And, This is How Democrats Win Back Men with Jackson Katz

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Speaker 47 When it comes to the issue of race and gender, when it comes to the issue of masculinity, there are few people that hold more credentials on this subject matter than my next guest.

Speaker 47 This is Gavin Newsom.

Speaker 47 And this is Jackson Katz.

Speaker 3 You've got a new book coming out, at least overseas, and we'll see what comes out here. It's called Every Man.
But I mean, that's interesting, Obama, Renegades, and Springsteen.

Speaker 3 So tell me a little bit more about that. Well, yeah, my book was just published in the UK in February, but it's coming out in September in the United States, the American version.

Speaker 3 It's called Every Man, Why Violence Against Women is a Men's Issue and How You Can Make a Difference.

Speaker 3 And Jacks, just so for people that don't know you, you've been at this issue, been talking about the issue of intersection between gender, race,

Speaker 3 violence for decades and decades.

Speaker 3 I mean, you've been in this space talking about the issues of masculinity, what's happening to young men and the relationship between the sexes for 25 plus years, right? Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 Since I was a college student, really, which is a long time ago. And

Speaker 3 what originally inspired all of this and ultimately what inspired this book all these decades later, building on what the the work you've been doing?

Speaker 3 Well, you know, as a young guy, and I was a big, you know, athlete in high school, I was an all-star football player. And I was, I came from a blue-collar family.

Speaker 3 You know, my, my stepfather was a truck driver and an Army veteran in World War II. My father was a medic in Germany and France in World War II.
I came from a family where, you know,

Speaker 3 Well, you know, it was a blue-collar family and

Speaker 3 yet education was a big

Speaker 3 emphasis. And when I was in college,

Speaker 3 I started taking courses in subjects that related to gender and race and other things.

Speaker 3 And I was learning, I thought I was smart when I was a young guy, but I realized how little I knew, especially about how other people lived. Because

Speaker 3 I came from a kind of a white suburban background just north of Boston. And when I started taking classes on

Speaker 3 gender-related topics and started hearing about women's experiences of violence and I started seeing women organizing around the fear that they have so often, especially at night, you know, because that was the beginning of the Take Back the Night movement where women were marching to say, we have the right to walk outside at night.

Speaker 3 And I remember thinking when I saw these women, you know, sort of organizing for better lighting on campus, I remember thinking

Speaker 3 not that these women hated men, but that they felt like they had the right to walk across campus. And I felt like that was what leadership looked like.
I was inspired by it.

Speaker 3 I was a young student journalist at the time, and I was inspired by women standing up and speaking up for themselves, just as I was inspired by African Americans and what we used to call, you know, in the gay, what used to be called the gay rights movement, which is now the LGBTQ.

Speaker 3 And just put this in context, what year roughly would we be talking about?

Speaker 3 Roughly around 1980. 80.
Okay, God. So it's like,

Speaker 3 you know, I'm a little long in the tooth. But I've been doing this work.
So since I started speaking out then, and because I had this background in traditional male culture as an athlete and

Speaker 3 pretty successful,

Speaker 3 I knew that I had a platform. I knew that people were interested.
When I started saying, hey, you know, sexual assault and domestic violence, this is wrong, guys. This is like wrong.

Speaker 3 And women should be able to, shouldn't have to worry constantly about their personal safety. And how would you feel if you were a woman and had to live like that?

Speaker 3 I remember thinking,

Speaker 3 why aren't more men saying these things? Why aren't more men speaking out? Why is it always women having to organize and speak out and

Speaker 3 push for reforms of the laws? Why aren't men doing this? And I know most men are not abusive, but yet most men don't speak out. And so because I knew I had a platform, I I started speaking out.

Speaker 3 And honestly, I'm doing today, Governor, what I started doing as a

Speaker 3 19-year-old. I always say my hair is a lot shorter, not by choice.

Speaker 3 And I have nicer clothes than I did when I was a

Speaker 3 19-year-old guy. But it's the same message.
And my book, Every Men,

Speaker 3 Why Violence Against Women is a Men's Issue is like what I've been saying for 40 years.

Speaker 3 It's just that because of

Speaker 3 my work and other people's work and the way the culture moves,

Speaker 3 there's an energy now, there's a receptivity to talking about this, thinking about this,

Speaker 3 with the exception of the backsliding that we're doing in our country right now, which is a really dramatic series of steps backwards. And we can talk about that as well.

Speaker 3 So what, I mean, when you look back 40 years, I mean, did you really feel like you were the lone voice back then?

Speaker 3 I mean, was there any organized movement or recognition or was there any political leadership with men in this space to call out that violence against women? Or is it primarily with,

Speaker 3 would you describe it as the feminist movement that was really organized behind the women's rights in this space? Or at least

Speaker 3 it was definitely a sort of multiracial, multi-ethnic, feminist, women-led movement. And there was a tiny number of men.

Speaker 3 I mean, I was, you know, I was kind of early, an early adapter, as they would say,

Speaker 3 or adopter.

Speaker 3 Like when I was 20, I mean, there was not that many men doing this work. And now there are.

Speaker 3 I mean, there's no question that my work and a lot of other people's work over the last couple of generations has made a difference in terms of normalizing this kind of conversation.

Speaker 3 But political leadership, very limited. I'm not saying it didn't exist, but it was very limited.
And in the public space, it was very unusual to hear men talking about any of this subject matter.

Speaker 3 And the fact that you started to say this is a man's issue. I mean, what do you mean by that? And how was that received

Speaker 3 by women that were expressing themselves and leaders in the feminist movement? was it well received in that respect?

Speaker 3 Was it understood when you started talking initially about this being a man's issue?

Speaker 3 Generally speaking, I would say yes, because what feminist leaders were saying back then, and they say this now, is that the role for men who are really concerned about these matters, which by the way, all men should be.

Speaker 3 It's not something that should be specific to me or a small number of men yourself.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 a lot of the women leaders, including Bell Hooks, famously, the African-American, the sadly late African-American

Speaker 3 feminist scholar and writer and activist,

Speaker 3 she and others would say that the proper role for men in this work is to educate, organize, and politicize other men.

Speaker 3 It's not to go in and save women or even to work with women. It's to go into male culture.
In every racial and ethnic community,

Speaker 3 these are global problems, not local problems. I mean, they're manifest locally, but they're global problems.
The proper role for men is to is to like

Speaker 3 get with their guys, you know what I mean? Like their friends, their colleagues, their peers, and adult men need to be providing much more overt and explicit leadership to young men.

Speaker 3 And if you stay in that lane, in other words, I think that's what women are asking. By the way, it's very similar to what people of color have been saying for white people who are...

Speaker 3 whether you call them allies or collaborators. It's like, you don't need white people going to black communities.

Speaker 3 You need white people organizing white people and speaking out and using the platform of influence that they have within their own sort of, you know, culture or spheres of influence.

Speaker 3 That's, it's a simple concept. It's not even that complicated.
So you say, I mean, it's for 40 years you've been at this.

Speaker 3 And obviously there was, you know, you've had an incredibly successful career and a lot of influence in this space, but you referenced yourself that this is, there seems to be a door that's opening now in this space, but there's also a door closing.

Speaker 3 And we'll get to that in a minute in terms of some regression.

Speaker 3 But the door that's opening in terms of what, consciousness in in this space, a recognition of the crisis of young men, the political side of this.

Speaker 3 How do you describe from, is it a policy framework that you see shifting or a political framework that's shifting?

Speaker 3 It's both.

Speaker 3 I would say there's a shift in consciousness that's been happening over the last couple of generations, really. It's not a really...
you know, brand new thing.

Speaker 3 I mean, whole generations of men and young men have grown up with feminist mothers, with women in the workplace as equals, with girls and women sitting next to them in school, in the professional world.

Speaker 3 I mean, my parents' generation didn't have those experiences. It was much more sex segregated and women were excluded from mainstream

Speaker 3 sort of competition with men in so many areas. But there's a whole generation of men who have come of age in a way that it's been normalized, you know? And a lot of men have much more

Speaker 3 likely to have female friends and colleagues and take that as just obvious as opposed to something that's some radical new

Speaker 3 development that they have to adjust to.

Speaker 3 But at the same time, I think there's a whole lot of men who have done very little speaking out about men's violence against women. And a lot of men get really uncomfortable about this subject.

Speaker 3 And I think a lot of men, including powerful men, who are really incredibly articulate about a whole range of subjects.

Speaker 3 But when it comes to this subject, they are like, oh my God, I don't want to go near this, or I don't know exactly what to say, or they become inarticulate.

Speaker 3 And so what ends up happening for a lot of men, including powerful men, I'm serious,

Speaker 3 what they'll do is they'll either remain silent because they don't want to screw it up or they're just so uncomfortable or they'll defer to women and women's leadership.

Speaker 3 And I think on one level, fine,

Speaker 3 we need to uplift women's leadership. But in a sense,

Speaker 3 that's not fair.

Speaker 3 Why is it women's responsibility? It should be men's. That's a way of hoisting off,

Speaker 3 putting onto women what men should be carrying, especially those of us who have cultural, political, economic, you know, power and influence.

Speaker 3 And so I think one of the big challenges of our time is getting more men who are already there in the sense that we're uncomfortable with other men's abusive behavior. We don't like it.

Speaker 3 We know it when we see it. But we don't either know what to say or we feel uncomfortable around it and don't know what to do.
And so we retreat.

Speaker 3 And I think what we need to do is not that we have to quote unquote convert the men who are the most deeply misogynist and angry at women.

Speaker 3 women it's that we have to talk to men i mean that would be a good thing but i mean that's not where my i spend my time i spend my time with men who are already

Speaker 3 know that who already know that gender justice gender equality reducing gender-based violence is are important things but they don't really know how or what to do about it

Speaker 3 My goal is to empower them and to give them both conceptually and practically the tools to be better leaders and to be better partners, be better

Speaker 3 fathers, uncles, you know, teachers, coaches, youth workers, you know, religious leaders.

Speaker 3 There's so many men who are good men in positions of influence, especially with young people who could be doing so much more than they're doing right now.

Speaker 3 Contextualize the issue for folks and just sort of bring us in a little bit on, you know, what are the trend lines we've seen in the last few decades? I mean, when you started this work,

Speaker 3 was that an apex of the anxiety in this space?

Speaker 3 Was there just a little data, a little research in this space? Are we seeing a diminution in violence perpetrated

Speaker 3 against women? Are we seeing a return to a little more misogyny? And has it been impacted by culture, social media? Has it been impacted even by our politics today?

Speaker 3 All of that, I think you've touched on a whole bunch of really important

Speaker 3 developments. It's a complicated thing.
Like social change itself is really complicated. So we're making all kinds of forward progress.
There's reforms in the laws.

Speaker 3 There's a level of consciousness that seeps through, whether it's through the education system, through media.

Speaker 3 There's so many powerful and empowered women that are vocal and thoughtful around this subject matter, to a lesser extent men.

Speaker 3 But at the same time, yes, we have had an enormous backlash against some of this progress.

Speaker 3 And I think, honestly, I think right-wing populism in the United States and in Europe and other parts of the world.

Speaker 3 But a big part of it that doesn't get enough sort of discussion is that it's not just

Speaker 3 resistance to racial integration and immigration and the increasing

Speaker 3 racial and ethnic

Speaker 3 heterogeneity of some of these societies that had previously been pretty white. That's a part of it.

Speaker 3 I'm saying, I mean, part of it clearly is right-wing populism feeds on that energy, that sort of racial grievance. But I think it's also a lot of men who are really really

Speaker 3 put off by and decentered by feminism and by the LGBTQ revolution,

Speaker 3 which decenters sort of heteronormative, heterosexual men in particular. And I think that that has to be part of the conversation.

Speaker 3 I mean, Trumpism, for example, to me, Trumpism is so much of that is about

Speaker 3 not just white backlash, but white male backlash against forward progress

Speaker 3 by women, basically.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 this is tricky stuff because, you know, can I also say, I also think it's really important that I say, people like me who have been doing the work that I and we have been doing have long made the connection between men's violence against women, men's violence against other men, and men's violence against themselves, because, you know, suicide is violence turned inward.

Speaker 3 So the idea that sometimes men will say, well, you talk about violence against women. Yeah, okay, what about violence against men? You know, you'll hear this.

Speaker 3 And I write about this in my book, of course, because this is so predictable. It's like, well, I thought about that.
Of course, we've all thought about it. We all understand this.

Speaker 3 My friend Michael Kaufman, who's the co-founder of the White Ribbon Campaign, which is the largest global movement of men working to end men's violence against women, it's in like 60-something countries.

Speaker 3 And it's a great thing. It was started after the Montreal massacre in 1989,

Speaker 3 where a man, a 25-year-old man, lined up 14 women in the Institute of Technology and murdered them in cold blood. This is in 1989.

Speaker 3 And he left a suicide note that said feminists, you know, blaming feminists for having ruined his life and he was going to take revenge.

Speaker 3 Well, a group of men created the White Ribbon Campaign, which is this big public display two years later where a man, you know, at the end of November every year, men wear white ribbons.

Speaker 3 Michael, to say that they're not going to condone men's violence against women, be silent in the face of it.

Speaker 3 Michael Kaufman wrote this essay in 1987 where he connected men's violence against women to men's violence against other men, to men's violence against themselves, because they're all connected.

Speaker 3 And so no thoughtful person in the 21st century who's looking at men's violence against women

Speaker 3 fails to see that all kinds of other things in men's lives are also connected. In addition, by the way, look at all the men,

Speaker 3 I mean, who have women in our lives who have been assaulted by other men.

Speaker 3 Look at all the men, adult men who have

Speaker 3 partnered with women who are sexual assault survivors or domestic violence. And full disclosure, you know well, my wife, who's been very vocal about that, and what occurred

Speaker 3 with Harvey Weinstein. She has been, and she's been an an incredible brave leader on this subject.
And I love her leadership on this and her bravery. And I love working with her on these matters.

Speaker 3 Absolutely. But I'm saying there's so many which is

Speaker 3 a moment of you. I imagine you go to audiences all the time and just ask people to raise their hand.

Speaker 3 Yes. Or just in terms of my social networks and the people that I know.
I mean, I'm surprised if I meet a man who doesn't have women in his life who have been assaulted by other men.

Speaker 3 It's not some esoteric subject matter that affects some small games. Is it getting worse? Is it getting better?

Speaker 3 Again, it's a complicated question. I think we've made enormous progress until the current regime at the federal level.
We've made enormous progress.

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Speaker 3 I'm curious, I mean, you just put out a report that can really quantify that in terms of research dollars that are rolling back, obviously advocacy in the DI space, which is not, I think, so much of what people focus on DEI is around racial issues, but a big part of the movement was a gender issues.

Speaker 3 And obviously that's under assault. But what else? I mean, is the actual statistics in terms of

Speaker 3 acts of violence perpetuated against women, is that increasing, decreasing, or is those research dollars drying up and we're going to finally not really have any understanding of that?

Speaker 3 All of the above.

Speaker 3 I would say we have been making progress.

Speaker 3 There has been some data that showed that we have been making progress over the past 25, 30 years in reducing the incidence of domestic and sexual violence.

Speaker 3 But the flip side is you don't know fully because the vast majority is never reported.

Speaker 3 And then when you're effective at raising consciousness, when you're effective at providing services to victims and survivors, when you create an environment in an institutional setting, whether it's in a corporation or

Speaker 3 obviously in a school or some other in the military or at some other setting, if you create an environment where people feel comfortable coming forward to access services or to say that this has happened to them, then they're going to come forward.

Speaker 3 But if you create an environment where the institution is non-responsive, then they're going to remain silent.

Speaker 3 And so when all these programs are being cut, one of the effects is people won't come forward because they'll be scared or they'll be doing a cost-benefit analysis.

Speaker 3 They'll say, you know what, it's not worth it. Because

Speaker 3 why do I want to be re-injured by the system not being responsive to my needs and put myself even more in more position of vulnerability. So, so it's complicated, but in terms of the back and forth.

Speaker 3 But also, I do have to say, the social media, sort of the digital revolution has created a whole new set of challenges.

Speaker 3 It's also created new possibilities, obviously, for connection and for solidarity and community and people connecting with each other from their isolated silos.

Speaker 3 There's no question that it's a mixed bag in terms of this subject matter. But the porn culture, the pervasiveness of like deeply misogynistic

Speaker 3 objects, ownership. Yes, and the complete sexual degradation of women in the mainstream porn culture, that a lot of young people growing up with it are seeing that as normal.

Speaker 3 They're not seeing this as like some, oh my God, some radical, you know,

Speaker 3 new development. They're more like, this is what sex is supposed to look like.

Speaker 3 Some of it's just incredibly abusive and cruel. We're not talking about sexual expression here.
We're talking about cruelty and misogyny enshrined in the sexual act.

Speaker 3 And a lot of young guys, I mean, who think that that's supposed to be, that's normal.

Speaker 3 What ends up happening in some of these relationships is guys are doing things to women, like in heterosexual relationships, non-consensually, they're, you know, they're starting to strangle them during, you know, consensual, non-consensual strangulation during consensual sex and things, thinking that it's normal.

Speaker 3 And, and it's unbelievable. Have you seen adolescence? Yeah, I didn't have the guts.
I mean, I did back to my wife, Jen. She wanted me to see it.

Speaker 3 And I did the opening scene, realizing the depth of it as a father. You know, I've got, I mean, at this age, right? I mean, I've got, we've got four young kids, two boys, and

Speaker 3 social media is just encroaching upon their lives and our lives in a profound way. Well, I appreciate that.
And I'm going to say this,

Speaker 3 spoiler alert, but I have to say that the main actor, or one of the main actors, Stephen Graham, the British actor who is also

Speaker 3 one of the creators and the co-writer of the piece yeah brilliant this guy is brilliant right

Speaker 3 i mean he talks about this publicly he talks about it on jimmy fallon so i'm not giving away something that isn't like a mainstream sort of you know uh uh sort of plot point but one of the i think one of the most powerful things about the story and one of the reasons why it caught on so much i mean caught on like in the way that i think it might be the biggest netflix uh my big success ever and in the uk more something like half the population has seen the thing okay anyways the point is the storyline about the father and his feelings of of failure for having failed to protect his son.

Speaker 3 And he thought he was doing a good job. In other words, this was a heterosexual, heteronormative family, blue-collar family.

Speaker 3 He's a plumber, thought that he was doing what his father didn't do for him. And just quickly, it's a 13-year-old kid.
13-year-old boy

Speaker 3 who murders

Speaker 3 his classmate.

Speaker 3 What's in the background of the whole piece, they don't really foreground it, but it's certainly always there, is the manosphere, the misogynist manosphere.

Speaker 3 That's the Andrew Tate world, where this young boy had been in his room. So his parents thought he was safe.
He's in his room. He's, you know,

Speaker 3 they're doing their job. And meanwhile, he was immersed in that whole world.
The reason why I think that so many people resonate with this film, including men and myself, I'm a father of a son.

Speaker 3 I have a young son, you know. He's in his 20s, but he's, you know,

Speaker 3 young guy.

Speaker 3 I think it resonated with a lot of men because of the father's pain and

Speaker 3 how badly he felt he had let down his son, as well as, of course, the girl and her family, because she was the primary victim.

Speaker 3 No, I mean, it's look, I mean, well, it speaks with unpacking all of that. And I want to get back to this menosphere.

Speaker 3 And I think, I mean, you alluded to it in the context of social media, but even unpacking that a little bit, you've made a point and reinforced a point today in a report you just put out that there is now a big setback in this space.

Speaker 3 I mean, there's a very intentional, organized effort now with the current administration, the Trump administration, to vandalize a lot of the progress in the space. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yes. And it's disgraceful.
Let me just say, I'll just use that word. It's disgraceful.
And it's harmful to women, but it's also harmful to men. I'll give you an example.
The military.

Speaker 3 I've been working with the military. I created the first gender violence prevention program in the United States Department of Defense 1997.
We started out in the Marine Corps.

Speaker 3 And I and my colleagues have been working in that space for a long time, 27 years or something. And there's all these great people, men and women, and uniformed military and DOD civilians.

Speaker 3 And I was on the U.S. Secretary Secretary of Defense Task Force on Domestic Violence in the Military.
This is back in 2000.

Speaker 3 I mean, there have been so many different talented people, including uniformed military leaders who are on board with knowing how important it is to talk about this stuff, to have programming, to create, it's for morale purposes, for mission readiness purposes, for all these reasons.

Speaker 3 Having this kind of educational process within the military space is really important. And it's being all just radically cut back.
And it's just, it's absolutely disgraceful.

Speaker 3 And I'm saying this as somebody who's been working in that space. And if anybody thinks that it's somehow anti-male, this is what, this is the subtext of all this, right?

Speaker 3 That somehow it's anti-male to like talk about sexual assault or domestic violence. This is BS.
This is BS. They frame it in the wokeism, just more woke, BS.
Right.

Speaker 3 And they're and there, and that's, and I'll call BS on that. Amen.
Because there's so many good people, including really powerful men in that space.

Speaker 3 I mean, I've worked with so many powerful military leaders from the generals and colonels and admirals at the highest level of authority.

Speaker 3 But also, like when I started working in the Marine Corps, we were working with

Speaker 3 It was called a Sergeants Major Initiative. It was an enlisted leadership initiative.
We were training sergeants.

Speaker 3 These are generally men. And, you know, the Marine Corps is about 94% male.
So there are women, but it's very much a male-dominated space. Let's be clear.

Speaker 3 Most of the sergeants are in their 20s and they work directly with the young troops,

Speaker 3 the 18, 19, 20-year-old troops. And so

Speaker 3 providing the leadership training for them for how they can provide leadership to the younger troops, this is to me such a basic thing.

Speaker 3 It should be,

Speaker 3 not only should it not be rolled back, it should be expanded and deepened. And what's happening is the exact opposite.
Under the name of supposedly

Speaker 3 caring about warrior culture, this is just total BS. And I think under the name of anti-wokeism,

Speaker 3 some of the most forward-thinking and sort of useful educational and other consciousness

Speaker 3 shifting strategies over the last generation are being undermined.

Speaker 3 And are you seeing this happening also in sports?

Speaker 3 Because I know you've been not just working in the military, but you've represented a lot of good work in many different venues as it relates to athletics as well.

Speaker 3 Well, again, the program that I created, the Mentors in Violence Prevention Program, MVP, was in 1993 at a place called the Center for the Study of Sport in Society.

Speaker 3 That's an institute that was created by Richard Lapchick, Dr. Richard Lapchik, who was a pioneer of combining sport and civil rights activism.

Speaker 3 His father was Joe Lapchik, one of the pioneering players and coaches in the NBA, who was a white guy, Joe Lapchick. He's in the Hall of Fame.
I mean, this is an NBA guy.

Speaker 3 He ended up as the coach of the New York Knicks, and he was the coach of the St. John's men's basketball team.
This is the father.

Speaker 3 He was also a white guy who was for racial integration way ahead of the curve.

Speaker 3 The son was an activist, like a a 60s era activist who wasn't an elite athlete, but he was passionate about civil rights and sports. And he created this institute in

Speaker 3 1984. And I, as a graduate student in Boston, came over to his institute pitching the program to train college male student athletes to speak out on these matters.
This is in 1993.

Speaker 3 And my thinking was not that there was a problem in athletics of male athletes assaulting women, although there was such a problem and continues to be.

Speaker 3 My thinking was, where are we going to young men who have the status, the self-confidence, and the platform of influence to break the silence among men and young men?

Speaker 3 Because I was thinking lots of guys are uncomfortable with abusive behavior and misogyny around them, but they don't speak up, as I was saying earlier.

Speaker 3 So we need more men who have already have some confidence because it takes guts. One of the reasons why guys don't speak up on these matters is because it takes guts.
It takes strength.

Speaker 3 It takes self-confidence. And not just 20-year-olds, but for 50-year-olds, a lot of men get a little, they're anxious.
And you know what they're anxious about? They're anxious about other men.

Speaker 3 And they're anxious that other men are going to think that somehow they're soft or weak. And it drives me, I have to say, it drives me crazy because I watch

Speaker 3 people on the right mock and ridicule men who speak out about domestic violence or sexual assault. Joe Rogan.
Jordan Peterson. These people mock and ridicule.

Speaker 3 Andrew Tate is even more exaggerated in how he mocks and ridicules men who stand for gender equality and gender justice as if we're somehow soft and weak.

Speaker 3 And I often say, and I so appreciate the opportunity to say this to you here in this setting, if you're a guy,

Speaker 3 being one of the guys takes nothing special whatsoever. Just going along with your boys, it's like that takes nothing special.

Speaker 3 What takes something special if you're a guy is turning to your friends and saying, hey, dudes, that's not cool. The way we don't do shit like, you know, we don't do stuff like that here.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Or we don't treat women like that. Or that's not, you're my friend, but the way you're talking to your girlfriend, I'm concerned.
That's not cool, dude.

Speaker 3 That takes so much more strength and guts and self-confidence. And yet the guy who says it is a beta, is a wuss, is a soy boy, is a virtue signaler.

Speaker 3 And so many young guys have grown up in a media environment, a social media environment, where

Speaker 3 Like me, they'll say, I know that's what's going to happen is when people watch this. It's going to be people that's that, who's that beta?

Speaker 3 It's just so embarrassing to me because it's like literally the opposite of the truth, right? And so anyways, that's why I started working in the athletic subculture.

Speaker 3 And my program was the first large-scale program in college athletics. And that was the first program in professional.

Speaker 3 And I have to say, you know, who our first, the first team we worked with in professional athletics? New England Patriots.

Speaker 3 And then we worked with the Red Sox because, you know, we're in Boston, right? So we had the Patriots and the Red Sox. And at one point, the Patriots had won like

Speaker 3 three out of the first five years we were working with them. The Patriots had won the Super Bowl.
And the Red Sox had won the World Series for the first time in 86 years.

Speaker 3 Right after they started working with us. And so I would always say as a laugh line, I would say, you know what?

Speaker 3 Something about the Yankees, I'm sure. Well, that's true.
Well, that's true, but I, but it was even more self-serving. I said, I said,

Speaker 3 you know, I'm not going to claim that the Red Sox and the Patriots working with us was the reason why they won incredible championships, but you can't disprove it either. Well said.

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Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 back to the Manospira, because you mentioned Joe Rogan, you mentioned Joel Peterson,

Speaker 3 obviously mentioned Andrew Tate, who, you know, respectfully need not be mentioned much. I mean, he's, I mean, even by extreme standards, he's in a unique spectrum.

Speaker 3 That said, he's also been embraced by members of the Trump administration and Trump himself, which full disclosure. But talk to me about the Manospear.
I mean, what is it?

Speaker 3 And who, by the way, who are some of these folks? I mean, people, I think, have heard of Joe Rogan.

Speaker 3 If the average person may not have heard of Joe Rogan, then obviously heard something about him when it came to Kamala Harris not deciding to go to Austin to go on his podcast, though few people likely were first to learn about him with that alone.

Speaker 3 But Joel Peterson, someone not everybody knows. Who else in this manosphere? What is it? How do you define it?

Speaker 3 And when did you start to see the emergence of it? And how real, inconsequential

Speaker 3 is it in the context of this gender conversation?

Speaker 3 Well, it was certainly a small sort of dark corner of the internet for a number of years where men who were,

Speaker 3 many of them really angry at women, at feminism more generally, and at women.

Speaker 3 Many of them were men who were divorced, who had custody battles, who, you know, who were really angry at both the courts, in some cases, their, you know, their wives or their ex-wives because they didn't have access to their kids.

Speaker 3 And some of those men were abusive, some of them weren't abusive.

Speaker 3 It's a complicated picture. And when it comes to

Speaker 3 the messiness of relationships, I mean, who knows?

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 there was a sort of men's rights movement, which was organizing itself.

Speaker 3 And then when the internet came into the picture, they were organizing through, you know, through connecting with each other through the digital universe. And it was called the Manosphere.

Speaker 3 And it was, again, a small sort of corner of the internet. It's become completely mainstream now.

Speaker 3 And Donald Trump's election in 2016 was a big accelerant to the mainstreaming of the Manosphere.

Speaker 3 And now a lot of young people, young boys in particular, but not exclusively, but certainly young boys and young men,

Speaker 3 get drawn into the manosphere. And by the way, not necessarily because they're ideological.
It's not because they have a critique of feminism or something or anything or masculinity.

Speaker 3 It's more like the algorithms draw them in.

Speaker 3 And they may be learning about a YouTube version of a video game they like, and all of a sudden there's an ad that's right that's you know, with a Bugatti or something, and they click onto that, and all of a sudden they're part of some university.

Speaker 3 That's right. And then all of a sudden, two months later, they're in a conspiracy theory.
That's right. That's right.
And

Speaker 3 And part of the conspiracy is that, is that men are being taken advantage of and that men are being disadvantaged and that feminists are anti-male and that and that you as a man need to stand up and speak up and fight back because that's the whole red pill idea.

Speaker 3 Like somehow, somehow you're now consciously seeing that the world is lined up for women, which is, by the way, Again, talk about a topsy-turvy understanding of the way the world works, right?

Speaker 3 And by the way, a lot of these men, as you know, a lot of of these men have never, they've never taken a course on, you know, gender. You know, they've never read a book about it.

Speaker 3 They've never attended seminars. They haven't like watched long YouTube videos or even TED Talks, like my TED Talk or other people's TED Talks.

Speaker 3 They haven't had much exposure, but they have heard that feminists hate men and especially white men. Let me just say, this is one of the things that I think is really great about you doing this.

Speaker 3 podcast and the kind of people that you've been interviewing. You're having a dialogue.

Speaker 3 I i think a lot of young guys don't hear any conversation like this whatsoever and certainly if they're if all they're listening to is the jordan petersons of the world and the um and joe rogan and and by the way joe rogan has enormous

Speaker 3 enormous influence and he's not particularly ideological although he does platform people right of center and he's very conspiratorial in the way he thinks.

Speaker 3 So not long ago, he was platforming Bernie Sanders. I mean, on the other side of the political spectrum in that respect.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 3 But he's also, he's a smart guy, even though he's, you know, I think he's a little bit, you know, he goes in different directions. And sometimes I think, oh, my God, he's so insightful.

Speaker 3 And other times he says things that I'm like, oh, my God. But he does, you know, he interviews, you know, theoretical physicists and he has thoughtful conversations.

Speaker 3 And my son and others that I know, and I enjoy listening to him. So I'm not, this isn't just a complete, you know, sort of dismissal of Joe Rogan.

Speaker 3 I do think the Democratic Party has done a horrible job of outreach to men. And I think it's not just about Kamala Harris failing to go on Joe Rogan, although I think that was a mistake.

Speaker 3 I don't think that that's unique to Kamala Harris and her campaign.

Speaker 3 I think the Democratic Party as a party has done a really poor job for 50 years at outreach to men.

Speaker 3 So I want to talk, I want to unpack that a little bit because it connects to the manosphere and it connects to what's happening with podcasts and how media is now consumed.

Speaker 3 And that's been, again, an expertise of yours. It's sort of the intersection of race and violence and gender, but also the intersection of gender and media.

Speaker 3 But there's this larger trend line that also connects, and that is men are not doing well. Right.
I mean, suicide rates, 4x, the addiction rates, 3x, 12 times more likely a man to be incarcerated.

Speaker 3 You look at obesity rates, dropout rates, you look at graduation rates, you look at discipline, you look at all these larger issues that you've been focused on in terms of violence.

Speaker 3 I mean, this is a crisis, arguably. I mean, this is a serious, serious crisis, the state of men.

Speaker 3 And it's not just white men, it's young men.

Speaker 3 I mean, what is going on in this space?

Speaker 3 And what have you? I mean,

Speaker 3 you've talked in terms of hypermasculinity. You and my wife, full disclosure, were part of a film you guys worked on together around women and girls called misrepresentation.

Speaker 3 But then you followed up a decade ago in this space

Speaker 3 with a film called The Mask You Live In about masculinity, hyper masculinity, man up, be a man.

Speaker 3 You know, and you called out in that film a lot of these stats a decade plus ago.

Speaker 3 And so I think you're right to call out the Democratic Party. Where the hell have we been on this topic?

Speaker 3 We see where the Republicans have gone with it and to exploit, I think, a little bit of it, not necessarily to solve for some of it. But what are these trend lines? What do they mean to you?

Speaker 3 And what have you gleaned from? And what the hell is going on with young men in this country and maybe around the world?

Speaker 3 Sure. Well, I mean, there's no doubt that there's all kinds of

Speaker 3 indications that a lot of young men are not doing well. And you just named some of those statistics.
And some of your other guests have talked about this subject and thoughtfully. And, you know,

Speaker 3 and it's all good. By the way, I do want to say one of the things that is frustrating to me is that

Speaker 3 feminism is not the enemy of men. It's like if you want to help men,

Speaker 3 if you want boys to thrive, if you want boys to have better lives, better relationships, better self-regard and self-care to take care of themselves. Feminism is not the antithesis of that.

Speaker 3 Feminism is giving a pathway.

Speaker 3 Can I also, just a related point. The men's health movement, which is a small but growing movement of

Speaker 3 people who are looking at ways in which cultural ideas about manhood, and this is, again, around the world, it's not just in the United States, but

Speaker 3 have contributed to men's health problems,

Speaker 3 both in terms of risk-taking behavior and certainly in terms of health-seeking behavior.

Speaker 3 In other words, men not going to the doctor, men not going to the dentist, men not going to therapy, dealing with self-medication through the bottle or through drugs rather than going to get professional help like therapy, because that's unmanly to do.

Speaker 3 In other words, the impediment to doing that is a belief about manhood. Like a real man sucks it up, a real man just deals with it.

Speaker 3 The men's health movement, which is an important movement, to say the least,

Speaker 3 is directly connected to the feminist-led women's health movement. In fact,

Speaker 3 one of the major events in the women's health movement was the publication in 1972 of a book called Our Bodies Ourselves, published by the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, which was one of the first interventions into the public conversation about how women's health was affected by gender, you know, ideas about femininity and that, and how the healthcare system was set up for men and not for women.

Speaker 3 Anyhow, the men's health movement, some of the major figures in it, including my friend and colleague Terry Real, who wrote the first major book about men's depression called I Don't Want to Talk About It, Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression in 1997.

Speaker 3 People like Terry Real talk openly about how his ideas were informed by feminist intellectuals and activists and practitioners in the women's health space, in the therapy space.

Speaker 3 And yet the average guy who cares about women, you know, men's health

Speaker 3 or listens to Menosphere figures talk about how feminists hate men, they have no idea that some of the most thoughtful things, you know, thoughtful people about men's health are direct products of feminist ideas and feminist activism.

Speaker 3 And I think one reason why I think that's important is because we have too much artificial division between men and women. And I think the right thrives on this division.
And

Speaker 3 it's dividing people from each other rather than bringing them together.

Speaker 3 And I think part of what I do in my work, and I think you do it as well, but I think certainly what I do in my work is because I come from a fairly traditional background and I have all this experience in sports culture and the military and working with traditional men.

Speaker 3 I've been to all 50 states.

Speaker 3 I work in red states. I work with really traditional men in every

Speaker 3 sector you can imagine. Men can have these conversations

Speaker 3 with each other, with women. It's not like it's not so polarized.

Speaker 3 But I think if you go into these Manosphere spaces or the political spaces or Fox or you watch Fox or you listen to talk radio, conservative talk radio, which I've been listening.

Speaker 3 I started listening to Rush Limbaugh in like 1990. I know this stuff really, really well.

Speaker 3 Well, we had on one of the OGs, it was the number two on radio, Michael Savage, who sat right where you're sitting just a few weeks ago on the podcast. That's right.
About that history as well.

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 3 And by the way, these guys created a formula that made a ton of money for them and a lot of other people. And dividing people and

Speaker 3 making caricatures of people that they don't agree with. Rush Limbaugh did it fabulously

Speaker 3 and ridiculed and mocked feminists and women who are trying to be treated with respect. So you're basically, I mean, so this goes, I think this is the real dialectic, right, on this topic.

Speaker 3 It's a difficult one because people to see it's one or the other. It's a binary, that somehow it's a zero-sum game,

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 you are somehow diminishing the feminist movement if you're trying to elevate young men or if you're elevating or the opposite. I mean, how do you start to, there's more of an abundance mindset.

Speaker 3 What's good for the feminist movement is good for young men is the point I guess you're making. Is that the point you're making? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yes. And but it's, I have to say it's complicated because people can say, well, there's only so many jobs.
And if women are getting those jobs, then there's going to be harder competition for the men.

Speaker 3 But you know what? If you believe in merit, if you believe in democracy, if you believe in fairness, and you believe in fairness, I think fairness is to me the governing issue, right?

Speaker 3 I believe in fairness. Flat out, women, if women are smarter than men, if they work harder, if they're more talented, then they deserve the job.
It's like you don't deserve the job.

Speaker 3 And meritocracy in that respect is certainly showcasing itself in the education system and certainly higher education, which women are on pace in half a decade to be two to one of college graduates in that respect.

Speaker 3 That's right. And by the way, anti-intellectualism is deep in American culture, especially among men.
The idea that if you're somehow smart,

Speaker 3 you're a wimp, or you're condescending because you're educated, you're condescending to people who don't have an education.

Speaker 3 And I appreciate that certain members of the educated classes can be clunky, to say the least, in terms of the way they communicate with people

Speaker 3 with a less less pedigree in terms of their education.

Speaker 3 I don't think I'm like that, but I do think that that's a real thing. But the idea that being somehow intellectual, being

Speaker 3 somebody who reads, who engages with ideas, somehow makes you weak and soft as a man or less than a real man.

Speaker 3 This is the most self-defeating idiocy that I could ever imagine. And yet it's fed daily in the popular discourse, especially in right-wing talk radio.

Speaker 3 So what the hell is going on with young men then?

Speaker 3 What's going on? Well, I think it's a complicated world. I think a lot of women, for example, have been pioneering new ways of being women

Speaker 3 in a very diverse and changing, you know, sort of historical, social, you know, context. And I think a lot of men are as well.
We're just trying to figure it out.

Speaker 3 Like, what does it mean to be a good father? What does it mean to be a good husband? What does it mean to to be a strong man?

Speaker 3 If historically being a strong man meant you're a protector of your family and a provider, but then, you know, your wife, say you're a heterosexual man, you're married.

Speaker 3 What if your wife is like making more money than you? What does that mean to be a provider at that point? You know what I'm saying?

Speaker 3 Like, I mean, what does it mean to protect your kids when people are dropping off their kids at school and they're worried that their kids are going to get shot in a school shooting?

Speaker 3 Are we protecting our kids effectively? Or are we actually through bad policy making our kids more vulnerable? So

Speaker 3 I think guys want to do do the right thing. They want to be respected.
They want to be strong, but they don't really know exactly how to go about doing it.

Speaker 3 And because of the changes in women's lives, and again, I'm making a wildly general statement, and it's complicated by class and race and ethnicity and all these other categories. I appreciate that.

Speaker 3 Intersectional thinking is not just

Speaker 3 a slogan. It's real.
It's like people have complex identities, right? And they occupy complex social positions.

Speaker 3 But I think a lot of women have been doing incredible things to sort of upend centuries, millennia of tradition.

Speaker 3 And as a result, a lot of men are completely decentered and are still trying to figure out what does it mean. What do I mean? What does it mean to be me? What does it mean to be strong?

Speaker 3 And I think some men are drawn to,

Speaker 3 and again, I'm not dismissing this. I think it's okay.

Speaker 3 Some men are drawn to more

Speaker 3 traditional ideas about manhood in part because

Speaker 3 they're simpler and

Speaker 3 they're just less complicated. Like, so, for example, celebrating physical strength.
I mean, and by the way, Trump

Speaker 3 in

Speaker 3 his way,

Speaker 3 he's no intellectual, right? But he has a visceral understanding of some of this. And so, and the Trump campaign, how they go to UFC fights, and Trump walks into a UFC fight, and everybody's cheering.

Speaker 3 It's a conquered hero. Yes.
And it's like, that reestablishes that Trump is the man's candidate. The Republican Party is the men's party.
And they just doubled down.

Speaker 3 The Republicans doubled down on this in the 2024

Speaker 3 RNC. And it was like, to me, it was like a cartoonish, hyper-masculine spectacle.

Speaker 3 I was embarrassed by it, but it worked. You see Hulk Hogan ripping off his shirt and imagine.
Yes.

Speaker 3 And Dana White saying he's the best, you know, he's the biggest badass. And one person after another going up and saying Donald Trump is the strongest man I've ever met.

Speaker 3 And it's just, I was just embarrassed by this, but it worked. It worked.
It worked, especially for young men. But you knew it was going to work because you wrote books on this.
Yes.

Speaker 3 You wrote a book about Clinton and Hillary. I mean, about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
You wrote a book about masculinity and leadership. I did.
Yes, I saw this coming decades ago.

Speaker 3 I mean, it wasn't, and by the way, Reagan, I mean, how do you think Reagan was marketed to the, I mean, what your predecessor as governor of California, how Reagan was marketed to the

Speaker 3 American population was he was a cowboy riding in from the West to save a degenerated, you know, liberal establishment that's soft and weak and, you know, the Iranian hostage crisis.

Speaker 3 And Ronald Reagan is going to come in.

Speaker 3 John wayne wasn't available ronald reagan yep and and and and it started it didn't start there but it accelerated with the reagan administration and then and for the last 40 plus years one of the biggest challenges that the democrats haven't risen to is how do you at the on the one hand represent the interests of the ascendant classes of women and and and people of color and lgbtq and hang on to the one of the key parts of the new deal coalition which is you know blue-collar white men yeah and how do you do that at the same time and And it's really a complicated challenge.

Speaker 3 So what's the answer to that?

Speaker 3 I mean, because I mean, it goes back to the Democratic Party. It's interesting.
Democrat at the DNC, they didn't necessarily platform.

Speaker 3 They platformed pretty much every group, but they didn't platform a group that's struggling and struggling to be heard and identified. as struggling,

Speaker 3 that are looking for meaning and purpose and mission, that you for a long period of time have recognized are feeling these pressures, or these macro pressures. I mean, what is, is, I mean,

Speaker 3 why do you think the Democratic Party did not meet that moment? Do you think the Democratic Party is waking up to that moment? Maybe it goes back to my

Speaker 3 question a little while ago about what does this moment in this conversation mean?

Speaker 3 Do you feel like

Speaker 3 is it because of the political opening in this space? More people are having this conversation about men than they have in the past that's actually illuminating even more of your work as well.

Speaker 3 Yeah, there's there's so many pieces to that.

Speaker 3 I would say the crisis of right-wing populism and Trumpism

Speaker 3 is focusing a lot of people's minds.

Speaker 3 I think a lot of people who were kind of asleep at the switch a little bit and they thought, you know, the Democrats could just keep going without really addressing this complex set of

Speaker 3 identity issues, especially involving men, without being seen to somehow be, you know, selling out women.

Speaker 3 And I think the consultant class, I think, I think a lot of political consultants haven't, haven't been on this. They haven't understood this dynamic, the dynamic of

Speaker 3 men and speaking to men and how, I mean, Steve Bannon, one of your former guests, Steve Bennon says,

Speaker 3 everything is narrative. This isn't about ideology.
It's about narrative. And I mean, I'm one of the co-founders of an organization called the Young Men Research Project, right?

Speaker 3 And we've been doing...

Speaker 3 We started in the early 24 and way before the election, trying to push the Democratic Party, but not just the Democratic Party, journalists, people in the media, to think about the young men's vote, to think about how to speak to young men, because we were worried about the slide over to the right of young men.

Speaker 3 And by the way, young women moving to the left and politically and young men moving to the right. But it's not ideological.

Speaker 3 In other words, the same men who voted for Trump, young men, many of them, they're pro-choice on abortion rights. And you've been a strong leader on abortion rights.

Speaker 3 And unapologetically, which is, by the way, what we need, we need unapologetic leadership from the Democratic side on things like women's rights. But

Speaker 3 when it comes to strong labor unions, when it comes to action on the climate crisis, when it comes to increase in minimum wage,

Speaker 3 issue after issue, young men are progressive. By the way,

Speaker 3 there's some interesting statewide elections. Overwhelmingly went for Trump, but supported

Speaker 3 the proportion of

Speaker 3 reproductive freedom and supported minimum wage increases. That's right.
That's fascinating.

Speaker 3 Same exact voters. Because it was about identity, not ideology.
In other words,

Speaker 3 the identity politics.

Speaker 3 This is what identity politics are always, the Democrats are always accused of playing identity politics when they talk about issues relating to women or people of color or LGBTQ or something.

Speaker 3 But the Republicans have been playing identity politics with white male voters for 50 years. Richard Nixon started playing identity politics when he started talking about the forgotten man and

Speaker 3 that silent majority.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 they've been playing those games. Exactly.
Identity politics. But it worked again in the 2024 election.

Speaker 3 And I think a lot of young men, and a lot of young men were basically being told that the party that cares about you and the party that is the men's party is the Republican Party and Trump is the man's candidate.

Speaker 3 And the Democrats are the party of women and non-masculine men, right? And

Speaker 3 that was the mainstream message to young men. And young men who are low engagement voters,

Speaker 3 in other words, what does that mean, low engagement voters? It means they don't pay close attention to politics. They don't read.
They don't engage in political discourse.

Speaker 3 They don't read think pieces in the Atlantic. No, they're not where I am every night on MSNBC or Fox or

Speaker 3 Newsmax or CNN. No.

Speaker 3 But they're hearing on.

Speaker 3 And by the way, one of the things that we do in the Young Men's Research Project is we're looking at all these different ways that the media echosphere that young men are inhabiting are not necessarily overtly ideological.

Speaker 3 In other words, a lot of them are just talking about comedy. They're talking about working out.
They're talking about

Speaker 3 eating healthy and relationship sports.

Speaker 3 But then they throw in some politics. like, like they throw in a little bit of politics and, like, yeah, Trump, he, Trump, he's a guy.
He's a guy's guy, you know?

Speaker 3 And then this fight, fight, fight, which is, you know, by the way, let me just say, I was impressed. I mean, I mean, it was incredible.
He got shot. It was extraordinary in the moment.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I need knowledge. Yeah.
And so good, good for him.

Speaker 3 It's like, but, but then Charlie Kirk comes out and says, if, if you're a man, after this, after the, after the assassination attempt and Trump's response to it, if you're a man and you don't vote for Trump, you're not a man.

Speaker 3 That to me is that's embarrassing to me. Right.
Charlie Kirk, you know, that I'm sorry. That's embarrassing.
Oh, yeah. We had him on the show as well, as you know.
Yes. No, no.

Speaker 3 And again, let me just say also, I think it's great talking to people, having dialogue with people.

Speaker 3 I have arguments with and discussions with people that I don't agree with all the time, including men, you know, around some of this fraught subject matter. It's fine.
Good. Let's go.
Let's go.

Speaker 3 Let's have a discussion.

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Speaker 3 Let me ask you about just the Me Too movement.

Speaker 3 You know, the sort of ascendancy of consciousness in this space

Speaker 3 and then the reaction to it.

Speaker 3 Do you think there was, there's been an overreaction to it? Do you think there's been an appropriate reaction to it? Do you think people have understated the power of the Me Too movement?

Speaker 3 Where are you? I mean, just on that spectrum of observation,

Speaker 3 acuity, interest, your own activity in that space.

Speaker 3 Where do you come out in terms of just your experience with that movement and with where we are today?

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 I think we need to, like, one way to think about this is to kind of widen the aperture a little bit and think about this in longer terms. For thousands of years, men assaulted women.
in families,

Speaker 3 in relationships, in marriages. Marriage was leaked, you know, rape was legal within marriage, including in the West until very recently.

Speaker 3 I mean, in the UK, it was only allowed in 1991, rape within marriage. And in the United States, as late as the 1980s, there were six states where it was still legal for a man to rape his wife.

Speaker 3 I mean, seriously. I mean, we weren't so long ago cleaning up some statute language on that, even in California.
So I completely understand what you're saying. Right.

Speaker 3 There's still some language in that space. Exactly.
And to this day, there's hundreds of millions of

Speaker 3 people who live in countries where it's still legal for a man to rape his own wife. So there's been thousands of years of men brutalizing women and getting away with it with absolute impunity.

Speaker 3 And finally, you have in the 20th century, you have a movement,

Speaker 3 whether it's the women's movement more broadly, and then more specifically the anti-sexual assault movement that started really taking off in the 1970s and 80s, as well as the anti-domestic violence movement.

Speaker 3 So these are very recent movements. I mean, for somebody who's 20 years old, the 80s might sound like a long time ago, but let me just say, it's not that long ago.
You know, I was just listening to

Speaker 3 a mixed list from the 80s, and I was like, that was my, I was in my 20s during the 80s, and I was like,

Speaker 3 I could say, I know every word to these songs. Amen.
Anyhow, anyhow, the point is, it's not that long ago. Locus Seagulls, I mean, including her or just Duran Duran.

Speaker 3 Anyway, that's another conversation. Yeah.
So, but, but the point, exactly. But the, the point is, um, you have these movements organized.

Speaker 3 against something that's been going on for thousands of years and and finally, you know, giving a voice to women, reforming the laws. And then because of the internet, because

Speaker 3 the incredible digital technology that allowed the voices of women to be heard in a way that they had never, ever had the opportunity to be heard.

Speaker 3 The Me Too movement happened in part, not just on the ground because of women coming forward, but it became possible because of the technology of communication and the digital revolution.

Speaker 3 So many of the women who came forward to say, this is what happened to me. This is my truth.
This is my experience. Yes.

Speaker 3 Those women were speaking not just for themselves, but for literally, literally billions of women and girls who had never, ever had a voice for thousands of years. And so

Speaker 3 were there examples where it went over the top and there, and where, where, you know, due process for men who were accused of crimes, you know, was not, was not taken seriously?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I'm sure there was. And I, and I, and I'm empathetic.
And I always say this because I do gender violence prevention education. I've been doing this for a long time.

Speaker 3 If you're a man who's been falsely accused of some crime that you didn't commit, it's a horrible thing. And thereby for the grace of God go I and other men.
So I'm not saying it's okay.

Speaker 3 It's horrible and it's unacceptable. But the vast majority of sexual assault is never even reported, much less falsely reported.

Speaker 3 So I think a lot of men have this falsely inflated sense of their vulnerability to false accusations.

Speaker 3 And what ends up happening is that this narrative develops that all these women are coming forward. Oh, they can ruin a guy's life easily.
And meanwhile, we know

Speaker 3 how difficult it is for a woman to come forward and how unlikely it is that she's going to call that upon herself unless it really something really happened. Now, having said that,

Speaker 3 I do think there were some excesses and there were some statements, certainly by women and others that were dismissive of men's concerns about being unfairly targeted or falsely accused or what have you.

Speaker 3 But I think overall

Speaker 3 it was a step forward. But it's messy.
Life is messy and social change is messy. And I think we have to give each, and I'm just going to say this.
I mean,

Speaker 3 I'm not, you know, the czar who can make these, you know, issue these kind of edicts, but I would say we have to give each other a little bit of a break.

Speaker 3 I mean, we're all struggling to try to be treated with respect and dignity, try to live, you know, lives of

Speaker 3 dignity and in relationships. And with all these complexities of race and gender

Speaker 3 and sexuality swirling about, it's not easy. And navigating that space.
And so I think what's happening with a lot of young men is that they're really confused. They're really befuddled.

Speaker 3 And I think a lot of adult men are too. So it's not just the young guys that are befuddled.

Speaker 3 And so part of the reason why so many young guys are befuddled is because the men, the adult men that they look to for guidance are themselves often

Speaker 3 bewildered. What am I supposed to say? How am I supposed to, my wife wants me to be strong.
She wants me to be powerful,

Speaker 3 but I'm also vulnerable. And when I express vulnerability, then she's.

Speaker 3 uneasy about that because she wants me to be strong and I'm not sure what to do. And what, you know,

Speaker 3 this is, this is, you know therapists you know for example couples therapists deal with I'm not a therapist right but I know that couples therapists deal with this every day

Speaker 3 and and and Terry Real who's this brilliant you know couples therapist he's by the way Bruce Springsteen and Patty his wife Patty's couples therapist and I'm saying that because Bruce Springsteen wrote the literally wrote the foreword to Terry Real's latest book, which is called We.

Speaker 3 It's about relationships. And Bruce Springsteen is like, he's like a guy.
He's guy.

Speaker 3 He's like the prototypical American guy, right here

Speaker 3 best the best he is but he's also extremely self-reflexive and vulnerable and he's like that doesn't make him any less of a of a of a sort of alpha rock star to be able to say you know he he needed therapy and he needed therapy for his own stuff with his own father and his relationship with his wife and you know and it was really important to have support in this in this sort of environment and this this notion that vulnerability is somehow weakness this is one of the biggest lies that young men get sold but there's the pressure on young men to be sort of sucking it up and pretending that they've got it all going on because of the narrative that they're hearing is that a real man does that.

Speaker 3 And again, some of those Manosphere figures that we've been talking about, including, by the way, Donald Trump, who says it all the time, you don't admit weakness, you don't acknowledge mistakes.

Speaker 3 To me, that's a sign of total insecurity rather than strength.

Speaker 3 But I think we need adult men to model, strong adult men, to model vulnerability, not as weakness, but as I'm confident enough to say that I don't have it all figured out.

Speaker 3 I'm confident enough to say that, you know what, I make mistakes too, but I'm still going to get back up on the on the horse. I'm still going to do my thing.

Speaker 3 And hearing professional athletes say it, I think it's one of the reasons why it's so powerful to hear like professional male athletes in this case, who have mental health challenges, who will say, you know what, I have panic attacks.

Speaker 3 I'm a great professional athlete. And, you know, look at me.
I'm, you know, I'm, I've succeeded at the highest level in my sport, but I, I have issues and, and, uh, and I, and, and that's okay.

Speaker 3 Michael Phelps, the greatest swimmer, men's swimmer of all time. This is really a powerful part of this.

Speaker 3 And last thing I want to say about, about all this, I appreciate, again, I appreciate all the opportunities you're giving me to say these things.

Speaker 3 Sometimes people will say to me or to other men who talk about

Speaker 3 the issues in this way, they'll say, you're trying to make men soft and weak. And if you listen to Fox News, they say it all the time.
wussification of America.

Speaker 3 The liberals are trying to wussify America. They're trying to make men soft and weak.
And to me, it's a cartoon. It's like watching a satire.

Speaker 3 But I reject the idea that I and others are trying to make men soft and weak. I think I want to be strong.
I think I'm a strong man.

Speaker 3 I think that I want my son to be a strong man, and he is a strong young man. The question is not whether we want men to be strong.
The question is, how do you define strength?

Speaker 3 And how do you define strength? Is it this cartoonish ability to impose your will on another person and dominate? Is that strength? Really?

Speaker 3 In the 21st century, are we supposed to take that seriously as the definition of strength? What about moral courage?

Speaker 3 What about the courage to do something that even though there's going to be a consequence for you that's negative because it's the right thing to do?

Speaker 3 What about social courage, which is to say, speaking up in the face of, you know, abuse, you know,

Speaker 3 whether it's, you know, you friends of yours making derogatory comments or online spaces where guys are being really disrespectful to girls or women and calling them out and saying, hey, that's not cool.

Speaker 3 What about resilience in the face of adversity? These are, all these are evidence of strength and courage and positive, you know, part of

Speaker 3 positive qualities. I think we need to say to young men and older men, we want you to be strong, but we want you to expand your definition of strength.

Speaker 3 And the reason why that's so, I think, so helpful is because it's positive and aspirational.

Speaker 3 It's calling men into good behavior rather than calling them out for bad behavior.

Speaker 3 And I think if you call them into good behavior and say, we need more men with the guts to speak up, we need more young men who have the courage to say

Speaker 3 misogyny is not cool. Treating women with disrespect is not going to get you my respect.
It's not going to get you my admiration because, you know what, you've got some issues.

Speaker 3 If we had more men who are willing to say that and young men willing to say that, then we would begin to counteract some of these. harmful things that are happening in men's lives.

Speaker 3 And I think a lot of young men seek connection. They want relationships.
They want intimacy in their lives.

Speaker 3 But if they're going down the route of hardening up, getting tough, you know, being, being, being, sort of, you know, hiding in their shell, if you will,

Speaker 3 and inhabiting this angry world of the manosphere and the sort of the right-wing populist movement, that's not going to get them what they want.

Speaker 3 That's not going to get them the love and the connection and the intimacy that they crave. So I think we have to say it in terms of men's self-interest and boys' self-interest.

Speaker 3 It's in women's self-interest. Gender equality and gender justice is is obviously in women's self-interest, but it's also in men's self-interest.

Speaker 3 And I think if people can hear that, I think we have, you know, we've made a lot of progress. Jackson Katz, thanks for joining us on this podcast.
A hell of a way to end and close out this podcast.

Speaker 3 Thank you for your work. Thank you for your advocacy.
Thank you for your clarity, your conviction. And thank you for being at this for decades and decades.

Speaker 3 Thanks, Governor. And thanks so much for giving me this opportunity and for having these conversations right on.
I really appreciate that leadership and that thought leadership and your commitment.

Speaker 3 Thank you. I appreciate it.
Thank you.

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