock and, oh, this is horrendous. I mean, they called it a sex scandal on the front pages. Again, that kind of titillating, the idea that it was a shock, it was an aberration. But the government who came forward whose ministers went on TV to say how shocking this was had had a report from their own. Women in Equality Select Committee some four or five years previously that had told them a third of girls are sexually assaulted at school. We've known for almost a decade now that on average one rate per day of the school term is reported to police from inside UK schools. I mean, if that's not a public health crisis, if that's not a national emergency, then it's really

hard to think of what is. And yet what happens is we know, we shake our heads, we move on, it happens again, we say it's a shock and it's all brand new information and we carry on. And Laura, can I just ask on that? I start this conversation by saying it feels particularly heavy now and it feels like this year has been a particularly bad year with regards to women's safety. Are things getting worse or are we more hyper aware? Are we talking about these issues more and they're getting rightfully more kind of press coverage? Where are we at? There are some cases which are receiving press coverage but as ever,

very specific cases. So we tend to hear the cases of women who are photogenic, of women who are white-skinned and middle class, of women who are young and we don't necessarily hear the stories of disabled women who are dying, of women of colour, who are dying, of older women who are being murdered by their partners. So I don't think it is a case, I almost don't think it's a case of either, really. I mean, I think the problem has been at epidemic proportions for a long time and still is. We know that around half a million women are sexually assaulted every year, about 100,000 women raped, although that's kind of official statistics. The likely number is much higher. We know that there's a phone call to the police every minute about

domestic abuse. We know that a quarter of women experience it, that a woman's murdered every three days on average by a man. I mean, these numbers are so bad and have been so bad for so long that it's almost kind of pointless to even talk about whether it's getting better or worse. I think it's fairly stagnant. There are some areas in which reporting is increasing and that's a good thing. I think a good example of that is around transport and there have been some really concerted initiatives there around reporting. The problem is that the situation has been at crisis point for some time now and yes, to a degree we're getting a bit better at talking about it in some cases, but we're just not taking any of the systemic steps that we need to be

to see real change. And Ben, you're in rooms with young boy, yeah, that sounds a bit weird, but you're facilitating very valuable conversations with young men constantly, regularly. Much better framing on my part, sorry. To what extent are these young men bringing up these sorts of news stories, discussing the issues that we're talking about here today. Are they top of mind? How do they feel about stories like Giselle Pelico? they

I have to think carefully about this I was going to say they don't care but that's not accurate I don't think I've been in a classroom in the last fortnight

where a boy has brought up Giselle Pelico as a conversation I think there were two boys that brought up the man and the bear thing

again and interestingly actually there was a boy who'd brought up the week before this happened and just for anyone who might have missed

the internet trend explain for us Ben So from what I understand, there's a conversation online, which is asking women whether they'd rather be stuck in a forest with a man or a bear. And obviously, women will say the bear, because no one wants to be stuck in a forest with a man. And the boys don't believe that. The boys are like, no, obviously not. It's really interesting because boys go into like, suddenly they're experts on bears and they're like, well, it depends on what kind of bear it is. Like, is it grizzly? Like, do you know, like, you can, if you just do this, you can escape from, like, obviously it would be

easy. You can never escape a bear. But like, there's loads of, loads of very, very interesting conversations. Yeah. I mean, their minds go to weird places. And what was the question that you asked me, sir? I'm stuck on the bear thing. I asked what specific type of bear should we be scared of. Are they bringing it up? Are they bringing it up? Are they talking about it? Are they having these conversations? Are they worried? Are they angry in the way that women are? No, no, no. I think I think boys are scared. And I think, I think interestingly, when you were talking about this before, the thing that was like on my mind was this idea of the narrative of like monsters and heroes or good and bad. I was doing some work with the police in West Wales over the last month.

And it's always interesting talking to police because they have like a such a binary in their minds of like good and bad. And they cannot see themselves as anything other than good. Even when there's evidence of them causing harm, they just. have to see themselves as the good guys. I think boys are very similar in that regard. I don't think there are any... I think in the eight, nine years I've been doing this work, I can probably remember about three times

when I've been in a room with a guy who's identified themselves as a bad person. I don't think guys see themselves as bad people. And I don't think guys, even who have committed acts of great harm, see themselves as bad people. But I think there's something interesting that happens in that kind of space there.

where there's a I think it's a bigger conversation about like complicity and I think actually as men and for lots of I was going to say lots of us but for lots of you as women as well I think lots of us are complicit in the systems that cause harm lots of us benefit

in loads of different ways from those systems and lots of us perpetuate those systems in real time but I think for boys the thing that's difficult is like how do you encourage them to dismantle those systems when a count of

responsibility means punishment for them. And so I think actually boys are just really, really scared. They bring up accusations, false accusations of rape. The only time they do bring up rate cases is before there's a conviction. So they're often like at the moment, the thing they're talking about is not Giselle Pelico. They're talking about young Philly and what's happening in that regard because for them, they're like, well, there's no proof. He's that how do we know he's guilty? How can it might have been a sex worker. And they have these interesting again, pathways in their mind of who can experience sexual violence and who cannot experience sexual violence. And so I think there's a really important piece of work that has to happen

there. I think maybe the narrative of like believe women has done a bit of a disservice to those boys in particular because they can't reconcile the fact that they know girls in real life and those girls lie about things all the time. Not about sexual violence, but just people lie, right? With the fact that we have to believe every woman that says, anything about sexual violence all the time, but also that they feel like there's a massive consequence to that for them. And in their minds, they all think they're like really rich footballers who will be like trapped. And that's not reality for them, I don't think. But they have like delusions of grandeur in lots of ways. So I think it's a very complicated map.

But they're not bringing up, they're not bringing up these conversations in terms of being disgusted by what's happening. They're bringing up the conversations in terms of a fragility and a fear of like, what happens to me if somebody says that about me. and how do I approve that I'm not guilty. And so I think there's a part of the conversation that's really important that we shift. Like I think there's a big movement that needs to happen in terms of conversations about consent. And a part of the conversation where we frame this whole thing as like a minimum standards approach. So what do boys have to do to not get in trouble as opposed to like, how do we ensure that everybody around us is like happy and healthy and having good relationships?

And I think that's like a helpful shift that we can maybe make in that area. It's so interesting hearing you say that, Ben, because I think that. that immediate reaction being one of fear and the fear being the blocker to being able to even entertain conversations to how this could happen and how we can all be complicit. Even hearing that, I do feel

maybe some people here feel the same way a kind of flicker of annoyance, obviously, because I feel that amongst women there's a lot of self-awareness of our complicity in many things and issues. Internalise misogyny, internalise racism, internalised, I think women are constantly like in our groups and our conversations

questioning the way we participate in systems of injustice. Maybe I have a great group of friends and sex talks audience members are fabulous as I know we all are. But I guess so it feels that there is that kind of I get immediately, I get kind of defensive when I hear you say that and I immediately want to say

well come on, do better. Why? Like if women can be self, it can be introspective and can be self-aware, why can't we expect more from our young boys? So you mentioned there that it's having conversations around consent is, you know, in an important way of being to address this.

But how do you begin to break down that fear and that fear from being that first immediate reaction where then it becomes quite an individual, personal thing? They're not able to engage with the bigger political, social issues at hand. They're about me, me, me, and what's happening to me. How do you begin to dispel that fear so that we can begin to have better and more productive conversations of young boys? Complicated.

I think a lot of it is about creating spaces that feel safe and you can never promise safety right because you never know what's going to happen in any given space but I think a lot of that is about opening up environments where the education that we're giving is not prescriptive so we're not telling people the right answers and asking them to memorize those answers so that they are better people and we're allowing them space to explore these complex issues for themselves and in one way they're complex another way they're very black and white right they're very clear um it's really interesting what you were saying about feeling that sense of annoyance.

I feel like for me, like the intersection of my identity gives me like a little bit of an insight here. It's a bit of a false equivalency because like race and gender are not the same thing. But I often feel that like if I imagine my own self in conversations around race where I'm allowed to be the person that's annoyed and everybody else on the other side is the person that's at fault. And so I can just look at other people and say, you're not doing enough. Read the books.

I haven't read the books, but I can say read the books, do some education, do some work. I think that same dynamic exists for the boys in that way. We're actually like having been a man who's gone through this process myself, like going through the journeys, like of understanding yourself and recognizing your place in the world and the impact you have on other people, it's not that easy, right? Like I think it's actually quite scary. It's quite complicated. And so holding those spaces with compassion, holding those spaces with acceptance and

grace, like knowing that people will make mistakes and allowing for those mistakes to be made. I think a big part of their safety is like not having women in those spaces because there's a lot of shit that comes out that women just don't need to hear. And I think a lot of stuff that would evoke a response that maybe isn't the same response that I would have because I'm not directly impacted by the thing that they're saying. And so I think it becomes that quite a complicated kind of dance that you have to do where you're allowing people to have thoughts and have points and see and change and give counterpoints and allow them to debate between each other with

and add suggestions and add perspectives and ask questions. But I think if you can do that successfully, what you do see is change. And you do see like a shifting mindset, a shifting, I mean, we hear reports from schools that we've worked in. I mean, the boys don't turn into perfect people the next day, right? But I do think that they are more open to conversations and they're more open to hearing other people's perspectives.

They're more open to being called out to being challenged. And I think, again, it's at the core challenging the idea of, like, being a good guy. One of the questions we ask in, like, some of our workshops with adults is, like, we do an opinion continuum. So one side of the room is strongly agree. One side of the room strongly disagree. And we'll ask the question or we'll give the statement, I see myself as one of the good guys. And people will have to place themselves. It's really interesting when you do that because no one wants to say yes, but no one wants to say no.

so they like all try and hover around the middle kind of section but maybe like a seven or an eight and they're like I think I'm generally a good guy but I guess the question then becomes a good guy to who right like and who who thinks you're a good guy and where have you caused harm

and who doesn't think you're a good guy and can both of those things exist at the same time and how do we reconcile those different parts of ourselves and change so we cause less harm to other people well I've been said before complicity question is such an interesting one And no one wants to, I think no one wants to see in themselves the really, you know, what I think we're all capable of quite terrible things. Some people that, but no one wants to see that, no one wants to see that in themselves.

And people, I think, often don't want to see it in their friends. And I know this anecdotally in my own friendship groups. I see boys turn up, like men turn away from the wrongdoings of other than not call it out and not say anything. And I think it is that like that fear, we don't want to believe that people that we love, that people we care about are capable of. of doing bad things. It doesn't square with our idea of the people we love. And I think, so I think understanding how we are complicit in these issues is, I guess, the hardest and probably the first challenge that you're seeking to deal with. Laura, just telling you to know, in 2020, you published a brilliant book, which we are selling here, so everyone can go home and read it tonight. If you

haven't already, I thoroughly recommend it. It's called Men Who Hate Women. Again, perfect for tonight. examining misogyny in terms of an extremist ideology. You note at the outset of the book that one of the things that prompted you to write this specific book at that time was you'd noticed a change amongst the young boys that you speak to at schools. So Laura does a lot of education within schools around the topics we're discussing tonight. And you said that you'd noticed a real shift in how the boys were talking about misogyny, we're talking about sex and sex and we're talking about rape. Can you just describe for us what that change was and when you saw that occur?

Yeah, so it was probably around about 2018. And it's not to say that the conversations before that point were all breezy and simple and brilliant. Of course, these are challenging conversations and sometimes they're awkward and sometimes they're uncomfortable. But generally speaking, there was at least a willing us to have the conversation before that point. And it wasn't a sudden shift, but gradually over that couple of years, or so, there was a kind of quite rapid increase in young men basically repeating and parroting back sentiments that I knew to have come from the kind of extremist misogyny that thrives on

the internet, not just in certain corners of the internet, but really across social media and that was really gaining traction at that time, particularly in terms of the mainstream. And so we're talking about things like women lie about rape. Rape is a compliment, really. It's not rape if she enjoys it. These are all direct quotes from young people in schools that I've worked with. It's things like Me Too as a witch hunt. Good men everywhere are losing their jobs. Women are wearing short skirts, so they're asking for it.

There's no such thing as the gender pay gap. It's a myth. All things which would often come hand in hand with direct quotes and fake statistics that I recognize specifically from extremist men, male misogynist online. So at the time, it started out with lots of boys who were quoting back at that time, Miloianopoulos, and then it kind of shifted into kind of Andrew Tate type stuff. But very much, basically, what was becoming very clear was that a significant minority, I would say, of young teenage boys were definitely coming into contract with forms of extremism

online, that they were being groomed and that this was a form of radicalisation. What really alarmed me was that nobody was recognizing it as a form of grooming or radicalization and nobody was really talking about it. And there was this kind of like unofficial feminist policy, I think, at the time that we didn't talk about it because any woman who is in the public eye, any woman who is a feminist, any woman who's writing about this stuff knows that these guys exist, knew that these networks existed long before the media caught up and started talking about in cells and stuff much more recently. But at the time, we all kind of, I think, felt collectively, that you just didn't want to give them the oxygen of publicity.

And that had very much been something that I had agreed with, except that at that point, what I suddenly realized was that actually they were doing pretty well for publicity in terms of reaching boys, in terms of a kind of algorithmically facilitated, direct contact radicalisation. And at that point, it was really concerning if nobody knew it was happening. So that was why I wanted to write the book.

There was a real shift, I think, in terms of how boys were being reached on a mass scale with extremist ideas that were being framed as really quite normal and sensible. And I just ask, what point in a boy's life cycle does this radicalisation tend to begin? So we can actually be really specific about this because there are style guides, there are PowerPoints, there are strategy guides that are shared amongst men online who are trying to specifically target boys and they talk specifically about the ages of 10 and 11 as a particular focus point, it starts much younger than people think, and that creates an immediate

problem because no school wants to address this before the age of 15 or 16. And at that point, it's really already too late. I mean, if you, for example, 60% of kids have seen online porn by the age of 16, but no, that's wrong. 60% of kids have seen online porn by the age of 14, but a quarter of them have seen it by the age of 12. So we're always talking about stuff happening and starting much younger than people realise, but we're also talking about it happening in ways that people don't understand. So if you survey school kids about in-cells and in-cell websites, I'm not saying for a second that there's a significant chunk of teenage boys

who are on in-cell forums or would consider them in-cells, in-cells, or even know what the word in-cell means, actually. What I'm saying is there is a very significant number of teenage boys who have come into contact with those kinds of extremist ideologies kind of downstream online without necessarily knowing what their origins are. And there is such a reluctance to acknowledge this. there's such a reluctance to take it seriously or recognise it as a form of extremism that we either don't tackle it at all or by the time we do it's much too late.

And we are now beginning to recognise this problem as a form of extremism, as you say, as an ideology. What difference is that going to make in terms of how we're then able to grapple with this as a problem? It honestly depends entirely how it's implemented. And while I really welcome the shift in terms of rhetoric, which I think matters, It will only make a big difference if it's backed up in a shift in, particularly, I would say, allocation of resources. Violence, Games, women and girls makes up 20% roughly of policing work, but only about 2% of their budget. So the caseload in the budget just doesn't add up.

If we look at frontline services, there's a donkey sanctuary in the West Country that gets three times the amount of public funding every year, as all the rape crisis centres in the country put together. They're fucking donkeys. And nothing against donkeys. like of course the donkeys deserve to be safe and careful but it's wild like our priorities are so far off and so I think it's about how we recognise it and and there's a risk I think that we talk about radicalisation extremism we go great we'll bung it in with prevent and actually prevent is hugely problematic in itself and what we need to recognise is that this is a cultural problem it's

about the normalisation of mainstreamed misogyny throughout school culture as much as it's about what's happening to those individuals online. It's about the mainstream media, which is widening what's known as the Overton window, the kind of window of publicly acceptable discourse. Because if you can read Jeremy Clarkson's comments in the sun about wishing that Megamark will be paraded down the street naked and pouted with excrement,

then it makes it seem just kind of quite normal if some guy online tells you, well, actually women should be chained up and shouldn't have the vote. You think, well, that's broadly in line with what I've seen in, you know, highly respectable kind of outlets. So basically there is this, and it's a bit generous to the sun in mainstream outlets.

So I think there is this risk that we describe it as extremism but then approach it in ways that don't necessarily have a kind of massive fix. What we need to see is real resourcing for schools. It's not enough to just say schools should deal with it. We need to actually put it into teacher training programs. We need to actually give schools the money and the resources that they need to really train teachers to know how to deal with it when it happens. We need to see it mainstreamed as part of it.

of a whole school approach that's looking at curricula and school dress codes as much as it's looking at individual policy. There are also some incredibly simple things. There is no national recording system for incidents of sexual violence occurring in schools. Some schools don't record it at all. There is no national system. Some of them don't record it at all. Some of them will bung it in with bullying. So there is no simple way of going. Let's look at how many girls are being harassed, assaulted and raped in schools. So there are some very simple things that should and might change, but there's also a kind of cultural piece of work that needs to be part of the picture. God, I'm really not that, especially given that you earlier on the conversation

said that one rape is reported a day in schools, to not then have a proper system that allows us to record and understand the level of assault, harassment, abuse just seems, just actually seems just quite stupid. I mean, just at a certain point you think that's just pure idiocy, at a certain level, you think, come on, get a grip. Ben, just telling to you, before, Now, what do you think specifically? So Laura said there that as young as 10 and 11, young boys are, I guess, being quite purposefully targeted by this content. And what we, what makes misogyny so different today is that we have an algorithm very effectively pumping out very specific types of content to a specific demographic who are ripe for being influenced, which I guess makes it such a difficult problem to deal with. But what do you think these young boys who are being drawn who are being drawn into the kind of Andrew Tate ideology online. What are they looking for? What are they seeking out that then they are beginning to find

in these sorts of videos and these sorts of men? Yeah, I think it's a really interesting question. It's not a question that people often ask, but I think it's the right question, like not how do we stop them from accessing it, but what is it that they're looking for that leads them to those spaces? I think for lots of the boys that we work with,

I guess they're looking for a range of different things. but mainly guidance I think is a big thing there's an organisation that we work with in Australia who called the Man Cave who do a big piece of work around rites of passage and talk about like boys in

the Western world not having Western world in inverted comments but not having access to rights of passage or guidance through to manhood from adolescents and I think actually what the misogynist online influences have done is they found a niche which

speaks directly to those things that the boys are looking for. So conversations about how to connect with other people, conversations about hygiene, conversations about health, conversations about discipline, conversations about what it means to be a man, what a man should be like. And in the absence of a society where, or in a society where we have the absence of those narratives being provided for boys, or the narratives that we do have are very harmful ones. These guys are providing really, really simple answers for very, very complex questions, right? So things like, how do you get women to be attracted to you? If you're a heterosexual boy and you're attracted to girls and you're going through puberty

so you look like a weirder and everything's like, things are growing in places they shouldn't be growing and like it's just scary and weird and you don't know how to process it. And some guys on the internet saying, listen, all you have to do is buy a Bugatti and join my online classes and I'll teach you how to get girls. then obviously there's no teachers saying how to do it. There's no men's schools saying how to do it. There's no parents or carers or caregivers teaching you those things. But I think boys are looking for all of those things.

I think there's also something that's important to recognize in the brain development of teenagers. And I remember learning this in a community of practice session. We invited a psychotherapist in to talk to us about working with boys. And it really shifted my perspective because actually there was, like, I remember being 14, we never talk about this stuff, but I remember being 14 and watching South Park and find it absolutely hilarious. And I think there were loads of jokes in South Park

when I was 14 that I just didn't understand. There were things that I laughed at because I knew I wasn't supposed to laugh at. And then there were some things that were really funny. But I think actually there are things going on in the brain of a teenager. So puberty being a big example of like lots of change, lots of hormones racing around your body, you're processing things in different ways.

You're becoming more intelligent. you're becoming smarter. You're starting to think for yourself. There's stuff going on in your brain, which means you're intentionally trying to differentiate from your caregivers. So whether that's teachers or parents, you want to form different opinions to those people, whether those opinions are right or wrong,

to establish a sense of identity. There's a range of different things that are happening that mean that boys are engaging in more risk-taking behaviours. They're looking for more edgy humour. They're looking for people who will give them those pieces of guidance that aren't their mum, that aren't their dad, that aren't their teachers. And so I think actually, when all of those things are going on for teenage boys,

they still haven't developed empathy. So around, I think they start to develop empathy around like 15, 16. That seems quite late. I know, right? Wow. Girls do it a little bit earlier. Yeah, I presume. I think so.

And empathy is also like a skill and a muscle that needs to be exercised. So I think we as adults have a role in teaching and educating boys and helping them to practice that. And we see that happening in our workshops. But I think their actual brain development. is not at the space where they instantly consider somebody else's perspective. They're not thinking about long-term consequence. They can't comprehend it.

So they only understand that if I do this now, this will happen directly afterwards, but they don't think a year, two years, five years into the future. And so actually there are loads of things that are going on for them that are quite complicated. And unfortunately, the way that our society is structured, the answer to most of us who are adults seems to be tell them not to do it, and then they'll stop. but that obviously doesn't work. So I think actually it becomes about creating creative pathways.

I've heard a lot of conversations recently about like a positive masculinity influencer approach and trying to equip influencers online to create content for boys that's positive, which I think on one hand is really good. I also think on the other hand is not what's funny to them. It's not what's edgy to them and they're going to reject it the same way. They reject all the other positive stuff online. But the positive mass interview might be really cool like you. Yeah, no, it doesn't work.

Only white women follow me online. Yeah, no, the teenage boys don't want to hear what I have to say, unfortunately. They're not really interested in my perspectives online. But I do think there is something important about, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's something important about maybe finding ways to reach rather than, because I think influence has to be organic, right? And so there's something about rather than finding new mentor position in those spaces that can model a different type of masculinity.

Maybe it's about transforming masculinies for those men that are in those spaces and introducing them to conversations so that they can influence in a different way. So like with the chunks and Philly stuff, one of the things that's been really interesting in the conversations we've been having with young people is that they suddenly all know that Philly's been a weirdo for the whole time because they've watched the dating shows and they've seen how he talks to women on those shows. And my pushback is always like all of them talk to women like that. Like obviously he's an extreme version, but like that's the same thing. same narrative when you talk about Riz, when you talk about charisma, sorry, but when you talk about chatting up and chat lines and all of that kind of stuff, everybody's approach is the same because it's the same thing we've all learned from society. And so actually, I think creating new models and new versions of that. But I think the big things are like, how to get money is a big one

that boys are looking for. How to have connection is a big thing that boys are looking for. How to have sex is a big thing that boys are looking for. And unfortunately, we're not providing any of those answers for them. And again, I think our approach is not a prescriptive one. So we're not walking into classrooms saying, listen, I'll tell you the secret. This is how you get money in sex and women. But actually, it's more about a conversation which allows them to explore what is that they value in relationships, why they think those things are important, what money represents for them, what sex represents for them, what relationships with women represent for them. And then maybe how they can find those things in themselves and also in their

communities before they start looking to take control of other people to get those things. God, you bring up so many fascinating points there, Ben, I guess all touching on this, what we're now discussing as a crisis, so called crisis of masculinity, and the factors that are feeding into that. And just as you were speaking, I was just thinking of some recent research that the Financial Times have done, examining the kind of the widening gap that's emerging between men and women. So you said these young boys, they want money, they want sex. They were essentially looking for the overt trappings of success that our society and power that our society prescribed. And of course, because you look online and that is what is showcased as that's what success looks like, it's money, it's power, it's women. But actually the reality is more and more young men aren't actually going to university, getting well-paid jobs, following this trajectory, this more traditional trajectory towards success. And I found it fascinating that this research found that across the developed world, the portion of young men who are neither in education, in work, nor looking for a job, has been climbing steadily for decades.

And in several rich countries, young women are now more likely to be in work than young men. So the UK joined this group in 20s 20. So you're seeing, I guess, this widening gulf between women who are on this kind of more upwardly mobile trajectory. I guess we also had to start a bit further down because patriarchy. So women are on this more upwardly mobile trajectory, whereas you are seeing men now for the first time. The graphs are fast are going like this. So are not on that upward mobility, mobile trajectory. And yet the influences culturally are still saying, you know, we need power, success, et cetera, and et cetera.

So I'm interested in light of that research and I guess the backdrop to this kind of crisis of masculinity that you're discussing. So what are these kind of demographic shifts? What kind of impact they having on the way that men then see women, see their roles in society? Yeah, good question. I think every time you ask a question about that, it's a good question. It's literally your job to ask a good question. But you're doing a good job. I think the impact that we see it having, or if I think practically what impact do I actually see that having, is there is a, almost like a rising consciousness of an issue with an inability to articulate what the issue is.

So the way I would describe it is boys are figuring out now, at their age now, I mean, they're living in the world where the climate is going to destroy the planet anyway. So they don't even know if they're going to live to old age and they're stressed about that kind of stuff. But that aside, I think they are aware that they're witnessing almost like the collapse of empire, right? So capitalism that they've been told works and if you just follow the rules, it will work for you and patriarchy, which again, they've been told works

and if you follow the rules, it will work for you, are not working for them. And so they don't know what they are supposed to do to get what they've been promised as their birthright because they are boys and so they are supposed to be better than women and when they were children they were told to throw like a boy and not like a girl and they were told to run like a boy and not like a girl they were told that boys are better than girls and now suddenly all of the girls in their class are doing better than them and go to uni and they're stuck and so I don't know if they articulate it in

that way I think they articulate it as a real frustration and a lot of what aboutism so whenever you raise a conversation especially about you were talking earlier about the conversation conversations around sexual violence. Whenever you raise a conversation, the conversation instantly becomes, but what about false rape accusations? I think you see that in loads of different areas where boys are recognising that the feeling is changing for them. It doesn't feel what they were told it would feel like. It doesn't feel fair to them, but they don't know how to put their fingers on the thing. And in the British school system, nobody's talking about capitalism and nobody's talking about patriarchy. Nobody's talking about imperialism. Nobody's

about any of these things. And so they're kind of grasping for straws. And I think that the difficulty with that is that it makes them very susceptible to that kind of radicalisation that says the reason that all of this stuff is happening is because of women. And so they look around and they see what they can find. It's probably her fault. So it's women. It's women, but not my mum. It's all the other women who have done this, who have done this to me and made it this way. and I think they feel a real sense of frustration but they're not being equipped to navigate the society that they're now living in and I think actually another part of the conversation

which I mean in rooms I don't know if it's the most popular conversation but is that we have seen a massive increase in and also not enough of an increase but an increase in the services in the access that women have two services in an access that girls have to support and that's not been matched with boys but I don't think it needs to be matched like for like I don't think that that's actually the solution I think it means that it will take a different form

and a different shape so maybe I don't know I don't have the solutions to this this is not my work but I think on the most basic level maybe we need some reading classes for boys right that maybe we need some literacy lessons for boys in schools yeah book club for boys right and maybe it's about things that they want to read about or it's some way of engaging them but I do think the boys know but they just don't understand why or what it is and also when

you're failing Spanish in year eight you don't care like they're not bothered they're not actually like inherently understanding that this links again they're not developed long term thinking so they're not like well this is an injustice that I'm experiencing they just know that the girls are not supposed to be doing better than them. Even though historically I think girls have always, since they were introduced into education, been doing better than boys for the most part. But yeah, that's

my read on it. I think we have to be really careful about not letting bad faith actors define the conversation. So there are so many, like, so-called men's rights activists, aka women's wrongs activists online, who are saying like, oh,

women are doing better than men, girls doing better than boys. That's why so many young boys are disaffected and that's why they're being misogynistic and you know you can't really blame them and as a society particularly in the mainstream media we kind of take that at face value in the same way that the mainstream media describes incels as incels it doesn't say so-called in cells like guys who have decided collectively that they are a victim group because of the fact that women won't have sex with them and as a society we've gone yeah okay that sounds legit like that's a thing like you're an in-cell like instead of saying like I think we should be saying so-called incels

And I think it's the same with a lot of stuff around this conversation. Another thing that we say is we say that there are no good male role models and we like ring our hands about this. And we go, that's where Andrew Tate is just so popular. And he's like this pied piper, right? And boys are just drawn to him. That's just playing into Andrew Tate's own absolute bullshit, right? His mythology, it writes on that.

Exactly. Self-metologizing. So it's really interesting because Ben was saying like, but it's got to be organic. Andrew Tate's influence isn't organic. It's algorithmic, right? So, like, we've got Daniel Cray, we've got a former James Bond who's carrying his kid around in a baby sling. We've got Barack Obama being president, like crying on the job.

We've got guys in the England football team who are talking about social justice. They're taking the knee. They're taking time off from matches because they're saying, well, being at birth of my kid is more important to me. We've got guys like Ben. We've got pop stars. We've got guys like, yeah. We've got Ben Harris. But there are so many guys and have been for a long time who are.

are great role models. I think part of this is about being really careful that we don't take as read these arguments that these men are actually feeding us. Because what that does inherently is it says there's a reason for this, right? Like there's a reason for extreme misogyny and hatred of women and for these boys and for individuals online who are calling for women to be raped and murdered. And it's probably because like a few more women are in the workplace. So fair enough. You know, like, wait, stop. Like we don't we don't. We don't. We don't stop and go, hang on a minute. Like I don't know if I actually accept that rhetoric because I don't think that this is an issue that has been invented by those societal shifts. And sometimes I think

it's possible to question whether actually the opposite is true. As anyone stopped and said, given that we have more young men now who know the name of Andrew Tate than who knew the name of Rishi Sunat when he was prime minister, that maybe guys like Andrew Tate and their overwhelming influence could be part of the reason boys aren't performing so well. You know, nobody is stopping and saying, hang on a minute. Like, why are we accepting? And I've seen so much in the mainstream press that accepts this self-spun narrative that Tate is popular because he's standing up for boys in a climate where it's really difficult to be a boy. And he's one of the only guys who is, you know, speaking up for them and standing up for them.

That's bullshit. Ben Hurst does. Because suicide is the biggest killer of men under the age of 50 in this country. And Andrew Tate says that depression doesn't exist. He's not some great champion of boys. he's creating exactly the conditions in which we know that men and boys suffer often with tragic consequences. So I think we have to just be really careful about drawing those kind of lines and those assumptions. And the other one, of course, which we've also touched on tonight, is this

assumption that boys are kind of terrified because of feminism. Like boys are scared because of feminist gains, because things are somehow improving for women. That's also bollocks. We still live in a country where less than 2% of rape cases reported to the police. result in a charge or summons, a boy is 230 times more likely to be raped himself than falsely accused of rape in this country. The reason they're scared is because of men online telling them that women everywhere are taking their jobs and making up false allegations and coming for them. So it's just incredibly important that we question, I think, some of those lines of logic that people take as just totally accepted. And undergirding that, Laura, is also the

lack of accountability around social media platforms whose algorithms are pumping out this content to young boys, and we're not talking enough about that. The algorithm is at play. Misogyny, I think you said this to me before. Misogyny has always existed, but what hasn't is your algorithm. That's right. So we've always seen backlash. We've always seen pockets of people in society who will pedal this stuff, but generally speaking, they've been talking to each other. And suddenly now, the content of Andrew Tate has been viewed 11.4 billion times on TikTok. That is more than the number of people on the planet. So we are seeing the facilitation of the spread of misinformation and extremism with complete impunity for that

platform, I might add, on a scale that we've never seen before. And you've got people like Ben who are doing this incredible work and the other guys from Beyond Equality and there's, how many of you are there? Like 20, 30? 45 of you. And then you're up against 11.4 billion views. And like that's a huge part of the problem is that we don't regulate tech and that we don't recognize harm and that tech companies don't recognize misogyny as a form of extremism. And so we've got this thing where if you're a food company and you go, well, you know, we're global and we're this huge conglomerate. So like, you know, obviously we can't be expected to safeguard the safety of like everyone who eats our food. Like a few people will

probably die. Like that's, you know, you know, like we would just say, well, no, you can't have a business. You're shut down. But with social media companies, there's this sense of clear active evidence of harm happening. But we all kind of shrug and go, but it's, you know, it's just very difficult. You know, how can anyone control any of this? And the first thing is by design that these algorithms were designed to work in the way that they are. And the second thing is that, of course we can regulate them.

Of course we can sanction them. We just need the political will. And the third thing is that it is totally disingenuous to suggest that this is an impossible kind of shoulder shrug issue because some of these companies have a bigger income than small countries. Of course they could do it if they wanted to. They could pretty much do anything. that they wanted to. They could spend a tiny portion of their billions of dollars of profits

on training and resourcing real-life moderators to actively tackle harm. But they don't because at the moment no one is making them. And they make a ton of money off of all those views because it's a profit motive that underlies it. I'm conscious of time and I want to have a quick pause so that we can have a Q&A session. I would really love to bring everyone into this conversation. But just before we wrap up, so we have usually about 10 minute break and I'll hand around pens and papers. We're old school and we do an anonymous Q&A here. So you can ask whatever question is on your mind. And then we can all, I hope people will kind of participate in the conversation that ensues from that. But I think it's really important for this

conversation to also step back a bit and understand the impact of doing the sort of work that you do, Laura. You write in men who hate women that once you know, know that there are hundreds of thousands of people out there despising women to the point that many of them believe we should all be exterminated. You can never unknow it. What is it like for you personally to be so hyper exposed to the most extreme examples of misogyny and violence daily? Well, it's not an easy thing, but it's also something that I think comes with a real sense of purpose and that helps. And it's also a thing that comes with exposure to hundreds of thousands of women who are going through much more severe things. And it comes with hope because it

also comes with exposure to so many people, both in organisations and as individuals who are fighting to change things. And that just absolutely shows you that change is happening, work is happening. There is such an incredible network of people who are working so hard. And to change this stuff. And they range everywhere from people in positions of power in companies who are genuinely trying to change things all the way down to the schoolgirls who are starting their own feminist campaigns. And just sometimes it's the really little things. But you just get that. I had this woman who wrote that there was a guy in the street and she was walking down the street and he started shouting. He was harassing her. He was working up on a roof.

And she started trying to shout back because he was at a distance. So she felt safer than she usually would. She tried to kind of object. She tried to say, like, how would you feel if I was shouting about your genitals as you walk down the street? It didn't go well. He started shouting kind of worse abuse at her. So she just took his ladder down and left him up there to think about it. And I told this story. I told this story at a book festival. And then I got this email about a week later from the organisers saying, I thought you would want to know that after your event, there was a group of women who'd come to watch you and they were on their way to their next event and as they walked through the town

there was this guy on a roof and he started catcrawling them so they all ran away with his ladder and like I know that's so stupid in the scale of everything that we're talking about like I know it's so minor but there's something about that idea of that ripple effect that I know

that one person being brave has a genuine massive effect and I know that Giselle Pelico will have affected literally tens if not hundreds of thousands of women and girls around the world and I think something like that gives you so much hope to keep going. Completely. And women just saying no, that's not acceptable and recognising it's okay to think that's not okay. And there's a huge power in that. Ben, to wrap us off, what is one thing that's giving you hope in the work that you're doing? One thing that's given me

hope in the work that I'm doing. Oh, I've got one. Sorry, I do a lot of stuff. So I don't have loads of memories of all of the stuff. I like put it in a folder that just gets archived in my brain. The filing cabinet is overloaded for Ben. What's that film? Bruce Almighty, where he does the filing company. The infinite filing company.

Niche reference. One thing that is giving me hope. So recently, so you speak about ripple effects. And I think there are lots of pieces of work that we do where we never really see beyond lack some feedback

platforms or like some data, we never see the impact because we don't always see the same group of guys more than two or three times. And so years down the line, you don't know what impact you've had. Actually, one time I was working in a prison and there was a dude that was that, I know you. I know, bro, you don't. He was like, you ran a workshop at my school. I was like, don't say that to the other. But I said, don't tell anyone else. But one of the things that's made me really proud in the last, about a fortnight ago, ago. A couple of years ago, we went down to Plymouth and ran this program. We'll call it the man program, which is an acronym for Men's Allyship Network, which is incredibly creative, Anna. And we

ran this man program. So it was two and a half days with these guys and then some action planning sessions afterwards. And it was with community leaders across Plymouth who wanted to tackle violence against women and girls, but didn't know where to start with the conversation. And so we did these two days with these guys. And it's a really interesting program. So we start with like lots of just space for self-reflection for the guys to share their own journeys what's brought them here, who they are, what they care about. And then we go into like some stuff

around masculinitys and where we learn gender norms and all that kind of stuff. We end the first day on a conversation about power and privilege where we do some like explorative activities and the guys get to really reflect. And I remember at the end of the first day there was a guy who was for human. He was so angry. And

his conclusion at the end of the first day was, you're telling me I'm a bad person and I'm not. I think he used to work in the army or something. So he left, everybody left for the first day. And they came back on the second day and it was so interesting. We've run this program a couple of times now, but you always see the same change, which was that they come back having gone home and spoken to their wives and gone home and spoken to their sons and their daughters, gone to drop their kids off at the rugby game and talking to the guys who were at the game. And the same guy came back the next day and he said, I didn't get it yesterday, but I get it now

because I've spoken to my wife, which again is not great because women should have to do unpaid labour. But that aside, it worked on this occasion. And so we finished the programme. They did the action planning. They were like, we're going to run workshops like, could you? And I was like, no, it's not a good idea. Don't do that.

It takes a certain level of skill. But they decided that they were going to start a conference. And so the next year, which was last year, they ran this conference. And they invited me to come down as a guest speaker. because I came down and as you would expect it was like mostly women from Plymouth in the room, women from women's services, women from health services, a range of different places. And then a couple of guys and my boss and me were actually sat on a table with some guys who were actually men's rights activists and had come and just decided that they were pissed off

and they weren't going to engage. But we had some conversations with them and they made some shifts in their approach to the rest of the conversation. And this year they had the conference again, I wasn't able to go. but seeing online like all of the feedback from the conference and I think for me it's a real hope that like the work actually works and like you can do things that do change things for men and these were all like really higher profile men in the city

I don't know how high profile you can be in Plymouth but they were super high profile men in the city men with lots of different lots of influence like head teachers and guys who ran school trusts guys who were in the police, guys who are in the fire department. So men who were in positions to impact other men in their community and seeing them carry that work forward and continue to carry that work forward, even without their hands being held, I think it's like a real,

gives me a real sense of hope for the fact that this work does make a difference and sometimes it feels smaller. Sometimes you don't see what the impact is, but it does have an impact. So that's something that's giving me hope. Well, to be super corny, you two give me a lot of hope. Not to make this a loving, but you really do. And I find it so, as I said at the start of this conversation, it is a lot to constantly be reading news story after news story

and to be so hyper-exposed to just such a litany of abuses that women face day-to-day, harassment, assaults, everything. But I think we have to believe and we have to know that change is possible. And I think when I hear both of you speak, I really do. I'm reinvigorated in the belief that it can, that we can make changes. And I often think it's always about understanding within your own little sphere. of influence, what is the change that you can make within that sphere of influence? Because there's a lot of change that has to happen, but we all are able to shift the dial in some respect within our sphere of influence. So I think it's about understanding and isolating what

you can do and then being able to move forward with that. Quite a few people have written in a question I've noticed amongst different questions I've read that is in a similar vein to the one I'm going to read out now. And I guess it's really about how we tackle and process examples of patriarchy and radicalization at a personal familial friendship level. So this person has asked, how can I communicate with my brother who has become radicalized? I'm a feminist woman and I hate that. I think I hate that. Now he has a son.

He thinks he knows best and just to reflect. in amongst questions people have communicated about brothers, dads and friends holding seemingly increasingly radicalized misogynistic views. Laura, how do you suggest people begin these personal, personal conversations? Yeah, I want to start by acknowledging how painful it is and by telling you that you are not alone. In fact, this is probably the single most common question I am ever asked is how do I, how do I deal with it when it's my dad or when it's my brother or it's someone that I love or often it's male friends or even a partner and it is so incredibly painful in those situations and you can't just walk away and it is complicated and you know that

you know that person probably has lots of things about them that you love and that's really hard. I think there are loads of different answers to this. There's no one size fits all approach. The first suggestion I have is to make it little tiny conversations and not one big terrifying one because that is a huge burden on you, but it's also going to provoke a knee-jerk defensive response in them. If they feel that you are sitting them down, it's this horrible, awkward thing that you both just have to get through and then you're never going to talk about it again. It's never going to work. But letting it come up when it comes up naturally, like with kids, especially I say this, with parents talking to children, it's like, oh, we just drove past

a billboard and those two actors are advertised in the same movie, but the woman's naked and the guys in a suit. That's interesting. Just like these little, oh, we just went down the magazine aisle in the supermarket while we're doing the weekly shop. And under men's magazines, it has the National Geographic and the New Statesman and the Economist. That's interesting. It's a kind of different version of that where it's little tiny things. Another thing I would say is that statistics can give kind of some objective fact to rely on and to fall back on. They don't always work, but they can be quite helpful in terms of tackling kind of blanket statements. Women have nothing to make fuss about anymore.

You know, women are equal now. All of those things can be utterly disproved, shattered really by statistics. Another thing is personal experiences. And I have just as Ben said, there's a mixed relationship with this. You shouldn't have to bear your own trauma if it doesn't feel comfortable to do so. If it does feel possible, I know that for many men, the pivot, the turning point is the sudden realization that this isn't some kind of intellectual argument. It is something that's affected the women that they love on a day-to-day basis and that that can be completely transformative in getting it and recognizing it. Another thing I would say is that the burden shouldn't just be on you within a family

if there is another man in the family that you can ask to intervene on your behalf to have at least some of those difficult conversations, maybe to be the one that broaches it, that starts the conversation. And I would also say not to be discouraged. Just like Ben said, this never happens overnight. And you might well get a kind of defensive response. But that doesn't mean that you haven't shifted the dial. It just means that it's not always possible for someone to acknowledge that you have.

And very often I see conversations that people think have been disastrous. And then whether it's two weeks later or two years later, that person comes back to the table and the conversation develops and they've been thinking about it. Or it's led them to have conversations with other people about it. and it has made a difference. And I think the last tip I would give is people find it so much easier to talk about this stuff. If you're talking about the action and not the person, people find it almost impossible to have a conversation about something if they think that they are being accused of being a sexist, being a misogynist, being a bad person, being prejudiced. if you can separate it and talk about a specific incident or a specific thing that's been said and make it clear that that is the thing that you were talking about,

it can help people to be able to hear you in a way that otherwise there's almost this panic that drowns out anything that you're going to say. So making it kind of accessible to them in that sense can be useful as well. This person has asked, do you think the epidemic of violence against women is having a knock on effect on romantic relationships between men and women. What conversations do you think we need to be had about this? I think this is a really important question.

And actually it's one, I mentioned earlier the research, the FT did. I saw the guy, the statistician who did that data analysis of the FT, did a talk that I went to recently. And he began the conversation saying the reason he got super interested in looking at the demographic shifts that have occurred and leading to men and women kind of going in very different directions when it comes to kind of upward mobility was because he noticed that so many of his female peers

were saying, I just can't find anyone to date. There are no good men around. It's so great. And he was like hearing this again and again, which is quite a reductionist, but he was hearing it consistently and he was interested in, is there any kind of data to back up

this seeming kind of disaffection amongst particularly young women dating? And then the study suggests, yes. How do you both think, that this epidemic of violence and a broader issues around gender inequality and misogyny are affecting our intimate romantic lives? I actually, this might be a bit controversial, but I don't think they are very much and I actually think they should be more. Oh, interesting. I didn't think you'd say that.

Lord, tell us more. I just think that we have this weird bubble around intimate relationships and interpersonal relationships, particularly like heteronormative partnered relationships, where we just don't let the kind of discourse in the more mainstream around feminism, somehow it doesn't penetrate that bubble. You know, I think there are so many people who are really active in the social justice space or are really kind of aware of these issues where still, if we were honest about our relationships, there is still a massive gender divide in terms of emotional level,

in terms of the mental load, in terms of caregiving, in terms of health work. And I just don't think we've managed to penetrate that yet. And I think it's really far behind where it should be. And I don't know exactly what the answer is. I think it's possible that there's just like a lot of women out there who need to leave their partners. Like genuinely. You heard it here first. Laura Bates, who knows everything.

But no way, do you like, I think there is a real, for some reason, as a society, we are very slow in that. particular space to catch up. So we still have, every time I ever speak to you, we talk about the orgasm gap. And I know it's your favorite, I know it's your favorite topic in the world. But it is like, it remains ridiculous that there is such an absolute golf in men and women's outcomes in terms of sexual pleasure within paired heterosexual relationships. And within a society where we are talking more openly about other stuff, we are not very good, I think, about that introspection and about recognizing it in our personal life.

And I think a big part of the reason for that is that there remains a kind of stranglehold on our society of this notion that no matter what, no matter how much we talk about women's success in different areas, no matter how much we pay lip service to all of these things, as a society, we still utterly really deem women's success to be linked to a romantic, heterosexual partnership with a man. So thank you both so much for being such wonderful speakers. You are both absolutely fabulous. And thank you so much for listening so wonderfully tonight. But a huge round of applause. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to today's Sex Talks podcast with me, your host, Emma Louise Boynton. If you'd like to attend a live recording of the podcast, check out the eventbrate link in the show notes, as we have a lot. lots of exciting live events coming up. In the meantime, don't forget to submit whatever ag-dient question you'd like us to tackle

on a future podcast episode via the SexTalks website. That's sextalks.co.uk. And finally, if you enjoyed the show, I hope you did. Please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe on whatever platform you're listening to this on, as apparently it helps others to find us. Have a wonderful day.

Thank you.