matt is the chief national

correspond and for abc and is the author most recently of no time to panic. richard reeves in the middle here is the president of the recently formed institute for boys men and is the author of the wonderful book boys and men. brett writes for a local paper in york city that will go unnamed, and he is the author of a truly prescient book in retreat. guys, i'm so happy be here with you. richard you wrote a piece for us at the free press. might not even remember it because you're producing much these days, but it was called the boys left behind, and i wanted to just read a little bit of it for you. in the span of just a few decades, write an astonishing revolution. human relations has occurred since the widespread adoption. agriculture, patriarchy has been the norm in human societies. no longer patriarchy been

demolished in advanced economies, women are no longer dependent on for material resources, tearing down barriers to education, the labor market, feminism achieved a central goal of securing for women economic independence and power. i like all of those things, but you go on to say this the movement to liberate women has unleashed the power, talent of half the global population. but like all revolutions, it has real challenges. you upend a 12,000 year old social order without experiencing side effects. so the subject of the panel today really about what those side effects are. yeah, they're good sentences. yeah. you really drew it out of me for that area and i wondered if we could start with you since since this is your topic what are some of those? obviously, i would not be sitting up here were it not for feminism i would not have the life that i would have the freedoms that i have without it. what are the unintended consequences of this revolution

that you wrote about in that piece? well, thank you again, carrying that piece. and as i just intimated, that was probably you get people to write more boldly for you than perhaps they do for other places as part of your magic? i think so. a lot on how you define patriarchy, of course. but the the central because it's not as if there aren't many areas of american life and around world where there's still a lot more to do on behalf women, especially at the top. but you see the central changes, the one that you just quoted me as saying that is the fundamental shift in the economic relationship between men and women. so just a couple of data points. i'm a data guy in 1979, 13% of women earned more than the median man. the guy in the middle. now it's more than 40% of women earn more. the median man, that's not 50%. but it's a it's a revolution in the economic relation between men and women. all great. but if you've defined the role of men historically as being about that provider role as having that kind of economic relative to women, then you don't change that that quickly

and expect there not to be some difficulties in adjustment. so i think that's driven all kinds of things we see falling away from education. we see deaths of despair. we've seen rising rates of suicide among men. obviously, there's huge changes in family life. and so in a sense that to bring to a sharper point, we positively and hugely, wonderfully expand what it means to be a woman. more work to do we have not done the same men and then we've wondered men are struggling with this new new world that has changed in the space of one generation, maybe two. i think that this topic is one where the gap between what you read like what the official narrative and what people's actual concerns are is maybe wider than almost anything. you pick up the newspaper, you watch television, you're in elite circles, going to hear about toxic masculinity. you're going to hear about the patriarchy. you're going read about like cis, heterosexual will, jargon, jargon, jargon.

brett, matt, richard, you're all parents of boys. like give us. a sense of what things are like now parenting boys in 21st century america. because if you read the official line, you would think we somewhat many people think we still live in a patriarchy but then hear the statistics and you talk to actual parents and they say that is very much not what my experiences of, my child's life. i just actually have a reporter's question and this may be very easily answered. is there definitely a direct causality between the rise of feminism and the fall of patriarchy and the challenges young men and boys are finding? or could it be other forces at play that might be acting on them as well? yeah so obviously the economy has changed as well, which is unrelated to what's to women. so it's an opportunity for me to clarify my comments. there is this tendency on the political right and, maybe brett can speak to this to say, of course men are struggling. it's because the women are doing

better, right? the women are taking the jobs. the women are running a families. and so the the conservative critique of this is that is that yes women have risen that has what has caused men to rise. that is economically and socially just not true. what has happened is that the question what it means to be a man and to mature into masculinity is no longer it's not it's not clear what. the answer to that is and i just don't think we're doing a very good job of even acknowledging the fact there is now question and i think that's created very dangerous vacuum in our culture and in our politics because it's an axiom that if responsible people, aren't grappling with this difficult question, irresponsible people are going to exploit it. and i think that's happening in real time. i think there's an economic question. i think also a cultural question, which is, you know, ask myself, you sort of just are a consumer of movies, television, where is the model of manhood? right. i mean my father grew up in an era where you could look at humphrey bogart as a kind of a

model for what a man should be, how he should be with women, how he should be with you know, the bad guys. i think of, you know, casablanca and his his role is as kind of being on the surface a cynic and at heart sincere. now, if there's anything about male roles, they're cynics through and through. and i worry about i mean, one of the things that i have to struggle with, with i wouldn't say struggle with because i feel like my son is is a very good place is how do you provide models not only in your own life also in terms of the literature that he's reading or the movies to which he's exposed or the songs he's he's hearing that give an idea of what a man ought to be. that is neither above and or below women, but has a place has a kind of concept of what it is to you know, maybe almost in a hebrew sense or you just to be a man to be a person, be an

upstander, to be to be courageous, to be masculine in a certain of way. all of that has sort of gone away. and i challenge people maybe there are examples of this, you know, in an odd way, there's this beautiful film called the hold overs, if you haven't seen it, the latest alexander payne film, which which touches on this in a in a in a rather deft way. but i think those examples are few and far between. and i remember when when my son was we go to these awful marvel movies right? which, you know, first of all, if you're a parent and you have to sit through this --, it's just like, oh, my god. right? but the whole thing was, was, was, was all of the films just scribe masculinity in the most caricature ish terms? and we have to i think, find our way back to a culture is able to talk about explain and model a kind of idea of manhood and

masculinity that is modern but also retains something like something honorable, strong and and and attractive. and that i think is his is absent from our culture. but isn't this i mean, someone like matt gutman here. yeah yeah. hard to you know, a lot of my book focused evolutionary and evolution in the roles that we as primitive societies played right and i always thought of myself someone who has that kind daring that i would be guy who would, you know, taste the mushroom like is that delicious or is it deadly, you know, and would find out and either be dead or like i probably try to go spear the mammoth and might get killed. but there were other roles to be played and so you know when we talk about what looks like and i'm also very touch with my

feminine side and the whole book is about how i cry, by the way. so seriously, yeah, there's a lot of sobbing. brett gave me a quizzical look, but the question is like, is it possible to define mask salinity or manhood? you know, like it is this constantly broad spectrum that's a moving target. no, but as the culture change, it's like humphrey bogart i mean, that's that's one view. and is, you know, iron man is another. but i mean, i think we've always these but i think we're fungible. do you do you agree, matt, that we live in a society where for safety as a virtue is something that is prized over risk taking? to me, that is like a typically that is that is a shift that has happened that some people would call feminization maybe that's the wrong language for it but i think it's pretty clear right now at least in many elite spaces in the culture let's let's leave other parts for a minute because that's different

but in the worlds that we travel in that those that safety that comfort coddling is the norm and that when becomes the norm and when sort of especially physical risk taking becomes something that is not not normative, is looked at as crazy, that that has an effect, especially especially on boys that's that's broadly how i see it. i do agree with that. and i think one of the biggest things that i and we talked about this backstage that as a boy, i was allowed and my mom was actually very forgiving in this to be a complete disaster like i was a mess. i was sloppy. i made mistakes. i fell down. i was like and i think that there is a a form of perfection that boys these days have to embody. there was an incident at the school. i probably i shouldn't get into it, but let's get into it. a couple of boys in the third grade were apparently annoying,

really cute girl named in the fourth grade and my son was sort of on the periphery of this and they got called into the dean. and you tell your kids you're not to annoy a girl. and i wondered what that would have looked like 30 years ago. 40 years ago or whatever. how old i am when i was growing up and what the dean would have said if would have just been, okay, let the boys be boys. i'm not condoning it, by the way. i'm just it's a question that i asked myself. and perhaps, richard, i mean, we've all probably had similar experiences like that raising boys. but i think the point here is that i think two of the biggest problems with this debate, but perhaps were the debates to the following the the unwillingness to imagine overlapping distribution of something. right. so when we say men are taller than women, we know what mean by that we don't mean all are taller than all women. we just mean the right. and those distributions overlap. and so when we talk about the difference between men and we're not saying all men have to be like this and all women have to

be like that, what we're saying is at the average there are some differences between us and one of the biggest, by the way, is risk taking. right. the willingness, appetite, whatever you want, call it a risk of risk is higher on the average among men, physical, not just not just so i've stumbled across very interesting study when you look at companies that are led by men ceo and ceo they're on average more profitable also more likely to go bankrupt ones. that led by women are on average a little bit less profitable, less likely to go bankrupt, which is entirely consistent with the evolutionary psychology about the fact that the average are a bit more risk taking. right. if the risk pays off the companies got to be very profitable. but if it doesn't, it's going to go under. so one conclusion that is that's why we need running our companies so that we can take these risks and build rockets and make capitalism great again. another temptation is that's why we need women, our companies, so that we don't have these recessions and runs and it's all testosterone. so let's have a female run economy. my conclusion is, how about we

make sure our boardrooms are mixed so that we can balance that appetite towards risk, etc. and the idea that we could think that thought that there's on the average that we can combine is attacked on the left where the idea that to have equality we have to have androgyny has taken which is crazy but it's also attacked on the idea the right which is to say we know how to give men purpose and a role. again we just need to reverse about 50 years or so. and so we have situation now where young, many young men who are turning against feminism as an idea feel like the is turning the back on them or even blaming them for their and the right feels to a lot of women like it's going to back the clock and. that is not where most people want to be. most want be is which is we want gender equality. we want modernity, but we don't

think we need to destroy the very idea masculinity in order to get there. and, you know, you you said something very earlier. i mean, the works in exactly the opposite direction i was essentially for forced by my daughters to, watch the greta gerwig, barbie and, i'm just curious. pull this room. if you like the movie, raise your hand. okay. most of the room. i hate it. i figured you were about to say that. well, i mean, i hated it for. for a variety. i mean, i sort of admired some of the kind of technical brio, and i thought ryan gosling was was, was, was was terrific. but why did you hate it, brett? because think it peddled a caricatures of reality and not just caricature ish, but profoundly caricature ish because look, anywhere mean just in my own upbringing of my two, you know, my two girls who are academic superstar and my son

who struggled for a while. i think, by the way, there's a tremendous amount of data that bears this out that that it's not the girls who are suffering under a patriarchy. it's it's boys who are struggling. and i think they're struggling in many ways because, again, they're lacking models. you know, people ask, you know what is modern manhood or what should it be? and, you know, i think of stewart's definition of pornography, you know you know what? when you see it, you know, one of the things that we have done books. donald trump no, it doesn't. i'll tell you how it looks like. okay. okay. i remember vividly after 911 when people wanted to say they're all heroes, and i'm like, no, they weren't heroes. the heroes were the guys were walking upstairs when everyone else was walking downstairs and those were overwhelmed manly men exhibiting, extorting physical courage to save other people. they were all men, all men. and because in part because the physical burdens of carrying you

know, cozies up, you know, hundreds of flights of stairs or hundreds of flights of stairs. this is just, you know, overwhelming for for most people. and very and there was almost a conscious effort to try to devalue what these did when all of us in our hearts know that on 911, the heroes were those first responders who were going up, we need to do more and find ways to do more in our culture to make sure that that sort of thing is honored and appreciate. and it is not take away from the achievements of women or, the courage of women, but it is to say that this one specific type of courage exhibited overwhelmingly by men and you young men should look those people and say that is the kind of person that your you ought to aspire to because it exhibited something in some ways i don't want to use. but is it fundament sense to man and i don't want to put my foot into it but exhibits what we our bones know what it is, be an honorable man. so the.

so an honorable man is someone who would commit himself a cause that he believes in and would be willing to essentially die for that cause. well, as they like the suicide bomber, it's depend no okay. but no, i think the idea that if you commit to a cause like i am here for saving people, i'm here for, let's say, national liberation. i'm just saying, i don't know if that is something that we, our young boys to be able to do in the second. no committing risking their lives for something believe in because it could really quickly peel off in the other way and just arrived back from israel. and i know were there too. i know the palestinians have always lionized the shaheen's people who are willing to sacrifice for the thing they. so just just just very very briefly timothy anyway so i just find that problematic that that's like i don't know if i want to tell you something like just these are the guys you want to aspire to. but let me just expand on, on the point for, for one, a couple

of sentences. you know, the historian timothy garton ash once made a very valuable distinction between the secondary virtues and primary virtues. so loyalty is a secondary virtue, but it's a question what you're being loyal to and absolutely i think a necessary condition of of manhood manliness to use a harvey mansfield term that, as i see it, is exhibiting these secondary virtues. but they are not sufficient unless there is a primary virtue, which is the thing to which you are devoting yourself to, is a morally worthy objective. so saving people in the towers is both exhibiting secondary virtue as well as the primary being a shaheed. what never minded the shaheed, but being a a soldier in the vermont in the second world war might exhibit all the secondary. but of course you're in the service of of of a monstrous evil. it to be both and we have to teach both. and it's a question then of how those differences might be expressed in like positive or negative ways.

right. i think what we're talking about here. but but denying that they can be expressed in positive ways, i think is very important. so i'll give you a specific just because it happened to be what i've become a little bit obsessed recently with smoke jumpers does hands up, who knows what smoke jumpers right in the audience. okay, fine. so to me, so they are people who parachute of a perfectly serviceable into a wildfire in order to try and put that fire out. and they have to parachute because it's so distant and. there's however many there are federal government employment and. there's an issue about their pay right now and, pr does a story on what's to the pay of smokejumpers right? what's really interesting is a long interview with a smoke jumper and what it's like come the risk, etc. and it was a woman now by my calculations, women make up a tiny fraction of smokejumpers. it turns out that parachuting out of planes into is something that more men are inclined

towards. i don't know if anybody on panel wants to do it. i know i don't. but the decision of npr to say, okay, well, that's a very male profession, so let's make sure we highlight the woman doing that job. i understand the thought process, but on the other hand, you came away from that not recognized the fact this is overwhelmingly something that men do. it's incredibly courageous, it's incredibly valuable. and it might be okay to put a man on npr talking about it on this occasion. right. and you don't want a society where masculine values are seen as somehow superior to feminine ones or only to be found in men. nor do you want it the other way around. either. and the hollywood thing, i think, is now just overcorrecting a little bit too. i don't want to live in a world i didn't try and raise my sons to live in a world where basically boys were treated defective, girls. do you think do you think that that's where we are education too often? that's right. it's is like, why can't you be more like your sister? why did you keep moving around? maybe you've got a.d.d., it's a medication. all the stuff you talked about,

it would be just as much a problem, by the way, the other way around, too, right we don't want to treat our girls or our women malfunctioning men. in the eighties were told shoulder pads, assertiveness training, lower your voice than the funny way in words. be like a man if you want to be ceo and most just said, screw that, i want be ceo, but i don't have to start pretending. and then there was elizabeth holmes, you know. right. and in my business there are i mean, female reporters and the newer generation, i feel i think of women feel comfortable being women. but there's an older generation who really do you hear? well, they were told that artificially. yeah i'm also margaret thatcher was to lower her voice. but do you think that this is just part of i mean you said that the patriarchy has been in place for 12,000 years. yeah. and so we are, you know, evolutionarily and historically a blip 20 years is a tiny blip that maybe will self-correct in a few years or even half a decade, a decade or two, that what are the stakes it, richard,

as far as you're concerned of it not correcting itself like, why is this the topic to which you are devoting entire professional life? i feel these problems, the many men are facing an advanced economy now are real. they're not confected. last in the us we lost more than 40,000 men to suicide. that's the same as the number of women we lost and. they were white men. they were the dusky by race. and since 2010, it's all been men. all right. and and as all the other evidence we could go into in education mental but like there's a lot of men especially young men now who are just really struggling to figure out their place in the world, their worth in the world and their value in the world. and they don't feel needed in many cases, don't feel seen if we don't step up and say, yes, so much more to do for women and girls and we see you. we are also helping boys and men. if don't do that, their problems

neglected become grievances and grievances feel kinds of things. they end up in a bad but it is not their fault. it is our for refusing to allow to think two thoughts at once and say is simultaneously true. there's a lot more to do for and girls and we've got to pay more attention to it so as we lose them we lose them by way and this is this is the based on nothing anecdote women lose as well from generation of young men who are losers. i mean in every every conceivable respect you know, young men who think that sex is what they saw, you know, in pornographic movies or, you know, that that the way of them being the world ends up being continual disappointment for for women. i mean, you hear about this by the way in this is this is in

the advanced countries of east asia. this is an even bigger problem with women who want nothing to do with young, young men because they, too have lost a sense of what it means to be a man in in in a modern society. so the stakes are not in terms of the losses that i think richard rightly pointed out to to men. but it's also like you want to inhabit a society where the opposite sex exhibit the virtues to you are attracted and find admirable and but you know one have something to do with. yeah i wanted to say when i sorry when i when i'm talking about this mum's mums will sometimes come up to me and talk about their boys if they're boys are school age and they may be watching a lot of andrew tate or struggling with school or whatever. the mums who have school age girls generally are like, what's he talking about? and then when they hit their twenties, the number of mums and dads come up once their daughters get to about 2527 and

then they suddenly wake up because like, wait, who's she going to marry? and actually it's interesting think the barbie movie thing, a lot of young women necessarily hate it, but it felt a bit dated to them i think the problem with hollywood feminism, if i can call it that right. right now, is not that it's wrong, it's just that feels a bit dated. like that's not the word that a lot of young women feel that they're negotiating right now. they're actually of navigating what to do. these guys and what i do with so the sort of the the feminism of of that just felt like it was true 30 years ago maybe but doesn't feel true now i i'm probably going to get pilloried for this but i found the abundance of the minority for it to be you. thank richard. i found it actually a little bit even more. i thought it was less about men and boys and more about ultimate power. those who gain ultimate power get keep ultimate power and subjugate the weaker ones. right? so the women gain the ultimate power really got a lot out of this barbie movie. and i'm watching it with like, no, but you like, okay. so women women win. they they they they pull victory

from the jaws of defeat at the end and then they continue to subjugate whatever it is. forget men female. it could have been androids, right? but the people who lost get subjugate it again. yeah. no it's a terrible message. sorry. the conclusion of the movie. yes. that the real world with all its flaws, is more than the fake world. and that barbie is choosing to live in a real world where women age and die and there is loss and grief. yes, that is okay. but not ends get well. that's beautiful. the subject of class also remains so there is no liberation or inequality not. are you with me on this book about the barbie? here we go. it's last section and it's a great movie. except for that no one's bothering me. so what was interesting you're absolutely right about the story arc for barbie, but what about ken? and then the last. oh, ken. ken. and is she says to ken laughing? she says you have to figure out who you are without me the last

thing there is no end to ken story arc. and i got to tell you, that moment, you've got to figure who you are without me. that's exactly the question we're addressing on this panel. but the movie gave no, and that's fine because it was a barbie. it was a feminist movie. the movie, didn't it goes on greta gerwig's job to finish arc maybe it was the but it's someone's job and she's not doing it who else is doing okay i'm taking us out of barbie land a second and into the real world because my my colleague is the audience looking very nervous on every measure. girls and young women are beating boys right now in k through 12 education in college and in the labor market. and i'm just going to read a few statistics for every hundred bachelor's degrees that are awarded to women, 744 are awarded to men. the labor force. labor force participation among men in the us dropped by 7% in the last 50 years. even covid, there were 9 million men between the ages of 25 and 54 who were not employed.

there are so many statistics i could pull from from k-through-12 education, but there's a lot of women i know. my age who say, great, no, not great, but let's not cry crocodile tears over this. other words, women were behind forever and, basically since the 1970s, we've sped up and now we're a little bit ahead. why we be so concerned about the fact that women are ahead and that that's really the retort that hear a lot too to the largely richard that you make so i wonder if someone want to pick that up battle of the sexes know the one of one of the one of the one of the great phrases that screws up everyone's thinking is to say that it's a zero sum competition between men and women or that turning tables amounts to some form of cosmic justice. i mean, women are suffering either in small or large from the decline. if that's the word you want to use of of men and the prominence of of men.

it and by the way, every mother who has a and, you know, who's worried about know what's he watching what's he doing by himself in his room who are his friends? you know what his role models. what is he reading? he's reading at all. every mother of a boy is worried about these days. it's rare to find boys, even, you know, in my generation. and i think one of the things, you know, i've been thinking about this a lot because i sent my two girls to this kind of tony prep school in new england where money was almost limitless. and my son middle very much wanted something different. and so he ended up going to a school in sedona just outside of sedona, arizona, actually. how. gross which is in the audience? his grandson went there was a dear friend of my my boys this school had very little by way of resources it was hand-to-mouth practically. but what the school taught was

resilience. the school taught toughness. and my eighth grade manhattan kid who like would freak out if there was a fly in the room suddenly like, well, yeah, there was a tarantula in the room, but it was kind of cute rent to rent a room in the grand canyon. nothing fazes him like something about boys need that exposure with opportunities to demonstrate various kinds of courage and you mentioned safety i mean the concept safety ism has become, i think, pervasive in in our culture. do feel safe boys? do not want to feel safe. boys want to feel exposed used to risk. and we have get back to a culture which finds ways of doing it without having to sign endless papers for lawyers. god forbid they're going to scrape their knees or hurt themselves way. you know, quite frankly, you know, now my son is talking about joining after college. he very much to be a military

officer and it's very much sort of part of his know, like his idea of of himself. it would help to make to create have whereby military service becomes a more a option and it could be national other forms of service a more attractive option for for young men because i notice in my own experience when i'm meeting young young men and women, young men coming of the service, they are qualitatively better people than. those who who didn't have that experience. and that goes for me, too. they're better than i. so it's so interesting that when you look at data now on voluntary service, there's one of those interesting smaller data points rather than the big education ones. there are twice as many women in the peace corps as men and twice as many women in americorps as men. and so that sort of stepping into service is also just massively gender skewed now. and the issue, i think, for a lot is men is this sense uncertainty about what to do,

passivity which i think is underpinned by a sense of not being short script, is now not being sure you're going to be needed. and i think we can all agree that it's a universal human need to feel needed and feel seen. and i think that's a big problem. but the question you asked at the beginning of areas like do these gender gaps matter, right. we've had them one way for ages. the skip other way. does it really matter? well, i think it depends. does it matter that that boys are so far behind girls in school and in colleges now, does that matter, there's a big a bigger gender gap today in education than there was in the seventies, just the other way around. so in seventies, boys were and men were way ahead of women and girls in education we thought that was the problem. and we looked at the system and tried to say, hold when you've got that big a gender gap. that does suggest that maybe the system's not actually quite fair to girls and women. now we've got an even bigger gap other way round. i think the logic applies. we want an education system that serves boys and girls equally, and that was the animating idea

of the women's movement. i think it applies both ways. i think it's incumbent on the people on the other of the argument to say why gender gaps of this scale don't matter, because on their face, anybody should look at a gender gap of that and go, okay, that's troubling. we should look at what's causing that and see if we can't fix it. one of the things that i there was an article that came out in the ftc a few days ago you guys may have seen it that has these new gallup polls are really striking typically generation's generational cohort sort of move together politically. but the gap between young men and young women when it comes to politics is crazy. mm hmm. the gallup poll showed that women between the ages of 18 and 30 in this country are 30 percentage points liberal than their male contemporary. and that opened up in the past six years. similar numbers, germany, similar numbers in the uk. in other words, young women becoming just much, much more politically progressive, young

men becoming more conservative. what how do you guys explain that? well, there's a very good piece by daniel cox from enterprise institute on that data. and i've written about it, too. you're right to say that thus far, most of the move has been young to the left, and now it looks like more young men are moving to the right as well. some huge gaps in south korea. in fact, south korea is an interesting test case of this sort. i was looking at a couple of years ago, we saw that the gap between south korean young men and young women is even bigger and presidential election actually swung on the votes of young men with a promise from the president to abolish the ministry gender equality. and so this is issue is playing out politically now in a way that's very trouble my of this is that if men don't feel as if the progressive left or mainstream left is paying attention to their issues and is honestly trying to address them, that just means that inevitably and maybe maybe depending on where they go, it's not

necessarily a terrible thing. they might start to say, well, who is listening to me? the is that what's on offer from the conservatives on the other side is reaction by and large and the entertains and the young audience through know who knows who andrew tate is. i did this other day actually. it was a show. that's amazing show. so just to give you one, i don't feel badly when when. yeah, well, this is a good thing, but i just anecdotally i spoke at jewish high school in pittsburgh, my hometown. it was an orthodox school, not the kind of kids you would think listening to entertain who's an open misogynist convert to islam the number one topic they wanted to talk to me about was andrew tate. he is one of the most sort of most influential people online over the last five years. yeah, no question. no question. i just think he's come up a few times. i just want to there's this massive generational divide in understanding and what's happening. i think among young men. i'm just not knowing it. and i've been blessed to have three young men, all my sons in

their twenties now. so i've been quite close to this and they've alerted me. in fact, when i was finishing book, my youngest son said, you've got to write about this guy, andrew tate. and i said, who is andrew tate? i looked at him, ignored him, cause my son was. right. but i think a more interesting figure in this regard is somebody like senator josh hawley, who has his own book, is a bit critical of of my work to be fair. and so he has a book out. his book is called man hood. i always got that wrong, man manhood i can't do man manner the masculine virtues america. there's some good stuff in the book, but the basic message is, number one, a lot of men and boys struggling. number two, mainstream institutions are ignoring those struggles. number three, that's because those institutions hate men and, hate masculinity and want to get rid of it as part of the woke world order, which is why you should vote me and i'll bring back marriage and manufacturing. so and so. you love the first two points. first two are true boys and men are struggling. those issues are neglected. and so senator hawley is able to

say and the reason why is because all those people on the left hate men. i don't write for me. and that's an incredibly message. and too many people are saying actually they skip over one and two. it's true. and we all neglect again say, why are all these men turning the to the alt right? i don't understand it. i raised them on ruth bader ginsburg speeches and and it's because like you're just you know, you're getting the fact that there are sort of these young men don't feel like you're paying attention but and it's also i would have, you know, how did i finally turn my son on to reading was andrew biography of churchill then right but then he was then he got to the biography of grant. one of the things that i think it's not coincidental that military history is is atrociously neglected. and by the way i don't think princeton princeton university. so when someone at princeton was telling me this employs a single military historian, if you study history at princeton you will never encounter professors actually spends his time

studying war but this is should not be an insight boys are interested in this stuff mean i remember i was interested in stuff and and you know military battles and how these things unfold in and who are the main actors and was patton you know how was patton as a general so on i grooved that as a kid and we do not offer most young boys access to a world of two fields of of human that correspond with what interests them. so then we wonder our boys don't read both. they don't want to read what, you know, their sisters are reading and that's fine. but we should make sure that they're reading something that. they will start and then be up night. you know, i feel like matt wants to say he did not groove on that kind of. no, i did groove. i distinctly sitting on the toilet hours moving on these

like that like world atlas is history. i had that was william manchester's yeah but and biography of churchill's by far superior i will say but not at all but by far many parents here right. yeah so i was an athlete like i'm obviously a tiny person. right. i'm a small person. i had grit, i had resilin i was ferocious, i was aggressive i was pure testosterone as a young man. my son is different. he is completely different. all i did play sports. i was a three sport athlete. all of them were physical i played football. i wrestled, i played lacrosse. and then i play rugby and destroyed my face college. right. like i was that guy, i went to war at 22 to israel. like this is what i was and son is very different. first, at age four and a half, he's like, i'm not interested sports. and that hasn't changed he doesn't want to like he likes to you know roughhouse a bit but

he's not that into it he very different than i am and that is my great redemption as a parent. it's very early on, realizing it, accepting and it made me forge a much better relationship with my son, realizing that he's not going to groove on the things that i grew up done. and i imagine that throughout there have been ben governments where you know he's, just different his parent and he's not interested in martial aspects of manhood manliness he wants to draw and he wants to play with his stuffed animals and create scenes and that's all he he's headed for broadway. so he might be. but the point is, if you get what i'm saying, i feel like we're we're what the beauty of and i know we're short on time. well, no, i'm about to announce the plug that. we are now able to show our children, men and young boys, that is that it is not monolithic. and i feel like part of this conversation is focusing on stuff that is monolithic and

distracts from the reality that i see as a parent and i see it and the school that's a nice transition to your book because you've written a book about how basically had panic attacks for your entire adult life did little about it denied it was happening how much of that denial had to do with your own sense of your masculinity. an excellent question a lot and one of the salves for panic and it turned out being the least masculine activity crying crying a lot of crying and it helped i mean and i cried by using and i couldn't there in my right mind so one of the things that i had to do was get out of my right mind. so i did breathwork and i did mushrooms and, ayahuasca and the licked desert toads and every possible psychedelic you can imagine that tortured the body and let the mind go free in to excavate the pain is what i did because i couldn't get there in

the right mind. possibly because i am kind of rigid in that way now i'm better at it, but crying, you know, was something that really, really helped me. but which was not typically a masculine activity right. i was going to say. but how much of your inability to get there was because you felt like you're in cultural construct where crying is for girls or releasing is for, you know what i'm saying? probably not an insignificant proportion of it. i would say, or this is not something that i should be. i'm really worried that things like education but also mental health are increasingly coded as female or feminine. so we just put out a research research report that like psychology is becoming a female profession, social work. and i just discovered that one of the reasons we're picking up more anxiety teen girls is that since 2012, screening anxiety among girls and women been covered without cost under the affordable act. but the same is not true for boys and men. we do not cover screening for anxiety among boys and men under

the affordable act for reasons that are too boring to go into in the last seconds. but watch the it's not a feminist plot. it's the result of a public policy. but part of that is because of the sense that this is a thing that girls from that women struggle from and the profession that the men enter the story that women enter and they don't cry, etc. so two quick points. one is back to the gist. the distribution's overlapping. we don't have to in order to honor the exceptions. the rule, like your son or others, ignore that there are on the average rules. we don't have to have androgyny to have equality and we can have exceptions and we should honor those exceptions. i agree with you. that's a wonderful but we've also just got recognize that a lot of these men and boys just need more help and in some cases even need more friends. so one thing we haven't really touched on is the growth of male loneliness. 15% of men under the age of 30 say they don't have a single close friend. wow. all right. that was only 3% in 1990.

that is associated with all kinds of other issues. and so the environments and places which men make friends, especially as families are changing, that's huge. and the surgeon has quite rightly drawn attention to this loneliness epidemic. what he hasn't done quite yet is to recognize is highly gendered as well. and so we have a lot of quite lonely young men. it is shocking. we've got to have more for them without in any way you look and you just i know we're running out of time. but one of the things i think you've touched on this very well that, you end up with an idea of masculinity looks like donald trump, which should not be the ideal of masculinity. it's a fake idea. and in some ways is a product of this kind of react chinnery idea of what being a man means, which is know, owning your opponent and humiliating other people and turning and putting them down and having a kind of man aura and having trophy wives and you this kind of thing. and it's one of the many reasons

i find the phenomenon sickening, but we don't get back to a healthier, masculine culture until we understand what that should look like. right? if we don't like his answer, we need better on because because we can't end on donald trump. 20 seconds each. who is your male role model? i'm going to take my 20 seconds for something else. i think it's absolutely criminal that screening for is not part of the health care is not covered especially since it is males in our who are most likely by far to perpetrate mass acts of killing against others. and that is something has to be addressed and i think is extruded nearly dangerous sorry it's the result this asymmetric view the zero sum. it's a cliche but it is my father. my father modeled what i referred to in some of my writing as relational masculine rather than lone ranger masculinity. the idea that it's masculine to go your own way and separate yourself up is the opposite masculinity. my dad was all about giving more than he got.

it was about generating a surplus and. it was that model, which is it's about you give and what you give others through relationships, masculinity is not formed in isolation. it's formed in community and in families and in relation ship. and he was an absolute model for me of what relational masculinity like. right. last word. same story. you knew him. my thought late father modeled to me was being a man and it would began with a certain kind of kindness and. and straightness character in everything he did. said it felt true. as i get and raise my children i think of how i fall short the model he set because he set such a high standard and the same here. thank you all so much. thank