The One You Feed - Navigating the Impossible Standards of Masculinity with Ruth Whippman

Episode Date: November 5, 2024

In this episode, Ruth Whippman discusses navigating the impossible standards of masculinity. Ruth has grappled with the conflicting emotions of mothering boys and societal shifts and she found herself questioning the very essence of masculinity and its impact on her sons. She delves into the challenges boys face in navigating societal expectations and the lack of language for them to articulate their experiences. Through her personal experience and research, Ruth sheds light on the overwhelming pressure boys encounter to conform to traditional masculine standards, while also questioning the divisive nature of the term "toxic masculinity." Key Takeaways: Understanding toxic masculinity and learning to empower boys to be their authentic selves Navigating the shifting landscape of raising sons for healthier relationships and respectful behavior Embracing the beauty of blending masculinity and femininity to create a more inclusive and empathetic society Embracing the profound impact of body shaming on men and how to promote positive body image for boys Redefining masculinity standards for boys to foster a culture of kindness, emotional intelligence, and self-expression For full show notes, click here! Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The sort of ideal body shape for men has like ramped up to this like ridiculous proportions in the same way that the ideal body shape for women has kind of shrunk to the part where, you know, if Barbie was sized up to a real person, she'd have a feeding tube and not be able to walk. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do.

We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer.

Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Ruth Whitman, a British author, journalist, and documentary filmmaker. Her essays, cultural criticism, and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, Time Magazine, New York Magazine, The Guardian, and many more. Her first book,

America the Anxious, was a New York Post Best Book of the Year and a New York Times Editor's Choice. Ruth is a regular speaker at venues including TEDx, Google, The Moth, and Somerset House in London. Today, Ruth and Eric discuss her newest book, Boy Mom, Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity. And don't forget that The One You Feed podcast is now on YouTube, so you can watch some of your favorite interviews by going to theoneyoufeedpod on YouTube. Hi, Ruth. Welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me on. It's nice to have you back on. We had you on maybe four or five years ago, and I remember really

enjoying the conversation. So I'm glad we're getting to do it again. We're going to be discussing your latest book, which is called Boy Mom, Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity. But before we get into that, we'll start like we always do with the parable. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with her grandchild. And they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops. Think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. beings. We are all both good and bad. These qualities exist within all of us. And there's no point denying that. There's no point pretending that we're all virtue and there's nothing wrong,

or that we're sort of better than everybody else. But I think it also points to the fact that we have some agency in our lives, that we don't have full control and the other wolf will always be there, but we have some choices around how we live and what our values are. I love that, you know, these things are in everyone. And I think that's relevant to your book, because it's a book about masculinity, but you can't really talk about masculinity without talking about femininity, right? They exist on a pole. And as I walked away from your book, the one thing that sort of landed on me, it's something I've thought about a lot over the years, is that the ideal person really has a blend of those characteristics. They're not all masculine, they're not all feminine. And to

force ourselves into being all one way is damaging to us. I agree. And I think also I'd rather see us moving away from labeling qualities and traits with a gender. So whether we're talking about bravery or courage or strength or physical toughness, which are associated with masculinity traditionally, or nurturing, caregiving, empathy, emotionality, you know, which are traditionally like feminine coded traits. In a way, I'd rather see a world where we're all able to embrace all of those things. They don't have a gender, exactly. Yeah, that's an interesting way to think of it. It's so deeply conditioned to think of things that way. And obviously, those didn't get made up in a vacuum, right? Over the millennia that there have been humans, there's been observations made

and it said, hey, you know, more men seem to have this and women have that. But I agree with you that maybe taking them out of a gendered context makes them more applicable to everybody. Yeah, and more accessible to everybody. Because I think, and I just want to state here, there's nothing bad about masculinity and there's nothing bad about femininity. They're both associated with all kinds of wonderful things. It's just that when we use that as a framework for, you know, a standard that we have to meet in order to be worthy, I think that's where the problems come in. Whether that's if you're growing up as a boy and you feel you have to be, you know, tough and strong and invulnerable and not show your feelings and not be like a woman, you know, that's quite an exhausting and kind of debilitating and unhealthy standard really

to try to meet. Or whether you're a woman who has to feel they have to be demure and submissive and not have agency or pretty or, you know, like an ornamental kind of object. And that is the standard you feel you have to meet. I'd rather that we just allowed everybody to embrace whatever sides of themselves they would like to. Right, right. So the book is a deeply personal book because you are sort of trying to balance a couple things inside yourself, right? One is your deeply held feminist values. And the other is the fact that when you start the book, you have two boys and you're pregnant with your third boy. So there's this moment trying to embrace these feminine ideals. I've got boys. The culture is changing in such a way that some of the problems with masculinity around Me Too movement and all that sort of coming out. And you're trying to figure

out like, how do you raise boys in all of this? So it's a deeply personal book as you walk through it. It's also deeply personal in the challenges that you're having with your boys. The book is a mixture of memoir and reporting and analysis. But the memoir part of it opens in 2017, when I am eight and a half, nearly nine months pregnant with my third boy, and the Me Too movement is just like exploding all around us. So, you know, Weinstein's been exposed. And it kind of, you know, as I write in the book, it seems to go within like, a few days from Harvey Weinstein as a sex offender to every man on the planet is a sex offender. You know, it's just like one after another, after another, this like horror show of bad news about men. And like the whole conversation

about men and masculinity and the kind of harm that men have inflicted on the world takes on this like very new and very different flavor and kind of a scary flavor. And especially a scary flavor if you're about to give birth to your third boy. Yeah. And so it was this very conflicted moment for me, both politically and personally, you know, personally, I'm there going, how do I raise a good son? Are men just hopeless? You know, is it just that whatever I do, you know, it's inevitable that he's going to end up as being either some kind of predator or a school shooter or a, you know, rapist or something like that. You know, that's the kind of angsty state of mind that I was in. But then like, politically, I'm like, I'm a feminist. I believe that so much of this is socialized and we can do something differently. But there's part of me that's like very exhilarated and happy about the Me Too

conversation. It's like, finally, women have a voice, we can call out this bad behavior, we can finally speak to it. And people are listening for the first time ever. You know, I feel like pretty much every woman feels like they've been saying this stuff for millennia, and nobody, nobody has been listening. So finally, people are listening. Finally, women have a voice. But at the same time, you know, the mother part of me is like, I'm raising boys boys I feel defensively I don't want to think of them as being toxic or terrible or inevitably going to cause harm so it was this very conflicted very defensive very complicated moment that the book opens and it carries on you know the memoir part of the book lasts for the next five years until my youngest

son goes off to kindergarten. And the whole time, we're in the kind of shadow of this wider cultural conversation about masculinity, toxic masculinity. What is it? How do we do differently? How do we do better? And where are we going with men and boys? Yep. And I think that what you do such a great job of in this book is you said it's complicated, right? You keep the complicated in it because this becomes sort of a political issue, right? And each side, I often think lacks the nuance to have conversations that are actually useful. And that's as true of the way that I lean politically and the other side and you do a

very nice job of keeping that in there and and the struggles with it I thought maybe we could move into asking you about the title right reimagining boyhood but it's the last part of the title I'd like to get you to say something about, which is impossible masculinity. What do you mean by that? So this was a really interesting process coming up with that title, because, you know, what are we saying here? And actually, the British version of this book, they chose to replace the word impossible with the word toxic. And I didn't like that choice. I preferred the impossible masculinity framing of this rather than toxic toxic because I feel like masculinity has become impossible from all sides. So on the one hand, like all of the old pressures of masculinity, you know, the man up, be tough, be strong, don't express your emotions, don't be vulnerable, don't be a wuss, don't be a pussy.

You know, those pressures are still very much in circulation for boys. They still have to subscribe to that they still are living in fear of as i think many men are of like being exposed as feminine or as not a real man you know there's this standard that they feel they have to live up to but now there's this sort of voice from the left um or sort of newer voice, which is, you know, boys, you're toxic, you're harmful. You know, your very being is, you know, you're just kind of like a predator in waiting. Whatever you do, you're wrong. And it's also it's time for you to shut up.

It's everybody else's turn. Don't speak to your pain. Don't speak to your experiences because men have been listened to for so long and it's time for everybody else to have a go. So I think many men and boys are in this moment of just feeling like this is impossible, you know, from all sides, you know, where do we go with this? You know, on the one hand, we're supposed to be so privileged and powerful, but we don't feel that way. We still have all of these old problems that nobody's really addressing or seeing. And nobody really has any empathy. Like it feels like we have run out of goodwill for men and boys completely. We're done. And so I think what I wanted to capture with the idea of impossible masculinity was just,

it's kind of impossible from everywhere. We're in this moment in the culture wars where things are very complex and boys and men just don't really know how to be. And I prefer that to toxic masculinity. I think there's something about the phrase toxic masculinity. And I believe it was a really important phrase in its moment. I think it really spoke to a very specific phenomenon, which is really important to call out. But I think for this generation of boys who weren't the ones doing this stuff, I think they just see it as so shaming and so shutting down of conversations rather than opening them up that I kind of didn't want to perpetuate that. are new. And what I mean is, I believe that in my generation might be the generation that first, I think, started to really face this a little bit more. My dad's generation a little bit, but not as much, where if you were paying attention, you started to realize that the

be a man story that was the traditional one was problematic. There was a lot of encouragement from, and again, I think this does start a lot on the liberal side and in communities that are more psychologically informed, spiritually informed. And I don't mean maybe not Christianity, but alternative spirituality. This idea that that way of being a man isn't right, and it's problematic. So you should be different. And so that tension I have felt my whole life, right? I grew up in a sense, my father was very angry, very manly, and I grew up with, I will not be like that. But that's a reaction to the standard, right? And it's still a way of like being in the box, so to speak, right? It's just a slightly different box. So I just really resonated with

a lot of that. I was surprised by how much I resonated with some of the incels. We'll get to that in a second. Really powerful book, because I think I have wrestled for a long, long time with what does it mean to be a man? And what do I do with these characteristics that, again, maybe we get to a day where we don't gender them, but that are traditionally thought of as male. Those are in me. I feel them. Those energies are there. To shove them away is problematic. But to let them just run wild is also, you know, can be very problematic. Right. You know, one thing that I found when I was reporting and researching this book and talking to a lot of boys is one thing that I think is really hard for men and boys is that they don't have a very good vocabulary or

sort of, you know, just a good language and a good framework to really talk about this stuff. And I think that there's all these ways in which men are sort of subtly socialized not to really talk about their pain in different ways or not to really talk about their issues. And so it's like, I think a lot of boys are feeling like, I don't know how to be, everything feels wrong, but I don't really have the framework to talk about it. And I think that we have done as a society a pretty good job over the last few decades of giving women and girls a vocabulary to talk about the issues that face them. So it's not that those issues have gone away,

but I think pretty much any fifth grade girl, say, has the ability to like look through a book or look through a magazine and be like, that's sexist, you know, to call it out. This is wrong. This is oppressing me. You know, I think these girls are so savvy to this stuff. And I think we've done a good job of giving them that framework to think about it and to call it out. Whereas I think with boys and men, it's just, they feel something's wrong. They don't feel like they have permission to talk about it and they don't really have the tools to talk about it or the language. And so this is what I was trying to do in the book was just give it a framework, give it a name, name the problem. Yeah. So let's start with a core idea that is in the middle of all this,

which is sort of gender essentialism, meaning boys have certain traits, girls have other traits. And in the book, you say very clearly that it's possible to read the same research and come to two different conclusions that there are characteristics that are, you know, built into boys, and there are characteristics that are built into girls, and you can find the research and read research and walk away completely convinced that that's true. And you can come to the exact opposite conclusion. And even if you're actually trying to get to the truth, which a lot of people just want to be confirmed of what they believe, but even when you're open to finding the truth, good Lord, it's confusing. It's really confusing. And I think also, as I write in the book, I think that the whole thing

becomes a kind of proxy for a different fight, which is like, you know, when we're talking about is it nature or is it nurture, you know, are we really trying to find out about that? Or are we using this research to further an agenda that we already have? And that happens on both sides. I think there are people with very traditional gender beliefs who go through that research and they're like, look, it's all innate, it's natural, there's nothing we can do about it. Women are like this, men are like that, and women should stay in their place, you know, and men should stay in their place. And, you know, it's a way to justify sort of regressive things. And on the other side of things, you have

feminists who are like, this stuff is all socialized. It's all just, you know, the only reason why that men and boys behave the way they do is because we socialize them into that. And if we socialize them differently, we'd have a totally different outcome. And I think, you know, I read through this body of research many times, and I feel like, honestly, anyone who's really approaching it in good faith would say that this is a mix. It is a mix of nature and nurture. We will never know in exactly what proportions. And these are always group level differences. They don't necessarily apply to any one individual.

So it's like height. Most men are taller than most women, but you will find women who are six foot tall and you will find men who are five feet tall. And that's true. But at a group level, there are differences, I think. And also nature and nurture sort of aren't really distinct. You know, there's the field of epigenetics. So what genes get turned on and off by how we socialize people. But what I ended up feeling was that, yes, there are some elements of this which are hardwired biologically or tendencies which are biologically hardwired. But actually, we use that. We use the idea that, you know, boys will be boys or that, you know, boys are just wired this way as an excuse to kind of not do anything about it, you know, to do less parenting when actually those traits should

encourage us to do more, you know, to step in more to help boys find and girls, you know, to do less parenting when actually those traits should encourage us to do more, you know, to step in more, to help boys find, and girls, you know, to help everybody find new ways to be. You tell a really compelling story near the end of the book about something you observed when you took Abe to his first day of kindergarten. Yeah. You want to tell that story? Yeah. So this is like a very, very tiny story. And I think, you know, I'm always slightly hesitant to tell it because it's the kind of thing that people dismiss and be like, so minor, so nothing. But I think what I was trying to convey

is that these kinds of very minor things add up. Right. You know, it's a million, million examples of the same thing. So what I noticed, I took him to kindergarten. He's this tiny little kid. He's very anxious. It's his first day of school. And we're going through the gate and there's this like big guy there. I think he might be a teacher or a volunteer. I'm not sure. But so right in front of my son in line, there's these two girls. And the guy says to the first girl, hi, sweetheart. You know, this little sweet voice. And then the next girl, hi, sweetheart. hi, sweetheart, you know, this little sweet voice. And then the next girl, hi, sweetheart. And then my son walks through and his voice goes down an entire octave and he's like, hey, buddy, and gives him a high five. And it's like, he has communicated in this tiny way that these girls are vulnerable, they're in need of protection and nurture, and that they have a

right to be scared, they have a right to be anxious and that adults are going to respond to that. And he's communicated to my son that he must toughen up, that he's a man now, that he's in the system of masculinity. It's not really okay that he's scared and vulnerable and he has to kind of toughen up and get through it. And it's this tiny little moment and it's very well-meaning and the guy was a lovely person. He's not trying to do anything wrong, but it's just having boys, you notice that like right from birth, and there's a lot of research to support this, that we kind of masculinize them in all these subtle ways, that we project these masculine qualities. We see them as sturdier, we see them

as tougher, we see them as less in need of nurture and protection. And we give them less nurture and protection as a result. And I think that's what the process of conditioning is. It's little things that add up. It's a thousand little experiences that grow into something bigger. So I found this, you know, yeah, it's very little. And I think your point is important. The guy there was a kind, good person doing the best he could. Right. And yet there is a message encoded in that. And it's interesting because we tend to think of boys as being stronger. But you say that boys are by almost every measure

more sensitive, fragile and emotionally vulnerable. Explain that, because i think it's easy for us to see the boys could be more aggressive or rambunctious right those boy things but in what ways are they also sensitive fragile and emotionally vulnerable yeah this was one of the biggest surprises to me and it's actually really well established in the literature it's not like some controversial thing that i've plucked out of nowhere what is really surprising is that a baby boy is born with his brain. And when I'm talking about the right hemisphere of his brain, which is the part that deals with emotions, emotional self-regulation, attachments, relationships, he's born with that part of his brain about a month behind a baby girl in development. So baby girl is born naturally more emotionally resilient and independent and with less need for a caregiver. And so you see that boys at birth are like a

little fussier, like they find it harder to calm down. They're more stressed by difficult events, like being separated from their mothers. And you can see that actually any sort of bad thing that can happen to a baby, like any adverse event, like, you know, that the mom has postpartum depression and doesn't bond properly, or that, you know, he's neglected, or that he's abused, or he grows up in poverty. All of those things have been shown in the data to have a bigger effect on boys than they do on girls. Boys' brains are just naturally more vulnerable to disruption in those early years. And that carries on. But I think what happens, so boys actually need a little more care and a little more support right from birth. But because of our stories about

masculinity, we believe that a boy is tougher and sturdier and he needs less care. And you see all this research about how parents like handle baby boys differently. They roughhouse with them. They jiggle them. Whereas they tend to give girls more of this kind of caretaking touch, you know, and they talk to girls more about their emotions. They use more words. They use more language.

And, you know, they just treat them in a slightly more nurturing and emotive way. And so I think this like combination, boys need more, but they get less, really leads to some problems down the line. So, listener, consider this your halfway through the episode integration reminder. Remember, knowledge is power, but only if combined with action and integration. It can be transformative to take a minute to synthesize information rather than just ingesting it in a detached way. So let's collectively take a moment to pause and reflect. What's your one big insight so far and how can you put it into practice in your life? Seriously, just take a second, pause the audio and reflect.

It can be so powerful to have these reminders to stop and be present, can't it? If you want to keep this momentum going that you built with this little exercise, I'd encourage you to get on our Good Wolf Reminders SMS list. I'll shoot you two texts a week with insightful little prompts and wisdom from podcast guests. They're a nice little nudge to stop and be present in your life, and they're a helpful way to not get lost in the busyness and forget what is important. You can join at OneYouFeed.net slash SMS, and if you don't like them, you can get off the list really easily. So far, there are over 1,172 others from the One You Feed community on the list, and we'd love to welcome you as well. So head on over to OneYouFeed.net slash SMS,

and let's feed our good wolves together. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

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It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You quote somebody who works in this space as saying, you know, we have an epidemic of uncared for boys. No wonder we're seeing all this toxic masculinity when they grow up. The other thing that we're seeing is, and again, this is not controversial. This is very clear in the data. Boys are not thriving in the world today. Young men are struggling in many ways. Tell me about some of those ways. So young men are struggling in education. They're falling behind girls in pretty much every measure from kindergarten to

college through postgraduate decrees. They're enrolling in college in fewer numbers than girls. They're much more likely to drop out of college. Unemployment rates amongst young men are rising faster than in any other group. Boys and young men are not socializing as much as young women are. They're spending far more time on screens and far less time socializing in person. So the suicide rate for young men is about close to four times the rate for young women, even though we see in the data that young women are more likely to report that they're depressed. So boys and men are like holding this stuff inside until it's way too late. They're not seeking help.

There's a serious mental health problem with young men at the moment, but they're not getting help for it and they're not able to articulate it. So all these different ways boys are not doing well. And so I know there are a lot of theories about why this is, and you probably don't have an answer, but what are the theories that make most sense to you? Yeah, it's a really interesting question. I think, you know, there's this voice from the, mainly from the right, which is like, boys don't have enough masculinity. They just need to toughen up what we need to sort of toughen them up more. And back in

the good old days, they were tougher and stronger, and they were doing better. But I think that is a misreading of everything that's going on. Personally, I think that what's going on with boys at the moment is a combination of an old problem and a new problem. So the old problem is the old story that we've had for generations and generations, which is, you know, the toughen up that boys are undercared for in those sort of emotional and nurturing ways that they're meant to squash their emotions. And these things can lead to quite a psychologically unhealthy mind. So all of those old pressures of masculinity, I think, are really unhealthy for boys and men. Men used to rise just because they had privilege.

You know, it used to be that they would rise to the top just because everybody else was kept down. But now we're taking away the barriers for everybody else. We're starting to see that the way that we're raising boys is actually really unhealthy. And that, you know, without privilege, they're just kind of crumbling. Also, I think there are sort of more modern pressures, which are like things like screens have given boys a real kind of option to avoid the real world in a way that they never really had before. And so I think that it's easier, for example, you know, it's never been a more fraught time to have sex and relationships as a boy or young man. And it's never been easier to get your phone and just watch porn, for example. And it's very fraught for boys socializing in the real world. They don't know how to be.

It's never been easier to just get on a video game and live out your heroic masculine fantasy. One expert that I spoke to in the book characterized it as a combination of fear and ease. So it's like fearful being in the real world and it's easeful being on a screen. Yeah. So that's one part of it. And, you know, there are also economic reasons. I think that the types of jobs that boys used to go into are in decline, you know, all of those kind of manufacturing roles. So I think it's a combination of all different kinds of things

that are all coming together in this cultural moment that we're at. And when we talk about this, you know, you can't talk about it without talking about privilege, right, that men have had over time. There was something in the book, though, that genuinely shocked comes to success in high school, rates of going to college, rates of postgraduate degrees, on most of these measures, black girls are doing better than white boys. And so all of our understanding of systems of privilege, you know, of race and gender are being turned on their head. You know, if privilege leads to success, then you would think that white boys would be doing better than anyone because they've had every type of privilege, you know, racial and gender privilege. And black girls, you know,

you have to hand it to them. You know, it's amazing. They have the same limitations, the same structural obstacles, the same underfunded schools, the same lack of opportunities as black boys, but they've managed to overcome all of those and, you know, overtake white boys. And so I think what we're seeing is that something about the way we are socializing boys, and particularly when it comes to education, is really harmful. One thing that I would say about this sort of modern moment that we're in is that, you know, we've got all the old pressures of masculinity that all our fathers lived with and our grandfathers, but also like this kind of flavor of masculinity is changing as well. So it used to be this kind of, we had this model, which was like, be a tough guy, suppress your emotions, but also be a family man, be a breadwinner, be a provider.

And those stories were also like really part of masculinity. But our kind of model for masculinity is becoming like more of a kind of cartoon action hero kind of masculinity, you know, a kind of muscle man. You see these kinds of masculinity influences are all kind of doubling down on this model. So it's like taking all the seeds of the old model, but just turning it into a cartoon. It's basically, you know, muscles and guns and cage fighting all the way down. And so that is creating even more pressures around masculinity for boys in this moment, I think, you know, it's even more ridiculous, and even more hyped up than it ever was in many ways. Yeah. And it's interesting, my son and I have talked about this. My son is 26. So he's a young man. And we've talked about how there is lots of resources for men right out there, but they are overwhelmingly right wing and or very, very Christian, which again, that's not necessarily bad unless you're neither of those things.

Right. And then where do you go? Yeah. Yeah. And that is the question him and I've talked about is it just doesn't seem that there's places to go to talk about what being a man is or masculinity is in a time where the social pressures around that are changing very rapidly. And I think boys are very fearful to talk about it, and rightly so, for being called

out for being overprivileged or being entitled or mansplaining or taking up too much space, you know? Exactly. And yet, it's critical, right? You talk about this idea, you say, we don't experience our lives or emotions as part of a political class, but as individuals. So the fact that men, for as long as we can go back, have been privileged and have had power is all true. And some of that trickles down to young

men of today, right? It's not that there's not some inherited benefit there. But I know that around young people today, in a lot of spaces, I think being a straight white man is possibly the lowest social category. It is just a category that nobody, like you said, nobody wants to hear from. Shut up, right? We've heard from you for long enough. Right. And that's not tenable as an individual. Right. And these boys who are growing up now, they haven't lived that context, you know, and that context

is real and it's important and we have to remind boys and men of it. And so it's really complicated. My friend was telling me this story the other day about how her son, who's I think 11, was at school and they had an affinity group for every sort of identity category. So it was like the black students affinity group, the LGBTQ, the girls affinity group. And the one that they didn't have was for boys. And it's like, well, boys have already had power, you know, and this is meaningless to an 11 year old boy. They don't feel powerful in their own life. They have nowhere to process it. And the thing that kind of compounds it is that yes, it is true that patriarchy has given boys and men access to power. That is a very real thing. But even in that system, boys and men have been deprived of some

really important things, which is emotionality, intimacy, human connection. So as I say in the book, you know, under patriarchy, boys and men have everything except the thing that's most worth having, which is human connection, access to human intimacy. And so, even under patriarchy, it's not that men had all benefit and no harm. Patriarchy harms men and boys. Precisely. And so, there's no way to talk about that. We've focused so heavily, particularly, there is a rich tradition within feminism of recognizing that patriarchy harms men and boys. But it's like we've forgotten it all, you know, in this moment, post Me Too. It's just like, you're privileged, you get everything, you're

lucky, shut up. And that is not a healthy way for any young person to live or to grow. Right. And there's a couple different points in the book that you make this point that, you know, what we're doing is we're trying to sort of push men down instead of sort of get everybody to the same level. That doesn't really work. And you say, you talk about this because what we're talking about, and you put it in one sentence, it's hard to square male privilege with male vulnerability. You have both those things happening at the same time. Men have had privilege, do have privilege to a certain extent. And yet men as a whole, younger ones in particular, are extraordinarily vulnerable right now to many

different problems. And so I think you do a great job of walking through this. I wanted to turn a little bit now to something that I didn't really know about. I had heard the term incel, but I didn't honestly even know what that really meant. Yeah. Before we go into it, share with me what that is. Okay. So the word incel stands for involuntary celibate. So it's a group of generally pretty young men on the internet and often adolescent boys as well. They're pretty young men who believe that they have been excluded

from sex and relationships. They can't have sex. They can't find a girlfriend or a partner. And they're extremely lonely and usually profoundly depressed and often have pretty toxic politics not always but often have pretty toxic politics so they are misogynistic there's sort of links between incels and like white supremacy and all kinds of like really repulsive ways of being in the world not all incels are like that. And they have all these theories about, you know, they believe that it's a kind of genetic inevitability that they will never find women. They believe that women are terrible and they're shallow and they're only interested in men for their looks. And they congregate in these online communities. And

at their most extreme, they have this kind of violent fringe. So the incels and sort of incel adjacent men have been associated with several acts of mass violence, including mass shootings. Some of the very prominent school shootings have been traced back to men who have been associated with this movement. And it's a really complicated and scary and also fascinating and sad phenomenon. And in the book, I spent some time digging into this community. So I spent a lot of time in their spaces online, in their communities and forums. And I go pretty deep interviewing a few of them. Two of them end up in the book, two of these interviews that are really quite lengthy and detailed with these two guys. Yeah, it was really quite an eye-opening experience

in a lot of different ways. Yeah, what I find interesting about it is there are many people who believe that you shouldn't even give these people any airtime, that they're not lonely, sad men, that they're toxic, dangerous people, so that you've got that view of the world. Now, I tend to be of the view that generally that, you know, that phrase hurt people hurt people, meaning that like, if you're hurting somebody, it's because you are damaged, right? In many ways. And looking at the incel community was difficult for me, because a lot of these men are feeling like they're not attractive enough, they're not tall enough, they're not strong enough for any women to desire them. I was a scrawny child and a short child. And it took me really till high school before I was

able to really have sort of any success with women. Is that even a useful phrase anymore? Did I just say something that people are gonna be like, you can't say that, but... I don't know. I mean, it didn't like for me, but, you know, who knows? It's all moving up, probably. Before I could have any relationships and go on any dates, right? Okay. So a lot of reading them with their complete belief that because of their physical looks, they would never find a relationship was really saddening. And the thing that was most sad about the community to me, and you talk about it, is

just the deep hopelessness in the whole thing. It's this belief that nothing could get better for them. Yeah. the, you know, all of these sort of masculinity people online, the masculinity influencers, the Andrew Tates, the sort of quasi self-help masculinity groups on the internet, because most of that sort of manosphere is predicated on this idea that there is a thing called an alpha male and that if you work hard at it, you can become that. So they sell this, like they sort of prey on these vulnerable boys by saying, we know that you already feel insecure about your masculinity. Yes, there is an alpha male. Yes,

this person is going to get all the women and all the success and all the status. And I can sell you exactly the model to get there. So pump iron and do this. And the difference between those guys and the incels is that the incels, they believe all this stuff. They believe there's an alpha male. They believe there's a hierarchy. They believe in this system, but they've given up hope of ever climbing that ladder themselves. And what's so interesting about them is that, so on the one hand, there's some of the most like, it is toxic masculinity central over there. You go on those boards, there is misogyny that you just wouldn't believe. There's talking about raping and torturing women. There's like some of the most repulsive views that you could ever imagine on those boards. But what there also is, is this

like deep sense of vulnerability, belonging and connection, like brotherhood. It's almost that because they've kind of given up on ever climbing the masculinity ladder, that they're freed from all of its pressures as well. So they don't have to man up and be tough and strong and invulnerable. And they can actually express their emotions and their sort of love for one another in a way that most men can't. So it's like both the worst of masculinity and this kind of freedom from masculinity there, which is really interesting. I'm Jason Alexander.

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And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You say that the irony hit me hard. I'd spent all this time searching for a space in which boys and young men felt they could disregard masculine norms. And 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'd found it right here at the heart of manosphere in toxic masculinity central. It's fascinating. You say incels are generally deeply preoccupied with their appearance. I think this is interesting because the narrative that has been going on most of my adult life is that

we have a culture in which women are body shamed and women are held up to these impossible standards. And 100% true. I also believe that men have been too. And it's more socially acceptable. Yeah. I mean, when I was reading comic books as a kid, right, one of the ads was the Charles Atlas ads. And in the Charles Atlas ads, he was a weightlifter. There was a little scrawny kid on the beach who was getting sand kicked on him. And none of the girls would look at him. He orders the Charles Atlas stuff, does the weightlifting and comes back and takes over the beach, right? I mean, that was being marketed to young boys

50 years ago. And it's only ramped up. That pressure has gotten exponentially worse on boys. Yeah. And so I think that that is an important part of the story that often isn't told, right? Or another way in which men suffer that isn't talked about often, because if I were to sort of say that sort of thing generally to females, they would be like, yeah, but nothing like we were. Not to the degree we were. And I don't know whether that's true or not, right? I think measuring degree doesn't matter because the level of suffering was great for me. Yeah, absolutely. And I think those pressures on boys, so it's like the muscle man, you know, the online fitness influencers, you know, you can see the sort of ideal body shape for men has like ramped up to this like ridiculous

proportions in the same way that the ideal body shape for women has kind of shrunk to the part where, you know, if Barbie was sized up to a real person, she'd have a feeding tube and not be able to walk. You know, there is no human that can look like the CGI superheroes and, you know, the online fitness influencers and that culture has really changed but yeah i mean one of the insults was talking to me about short shaming of men for example and you know yes body image pressures on women are terrible you know i grew up with diet culture it's a generation of women have been damaged by that or several generations of women but it's like at this point I feel like I would never talk about somebody as having like a fat girl complex. You know, it would just be unthinkable. But like to

talk about somebody as having a short man complex is completely fine. You know, and this insider who was very short was telling me that, you know, online, there are women telling short men to kill themselves, that they would never have a short boyfriend, that they were shaming boys for being short. It's something they can't do anything about. And it's like, you know, somehow we've got this notion that if we shame boys and men, you know, that we're kind of punching up with a joke. We have this idea that it's like, okay to punch up. It's okay to rib somebody who's powerful. And, you know, whereas punching down is not acceptable. But at what point do we need to stop and say, is this really punching up?

To like body shame, like whatever he was at the time, 18, 19 year old boy, you know, who has serious mental health problems, no financial or social capital. You know, these incels are like profoundly depressed, marginalized. You know, is it really punching up to call him short, to shame him for that? I believe not, you know, and I think we really need to look at that. You know, it's a blind spot and I think we need to stop body shaming boys and men. Agree. I mean, we shouldn't body shame anybody, right? Anybody, of course. But I mean, I remember clearly an incident in middle school of like girls laughing at me because I was too skinny. And again, these things aren't new. I'm not a young person, right? So I just think there's

this sense that you're not punching up to that. You know, anytime you're shaming anybody or making fun of anybody's appearance, you're being mean. You're being mean and you're harming that person. Yes. There's no punching up in there. And I think, again, this starts to get back to the thing we were talking about, which is like, do you experience your life as part of a political class or as an individual? You know, yes, men have had power, but that makes no difference when you're body shaming somebody who's, you know, anybody for anything. Yeah. And you say this might be inching us closer to equality, but it doesn't feel like progress, right? In the sense that like now men are being shamed at a level that women are. That's not

progress. Right, exactly. We're not doing things better. And we should be learning from what we did with women, what we got wrong. And I think also because things have historically been so bad for women in that area, we have now like a really robust, like body positivity movement. We have like language to describe it. We know how to talk about body shaming. We know how to call it out. We know how to like fight back. And I think the boys and men just didn't know how to even start to fight back. And they felt that when they did, they were shamed for, you know, well, back in your box, you've got too much privilege. You know, women have suffered worse from you. Don't, you know, don't call it out. And this, this insult was telling me, you know,

he wanted to go to therapy and to find a therapist. I mean, partly he couldn't afford it, which is a huge problem, but also he was scared because he felt that if he articulated his problems to a therapist, they would shame him and say, you know, well, women have had it far worse than you. Now, I believe that a good therapist would never do that. But at the same time, the fact that he's fearful of that speaks to something very real. It speaks to something very real. And it also speaks to the cultural messaging that he's getting from other men, right? I mean, as I was reading about the

incels, the layer upon layer of mistruth or misunderstanding was painful to read. And one of the things I was thinking about is like, there's a mistake that's being made there. And there's often something in psychological literature called the three Ps, and it has to do with how you explain things, right? You take things to be permanent, you think they're personal, and you think they're pervasive, right? And what these poor boys are doing is they're taking the fact that some women only want tall men, and that is true, that is true, to mean all women only want tall men. They're taking these things to be pervasive, and that's the big mistake, I think, that's happening there. It's not that they're not right some of the time.

They're not right all the time, though. I mean, and that's just a general thing I think we do across the board, is we just take an incident of a person on the left acting badly, and we say, that's the left. It's pervasive. Or somebody on the right doing that. And it just doesn't do any of us good. I think that's true.

And I think we've just got to the point where we've just lost empathy for anybody. You know, it's just like. Yes. I was talking to these incels and there was just layer upon layer of pain and trauma and terrible messaging and half-truths and, you know, all of these things. And these people are really suffering. And I think the more we say we're not going to talk to them, we don't want to humanize them. You know, this is a whole thing.

You know, we don't want to humanize these people because, you know, and there's this argument which is like, you know, if an Arab Muslim commits an act of violence, we call him a terrorist. But if a sort of white man, we say he has mental health problems. And there's truth in that for sure. There is. But like what we've decided is that we're going to do about that is this like race to the bottom.

So it's like, okay, let's dehumanize everyone, you know, rather than trying to humanize the Arab Muslim and see, well, what's going on for him? And like, how did he get to this place? And why does he want to? And, you know, he's a real person who probably got into terrorism through poverty and terrible messaging and terrible ideas about masculinity as well. Actually, let's just dehumanize the white guy as well to like, you know, and I think that is just this terrible mistake. It's a race to the bottom. Yeah. The other thing that you mentioned, I thought was very interesting was that you say

a wide body of research shows that it's not masculinity itself that makes men violent, but the sense of shame that they are not masculine enough. Oh, yes. And wow. And I actually resonate with that personally also. Not that I'm violent, but I can share a little bit about that in a minute. But say a little bit more. Yeah, this was really fascinating to me. And it's one of those things that you see in the research and it feels so profoundly true when you hear it. You're like, yes, of course, because there's this like impossible standard for masculinity that boys and men feel that they have to meet. And there's always going to be inadequacy built into that. No human man can be the kind of superhero, you know, the model that they're expected to be. So they will always fall short. But some fall more short than others, you know, and some people are more successful in this system than others.

But it comes in with built-in shame. And the research shows it's this measure called masculine discrepancy stress, which means that when a man believes that he falls short of the standard for manhood, he is far more likely, you know, when he feels shame about his inability to live up to masculinity standards, then he's more likely to commit pretty much all kinds of violence, sexual violence, domestic violence, you know, what they call intimate partner violence, assault with a weapon, assault of all kinds. And you can see it. It's that anger. It's that shame. It's the shame cycle that just keeps going and going and going. It rang so true. And this is why,

you know, we talk about all these extremes, you know, the incels, the manosphere, you know, the sex offender and everything. But I think this is so built into the culture at every level. We give boys right from the beginning, this kind of superhero myth about who they're supposed to be. So all boys are operating with this impossible pressure, this impossible standard. And so I think, you know, we really need to look at what we're asking of men and boys. And that's why I don't like this masculinity framework, even when it's positive, even when we're talking about positive masculinity, we just keep on reinforcing this idea that the most important thing is to be masculine. I just am very nonviolent by nature. So I'm lucky in that way. But I resonated with this because again, this is mostly stuff as a young man, you know, I wasn't, you know,

quote unquote, masculine enough, right? That what I just did was I just got in lots of trouble. That was my way of being tough, is I'm in trouble, right? I'm not afraid of the law, you know, and again, it wasn't violent, but it certainly wasn't pro-social behavior, you know, it didn't help me or society. And it was this, I can see it now, this semi-conscious attempt to be like, but I am tough. To compensate, right. And so that's a sort of very minor and, you know, relatively healthy example of the same thing that you see with, say, school shooters. You know, when you read the manifestos written by these guys, it's this like utter shame.

They've internalized this message that they're supposed to be this kind of glorious masculine hero and then the shame of like falling short and then something like a school shooting it's like this very obvious splashy trope of masculinity. You know you get a gun and you shoot a bunch of people. It's like a way of reclaiming this masculine status and that's like the most tragic and awful example of it. But you see it, you know, you see lesser versions of it everywhere. Yeah. Well, I think this is a good place for us to wrap up. You and I are going to continue talking in the post-show conversation because we just didn't get to at all what ways this has

caused you to parent your boys differently. And so I'd love to take this into some actual practical examples. Listeners, if you would like to hear this post-show conversation and many other post-show conversations, which some people tell me are the best conversations, as well as ad-free episodes and to support podcasts that you care about, you could go to oneufeed.net slash join and become part of our community. Ruth, thank you so much for coming on. I thought the book was so well done. I mean, your last book was too. You're just, you're great. Oh, thank you. It's been such a pleasure

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The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really No Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor what's in the museum of failure and does your dog truly love you we have the answer go to really know really.com and register to win 500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition sign jason bobblehead the really know really podcast follow us on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts