Navigating the Impossible Standards of Masculinity with Ruth Whippman

Episode Transcript:

00:02:06 – Eric Zimmer
Hi Ruth, welcome to the show.

00:02:08 – Ruth Whippman
Thanks so much for having me on.

00:02:09 – Eric Zimmer
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 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 grandchildren 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.

00:03:03 – Ruth Whippman
First, thanks for having me back on the show. And so this parable, I think it speaks to the fact that we are all complex 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.

00:03:37 – Eric Zimmer
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, and 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.

00:04:13 – Ruth Whippman
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, which are traditionally 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.

00:04:41 – Eric Zimmer
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, 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.

00:05:05 – Ruth Whippman
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, an unhealthy standard, really, to try to meet, or whether you’re a woman who has to feels 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.

00:05:58 – Eric Zimmer
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 chap that you’re having with your boys.

00:06:42 – Ruth Whippman
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 MeToo 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.

00:07:34 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:07:34 – Ruth Whippman
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. 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?

00:09:07 – Eric Zimmer
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 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?

00:09:55 – Ruth Whippman
So this was a really interesting process coming up with that title, because 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, 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 or a 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.

00:12:21 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah, the book resonated with me in a lot of ways as a man, because I don’t think the pressures you’re describing are new. And what I mean is I believe that. And 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 a 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. A 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.

00:14:22 – Ruth Whippman
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. I hope 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, like, 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.

00:15:44 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. 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.

00:16:33 – Ruth Whippman
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?

00:16:51 – Eric Zimmer
Right.

00:16:51 – Ruth Whippman
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. You know, it is a mix of nature and nurture. We will never know in exactly what proportions. And these are. Are always group level differences. You know, they don’t necessarily apply to any one individual. So, you know, it’s like height. You know, 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 help everybody find new ways to be.

00:18:41 – Eric Zimmer
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.

00:18:51 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah.

00:18:51 – Eric Zimmer
You want to tell that story?

00:18:52 – Ruth Whippman
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. You know, it’s a million, million examples of the same thing. So what I noticed, I took him to K 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. 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.

00:19:43 – Eric Zimmer
Yep.

00:19:43 – Ruth Whippman
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.

00:20:36 – Eric Zimmer
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.

00:20:54 – Ruth Whippman
Right? Yeah.

00:20:55 – Eric Zimmer
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?

00:21:25 – Ruth Whippman
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 a 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.

00:23:41 – Eric Zimmer
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.

00:24:05 – Ruth Whippman
So young men are struggling in education. They’re falling behind girls in pretty much every measure from kindergarten to college through postgraduate degrees. 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.

00:25:06 – Eric Zimmer
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?

00:25:16 – Ruth Whippman
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 under cared for in those sort of emotional and nurturing way 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, like, live out your heroic, masculine fantasy. You know, one expert that I spoke to in the book characterized it as a kind of combination of fear and ease. So it’s like fearful being in the real world, and it’s easeful being on a screen.

00:27:12 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah.

00:27:12 – Ruth Whippman
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.

00:27:30 – Eric Zimmer
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 me, and it was that black girls, by many measures, are doing better than white boys.

00:27:48 – Ruth Whippman
Yes. And that was really surprising to me as well. This was in the chapter about education specifically. So when it 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.

00:29:50 – Eric Zimmer
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.

00:30:16 – Ruth Whippman
Right. And then where do you go?

00:30:17 – Eric Zimmer
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.

00:30:33 – Ruth Whippman
And I think boys are very fearful to talk about it, and rightly so, for being called out, for being over privileged or being entitled or mansplaining or taking up too much space, you know?

00:30:43 – Eric Zimmer
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.

00:31:26 – Ruth Whippman
Right.

00:31:27 – Eric Zimmer
And that’s not tenable as an individual.

00:31:29 – Ruth Whippman
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 eleven 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.

00:32:47 – Eric Zimmer
Precisely.

00:32:48 – Ruth Whippman
And so there’s no way to talk about that. We’ve focused because 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.

00:33:10 – Eric Zimmer
Right. And there’s a couple different points in the book that you make this point that, you know, what we’re doing is, or 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.

00:34:05 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah.

00:34:05 – Eric Zimmer
Before we go into it, share with me what that is.

00:34:08 – Ruth Whippman
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, but 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, but. 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. 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 spend some time digging into this community. So I spend 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.

00:35:56 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. What I find interesting about it is there are many people who believe that you shouldn’t even give these people any air time, 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.

00:36:51 – Ruth Whippman
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.

00:36:56 – Eric Zimmer
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 deepest hopelessness in the whole thing. It’s this belief that nothing could get better for them.

00:37:23 – Ruth Whippman
Yeah. And this sort of is in contrast to a lot of what we have come to call their manosphere, which is like the, you know, all of these sort of masculinity people online, the masculinity influencers, the Andrew Tate’s, 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 so pump iron. And. 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, 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.

00:39:35 – Eric Zimmer
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. And 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.

00:40:20 – Ruth Whippman
Too, and it’s more socially acceptable.

00:40:22 – Eric Zimmer
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 only ramped up.

00:40:47 – Ruth Whippman
That pressure has been exponentially worse on boys.

00:40:50 – Eric Zimmer
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. 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.

00:41:17 – Ruth Whippman
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 it. The sort of ideal body shape for men has like ramped 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 influences. And that culture has really changed. But yeah, I mean, one of the incels 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, and this incel, 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 and 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.

00:43:25 – Eric Zimmer
Agree. I mean, we shouldn’t body shame anybody, right?

00:43:27 – Ruth Whippman
Anybody, of course.

00:43:28 – Eric Zimmer
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.

00:43:50 – Ruth Whippman
You’re being mean and you’re harming that person.

00:43:52 – Eric Zimmer
Yes.

00:43:52 – Ruth Whippman
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.

00:44:10 – Eric Zimmer
Yeah. And you say this might be inching us closer to equality, but it doesn’t feel like progress right in the. That like now men are being shamed at A level that women are. That’s not progress, right?

00:44:21 – Ruth Whippman
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 don’t call it out. And 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.

00:45:22 – Eric Zimmer
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 is. 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.

00:46:31 – Ruth Whippman
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. And there’s this argument which is like, 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.

00:47:13 – Eric Zimmer
For sure there is.

00:47:14 – Ruth Whippman
But what we’ve decided is that we’re gonna do about that is this race to the bottom. So it’s like, okay, let’s dehumanize everyone rather than trying to humanize the Arab Muslim and see, well, what’s going on for him and how did he get to this place and why does he want to. And 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.

00:47:45 – Eric Zimmer
Yep. 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 masculine enough.

00:47:57 – Ruth Whippman
Oh, yes.

00:47:58 – Eric Zimmer
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.

00:48:06 – Ruth Whippman
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 impossible standard for masculinity that boys and men feel that they have to meet. And there is 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 this 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. You know, 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.

00:49:56 – Eric Zimmer
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, 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?

00:50:33 – Ruth Whippman
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.

00:51:14 – Eric Zimmer
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 oneyoufeed.net 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.

00:51:58 – Ruth Whippman
Oh, thank you. It’s been such a pleasure to get to talk to you again. So thank you.