Why Do The Left Not Care About Men’s Problems? - George TheTinMen

you have one of the most interesting Instagram accounts I've followed probably in the last year and everybody needs to go and follow at the Tin Men on Instagram I absolutely love it these infographic Carousel slides that you've been doing I think are they're phenomenal they're very well researched I think you're an incredibly balanced voice in this space so what's the reason that you personally decided to get interested in the topic of talking about men and men's issues um well I work in the creative industry I create content for a living I've been doing it I've specifically been filmed for about 13 years now um I've always found it very interesting to sort of communicate data to audiences um I also engage heavily in sort of progressive left-leaning sort of political spaces and as those two parts of my life were developing I sort of noticed an unwillingness from Progressive left spaces to engage in good faith with an area which I was always passionate about which is men and boys advocacy and to be honest like I was quite naive when I started the journey I didn't know a huge amount about anything I spoke about so there's a lot of reading and I remember just being absolutely shocked at the data some of the information I was reading I just could not believe it and I I felt like as a creative with a lot of experience I was like I've been dealt a winning hand here there was so much interesting information so many undeniable facts about men and boys I saw an area of advocacy men and boys advocacy men's right advocacy especially is experiencing what I think is a massive brand identity crisis it's like very loud very aggressive it's very sort of in your face and I thought if I can just change the way we present this information which is compelling and I'm sure we'll get into if I can just change the way we present it through my own experience I think I can change their minds and some some Minds having changed some Minds have been entrenched but I just had to do it I just thought I had to do it I I just didn't see in my reality what I was being told about what it is to be a man and the facts didn't seem to add up and I was like I just need to try and present these things to be honest it wasn't even really supposed to be a public Channel like I was engaging so much in these discussions um we have a lot of feminists and I just wanted a space on my phone quite literally to be able to reference information about like suicide domestic violence uh violent crime homelessness drug addiction and I just wanted something to be under the table and I mean like what literally into the table so I could switch it's like swipe through and following my own beliefs like engage in this discussion um with that due diligence and then people would have started to follow and then some of the wrong people start to follow and give me some some [ __ ] which is fine and then it grew and it grew and it grew and then I spent a bit more time pers like personalizing the content to make it a little bit more entertaining a bit more attractive in the way that you described so kindly and then I'm here now I'm here so you are somebody that is from the left very much so I've seen your political Compass yeah and yet you're pro-men what what is first off why is it such a rare position and secondly what's unique about what you've learned being in those spaces holding those beliefs and yet talking about the issues of boys and men I mean even saying pro-men is sort of it makes you wince doesn't it it's like oh my God that's unpopular I mean obviously I'm Pro all human beings including women of course I speak I do speak actively about human as well yeah this is like this is something I've always found frustrating is that whenever we have these discussions it always starts with some sort of like prospective apology where we sort of get down on these and we plead and we have to like someone know to talk to the other day said you have to kiss the ring and you always have to kiss them you always have to acknowledge women and girls you can't just talk about men and boys I know I know you've spoken to Richard Reeves he does this quite often he starts everything by saying now I'm going to speak about poison men that doesn't mean I don't care about women and girls uh and if anything talk about men and boys is of benefit to women and girls and I find by doing that you you sort of undermine your own point before you even begun and I genuinely believe men and boys deserve a conversation in their own right not for benefit women and girls although that is a benefit an indirect benefit but primarily this is about men and boys uh doesn't that we have to do it now that doesn't mean I don't care about women and girls and I'm not going to say that again for the rest of podcast because I don't think I need to continually have to prove myself but um as for your question I just think I do think they're right has done a better job of talking about men and boys certainly not perfect but the progressive left spaces just seem very intent on blaming women boys for their own problems so if men have poor health outcomes it's because men aren't going to uh the doctors enough if men have mental health problems it's not speaking enough if a man gets assaulted on the street we ask who did it and like we don't actually engage with these discussions in that good faith and it's always an accusatory finger and then we obviously we get to the concepts of toxic masculinity and patriarchy which in my opinion again speaking as someone who works as a for a living writing copy I feel like there's words um they just place the blame back on men shoulders and they divide people and I was just like I think I could do a better job I think I can do a better job I think I can bring the progressive topics into my account because I the the frustrating thing is so many of the issues I talk about are I would say left-wing issues if you if we're going to classify left wing as social equality if you talk about homelessness everyone wants and homelessness which is great but 80 of homeless people are are men 90 of homeless deafs are men so really if you send for homelessness you sort of indirectly stand for men too right we a lot of people like hate War like I want war ended but then 99 of war deaths are men um and there's so many issues that men that people care about including like BLM for example that are that are men's issues men and boys issues are sort of re-categorized as something else so like BLM for example is certainly a racial issue but I never really thought mention at all that like 95 96 of Americans killed by police are men and if you were to line up like um all of the black Americans killed in 2020 at the year of George Floyd 99 of it was black Americans are black men more more in fact and it's a great database I think it's the Washington Post a fatal Force where they basically have every single American killed by police and he can search by race and it's like literally 244 black men killed in 2020 two women and I I've I never saw it brought up personally that's the way I've disagreed with a lot of people in my community but I never saw it mentioned as a racial and a gender issue and really if If you deny police brutality as they um uh a men men's issue I feel like that's that's even worse than denying as a black issue like it is both but it's way more men proportionally than it is black so when we're talking about what is Right such a good point dude right so well the conversation around um look at the proportion how many white people were killed by police versus how many black people were killed by police and there may be an imbalance and there may be a required redress Beyond simply the the sort of situational um environments that different groups inhabit but the real thing would be look at the 99.45 of people who were male that were killed by police compared with the ones that were female yeah so like I think a number's something like black Americans when you normalize to a population uh about 3.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white Americans which is a disparity that's worth discussing but men are 20 times more likely to be killed by a woman and then when you tell people that you put them in a very difficult pace of cognitive dissonance because they start reaching for or men are more violent which is why they killed by police and that certainly would explain some of the disparity but then are you going to apply that to the racial disparity as well and I was like good luck with that one good luck with that one I think to be honest it gets even worse because I feel like not only do the left neglects that part of the problem but I'd say the left actively encourage encourage it I'd say the left create the very problem they're trying to solve in personality because a lot of a lot of these left Progressive spaces actively participate in a very dehumanizing fear-mongering around men that men are dangerous across the street watch out keep your distance like men are men are terrifying men are dick men are violent and I'm like that is actually feeding into the the divisive um fear-mongering rhetoric you're sort of creating a cultural fear around men and I'm like who's going to pay the biggest price for that and the answer is black men like because when police start fearing um black men that's when black men get shot and I'm like are the left creating the very problem they claim to want to end by explicitly fear-mongering around men and like I mean that's that's a controversial question to start with but a good one nonetheless I think so what what do you find when you bring these sorts of positions up with the left-leaning friends that you will have what's the kind of presumably your left-leaning credentials must get questioned at some point yeah you're evidently not from the left you must be confused despite the fact that being left or being right is fundamentally a social issue right it's to do the problems of class and economics yeah it's not to do with are you pro-men like even the the conversation around being pro-life or pro-gun neither of those things should really factor into whether you are or whether you aren't it's just a predisposition that's grouped certain people with a particular Suite of beliefs into different cohorts so what what happens you're sat at the pub with your left-leaning friends some of whom have got blue hair and you bring up this conversation around men yeah yes what happens I lose I I've lost friends I've lost friends I've lost like people that acquaintances of mine like family members like quite literally stand up and walk out the room like people that I thought were important to me and cared about things that were important to me and that's fine like I know I mean putting into a case in point I have a friend um a male friend who lost uh one of his old flatmates to Suicide who was a man and he he sent Round The Virtuous text message to all his guy friends asking him to talk and it's good to speak and share if you want to reach out let me know which is like very worthwhile and I think that all men should do that but then I remember a week later I posted some information on sexual violence against men and how it's in the reported in America and it was a significant number of male rape victims and then the next time I saw him he pulled me aside and that was basically castigated me and called me tone deaf for saying that and I was just like mate do you realize that a boy who has been sexually abused in adolescence when he grows up is 10 times more likely to attempt suicide like sexual violence and suicide are inextricably linked that they're a massive part of one another and so how could he one week say um male suicide is a big problem let's talk about it and then the following we call me tone deaf when I talk about one of the biggest causes of of suicide and I mean we talk about that a lot but one of the biggest one of the biggest things I've learned is like if you want to talk about male suicide we need to go a lot deeper than we've currently gone which is just surface level men can talk men can cry which is again a very valid point and I I would like to use use this opportunity to encourage mentor talk about their problems but if you think suicide starts and stops there you're wrong it's it's not seen primarily as a mental health crisis but a societal issue like it's a really great paper I'm going on a tangent now but a really great report that said male suicide is not a mental health issue primarily it even described it as a a rational decision and a solution-based outcome when men simply cannot deal with the problems around them and a lot of the men who attempted suicide didn't even consider consider that they had a mental health problems they didn't consider themselves as mentoring well they're like I'm not mentally and well I'm in debt I've lost my job I'm losing my children in child custody courts I'm I'm a victim of domestic violence like that's another another really difficult a bit of hypocrisy from the left where if you look at male victims of domestic violence of which there are currently 3 million in the UK um 11 of those men will attempt suicide so it's frustrating when you talk to Advocates who are against male suicide and that's an important issue to them but then they'll refuse to talk about domestic violence against men I meant I mentioned child custody and um Martin Sieger who is an excellent psychologist he he's linked 20 of the suicides in the UK to child custody battles family courts relationship breakdown and like the family court system in the UK is one of the most heartbreaking um institutions you will ever see and that for a father to lose his child in a corrupt Family Court causes so much pain and a lot of those men they're not mentoring well they've just lost their child and um if you're a male suicide I'll Advocate male suicide and you're not talking about child custody joblessness Melbourne domestic violence I will question how effective you're being and if anything there are people that I genuinely feel like are not talking about the real shoes they're just trying to sell things like if anything's sort of exploiting the issue by not wanting to get their hands dirty by you know playing in the mud like I am I'm the one yeah they want to talk about the very virtue virtuous and applauded elements of communicating with men and boys which is you need to learn to open up you need to get rid of your man box of expectations around what it means to be a man but when you talk about what are the precursors to this which are a little bit more politically unpopular things like male rape things like men who are being mistreated through Family Court men who have lost things in marriages and divorce court and stuff like that that is a much more contested area I mean this is this is a you know the absolute rubber meeting the road situation of every social topic if you hold a belief and say that you're standing up for a maligned group and yet that belief is applauded by most people that's not really making any sort of a sacrifice like you somebody who is from the left talking about something that the left absolutely hates which is men's problems and not only that talking about men's problems in a domain which is almost exclusively dominated by women that's somebody as far as I can see that is paying the price you mentioned before and this is something I've seen pop up on YouTube quite a lot about uh Family Court child custody uh separations and stuff like that this is an area that I have done zero Research into I know I know absolutely nothing so given that you are coming at it from uh evidence-based research-backed lens what what don't people know about how family court and and divorces and separations and stuff works for men I would say the fact that you don't you don't know and I would say I don't know a huge man about either but the fact that we don't know is an interesting outcome in and of itself flight we don't know because we're not allowed to know our family Court's a secret the secret family court so you're not allowed to press you're not allowed public there's very little oversight like parents given up children and then a father comes out on his own heartbroken we don't know what's going in going on there I mean I would be very I'd be reluctant to talk too much about it but I know it's something I'm learning about and every time I speak to a dad who's fighting for his child that is probably the most heartbreaking story I'll hear like I don't when we talk about I feel like when we talk about politics so much of it's descended into things like women not having Pockets or uh the sound of my Alexa being a woman's voice and those are sort of issues that are important but you need to put those down on the ladder a little bit when a man is losing his child I'll just ask any parent like what's the one thing you don't want to lose and I'd say like nine times out ten I'll say my child and when you consider how many men are losing their child in a system that is corrupt I sure that's a bigger issue than it we then we pretend is and not just family courts but men are discriminated against in many areas of Criminal Court like I know there's been some interesting research by uh Professor Sandra star and she found that women are twice as like to avoid prison for the same crime um and if they are sentenced men will get 63 longer sentence that's in America but again for the same crime same criminal history in in the UK like the ministry of Justice came out of a report and I think it said men are 88 more likely to be sentenced to prison under similar criminal circumstances and um very little said and done that's the main industry of Justice's own report and a similar similar phenomenon as I said earlier where there is a sentencing bias against black Americans 10 is found so if you're black in America you'll get 10 longer men get 63 longer and if you're a black man it's 63 plus 10 so you've got the compounding of the problem itself uh and you see that everywhere same obviously BLM we talked about men are an at-risk group black men are and even higher risk group and I think that intersectional approach is a really interesting and valuable lens that we should be using isn't that fascinating so if you if you bring the word up intersectionality it triggers it triggers the the the base of the amygdala goes right on a lot of people because what they've been taught about to do with intersectionality is that this is a justification for somebody who's got a gluten intolerance and is Left-Handed to be able to claim some sort of a victim code whereas what you're saying here is that not using the lens of intersectionality allows us to ignore the problems of poison men and actually means that a more uh politically popular way of segmenting out different cohorts that are having problems is much easier to do if you ignore the problems of boys and men well I mean you see the biggest so the biggest victims of the problems I talk about are are minority men we've talked about black men another good example is gay men um obviously we talk a lot about historical sort of criminalization of gay people but very few talk about the fact that it was almost always gay men in particular who are criminalized so in the UK it's illegal to be gay and it was but it was actually legal to be a gay man like being a lesbian was certainly not tolerated by any means but you weren't castrated you weren't sentenced three years hard labor the same with the Nazi party when they were sending gay gay people to um concentration camps but they weren't gay people they were all gay men and again lesbianism was not condoned but it weren't rounded up and executed tens of thousands and like I've seen like popular instagramers on um talk about what happened to gay people um in the Nazi party and you look at the photos and he's like look at they're all men like why are you so afraid to say gay men like that's an important like the the intersection of masculinity and homosexuality is a really really important point to make and we are losing that perspective by indulging in this sort of political correctness I'm not wanting to talk about men I've never I've never thought about this lens before I've never thought about the other side of intersectionality that you know you use it from this lens that allows you to erroneously fold in unnecessary characteristics in order to maximize the way that a group is is being claimed to be maligned it's not just that you're black but it's that you're black and you've got a club or something yeah but when you do it on the other side it allows you to hide what may be one of the biggest determining factors for this and this is almost exclusively I would guess a problem over the left so this is a problem that is mostly present in and mostly driven by people from the left which who are ostensibly the group of uh tolerance and inclusion and trying to raise up maligned groups but because of this blind spot toward the problems of boys and men it's actually it's it the intersection or not using an intersectional uh lens is a disadvantage yeah I I genuinely feel like some of the issues I discuss of a new New Perspectives that are you may not have to agree with it but they're certainly worth discussing at the very least like combining what we talked about in terms of men being seen as inherently guilty not just by Society but by quite literally the criminal court so like I said 63 longer sentences for men if you if you apply this sort of inherent guilt that Society seems to see men as and you apply that to being gay that I think explains why we see women as sort of innocently gay you know it's a phase I'll get through it don't worry about it it's fine she's just experimenting it's an all innocent fun but men are men are guilty of being gay because they're applying that that inherent guilt onto gay men and get they are quite literally guilty of being gay there's an Abomination as it's called in the Bible and and like I said criminalized in the most literally possible I had a conversation that I was doing in in Qatar probably about two or three months ago now me and you were chatting beforehand because I wanted to make sure that I was absolutely on the nose of this conversation I was having and you sent me something uh and I've built this out um for a project that I'm working on at the moment I actually wanted to read to you about today's version of what you sent me a few months ago okay a common question is why don't men just do better surely they can try harder in school employment and health well no other group is told when they suffer with reduced performance or accolades in the real world that they should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps we don't tell any other group to talk about their problems instead we spend billions in taxpayer money and private charity to set up committees departments campaigns and funds to solve the problem in simple terms if a woman has a problem we ask what can we do to fix Society if a man has a problem we ask what can men do to fix themselves it's a blatant double standard and people who are unwilling to admit any structural disadvantages faced by men are standing in the way of us solving the problems that are hurting men and also the potential Partners who they may no longer be viable for what's the point in asking men to talk if we are unwilling to listen or even acknowledge the societal issues that they're talking about the problems are not in men's heads but out there in society and we should not Gaslight men into thinking they can solve these problems by just trying harder or being less toxically masculine if the patriarchy is so powerful why aren't men flourishing more I mean that's an excellent rewording of what I am I said I'm happy to take credit for it and I hope it went down well um I mean can I respond with a quote of my own absolutely like going back to suicide is a really interesting vessel to talk about this this is said appg if boys and men is a new organization that's launched in the UK it's all party parliamentary group so it's different members of different political parties coming together to discussion issue there's one on everything now there's one on boys and men they did an absolutely amazing report on male suicide and this is what they found uh sort of what I said earlier um the appg heard that the focus has been on viewing suicide primarily as a mental health problem when in reality it is largely the outcome of a range of external issues or personal stresses that take many men down on the path to Suicide suicide is a symptom or outcome of a buildup of stresses suicide is a choice made by men when these stresses reach a critical level and the stress bucket overflows it is not the result of either a single cause or men not talking these stresses range from a combination and culmination of issues such as relationship breakdown work culture employment Financial worries and the why and a more widen impacted by social isolation loss of belonging the lack of male friendly services and the lack of empathy towards men we heard evidence that many men view suicide as a rational decision and a solution-based outcome based on their failure to fix these stresses they often do not conceptualize their problems as being mental health problems so I mean I'll read those issues out again and you tell me Chris which of these could be solved through tears relationship breakdown work culture employment Financial worries like being in debt isn't solved by crying I mean I'm sure talk about it just talk about it yeah yeah bank will accept that and he will be out of your own right yeah yeah can you talk about this for a moment and don't get me wrong like talking is a way of dealing of the problem but I don't know how much it solves the problem it certainly doesn't solve it in its complexity I I work a lot of a male suicide researcher called Susie and together we've done some very large cities together we did one of the biggest studies into most suicide ever and she has more experience talking to suicidal men than I think anyone you could ever meet and what she told to me on my podcast was that she was like the more I talk to these men and listen to the life they're living the more I'm like [ __ ] I'm not surprised you want to kill yourself like it sounds awful like you don't have a mental health problem we need to stop pathologizing male suicide and masculinity and actually listen to what these men are saying like it's um no appointment talking if we're not willing to listen and the three words I I try to bring in are um listen ask and act like what's the point talking so you've got to listen you've got to act and you've got to ask and there's no point there really is a limited utility to men talking if Society is not willing to listen or if we're willing to we tell people what they can and can't talk about I get told what I kind of can't talk about on my own page people come into my page and they're like you can't say that you can't say that don't say it this way and I'm like I'll say what I want strange how you say Ben can talk but not about these things and it's like well it's not really talking if you can't talk about the things I want to do I love that I love that insight you're not saying the right things yeah we want you to open up but we don't need to open up in that way we don't need to open up in a politically uh uncomfortable way do you see John Barry's sense of male psychology did you see his new study uh I still always podcast to you uh oh so this is a new one this is John uh DM me this a couple of days ago my latest research has just been published it assessed the views of over 4 000 men in the UK and found that thinking masculinity is bad for your behavior is linked to having worse mental well-being around 85 percent of respondents thought that the term toxic masculinity is insulting and probably harmful to boys yeah yeah the funny thing is I put that into a post not long ago where I talked about the indoctrination of boys we talk a lot about how Andrew Tate is indoctrinated boys and in a lot of ways he has I don't support Andrew Tate in the least but we haven't also talked about how there are organizations that are going into schools right now to indoctrinate boys educate them just like Andrew Tate but to educate that them then that they are violent like rapists in Waiting um and that that John Barry research you're talking about I put that in I it was like a percentage of boys I've been introduced to the concept of men being bad for society and the percentage of boys being told about toxic masculinity at like 10 years old and it was really really high and the reason why I don't know the actual stats is because that slide was actually deleted by Instagram somehow that's why I got that slide got reported and deleted and I was like there's nothing wrong about style so it's a really great example of like Associated story you might have seen I put a reel up maybe a month ago uh talking about the fact that I'd once recorded a podcast with Andrew Tate but never released it and I was talking about the fact that um I'd had the opportunity to I recorded it maybe three years ago when he was relatively small and then I could have re-released it or I could have released the first time at the height of his Fame it would have got millions of plays uh everybody in the comments a couple of couple of things first off everybody in the comments was saying um this is you your morality standing on the shoulders of of sort of a high horse here um like I didn't need to know about the fact that you consider yourself virtuous well if I had released it three years after a very bombastic guy was talking in the middle of a global pandemic I would have also been accused of hang on mate you've stitched him up he didn't believe this anymore and it would have been harsh on Andrew I did most of the reason that I didn't release that a couple of years later is it's a [ __ ] thing to do to someone who was making claims when there was a lot of unknowns and now there are knowns and you can prove you can prove false a lot of the claims that he was making like it's just a bad thing to do I don't care who he is but what you think about him you don't Stitch somebody up with a three-year-old video anyway that was the first thing second thing Instagram took that down Instagram deleted it and it had two seconds of him saying hello good to be here that was it he featured in the video so that is how tight they are on a number of uh topics especially around boys and men so the thing that I've got in my head you know we've got this individual elements here whether it be suicidality homelessness education relationship breakdown looking at a bit of a more macro level why do you think people get angry if you start to discuss the basic truth that boys and men face disadvantages have you ever like had it where you you you spend a whole day out in town you're walking around meeting friends uh you know go on a date or go for dinner and you get home and you've had like food stuck between your teeth like all day and it's like embarrassing that is what I think is going on to the left where they've badged themselves quite literally bought the T-shirt about their political ideas they badge themselves and made their political beliefs a fundamental part of who they are some people's jobs are quite literally dependent on certain political philosophies and theories being true and people will fight to the deaf to defend them they'll look in the mirror and be like oh oh no and they'll get angry at everyone else not telling them and um I feel like to overcome that identity crisis where your community your friends your job your lifestyle is all built around a certain set of ideas if something comes along that challenges ideas it's a very difficult thing to change it's like changing your skin you can't really do it so which is why I try not to identify with any political movement neither MRI or feminism I try to identify as George and George is a constantly shifting selection of ideas that I'm I'm able to bring in take out as and when I choose I'm not I'm not sort of confined to my Community I know there's a I can't name who I can't remember who said it but he was saying how he's a psychologist and he talked about how um opinions don't necessarily exist in someone's skull they exist in a community it's like a shared belief that Community has it's not like in someone's mind so to change someone's mind you either have to disassociate yourself in that community and lose friends family in a way that I described earlier or you have to change the mind of the entire Community that's how you change someone's mind and they're both extremely hard things to do especially when you're talking about very important issues like Domestic and Sexual Violence where sadly huge amount of men and women have personal experiences of that and I generally I genuinely try to understand like when people hate men I try to understand what has happened to that person for them to hate men so much when I the same same principle applies to look at Violent Men I don't just see them as an end product of violence I also I try to look into what have they experienced so they've become this way I truly believe that the vast majority of people are not born bad they've become bad from their experiences and their environment so I tried to ask challenge people to ask themselves what sort of Journey has that man been on and in the same way the angry the angry people I get in my comments and DMs I try to ask like what have you experienced at the hands of men that has made you hate them so much and I I try to apologize I'm sorry whatever happened to you happened and I hope you give a second chance but do you think that most people who do hold those beliefs have had first-hand personal experience of being mistreated by men or do you think that they see a culture online that praises and raises up people who push back against men as far as I can see it's way more that mimetic I am holding a belief that is currently politically popular to hold which is to I'm gonna stand up for the for the dispossessed groups and I will ignore information that suggests that a group which isn't commonly seen as being dispossessed actually might be therefore men bad women good white bad black good immigrant like good just think that's not easy yeah we just if I had a catchphrase it would be treat the issue not the gender like just look at the issue and if that issue impacts 80 of women then 80 of the benefits will go to women but we need to look at the issue and like not see just genders like if you look at domestic violence like even in the most conservative estimates one in three victims is a man and yet there was there's virtually nowhere for um men to go so one in three victims at one percent of refugees for men and like that is not acceptable if I were to say there was a group of survivors who make up one in three victims and they are systematically shut out of refuges people would lose their mind I tried that all the time I'm like um if you look at homeless people 90 of deaths are of one type of group and people get outraged upset and then you reveal it's men and then again they're they're confronted the same sense of dissonance but um I don't know it's just a lot it's just a lot to overcome for some people and I just don't think people are willing to put any effort like um too much part of their life and uh it's a shame it seems to me I I learned this originally from Destiny but I know that you kind of hold a similar belief here which is that one of the reasons that the right has dominated the conversation with men so much is because it's largely been evacuated by the land that you don't get to tell men that they are a problem or have a problem or need to do better and not hold up any potential role models for them to step into you have to provide a positive inspirational aspirational view for what men could become and that has almost exclusively been dominated by the right and you know for every single person every single person I don't care who you are that says I have a problem with Andrew Tate I have a problem with Jordan Peterson okay who do you suggest instead and I asked the guy who you um helped me prep for that debate that I did in Qatar he I came out and they played this video that was like a bunch of individuals famous individuals that might be accused of being toxically masculine in one form or another the first one was Milo yiannopoulos I was like look if you've brought me here to defend [ __ ] Milo yiannopoulos I'm on the wrong show yeah Jordan Peterson Joe Rogan the usual David Goggins the usual crowd and I was like okay um I understand my interlocutor as I understand that you have a problem with the people that have just been held up as potential role models for men please tell me who you'd suggest instead and it took 10 minutes in front of sorry 10 seconds in front of the live audience of silence for him to say my brother-in-law and I was like how about somebody that we all know it was I didn't mean to be mean but I think it was a really important moment that showed if you are from the left it is really hard to find a positive image for what men could and should be it's just it goes back to what you said before if women have a problem we say what can we do to fix Society if men have a problem we say what should men do to fix themselves yeah yeah yeah you know yeah quoting all my work now thank you um yeah I feel like I would say a better example is like an example of a masculine man like there's often an example there's often certain Role Models by left of men but I'd say they don't I wouldn't say they're traditionally masculine in in the way they present themselves the strange thing is that the the things that define masculinity we do celebrate them but in women so when a woman is like confident and loud and in your face and they go get her in a boss and you know we love that and quite rightly so but if you if you say oh yeah man confident to go get in fierce in a fighter it's like oh no we don't we don't like that toxic toxic toxic and I I it's a shame because we we just not don't seem to be benefactors of the lessons of History because this isn't the first time we've pathologized agenda like I I part of me thinks that toxic masculinity is just a modern equivalent of female hysteria where we take female distress and we pathologize it as something to be treated something that's wrong inside of them and we subject them to this this this crazy sort of um experiments to to fix the problem and we're doing the same now we see masculinity as a problem to be fixed and we're subjecting men to the same bogus sort of corrective therapies like the new masculinity workshops sort of presented new residential workshops are like really really expensive uh workshops that are about curing men of their masculinity that are extraordinarily expensive and entirely ineffective uh they're done by this really they're just instagramers who have done like a six-week course on somewhere over and that thinks they're a therapist a therapeutic coach I think you have to call themselves and it's basically about correcting the problems of masculinity it's the same thing we we subjected women to like 50 or 60 years ago for the so-called what's the female hysteria I don't know the story about it so female Hysteria um it was basically a phenomenon that looked at Women's distress and it basically pathologized it as a problem to be solved I think I mean I think it was um part of his masturbation therapies that were a cure and Pro or anti pro pro yeah yeah masturbate more and it'll get more more to merrier I'm sure I'm sure that there are many many women that are like yeah very very hysterical all the time actually I feel like I need this treatment well I can't hurt to try um and you see this if you Google it you see the same these black and white photos of women in sort of core being experimented on and it's it's horrific and I feel like we pathologized female distress instead of listening to it we pathologized it as something that's wrong in them and I I feel the same about toxic masculinity I feel like the frustrating thing is that the people that disagree with me often don't realize that the thing we disagree on is semantics because I I do I believe there is there are problems within men there were Violent Men there were men are just very aggressive competitive uh that are not great at expressing their feelings those are the problems I agree exist are so-called toxic masculinity but I feel like toxic masculinity is a term takes the problem and stuffs into men's heads and this is your problem and if you want to solve it only you can solve it rather than saying it as a societal issue so I mean I would say toxic attitudes towards men or toxic attitudes towards masculinity which all of society is guilty of perpetuating including women and um I feel like toxic masculinity just again confines the problem to men's heads it sort of takes a problem and puts them puts them in into men's heads in a slightly opposite patriarchy where it sort of puts men inside of the problem so patriarchy puts men inside of the problem toxic masculinity puts the problem inside of men and whatever it is it's like this is your problem and like for um for a political movement that's all about accountability it's like well aren't we all accountable for what's happening to men like what about the way we value men or sort of dating standards that men are held to are they not are they not part of it there's a really great study by a child psychologist in Canada called Crystal Tomlinson and she found that it was actually mothers who were perpetuating harmful gender stereotypes into their children men the fathers didn't really care either way but it was often the mother and then so um they did basically a IAT test I think it is where you're looking at different images of girls and boys exhibiting different behaviors and it basically measures the response of mothers and fathers to the different expressions of emotion so a boy crying for example and it found that the mothers were um a lot more disapproving of like things like boys crying so boys breaking the gender stereotypes and uh and it found that surprisingly fathers didn't seem to have really any sort of preference either way why do you think that is why do you think there's a sexed difference there I mean it could simply be that mothers spend more time with children uh I honestly don't know I don't I wouldn't want to comment on something I'm not not get out over your skis George let's get some yeah let me give you one let me give you one let me give you one from me so there's something called the sexy sun hypothesis and in it a little bit already yeah it suggests basically that what women are trying to do is find fathers that are going to give them attractive Sons because attractive sons are more likely to have kids right I think that what you see here is maybe an inbuilt biological mechanism that women have which is a predisposition to make their sons attractive to Future women and they have deep down in understanding that the more prestigious and domineering men on average have better mating outcomes they're more likely like remember what we are we are grandchildren optimizing machines that's what humans are we're not children optimizing machines we are grandchildren optimizing machines and once you get two generations away from you away you go crack on but I I think that that could be that could potentially be a big part of it I loved your breakdown when we were talking about that conception of left and right and and how people see it uh one side is a Mindless cacophony of anti-male bigotry minimization and Erasure the other an equally Antiquated and equally restrictive worldview of alpha males and pickup Artistry so good did I say so good oh yeah you did mate you would Smith that very well yeah yeah well I see a lot of stuff in there fan of your own work um but yeah I I think so one of the things one of the things that you're trying to do is is improve this conversation and improve the way that it's communicated given the fact that you're trying to display these ideas what have you learned about the way that it is effective and ineffective what is missing from the the communication side of the conversation when it comes to this topic uh I just think a really people just want to live in denial a lot of the time that people don't don't want to believe it doesn't matter how much information you present to them or how compelling an argument you make like uh some of the studies are presented in domestic violence especially like we're talking about meta-analysis of 200 surveys taken across 30 years collected by probably the greatest expert ever on domestic violence the man who invent the man who founded the field of family violence research did the study and he found that it's not gendered issue men and women abuse each other more or less equal rates Professor Murray Strauss the late moisture he's like I don't know if it is he literally invented the instruments we now use to study domestic violence and he's saying that so if I'm given that data and I still can't change one's mind I really don't know what hope there is but I have learned I've learned I mean I still find the issues extremely interesting but more and more I'm finding it even more interesting how reluctant people are to listen to what I'm saying like especially when it's so compelling not only not listen but not everyone to discussed and any discussion of it makes you a misogynist or in cell or some sort of Virgin I don't quite know um I've learned that the way I described it was um Minds aren't changed through like cells of a spreadsheet there's change for the cells of a human heart which by that I mean that it doesn't matter how many pie charts I flick around or how many spreadsheets or diagrams it's very dehumanizing way of talking about very important issues because one single story from like wanting a person is way more powerful than any pie chart I I mean I don't want going into the habit of quoting Stalin but he said one death is a tragedy a million is a statistic and I've really learned the power of personal anecdotes and that's something we can all learn from feminism where they're saying the personal is political and they are framing these important political issues as personal problems so I try creatively I try to combine different types of information like I'd like to see some data I like to see some personal quotes and stories maybe some expert testimony I try to mix them around in different ways and present them with different sort of perspectives and strategies sometimes I take the same issue remix of another honestly overall it's been very difficult it's been kind of frustrating but at the same time it has an added benefit because so many people are not willing to talk about these issues it's excellent for me as a content creator because it means there's so many topics that I can talk about that no one else wants to talk about it's like I I described it once as like eating from the garden of forbidden fruit where no one wants to talk about these issues and I'm there gobbling all up I'm like yeah this is great no one's talking about this no one's talking about that this is a great perspective for no one and like no doubt my chickens will come home to ruse eventually yeah um I feel it's a combination of many different things I do feel like it's a brand identity crisis within men and boys but I also feel there is a reluctance to actually give a [ __ ] from people like which people always talk about why don't Mentor why do men crying it's like oh maybe because no one cares maybe that's why maybe we simply don't care there was a there is a division of Inner Space about whether that's a biological thing or environmental thing normally like most things it's both but I do feel like we seem to care more and empathy Gap is or male gender blindness I think John Barry talks about when you're gamma bias is that gamma bias yeah John Barry two for two today yeah sometimes you read stuff and you're just like that is so true that we do we do like a raised male to gamma biases how we highlight and minimize gender depending what we're talking about so we highlight male privileges in an area of privilege we highlight the male sex and in the area of victimization we highlight the female sex and by that I mean like if you look at newspapers any any of your visitors that want to go away and do some homework look at how the news reports social issues if there's like 100 people killed and two of them are women you'll be like 98 passengers killed and two including two women and what we're doing is we're highlighting women when they're impacted and we're raising men when they when they're when they are impacted like another example I can give you is in London where I currently live uh last year we had the worst year in history of knife crime in terms of the amount of teenagers killed um I mentioned earlier how we talk about um gay people historically we don't talk about gay men same for this we use the word teenagers another team just up to their 30 teenage 35 teenagers and then I looked at the data which no one's going to do apart from some nerd like me every single one is a boy not 90 not 95 everyone all of them every single one was a boy or young man mostly inner city black boys and we were reporting in the news he was as teenagers or children or like 15 year old like and I was just like you should be saying boys if it was just women if it was just women that would be headline news and what I know another more recent example was a another investigation a shocking results came out from a study into the Metropolitan Police and it found that they were they were strip searching children as young as eight so if you again Google it children as young as they strip search by police that would be your headline you'll find again and again and again and then here's me digging into their data and I found that 95 of those children were boys again black boys and sometimes races brought into the title sometimes it's like black black children but never 95 boys and it's just like we wouldn't put up with that if it was the other way around it was 95 girls people would lose my mind including including who's their mind including myself like we wouldn't put up with that but when it happens to men and boys we erase it another place we highlight um gender is in perpetration so obviously you have a gunman henchman and Knife Man and con man and it's like again a man man man I know like uh we look at like 911 for example we very much highlight the fact that all of the terrorists Were Meant all of them but no one highlights the fact that every single firefighter and when I say every single one I mean 100 of the firefighters killed running into these buildings were men I think it was like 340 something firefighters killed and I might fire men like I get it I'm all for firefighters but when it is all fire men please say firemen like and that's I feel like when we erase men from those situations the heroism of men bravery and sacrifice of men we also erase our ability to construct the very Role Models you talked about because we're not seeing 300 men sadly lose their lives dragging innocent Americans out building so that is that's something that is tragic and it makes it upsets me that maleness masculinity is often defined by sacrifice and the loss of life but it is that is something that we should all be proud of and that's something that men can look to be like wow those men gave their lives for others and they are heroes from now until forever and like I guess that feeds into what you said about where are the male role models and the answer is weeds that raise masculinity we highlight the bad bit we erased a good bit and then I'll give you one final example was that the year after George um George Floyd is killed it was a a really really shocking murder of a young woman called Sarah everard in London uh and it was awful by Wayne cousins who is just human filth and again the headlines were the same male violence male violence male violence which is fine we'll talk about male violence but the following week a young man dived into the Thames to save a woman he didn't even know and he died he lost his life saving a woman and there were no headlines about male heroism male sacrifice male bravery and we just again highlighting the bad minimizing the good creating a very warped one-sided perspective of men and masculinity that really does hurt everyone including boys because they're growing up in society that doesn't show the good of men and only shows the bad and that's what leads people back to Andrew Tate who I don't appreciate and I feel does I don't like him for my own personal reasons because I think he brings a very bad brand to the sort of area I talk about and he's a poor role model but he's a result of the left's failure in my opinion he's a reflection of our inability to talk about boys and men in good faith in a way that isn't toxic there's some patriarchy that in orders of a nonsense we're not giving boys the space the talk in good faith or men and they're going to other people it makes sense and if we don't fix it it won't be agitated it'll be someone else it'd be someone worse potentially and um he is our failure and our best to clean up and um I just wish more people would see that but think about it this way man being your political leaning is very highly heritable right whether you're from the left or from the right it is very very highly influenced by your genetics which means that there are going to continue to be people from the left and that are going to continue to be people from the right and some people can move between two but there are a large cohort of people who were born to be on the left and born to be on the right um is there maybe a little bit of a gender skew one way or the other there might be there might be a few more a a small percent more women on the left or maybe women on the right I don't know my point being both cohorts have massive massive numbers billions of men and women inside of both of them and if one side decides that they're going to abandon the conversation they are seeding ground to a side that they don't agree with and here's the other thing people are more politically racist than they are racially racist people um parents of children a huge proportion nearly 50 percent of Democrats fear their child marrying a republican they fear their child marrying a hate that I hate that that's way more people than fear their child marrying a Chinese man or or marrying like an African lady or something like do you know what I mean like way more there is much more bias against the other political party than there is against pretty much anything else so given given the fact that we have this if you are from the left if you refuse to have this conversation with boys and men what you're doing is condemning all of the boys and men that are from the left to not be able to hear any positive role models which is why the right dominates masculinity not just the conversation you're boys and men but masculinity as well because let's say that people from one side aren't necessarily always prepared to hear the ideas from the other if one side isn't speaking to them and you can't cross the streams to be able to understand what the other side says you basically have maybe 50 of all men unable to hear what another side is talking to them about because they don't have anyone from their own political party that wants to engage yeah I mean the left them all it's talk of diversity never seems to want to talk about diversity of ideas points of view perspective uh it's only sort of things like I'd say things that are kind of arbitrary which is like race and gender which still really don't mean that much but diversity of opinion is what I'm interested in I mean I've seen I've seen what you talked about the unwillingness to sort of date or be romantically involved with those of other political opinions I know when I when I was dating in my dating profile it was like I'm a labor member but if you're a Tory I've still got a date with you like I'm not I'm not I'm not a baby yeah yeah and I've got so many people that are just calling me like there's all sorts of stuff and I'm just like it's not going to work out it's not going to work out for us and uh yeah I mean we all know it we're sort of engaging very much in like a very tribal sports team style let's defeat the other side at any cost sort of politics where I mean I I support Leicester City Football Club and they've just been relegated but I will support them for the rest of my life no matter how badly they do that's how sports team works but we're doing that in politics now where it doesn't matter how much we [ __ ] up we'll still support the left or the right and we don't we don't look at it the same amount of balance um it is interesting as well how you talk about voting I always find it interesting how women have outvoted men in America every year for about 40 years so every year women vote way more than men and if you look at Power we always talk about power dynamics and people talk about whoever's in office has power which is true but it was also power held by those who put that person in office and ultimately women can choose who goes into office because they outnumber men every single year every single sorry election and I wish more men would vote I don't think it's any women do anything wrong like they have every right to exercise their Democratic um vote but it's interesting how we talk about women as these sort of uh powerless people when in fact they are the biggest voting Block in America and that's why so many policies are for them that's why you have to buy an agenda of women and Obama's sort of review of women's issues and we have the White House Commission of women and girls which don't exist for men and boys like there's a dozen or so 15 I think States and a half commissions for women and girls set up by politicians none for boys there's four offices of uh Women's Health in America non for boys and men there's like a National Coalition for women and girls in education doesn't exist for men uh but even like the Bureau of Labor has a women's women's Bureau not for men and it's like if you consider the fact that thousands and thousands of men die at work every single year in America more men die at work in America every year than all of the American Military deaths in the entire Iraq war for 20 years so all the all the deaths from the Iraq War in America that's how many men die every year at work massive issue no men's Bureau in the bureau in the Bureau of Labor and I'm like come on like going back to amends there's no office for Men's Health four for women and I'm all supportive of that I'm not saying let's close the women's ones down and we're saying let's make some for men like if you look at the 10 top causes of death in America nine of them are dominated by men nine men lead nine of the top ten causes of death no office for men's health and not only that but like men are more likely to do men and boys are more likely to die at every age group like every age group from the neonatal to old age more likely to die and not just America either but um across the world every in every country men have shorter lives on average and nothing is said and done there is no I don't understand the structure of male Advantage why does it have so few commissions committees departments offices to actually solve these problems so I guess that's a criticism of the patriarchy theory for you what do people get wrong about the gender pay Gap I know this is something that you've looked at quite a lot yeah yeah yeah I mean oh it's I mean there's so much to say I mean I guess first of all I'd say it's not a gap between men and women it's a gap between mothers and fathers and there's some really excellent I mean I love Graphics there's a really great graphic of like different countries and you see men and women's salaries going up like this together over time and then women's comes down and men's carries and going and it's like well what happened there it was all going so well it's all going so well and then suddenly and it's like child they had a child and the women have taken time off work to have a child they get longer paternity maternity leave in the UK and um if they do go back to work they go back part-time if at all so I'd say it's better seen as a child penalty paid by mothers and the solution to that penalty is probably something to do with equal paid parental leave for fathers so if we can give fathers equal leave to mothers uh murders will be able to return to work sooner and then return to their sort of career journey and the pay Gap will be closed through more parental leave for dads and that's a really good example of like a approach I like to take where we look at men's and women's issues as symbiotically linked the problem of one is the problem of another and on any equation you've got to look at both sides so I'd say one side of the problem is to pick up the other side is parentally for fathers and you've got to solve them both I mean there's also a lot of evidence where men work longer hours Men Travel further men or more dangerous jobs and work in Industries where um that's more higher paying which is true but then I guess you've got to deal with the discussion of like well why are men choosing these jobs why are women not working in engineering why are women not working in stem and there's so much to say about that but it really comes down to the individual differences in men and women in general like do we have different interests do we have different behaviors and if so are they shaped by our biology are they shaped by our environment is it both and I mean it's both it's surely both so I guess the answer to what you're saying is that men make different decisions men behave differently they go for different jobs they don't take equal parental leave they um they're just different people in general and a lot of that has an impact on salary there's a really good um the biggest study ever on the pay Gap I think was done by Harvard and um you basically looked at Uber drivers in America so the big reason is the biggest because they had so much data Uber obviously has so much data and men and women both try viewers in America and they they looked at the pain and they were like well women are getting paid less at Uber so how does that make sense because it's obviously all automated so like what a great great way of studying male or female Behavior to work out what is in this Gap and there's three things in the Gap the first was men drove at different times at night so men would do the graveyard shifts the early mornings we're getting paid more they would want to do that women less so the second was that men were more likely to stick with the platform for longer so they had more experiences and they benefited from that experience makes sense of any job and the third reason which is 50 of the Gap was that men just drive faster let's drive a little faster guys then you'll close that Gap yeah I mean I guess it's I mean yeah that shows it's not it wasn't discrimination that's causing the pay Gap in Uber it was just different types of a heavy right foot different types of behavior and I guess we could have a discussion of what shapes that behavior but we need to start that conversation with it's not discrimination at least an Uber different types of behavior and if you factor in you know with men and women same job same experience same level same hours worked the pay gap's like 99 cents to the dollar and in fact Asian men are paid even more than white men and Asian women and it's like Asian privilege baby not Asian privilege and you know I really I I loved learning about this um from some of your infographics and what I love is the conception of the difference is between asking why are women paid less and when are women paid less yeah yeah yeah that's the conception right it's not about it's not about a reason it's about a time and the time is motherhood the time is becoming a mother and here's the thing man you know you've seen this in the Scandinavian countries this was sort of Peterson's Big Break whatever five or six years ago when he was talking about as you make countries more egalitarian you see gender differences between the Sexes increase not shrink because you open up the uh ability for your biological predisposition which isn't predetermined but it is a predisposition uh for you to be able to go and do the things that you want to do now the interesting thing is I wonder if you were to say um a a mother and a father how much is leaving the UK is like nine months usually right for a month I mean it's 12 months but it's sort of splits in government and the workplace okay so let's say yeah let's say you're doing that let's say you increased it and let's say that there was um 18 months and that had to be split between the father and the mother right so you have 18 months and that's the household and you can choose to split this however you want something tells me that would be making the system more egalitarian right the decision is now completely in the hands of the family something tells me that there is a lot of mothers that would just go looks like I'm getting 17 months and one week of leave like crack on honey because it completely fails to account for the fact that women who are mothers a lot of the time love being mothers for the most part that's the reason that they chose to become mothers that's not too loud yeah presuming that um presuming that women actually enjoy the the experience of becoming a mother which for lots and lots of my female friends who are writers who work in offices who are high-powered lean in career style boss baby women it's been the it's been the single most transformative thing that they've done absolutely adore it and if I was to tell them that they had to get themselves back to work earlier they would feel like they've lost well part of their life I'd say like that I'd say the ideal choice for both fathers and mothers is part-time parenting part-time work that's what the data says both parents want women want it more like I've looked there's been some interesting studies where like I think it was the New York Times They asked parents what they wanted do you want like part-time work full-time work full-time parenting and um and then I I found some interesting um Bureau of Labor Statistics data on what actually happens like what is the reality and it was like the biggest difference between what a parent wants and what they get was a full-time dads so that the vast majority of dads are working full-time but a lot of them want to be sort of part-time parents whereas if you look at the data for like full-time parenting full-time motherhood that was actually the closest that was where the what mothers wanted and what mothers got married at the most so he got like working dads over here lots of them working full-time but lots of them wanted to be parents as well so I'm like if I don't know why we don't see workers not a choice either like everyone talks about a motherhood isn't a choice and it isn't but then dads don't get that choice either like they have to go to work they can't be like I'm not going to go to work today because they do that's how it works and um I don't know if we talk about the sacrifices Farmers make in that way uh we do we do talk about mothers not enough and we can talk about them more but I mean my dad he was a career father and he was very successful he spent his whole life traveling the world going to conferences speaking at large events like really smart guy we never saw him he was out earning money and my mum took a time off her career to raise my sister and I and as a result she's built a massive network of friends like all her girlfriends around the village or she I imagine she met them when she was going to like play school and going to playground to pick us up my dad has none of that now they're both retired and he I guess he's not got that same network of friends like my mother my mum has and I'm like the price of his sacrifices being paid now but the price of my mum's sacrifice was paid at the time now she's enjoying she's enjoying retirement she's got all her friends she's got like a family she's got a great connection to me and my my sister because we spent so much time with her and I might I don't know if my dad has that same benefit because he spent his life working working for us and he didn't have a choice if you met my mum he would not she he had to go to work and um I think we should see the benefit of both and we should uplift women to become lovers if they want to like we should give a woman CEO as much value and respect as a mother like both are like just disrespectful and just as valuable um and it's like we talk about a lot of the left they they talk about how empowering women to do whatever they want uh women's autonomy but then it's like the autonomy ends when it's her decision to do something they don't like like be a mother like what if a man wants to be full-time full-time mum and it's like well now she's internally oppressed she's been conned by the patriarchy yeah being a domestic housewife she's a proponent of the patriarchy of course she's brainwashed she has to be brainwashed any woman has a different opinion to me it has to be brainwashed and it's like again without in a darker sense like abusive women like that's the decision women make too but we we ignore that we don't accept that level of autonomy when a woman chooses our autonomy to be abusive or violent we have a really hard time seeing that and accepting that if a woman comes a woman who wants to become a CEO excellent we love it a woman who wants between abuser less so and I know I mean I'll quote Margaret Atwood to you but she's she talked about my fundamental position is that women are human beings capable of both saintly and evil evil doings and uh I think that's true they're not perfect they're just as flawed as men are like they're no better not or worse and we need to sort of see them in the full sort of color of their beauty and good or bad that's what autonomy is and um I don't know if we extend that autonomy to that breadth in motherhood or anywhere else and then God that is a real tangent what what have you learned talking about um women and how they communicate and interact with men what have you learned about what men want from the women that are in their lives the kinds of conversations that they wish that they could have other things I know you ask your audience a lot for feedback and you know you get these stories from men talking about what they wish that women would know about them what they wish that women would understand you know what what is it that you think men want women to know more about them whether it be in terms of relationships sexuality mindset mental health career goals lifestyle goals any of that I felt that for women to understand what the Mad experience is like we need to go back to the lockdown of coronavirus and I was in London at the time and it was awful but that feeling you get when you were walking around lockdown right in the midst of the coronavirus was how I feel like is to be a man where people are afraid of you people avoid you people cross the road that you go to a supermarket and someone steps back that feeling of unease and unfriendliness and fear I even like the fact that your emotions are masked I feel like it's such an interesting reflection of the male experience that feeling of unease and fear and same and it's just like it's frustrating how the male and female experience exists and opposite ends of the Spectrum in a sense that men have so few things nice said about them like the vast majority of normal men never receive a compliment and go weeks months years about anything kind being said about them but women have compliments shouted at them from car windows like in the street like like this cat called and it's like oh like men walk through Society just completely ignored a lot of the time just ignored doesn't matter and there's benefits to that and disadvantages but women have like a spotlight Society burning down on their shoulders at all times especially if you're an attractive young woman and they're like whatever the differences are is not for me to say but surely the answer is just through talking about them not identifying men as toxic or violin or patriarchal but actually just listening to what men are like we talked about men man boxes we talked about how we're lifting men out of the boxes of like career provider uh status which I think that can be harmful boxes to be in we're taking those up take a man out of those boxes but we're just putting them into another set of boxes like male privilege male violence patriarchy uh male fidget these are just more boxes and I just don't want to go in a box we just want to be given the chance to live our lives and um any any answers through listening basically yeah talk to me about fragile masculinity I've seen you bring this up a couple of times it's a really interesting conception when you think about that I remember that you you use this example on one of your posts about the Razer gold products and like Ellen DeGeneres like yeah snide income took the piss out of Bic making her for her pen so yeah explain fragile masculinity and how that's interesting and through the lens of Ruthless capitalism well well I I uh I lifted that idea from an amazing blog I wrote I read from a trans woman and she was talking about because obviously she's experienced both sides of the gender divide and she was saying how it's amazing how when we see pink raises or Bic for her who Market to that women we laugh at Bic we laugh at the razor company we're like how stupid is that like I can't believe you're trying to find women by being pink and I laugh too but when a like a nuts for men that comes out that will crisp some men or chocolate bar big chocolate bar we don't do the same we blame men we're like oh look at these fragile men wanting to buy their blue Razor or their blue oh so fragile it's like a real like um difference in a way we approach those two things we blame the products when it they're gendered to women but we blame the man when they're gendered to men and um I guess that's fragile masculinity and it's like it's basically the same thing but it's treated in two different ways and uh I hope people open their eyes a bit more to that what's the story of Nora Vincent no no Nora Vincent was a gay woman uh and a journalist who um really sad story she thought her book I think the book's called Inside Man she basically lived as a man for I think 18 months just to sort of understand what the male experience is like and she didn't enjoy it she had to stop early and she had to check herself into psychiatric care then actually um earlier this year she uh ended her life sorry last year ended her life by Suicide as because of her Mental Health uh I mean a lot of people are politicizing her death as a way of being like Oh look how hard it's to be a man and the reason why she decided Ender life wasn't no directly because of the whole man thing but she just developed a really strong sense of gender dysphoria as a result as living as the opposite gender wasn't necessarily because it was a man um so I want to make that caveat but she came back from her experiment and she was like as a women don't know what it's like to be a man we don't know um That's the basis I try to start out when I'm trying to understand women's issues women's experiences I don't know what it's like to be a woman I have no idea what it's like to be a woman like sometimes I'm nearby attractive women and I see how they're treated in my society and it's horrible but I don't think women understand my experience any better than I understand theirs and whatever the answer is like I said earlier the solution has to come from listening in good faith like I have learned to take a seat and listen to what women go through when it comes to like Reproductive Rights um and I think it's important that I do but so too there's a seat next to me and women should sit in that when it's time to talk about things like male suicide men's mental health like there's a seat for everybody and a time to listen and too often like male suicide especially is so often gay kept by people that aren't even men and it's like kept well I suppose we've got like the whole concept of like uh suicide is caused by toxic masculinity which is a popular feminist concept that originally came from the myopoetic men's movement but it's obviously been adopted by feminism and that's used as a a lens a warped and ineffective lens in my opinion to understand male suicide again to blame to blame men on being so toxic and if men would talk more and surely the male suicide rates would come down but the problem is there's been studies on that there's been studies on that too and there was one study uh last year university of Manchester looked at men who had completed suicide and of all the middle-aged men who had died by Suicide 91 of them had sought help so nine to one percent had actually been and sought counter therapy or some sort of healthcare provider and I think 30 of them had sought help the week before their suicide so it's like well you're telling men to talk but 91 of men who died by Suicide did talk and they still died and um even more shocking is that of those men who died by Suicide who had been sort of seen by a clinician eighty percent of them were deemed low risk or no risk so of these people of his men that died by Suicide 80 were seen as no risk or low risk so yes I think it's more likely that we're simply just misreading male distress because a lot of a lot of our psychiatric interventions and the psychological industry in general is is often based on women's needs and women's Behavior because it's an industry dominated by women makes total sense like uh we look at industries that are dominated by men and we rightly identify the ways in which it creates spaces for men like environments for men like ideas and strategies for men but we don't look at a psychological industry which is dominated by women it's like 85 of clinical psychologists are women and naturally not saying is intentionally done but naturally that will create ideas and approaches that are perhaps more beneficial to women than they are to men and maybe that will help us better understand why suicide interventions just don't seem to be working on men as well as they do for women it's certainly worth discussing at the very least does that Richard Reeves bit where he says four times more female fighter pilots are in the U.S Air Force by percentage than male kindergarten teachers in the United States which just blows my mind every time I think about that yeah yeah and you know when you use or when words like toxic masculinity are used there's another Richard Reeves thing it's the same concept as original sin it's like there is something inside of you which is inherently wrong it is a part of your makeup and it must be expunged we must come in and we must do the exorcism you must prostrate yourself upon the altar of gender ideology to be able to fix this problem and the main thing that it does like regardless of whether you think that there are toxic elements of masculinity or not what it does is it causes men and boys to check out of the conversation yeah if I am told yeah yeah that there is something inherently built inside of me which is is wrong and reprehensible and it must be cleansed it must be sanitized and sterilized out of me guess what I'm not [ __ ] listening yeah yeah I'm not going to listen to what you've got to say to me because you evidently have such a a transparent veneer thin level of care for any experience that I go through from hearing anything that I've got to say we're not existing on the same plane no yeah no it is the parallels between like patriarchy Theory and the original sin are very interesting to explore um and it just lacks it doesn't have the same depth that I think is required to understand very complicated issues very complicated issues you look at domestic violence which is often seen as men's men and acting patriarchal control over women although power control is certainly a factor it's only one of about three dozen factors many of which are more important than power and control and by just seeing domestic violence through patriarchy Theory we're actually losing a huge part of the picture another another example University of Cambridge University Cambridge study looked at violent fantasies in men so men who fantasize about being violent often that man is called toxic that's a toxic man but then they looked at his experiences in adolescence and they found that about 97 of the most bullied Boys in school went on to have final fantasies later in life so a huge percentage 97 the most bullied boys violent fantasies in adulthood and um the academics work on that paper they hypothesized that fantasies of violence are coping mechanism developed by boys to deal with violence to come so these boys are being bullied so much that they develop this coping mechanism of fantasizing about violence that they never got rid of and They Carried into adulthood and then it became a man who fantasizes about violence so I guess I would encourage people to not see the man who is fantasizing about violence and instead see the bullied boy behind him and suddenly you start to get a bit more compassion for that man and you don't even necessarily need to have compassion you just need to understand that we can talk about these things about justifying it but we do need to understand that some of these issues are more complex than just simple one-word catchphrases and hashtags and the fact that we use patriarchy Theory not just to understand domestic violence we use it in the standard it's loads of different issues such as the pay Gap as you mentioned and it's not good enough I always think of it as like trying to explain um complex societal issues with the same one-word answer is like trying to fix a really meticulous watch with a sledgehammer it doesn't work it's not fine enough you just see to set up making a mess and like we now have access to really interesting complex economic psychological anthropological um tools that can help us understand the pay gap for example and we should start using them rather than just falling back on his Antiquated regressive very divisive and extraordinarily vague words uh just not good enough anymore all right we need to have a real academic evidence-based conversation around these different issues that isn't so dramatic it's so dramatic it's spooky it's like scary these words like they're patriarchy they're manosphere toxic masculinity it's like it's borderline on fairy tale sort of language and it's like I think we are we can do better and uh I hope I hope I've proven a little bit of how uh we can do better through through my page dude I absolutely love the way that you speak I think that it's incredibly eloquent I think it's very very balanced and the main thing that I want people to take away from today you know if you're a woman and you've been listening to this it probably is a bit uncomfortable because it's it's hard to hear a struggles the the modern framing of almost any conversation about one group and another is that if you are talking about the struggles of one it is implied that the other is somehow to blame at no point during this conversation have we said women they're the problem it's them these these [ __ ] at no point have we said this um what I would really love is for more of this conversation this is exactly the conversation I talked previously you may have heard me talk about a third wave manosphere you heard me talk about this no okay so first word hey this is the ah sounds really cut against Academia coming up can't wait to hear no it's not this is this is Cutting Edge bro signs um so first wave you understand there was different waves of feminism they were fighting for different things first wave first wave manosphere was pickup artists it was mystery and Neil Strauss it was the game it was negging it was Day game and pulling and stuff like that me too comes along that could no longer survive there needed to be a sanitized version of sort of men's mostly dating but kind of also started to creep into masculinity advice that rose up for the second wave which was red pill it was alphas and betas and cooks and soy boys it was Andrew Tate it was fresh and fit it was like that world right yeah now my belief is that we have the opportunity to do a third wave manosphere and the third wave manosphere would be not seeing women as the enemy it would be not adversarial it would not be antagonistic to the other sex it would be trying to integrate the positive elements of masculinity allowing men to be masculine but to transcend and include their emotions that are difficult to be able to talk about them but not just talk about them at a surface level to be able to act off the back of them and that for me is what I'm most excited about at the moment I'm really really excited about the conception of a third wave manosphere or call it what you want holistic masculinity integrated manhood like it doesn't matter about what we call it right yeah I'm talking about content creators like Hamza who I think is a really good influence for young boys he's telling them they need to train more he's telling they need to look after themselves they need to have a good uh society and uh support group around them people like David Buss people like Richard Reeves people like yourself people like John Barry with the female psychology like all of these people are putting forward a positive non-adversarial positive sum not zero-sum not negative some positive some relationship and and way that men can show up in the world and again for the guys that are listening there is a trend on the internet for men to start to point the finger and make these big [ __ ] sweeping generalizations about all women are and all men are there are averages on average everybody that's listening to this is not part of the average they're not part of the average because you're listening to a one and a half hour conversation about the in-depth nuances of what masculinity means in the modern world you don't show up or expect average from yourself in pretty much anywhere else in life so why start throwing these massive broad stroke generalizations around the accuse another group of being the ones that are in the wrong I don't think that I think that we can do better I'm positive that we can do better when it comes to this conversation and I'm very very glad that you George at the tin men are a part of this you are an un as yet uh unallied but soon future member of the third wave manuscript well I mean I'm happy to be a member maybe we can consult about some sort of renaming yeah it's The Branding problem again like yeah yeah well that's my job like I I love this what you said excellent I am fully on board of that I think we need to identify both the good and bad of masculinity um I mean one of the like you said like one of the things I hate is generalizations I often point out in the comments a lot of people make the broad stroke um generalizations about feminists in my comments and I'm just like listen like if you're if we're asking women not to make generalizations about men and what right do you have to make generalizations about feminism um and yeah I wish we would listen a little bit more I wish we would see masculinity as soon that can be good or bad I wish we saw it as something that is in a lot of ways immutable in the same way that sexuality is immutable we've come to terms with the fact that someone that's gay that is an immutable part of who they are that's how they were born and like why can't we look at masculinity and feminine the same way like sure you can change and bend your masculinity but that's just who you are and there's nothing wrong with that also you need to just get over these dramatic World Views really good book you should read Chris it's called factfulness by Hans rosaling I don't know if you read it I've heard of it a million so good he talks about he talks about overlapping overlapping distribution and on average also Richards talks about it and he's just like distributions overlap and we're talking on average like when I say women are one way men are the other it's not this it's like this like men and women are overlap the distributions are overlap and we're talking in general terms about these different groups it's not very sexy it doesn't fit into a tweet unfortunately but if you're not willing to engage in these discussions in a more extensive manner then perhaps you shouldn't be part of it at all it's like it's difficult it requires listening requires Nuance it requires putting aside your personal differences in many ways possible even like your own experiences and try and actually listen and I better understand and um I just think the factfulness thing is very interesting because it talks Hans rosling as like a world leading was a world-leading professor of global health and he talks about how we have a an overly dramatic worldview because we only see the very worst things like a million men and women go to work eat a sandwich come home go to bed boring but one of those people will get stabbed to death on the way suddenly it's everywhere and we were looking at that and we're like oh my God it's so dangerous so scary knife crime violence but in reality it's actually not like that if you look at Global Trends things are getting better things are getting safer we live in the safest time in human history he did a thing called The Gap minder test where he took I think he took 12 answers yeah 12 12 questions about like vaccines education poverty uh disaster zones like things that people think they know a lot about one of the questions was like what percentage of the world is vaccinated the answer is 80 but no one got it right you found that of the quiz which is multiple choice if you just guessed every single answer of 12 you would get um four four of sorry it's note 16 basically found that if you guessed you would do better than the people that actually took the test because we have a systemically negative view of the world we only see the world that's very very worst and he said that if I took this quiz to the zoo and wrote the answers on bananas and threw the bananas into the cage the monkeys would do better on current affairs than human beings because the monkeys haven't been subjected to this Preposterous dramatic um worldview yeah I call I came up with a meme for that two memes actually one is self-reinforcing antagonism which is where one group feels maligned the other group doesn't it doesn't feel like they're listening therefore I feel like I'm more aligned therefore I doesn't feel like they're listening therefore so the gap between the understanding of both sides the failure of cross-sex mind reading and and the other which really relates to what you're talking about although I only spoke about it in the dating space was recursive red pill learning so recursive red pill learning um talks about how chat GPT is now being trained on chat GPT data so presuming that there is an error rate within the data it is creating an error rate on top of an error rate on top of an error rate and it's going to create this recursive problem the issue you have with a lot of conversations on the internet generally the most egregious stories are the ones that rise to the top because they're the most egregious you know if if a guy leaves for work and comes back and finds that his wife's cheated on him with like three men and now he's got a gluten intolerance and lives under a bridge and she took him for all that he's worth quite rightly that's going to get a hundred thousand up votes on Reddit because it's [ __ ] mental but that because most people live most of their lives through the internet and because the stories that get the most attention are the most egregious stories people who don't have any counter actuals who see these extreme examples believe that that's the way that the world is and then it gets propagated by other people who are part of that same content machine so that's the recursive red pill uh red pill learning side of it but it's the same for everything you could have recursive feminist learning as well as soon as you retract yourself away from the world as soon as you don't spend all that much time day to day in IRL around normal people most of whom get up and go to work have a family get a nice dog and just [ __ ] watch Netflix and chill out and maybe go to the gym in the morning that's most people right yeah I have what you see on the internet is not thrilled it's not real guys it's just the internet like I noticed that one of the best things to do when you're stressed out on the internet just go outside for like 20 minutes like it's really not as exciting as dramatic it's kind actually kind of boring real life in the best possible way um but you're right in that in terms of what the way we perceive reality we either see like people winning the lottery and quite literally or people being killed and there's very little in terms of narrative forming in between that no one wants to watch a new story about items no someone that goes to work and does nothing and comes home it's like what sort of headline is that boring and I mean in in men and boys advocacy that's called um Apex fallacy so and that's that's what hurts men because we see all these rich men Jeff Bezos Bill Gates Mark Zuckerberg white men especially it's oh look how rich they are and they're the tiny little Apex at the top of the pyramid but also we forget the fact that the very bottom of the pyramid if you look at homeless but homeless people also disproportionately meant like men are overrepresented at the very bottom and the very top and yet we only ever seem to want to point a finger at the top which is fair enough but again it's a lot more nuanced than we like to pretend and the world isn't as exciting as dramatic or as scary as it seems and I feel like we should go outside a little bit more and uh remind ourselves of that I think touch some grass George look dude hang this one home getting the hell out of you uh I I love the work that you do everybody should go and check out at the Tin Men on Instagram uh where else should they go do you do other stuff too uh my only thing is I'm only one person like people keep being oh do a tick tock do a YouTube do this do that and I'm like I'm one person this is just a part-time thing I've actually also got a job so yes it is just Instagram at the minute at the Tin Men I'm on Twitter not that active but I've put all my effort into Instagram I want to absolutely nail that and then really what it is is my Instagram is more about research and development for what I hope one day I'll be a documentary I want to sort of learn about how do I have how do I navigate these very treacherous issues issues how do I walk this type rope that's that's phenomenally difficult like the the world of boys and men advocacy is often compared to literally the alt-right white supremacy and being a Nazi so that's the bedfellows I'm starting out with I'm trying to find a way of having these discussions that hopefully progress to the conversation and eventually I can build into some sort of documentary or when I've worked out what issues work what sort of what sort of language is effective what sort of creative strategy is um most resonates most of an audience then I'm going to sort of try and adapt that into a documentary but that's down the line for now it's just at the Tin Man on Instagram and you can find me there looking forward to a meeting you see you in the comments there's lots of comments so lots of debating going on like huge long big paragraphs of text the best the best comment I ever got made me laugh and I still think about it some guy was like holy [ __ ] every comment's an essay and I was just laughing so hard at it I was like thank you that's such a such a compliment like normally on Instagram it's just like yes yes yes okay yes Queen louder louder and then like for me it's like big text and then I you keep if you say something and don't like me you wanna you wanna call me out I'll pin I'll pin your comment and hopefully we can have a good discussion so I hope it's a rich and interesting space and if you like it can follow if you don't like it also come follow and we'll chat about it so yeah I appreciate you thank you George thank you thanks for having me on if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe