#1657 Modeling Positive Masculinity: Between Tim Walz and the Manosphere, boys are looking for guidance (Transcript)

Air Date 9/24/2024

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JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast. 

The positive dad vibes of Tim Walz came onto the national scene in the middle of an ongoing crisis of masculinity that stretches from the youngest generations to the oldest. Both positive and negative aspects of masculinity tie in with the general election, basically divided it right down the partisan line. And the next generation of voters, not to mention humans, are often feeling stuck between the two, with insufficient guidance from the men in their lives. 

Sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today includes Hysteria, Some More News, The Brian Lehrer Show, Amanpour and Company, Dear Old Dads, and What Fresh Hell.

Then in the additional Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in five sections, some of them quite short. Section A. Tim Walz. Section B. [00:01:00] J.D. Vance-branded masculinity. Section C. The fallout of stoicism. Section D. Dating life, containing discussion of sex, including violence. And finally Section E. Social emotional development.

Tim Walz is The Perfect Model of Masculinity Which Contrasts Weird, Blowhard JD Vance - Hysteria - Air Date 8-15-24

 

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: It's been such a wild summer. But I think that the moment that the vibes went from the worst vibes possible-- 

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: The worst! 

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: --to among the best vibes possible. 

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Because we needed it. 

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Because we needed it, which was when Minnesota governor Tim Walz, like a breath of fresh air, comes breezing in from Minnesota. And he changed the entire course of the presidential election with his just like positive Santa Claus energy. People immediately noticed that Walz reminded them of dads and uncles and relatives that they had. 

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Yeah! 

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Wish [00:02:00] they had. And the more we see him on the stump, the more we're seeing an example of somebody who is fully a man. Nobody would be like that guy's girly, because he is very, very much--

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Most decidedly not girly. 

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Exactly. But it is a model of masculinity, of kindness, cheerfulness, helpfulness, usefulness that is such a good counterexample to what we had been seeing from Team Trump, and even from in among the Democrats. Like I think we have Jamie Raskin is one person who sort of has this vibe.

But yeah, Alyssa, you're nodding. 

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: No, I just-- you know what it is? It's like we have been surrounded by people who are keen to tell us about all the problems, but not a lot of fixers. Like, you know, when Mr. Rogers is like, always look for the helpers, where have the helpers been? And the Republicans, more than anybody, are like, let me tell you why things are broken and who's to blame and why you should have grievance. And Tim Walz [00:03:00] just shows up with a tool belt. He's like, let's fix it. And I think that that's something that we just haven't heard in a long time. And that's no ding on Biden or anything. It's just a totally different energy, and someone who is bringing fresh eyes and fresh legs to this race. 

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Yeah. So this is something that was written into our outline by Fiona, our associate producer.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Yeah. 

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: And I want to ask you this question verbatim, because I think it's so funny. I don't know--

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: I'm going to be honest. 

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: "Is this a hopium high that will last through November?"

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: So can I ask a question? Is that like a reference I'm not missing? 

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: There's no "hopium" in the Urban Dictionary. This is just like opium and-- 

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Hopium instead of opium.

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: It's a brand new portmanteau. 

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Well, yeah, I just like to make sure, because we all know I'm a little Gen X sometimes. 

This was what we needed. Erin, I don't think that any of us could have felt sadder or worse for a gambit of reasons [00:04:00] after the debate. And I personally, my estrogen levels aside, not sleeping, not feeling good, not feeling joyful, feeling total despair about everything.

And we needed this. And I think, look, there are going to be pitfalls. Bad things are going to happen between now and election day. You and I both know it. But I think that we've got to take the hopium for what it is. 

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Mm hmm. You know, I agree with you and I find myself getting caught up in it. And, you and I have talked about this, that politicians aren't for stanning. They're--

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: No, they're people. 

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: They're people. They're your employees. But I think during the campaign, it is okay to get excited about the people that are trying to get the jobs that you are eventually going to criticize them when they are in it. Because-- 

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Of course! 

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: That's what democracy is. And I find myself really, really falling hard for the Tim Walz vibe. I think a friend of mine on Instagram referred to himself as being "Walz pilled", [00:05:00] which I think we are. We're Walz pilled. 

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: It is. You know what, though? I think it's also because he is such a contrast. Trump aside -- we've been listening to him drone on for eight years at this point, twelve years, however long.

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Too long. 

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: J. D. Vance, though, is such a poser, like he's such a poser. Like when he-- Look it -- I want someone who I can look at on Instagram and is like, you know what? I'm gonna bring the same smarts to fixing America that I brought to fixing this carburetor. I don't want some fucking broed out douchebag to be walking on the tarmac assaulting Kamala Harris's plane, to be like, I'm just here to see what my plane looks like.

It's like, are you in a 1985 gang movie? Who are you? 

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Oh my God. It reminded me of Gaston going over to Belle's house and being like, we're getting married. And she's like, no, we're not. 

I've found the archetypes that are at play [00:06:00] within the election I guess impossible for me to resist.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Cartoonish? 

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Yeah. So we have Kamala Harris, who suddenly is leaning into the kooky aunt who you can call her if you're at a party and she'll come and pick you up and she will not tell your parents but you better not do this ever again.

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: See, I think I really relate to that. That is my role in life. I am the one who tells my niece, and my sister always listens, I'm like you listen JJ, someday you're gonna get in trouble. And I'm going to be the one you call. And I'm going to show up. Just remember that. And that is how I feel about about Auntie Kamala. 

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Yeah. And, she'll drive you to the airport. You can stay with her for a week. She lives in the city. She's got an apartment in a tall building. Like she's got a boyfriend. I mean, the real Kamala is married, obviously, but that's the aunt I'm thinking of. 

And then we have Tim Walz, who is like the guy who can fix your car and clean the gutters and cares deeply about public education. He reminds me so much, and he reminds a lot of people, of male relatives. He's like my grandpa Ryan. 

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Like he's my uncle Dieter. 

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Yeah. 100%. And then we have [00:07:00] J. D. Vance, who is the guy your husband is friends with and they've been friends since high school, and so before he comes to town, your husband is like, look, I know he's a lot to bite off-- 

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: But we've been friends forever-- 

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: And he just needs to stay at our house for a couple of days. And he goes out and gets blasted and comes back and pees your couch. 

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: I was just gonna say his nickname is Detox. 

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: It's like the type of person who brings the mood down wherever he shows up. Like he's just-- 

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: A blowhard. 

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Yeah, but he feels also vaguely threatening. And watching, I just think having Walz as this example of somebody who could -- 

And he's not just up there spreading good cheer by singing loud for all to hear. He's saying things that are aggressive. He is being the vice president attack dog that he needs to be. 

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: There is something about him that is like the reason I think that he feels so trustworthy to me is because he has lived the life that most Americans are living right now and he can actually relate to [00:08:00] it. And I think that there is also something about him in the reclaiming of patriotism, like I think you and I have talked a lot over the past, how many years have we done this? Five years? 

ERIN RYAN - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: So long. 

ALYSSA MASTROMONACO - CO-HOST, HYSTERIA: Democrats are not great at fighting back. It's like either they go so low, like they're just not good at it. And he has really threaded the needle in a way that's like, hey, guess what? You're not gonna fucking say, you're not gonna try to make indictments or proclamations around my military service. You're not gonna do that, and I'm gonna tell you why. Because you shouldn't do that to anybody who has served, because they have given of themselves, they have made a sacrifice. And like, when he ended, when he was speaking at AFSCME, and he defended himself, which is someone who lived through the Kerry campaign, when John Kerry got swift boated by Republicans, and couldn't believe it, so didn't fight back against it because he's like Americans are never gonna believe this, but they did. And Tim Walz not only defended [00:09:00] himself, but said, you know what? I also salute and appreciate and respect your service, J.D. Vance. He's just got like the 360 response that I think a lot of people have been missing on stuff, or have not had the ability to do, because he had the actual lived experience. 

Are Men Okay – SOME MORE NEWS - Air Date 5-22-24

 

CODY JOHNSTON - HOST, SOME MORE NEWS: Are men okay? You see, because most men have balls. Not all of them, but on average men have 1.4 balls. According to me, just making up a number. Anyway, here's some news in the form of the question we just asked: Are men okay? I only ask, because, well... 

CLIP: Move forward. I'm a man. Move forward. I am a man! I am a man! I am a man! Move forward! I am a man! I am a man! Move forward! I am a man! 

CODY JOHNSTON - HOST, SOME MORE NEWS: Okay, so the short answer is no. Men are not [00:10:00] doing okay. Or rather, that man isn't. But to be fair, I have been known to scream, "I'm a man" repeatedly and through sobs, but that's usually while moving heavy furniture or taking a dump. Anyway, that clip is apparently from one of those wildly expensive and so-called alpha male bootcamps that have become recently popular, if only to mock on the internet. There are so many of these now, even Jesus is getting in on the fun.

CLIP: Welcome to the Stronger Men's Conference. What God did in your life, it's meant to impact the world around you. It's meant to be multiplied, that's the plan of God for you! We can change and impact the world because we serve the strong man, Jesus Christ! He says, I will go with you, but hold on with you always! I'm gonna give you strength!

CODY JOHNSTON - HOST, SOME MORE NEWS: Aw yeah! Monster trucks, wrestling, fire, and Jesus! Boy, as a man, that felt [00:11:00] both insulting and chilling to watch. And while it's fun and easy to make fun of the many clips from these camps, this of course speaks to a larger problem happening right now. And, honestly, before now. Which is that men everywhere are struggling with their mental health as it relates to their gender identity.

Nearly three out of four of every death of despair, as in a suicide or overdose, is committed by a man. I mean, look: we're all pretty bummed out right now. Probably because of the Queen's death. She had so much life left in her! 

But men, specifically young men, are even more bummed. While there was a 4 percent rise in suicides across the board, for young men, that rise was double. And that's probably in part due to men not seeking help nearly as often as anyone else. Here's a survey from Cleveland Clinic that found over 80 percent of men feel stressed, but also 65 percent of them feel hesitant to seek professional counseling. Here's another survey of [00:12:00] 1,001 adult males that found nearly 50 percent of them were, quote, "more depressed than they admitted to the people in their lives." Here's an insurance survey where one in four men admitted that they've never talked to anybody about their mental health. You get the point. Insurance ghouls don't screw around with this stuff. 

But it's not just depression. Men are struggling socially, too. They are lonely. I mean, I'm not. I have tons of friends who aren't puppets. Right, Friendulous? 

FRIENDULOUS: That's right, Cody! 

CODY JOHNSTON - HOST, SOME MORE NEWS: See? I'm not lonely. But for example, dating is far more difficult for men. That's probably why they are having less sex than they used to. That, and their living arrangements. Since the 60s, the rate of men living with their parents has steadily gone up, to the point that there are now more men living with their parents than living alone, or with a partner, or a roommate, or like, a quirky Mediterranean cousin, or two hot chicks, or a zany source of increasing [00:13:00] sexual tension.

For women, that rate of living with your parents is lower. But they are catching up. Good for them!

We don't know exactly why men are struggling socially, but it's probably somewhat related to the fact that they aren't making enough money anymore. I mean, yeah, we're all hurting there, but men aren't going to college as much as they used to, either. Their employment rate has either stagnated or gone down.

And since 1979, men's average wages have fallen 10%, while women's wages have gone up 25%. Although I'm guessing that's in part because women were paid less than men and have to catch up. Because despite everything I just said, men still rule the world? It's still a patriarchy? Everything is still dominated by men. The richest and most powerful people are still men, just not most men. So we have a bit of a pickle dilly, a dick pilly, a seow [00:14:00] mess.

Society is run by men and largely designed for men, but the majority of men don't feel like they are in charge of anything. And so their anxiety around that is uniquely related to their gender identity.

That's why if you were to ask, let's say, certain men if there's a patriarchy or if women have problems worth considering, you'll probably get a response that strips all nuance and just gives a laundry list of various issues that men have, like this. 

NEWS CLIP: Do you believe that we live in a patriarchy and it negatively affects women?

No. 

CHARLIE KIRK CLIP: Yeah, so for example, men are more likely to commit suicide. 

NEWS CLIP: Yeah. 

CHARLIE KIRK CLIP: More likely to die at work. More likely to declare bankruptcy. Women are far less likely to be in credit card debt. Far more likely to graduate from college. Far more likely to get a high paying job. 

CODY JOHNSTON - HOST, SOME MORE NEWS: Ah, you know how the left is all about victimhood and their victim mentality? Claiming that they're the victim, and Ah, I'm just sick of it! Because actually, the real victims are men? [00:15:00] Hey, quick question. All these problems that men apparently have, who made the society that created those problems? Is it the women who make you do all the wars? But these types of weirdos can frame it as a woman problem because women are more often supported and boosted in the interest of equality, because of this patriarchy that continues to screw over both men and women. 

Boy, if only there were a movie about this exact dynamic, perhaps involving a magical doll world and multiple musical numbers. 

I'm not saying that women have it easier, quite the opposite. We've had decades of women being told to be subservient baby cannons, and have only recently begun course correcting from that error. Women are redefining themselves beyond that role. And while the efforts to do that are extremely difficult, the message there is somewhat clear. 

But with men, the message hasn't really changed much. For generations, the concept of masculinity has always been presented one specific way. Men are expected to endure physical and emotional pain with little complaint, lest we get [00:16:00] soft! Men hate being soft! in multiple ways, aha! You can trace this all the way back to the 1800s, when writer Washington Irving complained that Americans too often send their kids overseas to become luxurious and effeminate in Europe and claimed that, quote, "a previous tour on the prairies would be more likely to produce that manliness most in unison with our political institutions." You got to do that trad Little House on the Prairie life, bros!

Dating Amid Gender Differences in Politics - The Brian Lehrer Show - Air Date 7-30-24

 

MATT KATZ - GUEST HOST, THE BRIAN LEHRER SHOW: Some important background is that voters under 30 have been a pretty unwavering pillar of the Democratic electorate since the late eighties when Reagan left office. So it's pretty noticeable that young men have recently been defecting. They're becoming more conservative and the Wall Street Journal gets into a whole slew of reasons for this, including a response to wokeness, a sense that white men are [00:17:00] demonized, men specifically are demonized.

So listeners, especially young people, we want to hear from you. How has this dynamic affected your dating lives or romantic relationships? Maybe your friendships. Have you seen a noticeable difference over the past few years? 

It's also important to know this shift toward Trump among young men isn't among just white men who have historically leaned Republican. It also includes black and Latino men before Biden ended his bid for reelection earlier this month. The Wall Street Journal found that Trump was winning support from a majority of men under 30. And if that stays true on election day, it would be the first time the Republican Party won that demographic, young men, in over two decades.

The Trump campaign has found a lot of success in framing Trump as something of an anti-hero, and that's clearly very appealing to a lot of young men who feel like they've been left out of the narrative or marginalized by progressive politics, by what [00:18:00] they would call "woke politics", those who feel abandoned by the Democratic Party for that reason and others.

Several of the men who were quoted in this Wall Street Journal article, they said they hide their conservative views when looking for a partner because women they know have said that they won't date right-leaning men. 

Also listeners, if you're a Democrat who will date a Republican, but maybe only if they repudiate Trump, or maybe you're a Republican who will date a Democrat if they, let's say, oppose socialism. Are any of those folks out there? We're opening this up to anybody who wants to talk about what it's like to be in a relationship to date at this time of such hyper partisanship. 

Give us a call, 212-433-WNYC. 212-433-9692. And, one other thing -- we have the calls are flowing in, I'm told. 

But one other thing before we get to the calls is the issue involving [00:19:00] reproductive rights. The headline of this Wall Street Journal article was "America's new political war pits young men against young women" and one of the main reasons it cites for women moving further left is reproductive rights. So women are leaning more to the left on issues like LGBTQ rights and childcare. So Democratic messaging on these issues appears to be resonating more with women than men. And the Trump campaign is definitely appealing to a kind of traditionalism, when it comes to gender dynamics, a return to masculinity as a thing to be celebrated. This was something that was evident at the Republican National Convention.

We've heard some rhetoric to this regard from Vice Presidential nominee J. D. Vance, so this is a dynamic out there and our lines are open for a highly informal poll to figure out if this is a dynamic that is occurring here in the New York area. Again, give us a [00:20:00] call, text us your story, 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-WNYC, 9692. 

I want to quote one piece of this article here. "Young men now favor Republican control of Congress and Trump for President after backing President Biden and Democratic lawmakers, just four years ago in 2020. Meanwhile, women under 30 remain strongly behind Democrats for Congress and the White House. They're also far more likely to call themselves liberal than they were two decades ago.

“BoyMom” Author Looks at Raising Sons in an Age of “Impossible Masculinity” - Amanpour and Company - Air Date 7-9-24

 

MICHEL MARTIN: You know, this is a quote that stood out to us when we read the book. He wrote that, "For boys, vulnerability and privilege coexist in a complex relationship. Masculine norms and expectations confer countless advantages, but they also bring significant harm. The two come together in male socialization to create a [00:21:00] contradictory and strangely destructive combination of indulgence and neglect". Can you talk a little bit more about that? Like, what do you mean by that? How do we see that? 

RUTH WHIPPMAN: Yeah. So, I think this is going back to the whole thing about privilege. Um, so obviously there are real advantages to being male in this world and we know that, but there are real harms to it, too. So the system of patriarchy that, you know, tells women to behave a certain way and oppresses women also oppresses men in certain ways, too, and cuts them off from their emotions, tells them that they have to be strong and masculine and makes people project masculine qualities onto boys right from birth. And so, in some ways, boys get very indulged, you know, there's all this research that shows that they do less chores than girls, and that they get paid more for them. And all of these things. 

So, parents do indulge boys in some bad behavior, they let them get away with things, they somehow sort of give them this idea that they're kind of special, and they don't have to do these difficult things, [00:22:00] but there're also ways that they really, you know, that they're under-cared for. They don't get that engagement with emotions. They don't get hurt. Their feelings don't get heard in the same way that girls feelings do get heard. You know, we spend a lot of time listening to boys and male opinions, but a far less time listening to their feelings. And I think that this sort of under-nurture thing is where the neglect part comes in, you know, and there are very real harms to that. And we see that with adult men, we see that they're lonely. We see that they're disconnected. We see that they're disconnected from their emotions. And so, you know, this is the same system. It is complex. It's not simple. It's not like, being a man is all benefit and no downside, you know,? There are very real harms built into the system. 

MICHEL MARTIN: Well, you point out that, you know, there really is a difference between, sort of neurologically, between male and female infants, how their brains develop and also just the impact of exposure to stress [00:23:00] and negative parenting, which I think was maybe... it was a shock to me. Was it a shock to you? 

RUTH WHIPPMAN: It was a real shock to me, 'cause when you sort of look at the science of sex differences and you know, people co-op this science quite a lot, it's quite sketchy. So, there's this idea that boys will be boys. So, boys are rambunctious, they're tough, they're sturdy, they're angry, they're badly behaved. But actually when you look at the research, a baby boy is born about a month to six weeks behind a baby girl in terms of right brain development. So, that's the part that governs emotions and attachment and emotional regulation. So, because their brains are more immature, they're actually more emotionally vulnerable and sensitive. So, all of the kind of stereotypes, you know, really go against what a baby boy actually is. And a baby girl is born more resilient, more independent, more able to regulate her emotions. So, because of that brain fragility, it means that any kind of adverse [00:24:00] circumstances—so, you know, poverty or neglect or poor circumstances—has been shown to have a greater impact at a population level on boys than it does on girls. But because of our ideas of masculinity, you know, what we think a baby boy is, we tend to treat them with less kind of nurture and less of that intense emotional caregiving than we do with girls. So, it becomes this double whammy. They need more care, but they end up getting less, in a sense, you know, we masculinize them. There's all this research that shows that parents use a different vocabulary when they talk with girls, that they use more emotional language, they listen to their feelings more. Whereas with boys, it's more of this like physical roughhousing and wrestling type play. And so maybe boys and boys all the way through childhood really kind of miss out on that emotional engagement. We don't teach them the skills in that way. 

MICHEL MARTIN: Do you think this is a new feeling? This feeling of having [00:25:00] to constantly be on your guard. Do you think that that's new? 

RUTH WHIPPMAN: I think that that is an old feeling. I think that comes from very old systems of masculinity, but I think what makes it more acute now, there are various cultural forces that I think are making it harder to be a boy now. So, I think that they still have these... you know, those are old stories. Men always had to kind of man up and be tough and not be vulnerable. But I think that now there's just so many different kinds of cultural forces. I think there's this idea, that it's time for them to be quiet, from the left. They're feeling like people are talking about them as if they're toxic and harmful. I think since #MeToo, you know, quite rightly, there's this whole conversation about consent, which is great. But I think it means that they Also feel at the same time that they have to be extremely cautious that they can never overstep. So at the same time, they're kind of expected to be dominant and aggressive and to kind of make the first move and be, you know, um, the sort of [00:26:00] masculine appearing one with girls.

But at the same time, they also have to be extremely cautious and to never overstep. And otherwise they'll be seen as creepy. So I think a lot of them were just feeling like I don't know how to be. I'd rather just be on my own in my room and watch porn by myself. 

MICHEL MARTIN: Oh gosh. So, what reaction are you getting? What reaction stands out to you? 

RUTH WHIPPMAN: Well, I've been really surprised by actually how many men have got in touch with me and said, Oh, I feel really seen and really heard by this. And they've actually read the book, you know, I thought the book because it's called BoyMom that it would appeal mainly to women, but lots and lots of women have been getting in touch with me as well.

But also I was surprised to see men saying, you know, this is exactly what my childhood was like, you know, all these pressures of masculinity, I feel very shut down. I don't know how to be thank you for seeing this and hearing it. So the response has been mostly extremely positive. I think some people are concerned that there's like a little bit of both sides ism, you know, in the sense of like, centering boys and men [00:27:00] somehow takes away from the work that we're doing to support women and girls. And my view on that is that actually, you know, we're all trapped in this system together. That, you know, raising emotionally healthy men and boys benefits everybody in society. You know, this is not a zero sum game.

We Love Some BDE Part 2 - Big Dad Energy - Dear Old Dads - Air Date 8-23-24

 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Yeah, it's really interesting if you think about Andrew Tate or whatever that guy is his name and you think about Tim Walz, it's so clear that one is a real man and one is not. Just imagine those two guys meet and we're gonna have that typical, they're staring each other down, they're gonna have some sort of measuring contest, and then you think what's that going to mean? Short of, I don't know, fighting, what is Andrew Tate going to do that Tim Walz can't? Tim Walz will fix your car. He'll have repaired every door in your house. He's got WD 40. He's got a special, like a holster for it that he carries around all the time. And let's like, and anything that you would need in your real life and any reason you would think, "Hey, I sure wish I had a dad type person, a typical [00:28:00] masculine figure in my life." for anything you'd really need them for, he's just the best. 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Yeah, there are a hundred reasons to have Tim Walz in your life. There are zero reasons to have Andrew Tate in your life. Unless you're like, I gotta get rid of this hornet's nest, but I want them to take someone with them when they go! I would use him to dry toxic waste maybe, or if I had a bunch of poison I needed eaten.

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: I 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: just did 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: an oil change. And you're like, we're not allowed to throw this in the trash. 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Exactly. Can I throw it into an Andrew Tate? And he'd be like, "I'll rub it all over my body. And then Lithuania," and I'll be like, yeah, go ahead and do that.

And I think it's so funny that we feel the need to caveat, " except if it were a fight," because Tim Walz is never going to fucking fight Andrew Tate. Andrew Tate orders his third drink at the bar. And Tim Walz is like, "that guy's gonna try and fuckin fight someone in a bit. I'm gonna leave. Doot de doo. Hun, I'm on my way home. Oh, did I have fun? Oh, I had a great time. Me and the boys were driving around," and Andrew Tate's just getting beaten to death by a cop on the front step of the TGI Friday's where he started to fight. [00:29:00] 

There's no universe where Andrew Tate is useful to anybody except Andrew Tate's mental illness. That is the only person who wants more Andrew Tate, it's Andrew Tate's psychosis. And again, the reason we are sold Andrew Tate is because Andrew Tate is the version of masculinity you can buy. You can buy a gym membership. You can buy a fancy haircut. You can buy oil to smoosh all over your 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: abs. 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Buy your 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: way out of those 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: rape charges. 

Well, it turns out not so much, but you can buy a lawyer to move you to Lithuania or whatever it is, but you have to earn the Tim Walz. You have to be there, you have to show up for people, you have to care genuinely, you have to have something to say. And Andrew Tate will never have that. God comes down to Andrew Tate tomorrow and it's like, "Andrew, you're a douche change your ways and try to be as much like Tim Walz as possible."

He [00:30:00] physically will never be able to do it. He does not have the things inside capable of it, which is why he has to constantly be selling his version of masculinity to everyone else. Because if you aren't selling it, if you weren't constantly pitching that commercial capitalistic version of masculinity, people recognize it as worthless, which is the thing you're most afraid of being.

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Fucking 100 percent all of that, Eli. And the other thing that this brand of particularly toxic And violent masculinity does is once you've believed in and created yourself as a solution for a violent and conflict-full world, when that's the world that you have been training for and sold yourself and all your buddies have sold each other on, what you're going to do is look for and create conflict.

So you're creating a more violent space so that your tools will be used. Because you're not going to say, [00:31:00] these are the things I value about myself as a man, and then live an entire life where none of those things actually come in handy. What you will do instead is create an environment around you where those tools, those tools of violence and aggression, are, at least in your own mind, useful. So you'll actually create a more violent world and create violent situations because that's the only tools in your toolbox, and you don't want to walk around being like, "did I waste my whole life? The whole thing?"

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: That's really interesting insight. I wouldn't give him credit enough to be doing that intentionally, but I feel like no unintentionally.

Yeah. 

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Yeah. I think it's entirely unintentional. And then you compare that to what I feel like is this service driven mindset around masculinity, where it's like, how can I be useful to others? How can I be competent and useful to others? And how can I be of service to the people that I love? And how can I extend that idea of loving service into the world in ways that [00:32:00] reflect my values and in ways that reflect my competencies. That is so much of what I see reflected in that sort of Tim Walz-esque stereotype, or prototype rather. It's so much better. It's so much better. 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: I don't consume any of this stuff, but I just absorb enough of it from Reddit and whatnot, but you see all the things those Tate Taints care about, and they'll be like, "you're a cuck if she's got a big body count," and it's all stuff that if you peel it back for two seconds, which these guys never do, it's all insecurity. They're all worried about the purity of the girl, that's just insecurity. You're worried that if a woman has ever found pleasure in another man, that's a threat to your entire ego as a person. It's all so weak and frail and fragile and the opposite of what you would think masculinity should be.

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: And again, I think that goes back to the idea of focusing on building a masculinity based on threats and what we find threatening and what we find we are insecure about, and trying to change the [00:33:00] world to fix our insecurities rather than fix our insecurities in ourselves. There's this idea that if I'm insecure about something, that is something you have to fix about yourself, your life, society, an entire gender, whatever, rather than being like, "hey, I'm just insecure about that."

And that's part of the human condition is to not be perfectly secure, and "I have work to do." That side of the aisle, that side of the world, I should say, like that idea, it's got no solutions. There's no solutions there. 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: And I think it can't be, because I think deep down, people like Andrew Tate know they're not capable of being a Walz. And I know as a humanist, I'm supposed to think that given the right circumstances and bur ba bur ba da, and maybe I would love to be proven wrong about that, but I think that people like Andrew Tate and Donald Trump are so far gone down a version of poison that all they can do is poison the pool around [00:34:00] them and hope no one notices we shouldn't be swimming in poison.

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Yeah. And there's also a total unwillingness, I think, reflected in that to ever experience vulnerability of any kind. I think you look at somebody like Tim Walz or Doug Emhoff, and you see people that are very demonstrably okay, with feeling things and being vulnerable, and I think you look at the stated goals of this Tate esque model of masculinity, and it's like, there's no vulnerability available to those men, so if you buy into that worldview, You buy into a worldview that I think just necessarily is lonelier, necessarily lacks love and lacks connection and lacks the ability to open yourself up in ways that allow you to be hurt because being hurt doesn't fit that aggressive worldview that men have to be this constantly armored stoic persona. And you look at Tim Walz, that's a guy who just [00:35:00] unabashedly loves. Doug Emhoff, who unabashedly loves. And I don't think you can like unabashedly love and accept the vulnerability that's a part of that and also have this aggressive worldview.

Rethinking Boyhood What Moms Should Know (with Guest Ruth Whippman) - What Fresh Hell Podcast - Air Date 6-17-24

 

AMY - HOST, WHAT FRESH HELL PODCAST: The point you make in the book, Ruth, that really was eye opening to me is that we encourage girls to break free of stereotypes, we encourage parents of girls to raise them to subvert stereotypes and raise them without the stereotypes we might have, and then we don't do the same thing for boys at all. We don't encourage boys to subvert the masculine idea of what it is to be a friend or what it is to care about people. That's not something that we ask them to question.

 "You be like a boy, and girls, you be more like boys, I guess, and then also be a girl." We don't ever turn it around and they're missing out when we don't consider that they have stereotypes too. 

RUTH WHIPPMAN: Yeah, and I think in some ways, girls are [00:36:00] encouraged, we talk about girls in this really inspirational way, which is great, " You can be anything, sky's the limit, you can do whatever you want, the future is female," and somehow we talk about boys in this quite essentializing way. So I hear a lot of, "Oh, boys will be boys, boys can't sit still. Boys are reluctant readers. Boys don't like school." All of these quite essentializing things, and it's just almost like boys are just biologically limited by these certain things, and this is just what boys like and what they like and what they are like. And we just have to work around that, and that's the best we can hope for. 

And I thought that really sad in a way, because I think it's stereotypes around masculinity, around not expressing your emotions, around connection, vulnerability, the so called emotional labor piece of it, these things are really limiting for boys. And you're seeing now down the line with adult men, that there's this loneliness epidemic with men at the moment in America. One in four young men [00:37:00] says that they have no close friends at all.

And there's all these horrible statistics on loneliness. You've probably heard them all. Read about them in the news and, I think we are not giving boys a fair shake. We're not saying, you can be a full expansive human being in the way that we're saying to girls. And these are progressives who often use this kind of language about boys. You're not talking about some sort of trad wife situation. You're talking about the progressive conversation. It's still, we talk about boys in these very limiting stereotypes.

MARGARET - HOST, WHAT FRESH HELL PODCAST: I think it's interesting talking about this idea of what we put on boys. You hear all sorts of different things about this. Some people would say, and some media certainly says, "boys are becoming completely feminized in this generation and, oh, they're soy boys" and talking points about how we're losing boys because we're trying to make them more female somehow.

Other people are seeing this side of these [00:38:00] statistics saying loneliness and lack of friendships, and I guess my fundamental question there is how much movability do you find there is, how much can we really affect outcomes here? Is it something that has to happen on a national conversation level, or is it something that happens within our own homes, or both?

RUTH WHIPPMAN: I think it's both. We can do a lot in the home to change norms and to open things up for boys. And I think a lot of it. It's about naming the problem, seeing the problem for what it is, seeing the stereotypes, because sometimes they're really invisible. I spent four years working on this book and looking at these things and they still pass me by and I'd be like, "Oh yeah," and then I'll think back to something and think, "Oh yeah, that's quite sexist or limiting." So it's quite invisible in the culture. 

And I think we have to do it at all levels. We have to be having conversations like these, we have to be working within our own homes, but on a personal level, how changeable is it? I think this is one of the things that I [00:39:00] explore in a lot of detail in the book because obviously I'm like, "okay, great. After my third son was born and the whole Me Too thing was happening. And I was like, great, I'm going to just change everything, and I'm going to be able to control this really, really easily. And great. I just need to do a few things," and obviously my boys are actual people with their own ideas and their own preferences. 

MARGARET - HOST, WHAT FRESH HELL PODCAST: We always have that problem. These children are actual people. It's so frustrating. 

RUTH WHIPPMAN: I think that's not a reason to give up. I think we're very comfortable when we're talking about girl socialization, we're like, there are so many harmful messages in the culture about body image or about subservience to men or about, princess culture, all of these things. And I think we can hold two truths at once. We can hold, we don't have complete control of this and they will get cultural messages that are harmful. And we can talk about them and they will probably succumb to some of them, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't address them or think about them critically. 

AMY - HOST, WHAT FRESH HELL PODCAST: Ruth, you tell a story at the end of the book about your youngest son arriving for his first day of kindergarten, [00:40:00] and it's an example of these things aren't writ large, but they're tiny and they happen all the time. And so tell that story. 

RUTH WHIPPMAN: So when my third son went to kindergarten, there was this male volunteer, I think, possibly a teacher, possibly a parent who was standing by the gate and greeting all the kids as they walked in. And we were in a line of kids and there were two girls in front of my son. And the guy was like, "hi, sweetheart," and then they were, the next one would be like, "hi, sweetheart," and then my son walks in and his voice goes down like two octaves and he puffs up and he goes, "hi, buddy," and gives him a high five. 

And I was like, that buddy sweetheart thing. It's so well meaning. It was so sweet. It came from such a good place, but. Sweethearts and buddies are really different. A sweetheart is a sort of nurturing, protective term, whereas buddy is like, "you're my peer." And it's almost just like a tick away from Hey buddy before you get in a bar fight.

And people already at the age of five, he's [00:41:00] this little kid who's scared going for his first day at kindergarten, he needs nurture and protection in the same way that any girl does. And buddy, it's like it's lifting him up and you can see why it's sexist both ways around. You can see why sweetheart could be patronizing or it can exclude girls from those channels of power where all the buddies get together in the locker room and slap each other on the back and make important decisions, but it really also excludes boys from that kind of nurturing.

And that was one of the huge themes that came up in the book, like right from babyhood, baby boys get less nurture than baby girls. And actually biologically at birth, baby boys brains are born more emotionally vulnerable and immature than baby girls brains. So they actually need more of that loving, supportive nurture to thrive.

And girls are generally more resilient and independent and so I think, this kind of like masculinization of boys can, be a very, very subtle form of [00:42:00] neglect in a way. 

That's My Gus Walz - Dear Old Dads - Air Date 8-30-24

 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Guys, we talked about this a little bit in the intro, but I want to talk about it just straight out and out. We saw Gus Walz's just absolutely lovely expression of affection for his dad. And so I thought in the spirit of the news media, we should go over some of the Republican reactions to that.

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Can we talk more about that though? What's funny is we did the masculinity episode, and I put this in the show notes, but we had recorded on Walz and Emhoff before the DNC. We had gotten a little ahead cause time that different dads needed off. And we recorded that and, which was a great episode—stand by all of it, before having seen the just incredible displays at the DNC by both those gentlemen.

Like I thought Doug Emhoff speech was so good. It was so fucking good and relatable in a [00:43:00] real way. Like I love this election cycle for being the first time, really the first time, that I felt like there's a bunch of normal people on the top of the ticket. It like never happens. 

I love Obama, but I wouldn't say he's like a normal guy. He's great, but he's a professor. Doug Emhoff, Tim Walz, and even honestly, even like Kamala somewhat, like she, they're pretty normal ass people. And I absolutely love it. And I got to say, I don't know if any of you gentlemen did this, but Lydia and I had this nice week last week, where after working our asses off and barely being awake, we would at 11 PM, grab a glass of wine and put on the DNC top couple speeches on 1.7 speed, whatever we could find time for, and we just sit and watch " Oh, this is what people that don't fucking suck are." it was great. It was so much fun. 

And in that process, Man, Tim Walz's speech happens. It's funny. The different things we see, like how we perceive the world differently for so many reasons, Lydia and I, so many [00:44:00] reasons, and one of them is obviously my history with my dad and all that stuff. And I saw Gus Walz, the minute they showed him, I saw that he was already teary and I was losing. I was like, I can't cause I could just tell I could just absolutely tell right away. And then they show him crying even more. And I just lost, I was crying all fucking night with how sweet this kid is.

I didn't know anything about any whatever neurodivergence. I don't even think that matters. I didn't even know that at the time don't care. I just saw a kid that was so proud of his dad in a way that, again, to my brain, I'm like, I didn't know that could be. I'm keeping it together right now, but I spent the better part of two days, if I see like a still shot of that, I have a hard time not getting super emotional because being able to see the possibility of a relationship between father and son like that is just, to me... It's not just Oh, it's so sweet, it cracks something cold and dead in my heart, and it's just Oh my God. 

And so I love this so much. I want to say this, I can't wait to roast these Republicans. But here's [00:45:00] a rare thing, when you love something so much, this happens to me pretty rarely, you love something so much it's critique proof. I was going to use Anna as an example for Eli, but now you'd still probably murder him, but there's certain things that I love so much that if somebody made fun of them, I'm like, boy, I feel bad for you. No reaction of oh, I'm mad at you, cause there's zero insecurity there. When it comes to Gus Walz, that was one of those things. I was like, boy, I just feel bad for those people. I don't even, I feel bad if Gus is seeing any of that, but there's nothing anyone could say that would take away the perfect sweetness and purity of that moment.

It's the most pure thing I've ever seen in my life. 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Yeah, look, I was joking in my intro, but literally, I wouldn't muster a punishment that bad to look at that beautiful thing and be like, "stupid" even though they're lying. And I know they're lying and there's this meta layer of everyone's lying and the social internet has destroyed our brains. Nobody knows that better than me. But underneath it, the character you've chosen on the social internet, the one that other people think [00:46:00] is you, Is one that looks at that and is like, "gay". That sucks for you. I wouldn't do that to you. I wouldn't do it. And these are some bad people. These are some shitty fucking people. We're going to talk about Ann Coulter and Dinesh D'Souza. And if again, were I hovering my pen over the death note book of Dinesh D'Souza's Twitter, I'd be like, "I'm not going to make him tweet what he tweeted. That's not nice. He went to jail. He's done his time. He doesn't deserve this." 

I also think that one of the things that we really wanted to do when creating the show is not just talk about positive masculinity and dunk on negative masculinity, but also just acknowledge how fucking weirdly masculinity is portrayed versus life, because I don't know if you guys have had this experience, but I have cried with joy multiple times in my life. I cried with joy yesterday. A friend was getting married and I was doing the ceremony and I had to practice [00:47:00] so many times so that the officiant wasn't crying at my friend's wedding because I was so joyful for her and her now husband. I had to do that work. 

The fact that I had lived most of my life and had to make it to, genuinely, especially when it comes to non fictional representations of healthy joy I can't count on one hand the amount of Gus Walz showings of joy and affection I have seen in popular media, and that's fuckin crazy. Do you know how many murders I've seen? Do you know how many people kicked out of helicopters I've seen? So many more. So many more people have been kicked out of helicopters in popular media that have cried with joy. 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Probably seen more people specifically killed by being put in one of those wood chippers. Specifically something horrible, more of that than Gus Walz. 

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Why do you think that is? I'm curious why, cause I don't [00:48:00] disagree at all, but I wonder what is at the root? Because I think in real life, many of us have been moved to joy, but we don't want to show it in our media? We don't want to reinforce it?

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: I think it just makes people massively uncomfortable. I'll tell you this, I'm gonna do y'all one better. Because Eli, I think, I won't shame Eli. There are men who are like, "Oh, yeah, I shed a tear," and what they mean is sometimes I moved to shed that single masculine tear and my eyes get a little bit red and then I can cry in a totally masculinely acceptable way.

And I'm like, "Oh no, I ugly cry. I can't chill about it because I also have some sort of depression brain chemistry. Like the minute this happens, I'm like, "Oh, God!" And I'm crying in a completely socially unacceptable way. There's the old timey "men never cry," and then there's the next level of " okay, but it has to be in this completely masculinely acceptable way. It has to be like a manly cry." Sorry, I've blown past that completely. I just can't even keep it in and that no one will ever show because it's [00:49:00] uncomfortable. I grant that's uncovered. I try to not do it around people because it's incredibly uncomfortable.

“BoyMom” Author Looks at Raising Sons in an Age of “Impossible Masculinity” Part 2 - Amanpour and Company - Air Date 7-9-24

 

MICHEL MARTIN: Given that you've described what a deep stem this has, how do we get out of it? 

RUTH WHIPPMAN: We have to do things in the home and in the wider culture, the way that we talk about boys and men.

So I think in the home, it's really about showing boys that nurture and emotional engagement that they need. So really naming the problem in terms of they're excluded from those emotional role models from those kinds of emotional conversations and trying to correct for that and to give them that nurture to talk to them about their feelings, to listen to them, and to not just see them as tough, uncomplicated. And I think we need to recognize male interiority and male emotions and to listen to them. 

And I think similarly in the wider culture, when we talk about boys and men, rather than having this conversation, which is it's a gender war time for men to shut up. I think we need to start listening to men's feelings as well, and making [00:50:00] space for that. We spend a lot of time listening to men's opinions, but a lot less time listening to their feelings. 

MICHEL MARTIN: Has the way you interact with your boys changed since you started doing this work? 

RUTH WHIPPMAN: Yeah, I think it really has.

It's subtle. It's actually, it's not like I've done these five things differently. It's more of a change in my orientation towards them in our relationship. So I think it's helped me to see them better and to see them as these complex, emotional creatures, rather than... There's this stereotype of boys I hear, "Boys are like dogs. All they need is food and exercise and discipline," and actually I think seeing them as these creatures that are vulnerable and fragile and in need of more nurture rather than less has really helped me approach them in that way. And rather than trying to punish them or discipline them out of their bad behavior to see the kind of emotions driving them and to try to engage them with them in a more nurturing way.

Note from the Editor: 3 top takeaways on and for boys and men

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: We've just heard clips starting [00:51:00] with Hysteria discussing Tim Walz and breaking down the masculine archetypes. Some More News looked at men being very much not okay. The Brian Lehrer Show looked at the gender political divide. Amanpour and Company dove into the complicated work of raising sons. Dear Old Dads discussed and mocked the manosphere style of masculinity. What Fresh Hell broke down how gender stereotypes influenced parenting styles from the very beginning. Dear Old Dads discussed vulnerability and repressed emotions through the lens of Gus Walz at the DNC. And finally, Amanpour and Company described the need for this to become a widespread discussion on all levels of society. And those were just the Top Takes—there's lots more in the Deeper Dive section. 

But first, a reminder that this show is supported by members who get access to bonus episodes featuring the production crew here, discussing all manner of important and interesting topics, trying to have some fun along the way. To support all of our work and have those bonus episodes [00:52:00] delivered seamlessly to the new members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at BestOfTheLeft.com/support, there's a link in the show notes, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. 

Members also get chapter markers in the show, but I'll note that anyone, depending on the app you use to listen, may be able to use the time codes I provide in the show notes to jump around within the show, similar to chapter markers. If regular membership isn't in the cards for you, shoot me an email requesting a financial hardship membership because we don't let a lack of funds stand in the way of hearing more information. 

Now, before we continue on to the Deeper Dives half of the show, these are my three top top takeaways for this topic that I want you to now. Here we go. 

The first one is mentioned in the show today. Just in a different phrasing, and I really like this phrasing I once heard. This is for any adult dealing with boys. Here's what you need to remember. 

They just got here. [00:53:00] They weren't here for the last several decades of feminist progress, and to understand all the fighting that went on to make the progress that has been made, and they need to be understood in that context of ignorance. But I just love the phrase "they just got here." It creates this image in my mind of the war of the sexes raging bitterly for decades, and these young boys show up and they're like, "hi, I'm new here? How does this place work?" And then some people. trying to be helpful, but, saying something, not literally this, obviously, but kind of effectively this, welcomes them and they're like, "Hey, yeah. There's this war of the sexes going on and your side has been winning for a long time, but the other side is starting to make some real progress and you need to be happy about that, or you're a bad person." And then the boys are just like, "But I just got here. What are you talking about, what is all this?" 

That ignorance runs deep and I feel like the [00:54:00] history of the progress of women over the past several decades is so ingrained for all the people who lived through it that it's hard to. Understand what it would be like to not know all of that stuff. 

Anyway, the second top takeaway is to be directed at boys themselves. So maybe you are a boy listening in which case welcome, or you know, one and you should definitely say this to them. Here's what you say, "just because someone has correctly diagnosed a problem. Doesn't mean they understand the solution." 

And to expand slightly. It is much, much, much easier to identify a problem than to correctly identify the best solution to that problem. So to expand slightly more, there are plenty of stupid people on the internet who can sound smart by correctly articulating a problem related to you, your boyhood, your masculinity, how you [00:55:00] feel about life, but that in no way means that they have any good ideas for solving those problems you're having.

To me, that one piece of information given to a teenager, young teenager, someone who's spending time on the internet unsupervised, that is as good of a piece of information for them to have as any I can think of to arm themselves against the seeming siren call of the manosphere and all of the bad advice that comes with it. 

And the last top takeaway for the day, I got this one from an Atlantic article, it's about the bad men in the world. And the main argument is it's better to pity than revile them. This is from the article Pity the Bad Men, or Sometimes Consider the Boar, because publications like to change titles on a whim on the internet now. From the article, quote: 

The problem with pity is that it's so often [00:56:00] interpreted as a soft emotion, a synonym for empathy or compassion. Asking women to pity men is like asking the subjugated worker to pity his greedy boss. But pity, crucially, is also a weapon. It makes its object smaller and weaker while casting the pityer as solicitous and tender. 

Now, it's not exactly the same, but I would argue that there's a striking similarity between that vision of pity and the current accusation of a weirdness being directed at Trump, Vance, and company. Which makes perfect sense because much of their weirdness stems from their deeply confused and self-defeating ideas about masculinity. I for one, have pitied Trump for years. He is a twisted, miserable person because his father didn't love him enough. He's some amount of wealthy, he has millions of adoring fans, and actually became president of the United States. Yet, he seems completely [00:57:00] miserable basically all of the time. How is that a model of masculinity to aspire, to? Look at the end result, it is clearly not the path to happiness.

SECTION A: TIM WALZ

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: For a better chance to find that path to happiness, we will continue to the Deeper Dives section in five topics. Next up, Section A: Tim Walz; Section B: JD Vance-Branded Masculinity; Section C: The Fallout of Stoicism; Section D: Dating Life; and Section E: Social-Emotional Development.

We Love Some BDE - Big Dad Energy - Dear Old Dads - Air Date 8-23-24

 

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: I do think we have to talk about this fucking Big dad energy moment that is like infusing American politics right now. The Tim Walz, Doug Emhoff, just wonderfulness of it all.

Have you guys seen all the, like Tim Walz backs into his parking spaces, Tim Walz measures [00:58:00] twice cuts once look at all this, this stuff, all this like Tim Walz stuff, and this is like a quintessential. Guys, guy, like a quintessential, like man's man in all the ways. I think that remind me of the kinds of masculinity that I think the three of us value with like none of the lack of empathy and cruelty and indifference and like inflexibility.

That is oftentimes, like, valued on the right and on the other side of this sort of, like, political spectrum. 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Yeah. He was created in a dear old dad's laboratory of, like, It feels like it, right? It's perfect. I love him. 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Yes. I saw a quote, which I have thought about a billion times a day since I saw it, which is that Tim Walz is the dad that Fox News stole from the country.

That's so good. That dad who got fucking turned into a slobbering, mean spirited, [00:59:00] racist idiot by Rush Limbaugh, who should have just been Tim Walz, that's Tim Walz. Tim Walz is just the guy who, like, was middle of the road. And I also think this, like, I think Tim Walz feels the way most Americans feel Especially if they haven't been brainwashed by the social internet, right?

Like I think Tim Walz is where I 

MUSIC: think if you're gay and you want to marry another fellow, well, you know, I might not want to marry you cause I'll never look that good, but I, I don't want to do any planks. So that's why I'm not gay. 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: They just want people to be well. And when their vegetarian daughter says they're vegetarian, they're like, you can have Turkey.

They are harmless. in their sweetness. And I, and I think that, again, one of the reasons we started this show is that masculinity has been so poisoned. And I think that Tim Walz just demonstrates the positive way that that masculinity can actually present itself. 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Our guest on OA on Monday show had a really nice quote that stuck with me, where she said like, [01:00:00] he's utterly unintimidated by a changing world.

I was like, that's so, yes, exactly. Like all these fucking terrified little weak cowardly ass men, like Vance and Trump, there's it's such weakness. That's what's so frustrating is like, it's not even a manly thing. It's just weakness and overcompensating for it and being mad and being heartless. It's weakness and being cruel is translated as looked at as like, Oh wow.

He's a man. He's a macho. But like what Tim Walz is doing is my idea. If any such thing needs to exist of what a dude should be. That's, that's masculinity. Again, unconcerned with the changing world. Cause that's, let's be real. That's where the reactionary politics comes from. It's the entire thing. Yeah. 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: And let's also point out the bar is so low.

Yeah, it is. Right? Tim Walz isn't like, well, after I got my sex. 17th doctorate from Harvard. He's just like I think if you spend most of your time thinking about which Children with [01:01:00] which genitals should go to the bathroom. That's a little weird. That's the bar That's the bar of what's expected of men not just to be like good men But to be great men to be great men who represent us nationally You have to be like I think you should 

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: talk about children's genitals less So much of like the examples out there about masculinity that have kind of become part of the social internet.

They are this performance of masculinity for other men. They have no prescriptive value. Other than like, perform this for other men, like here's how to get other men's approval. Yeah. If we all 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: do this, then none of us have to do anything. Right. Like if we all act like this, then no one can make us be considerate for a moment.

And it is focused 

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: so much on like what they find threatening. Yeah. Rather than any positive values toward, you know, actually building, creating. Supporting, empathizing. There's this like really beautiful [01:02:00] service and family driven version of masculinity that I think I see so much in my dad that I've always admired.

Like jokes aside, like my dad is a service and family driven person. The meaning that he finds from his life, allowing people to cut off his son's ears. But it's about being of service to other people. My dad would never be like. Late somewhere late to the ear chopping up money. He would never like give unsolicited advice or like be judgmental about other people's lives.

Like what? He's not perfect, but like he is service driven. Like his life is a, is a service and family oriented life. And I think that that's this view that is getting lost in the social internet about how we externalize our masculinity. It's become this horrible, toxic externalization. To sort of swim upstream against feminists, you know, and like more plates, more dates, like all this kind of like really hyper aggressive, [01:03:00] not at all appealing version of masculinity.

There's this great quote from like this WAPO article that I read that I'll summarize. It said something like, this is a version of masculinity that women would run into a burning building for. This is what's actually really appealing. Not just. To other men, but to women, which is a lot of what the performance of masculinity is for when it's performative.

So it's really funny to me. And I think it's like really worth noting that like this performance of masculinity that Tim Walz is embodying is actually far more attractive. Then this sort of tate level performance that's being sold to young men. Right. I was gonna say 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Andrew Tate. Yeah. 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Also, I like the way Tom said Wao.

I thought it was a slur for a good 20 seconds, so it was like, yeah, well give it 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: a second. Maybe we'll find out 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: this 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: WaPo

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: I just think that that contrast is just really important and like the. The [01:04:00] kids on the social internet, they're seeing this version of masculinity embodied in these tates and these Rogans and these other assholes. That's not what people want. That's not what women are asking for. Women are asking for more Tim Walz.

Look at the response. If you want to know how to get laid. Look at the response from women. Oh, he's for Tim wall. So 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: many chicks right now. That's for real. 

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: And isn't that what a lot of this performance is around? Like it is when it's performative around this idea. 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: And I think it sort of is the porn star effect.

There is a social agreement that men want blonde hair and quadruple D boobs in a tiny ways. and big plumped up lips because that's what porn stars have, right? Generally speaking, and obviously I'm, I'm speaking in generalizations cause that's what culture does. It's what reality 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: stars have, which is kind of the same thing now.

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Right. Exactly. Tomato, tomato, right? These ideas. And there are women who sell other women this idea [01:05:00] that, Hey, I am close to this thing or I am this thing. thing that your husband, that your boyfriend, that your son, that your brother wants. And if you want to be desired, you need to be like me. Right. And I think as a culture, we've gotten better, though, certainly not good at recognizing and addressing that.

And I think the male version of that is the Andrew Tate's right. Who are like women. What? Night. Teen pack abs, and they want you to be ready to fly into a murderous rage at a moment's notice, right? But because men are so unreflective, because men are so un self aware, that when those conversations about body positivity try to happen in men's spaces, We shut ourselves down in the same way that we saw like a lot of the toxic fat shaming In like the 80s and 90s and then obviously still today as well But like with less of a response than it had and so it's interesting to watch these two [01:06:00] Or in this case of Walz, just the one example of positive masculinity and positive response to it, because I think it does trickle down, right?

I think it does trickle down in a positive way that will inform young men. They can be kind and caring about the people they love and the less protected in society without losing this. Sense of manhood. 

That's My Gus Walz Part 2 - Dear Old Dads - Air Date 8-30-24

 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: And let's, let's get back to Gus Walz because it's so sweet. And that is a situation where I feel like that, you know, you can ugly cry in that situation. A whole room of people is like, just loving what your dad's doing.

And your dad 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: is running for vice president of the United States. Like what, what are you fucking saving it up for Eli? 

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: That's actually what I wrote down.

If not now, when, when, like, I can't imagine the sense [01:07:00] of like, And to be in that room with the energy of that room and the people and the support and the, the cheering and the clapping and you're like, and that is the guy who like loved me through riding my bike. That is the guy who made me waffles last night.

Like that's my guy. And he's standing up there. I would fucking fall apart if it was you. Like if it was you, like if it was just somebody that I knew at an intimate level and it's like, that's my fucking guy. That's my wife. That's my kid. That's my bud. Like whatever. I would, I think I would be, I don't know that I would ugly cry like that, but I don't know that I wouldn't.

I certainly would have feelings about it. Right? Like, yeah, I think if you're stoic in the face of pure joy and pride and like, That overwhelm. If you are so fucking broken inside that you're like, I must remain stoic. I am not allowed this moment of free joy and expression, like. Holy fuck, have we done a [01:08:00] bad job raising you as a society.

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: I think Eli and I have made this point, but like, what are you doing here then? What are you doing here? If this is not doing it for ya, if it's like, peak, I, I, I literally put on the Facebook after this, I was like, I think we might all be NPCs in a life simulator where Tim Walz gets to live the best life.

Like, like genuinely. 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: It's just amazing. I hate my programming. 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Yeah, I don't know why they put Eli in there. 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Nobody 

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: debugged your program at all, they're just like, ah, slap it out there, it's fine. I know we're trying 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: to balance out Tim, but Sad Boy 7 is real sad. Do we want to I mean, it's real weird, like, do we need to do 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: that?

Okay. It's part of the realism, alright. Did 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: you hear him on the bonus talking about cum covered tennis balls? I really, 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: I think Nope, it's necessary. To Tim Walsh, living the perfect life. It's, you know, complicated systems, you know, emergent properties. Do you want him to 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: be head of the hunting club and the gay club?

Or just one of them? Because we need to make Sad Boy 7 that sad. 

We Love Some BDE Part 3 - Big Dad Energy - Dear Old Dads - Air Date 8-23-24

 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: [01:09:00] We should talk about the Doug Emhoff part of it because I was interested in that. I think before the VP announcement, I want to talk about that just because he had a pretty high powered career.

He was a entertainment attorney and he had to resign that so there wouldn't be conflict of interest. And now, you know, it's like he's. Obviously there's notoriety with being the second gentleman, but to most men, I don't, I think that's insane. I think probably most men couldn't handle that or maybe at least a large group of them.

Oh, for 

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: sure. A hundred percent. I do still think that we are enculturated. largely in a space that sort of requires men's idea of themselves to include a work at a certain level that is at least on par, if not in some measurable, or at least like conceived ways of being. More than their spouse there, if they're heterosexual, 

MUSIC: right?

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Of course, that's an enculturated space [01:10:00] that we have not walked away from. We are still asking of men that they think of themselves in this way and reinforcing and rewarding that. 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Yeah. How would you guys feel about that? I would be a fan. That'd be fun. Yeah. I mean, I, I would love to take a little, little vacay.

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Yeah. I mean, you know, it's hard because I don't have a wife who is the forefront of my career. Obviously Anna does what I do and she's a part of what I do, but like, I definitely understand what it is to have an incredibly talented wife who is often the forefront of attention in her field. So like when I watch Anna, Yeah.

Yeah. In the folk music world, which is where Anna thrives. Obviously she's amazing on our shows and people adore having her at live shows and stuff, but that's the thing we do together. So it doesn't appeal to the sort of fragility that might come up where I not involved in the podcast, but in the folk music scene, I do see that.

It often gets brought up in sort of a roundabout way because Anna is such a, [01:11:00] like a well known player in the spaces where she plays music. And so people never mean it in like a negative way, but they do sort of hint at, are you mad about that? Or are you intimidated by that? You know, the example that I think of all the time is my friend, Rachel who both of you have met is like a pretty well known and pretty successful magician.

And she was talking to an interviewer. for like a pretty well known press outlet that she was being interviewed for. And they asked her, is your fiance mad that you're gone so many nights a week? And she was really blown away by the idea that like, cause you would never ask a man that right. You'd never be like, Senator, just, is your wife mad that you're not home for dinner by 5 PM?

But because she's a woman, it was just like, man, how about, how is the man who owned you feel about that? Right. And so. Yeah, I think, I think it's a really, I did have 

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: to swallow an air tag. So, you know, I would raise my hand and say it would be a struggle for me. It shouldn't be, [01:12:00] I'll admit that. But like a big part of how I've perceived my value to the people around me is as the provider financially.

I know that that's insane. And I don't think that that's a entirely net positive, but it's also still true. If Haley tomorrow found some career or occupation, and it meant that I was, that she was all of a sudden the primary breadwinner in the house. I think that I would be lying to you if I said that I wouldn't quietly struggle with that.

I would be smart enough to make that a quiet struggle and to go and see a therapist. Well, you know, like, because I know inherently that that's fucked up. So I, like, I admit like fully that I think two things can be true at the same time. And that is that like, I have ideas that are probably not good, but that have benefited myself and my family.

And I think my family looks to me to fill that role and they are grateful that I fill that role. And that's a dynamic that we've [01:13:00] always had. I think if tomorrow it were reversed, it would at least be an acclimation about how I think I'd have a hard time being like. Okay. So what am I here for? And I know that that's bullshit.

I know I bring a lot to the table as a person and as a partner that is not connected to my paycheck. I'm here purely for sexual pleasure, baby. I've always said that about him. I bring a lot of energy there to the table at the very least. But like, yeah, you know, I can't pretend that like, as a 46 year old man, that I could turn on a dime in my head.

I would do it. Nobody would, I would not tell a fucking soul about it except for a therapist, but I would be like, awesome. I'd be the most outwardly supportive, a hundred percent rah, rah. But I think in my head, in my heart, I'd be like,

SECTION B: JD VANCE BRANDED MASCULINITY

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Now entering Section B: JD Vance-Branded Masculinity 

Are Men Okay Part 2 – SOME MORE NEWS - Air Date 5-22-24

 

CODY JOHNSTON - HOST, SOME MORE NEWS: After all, [01:14:00] they want to make men great. Again, not to mention that conservative men are often the ones lamenting that they can't find a romantic partner. Probably because they want to take away their reproductive rights and treat their partners in this skewed, unbalanced way that eventually catches up to itself.

Meanwhile, noted January 6th coward Josh Hawley wrote a book literally called Manhood, The Masculine Virtues America Needs. Because manliness is often treated like a necessity for civilization. This is tied directly to nostalgia and the hard times create strong men meme you see going around. Once again, it's the same concern we've always seen.

That men need hardships like war and labor to keep them tough. It should be noted that there's actually not much evidence that men are becoming more conservative, but rather apolitical. Which, I would argue, just means that they don't realize it when they see it. They are conservative. Ultimately, the divide seems obvious.

We have these conservative leaning men who believe the generations long [01:15:00] propaganda about manliness, who also feel a resentment toward modern, liberated women who have absolutely no interest in them. And so they lost for the better days when women were To them, more tame. This is not exclusively right wing, mind you.

The internet has especially boosted nostalgia for pre 911 days. TV shows had 20 episodes a season. Mel Gibson wasn't a racist yet. We had malls and physical places to exist. And all the Gallagher we could ignore. And no one was struggling. I mean, that last one isn't true. But that's how a lot of people look at the past.

And like, yeah, you were a kid. That's why you weren't struggling. Wow, I'm so nostalgic for the carefree days of when I was a literal child and didn't need to care for anything. Anyway, undoubtedly, things got economically worse in America. But the thing about nostalgia is that it makes a tremendously effective dog whistle.

Because this decades long economic erosion just happened to take [01:16:00] place the same time that minority populations were expanding their own rights. And so people like Tate and Peterson can point to these two things as if they are related. By lamenting the good old days, they are often implying that Flying that things were better because women had fewer rights, and that feminism is why things are worse now.

It's just like how dummies like Elon Musk will look at crumbling infrastructure or airline companies and blame DEI. And so this is why the Manosphere is a pipeline to Nazi . Going back to that Beefcake fetishist Bronze Age pervert, well you see right in the name that the account is glorifying a.

mystical before time. It's no wonder that account was specifically popular with Trumpers. At first glance, you might see that his admiration for past civilizations is tied to his beliefs that men need to build strong friendships and brotherhoods like ancient Greece. Then, if you look a little closer, you might learn that this guy, under his real [01:17:00] name, wrote an entire book about eugenics.

And in fact, has proposed selective breeding as a policy. Because again, Nazi shit. It always goes back to it. And when you see right wing influencers, or right wing influencies, or moderate liberals, or why I left the left types mocking this idea by saying, Oh, so Fitness is right wing now? It's Nazism to be healthy?

We can safely and reasonably assume that they either didn't read the thing they're complaining about, or they did, and they're speaking broadly and vaguely and incorrectly about it in order to confuse the issue. Exercise is fine. It's actually good for you. Go outside, work out, stay hydrated, eat well, fall into wells, find pirate treasure, get good sleep, stick to a solid routine, develop good habits.

This is all fine. It's not man stuff, it's person stuff. It's all recommended by most people, regardless of ideology. But [01:18:00] there are elements of this, a certain viewpoint and perspective about these kinds of things that can lead to, Yes. Some Nazi stuff. Or, at the very least, just general women hating. In fact, the idea of a toxic pick up artist is almost quaint now.

A bunch of MIT researchers actually looked at the manosphere and found four distinct groups. Quote, Men's rights activists claim that family law and social institutions discriminate against men. Men going their own way. take this feeling of grievance further, arguing that society can't be amended. They often avoid women, blaming them for their problems.

Pick up artists, meanwhile, date and harass women. They believe society is feminizing men. And then there are the incels, the most potentially violent of the group. Incels abide by the Black Pill, a belief that women use their sexual power to dominate men socially. For that, incels want revenge. You can sort of see how each of these [01:19:00] manosphere types can melt into the other, and why it's so closely tied to white supremacy as well.

And this all starts with these self help grifters. Jordan Peterson isn't overtly a Nazi, but he's the first step in that direction. We actually made a quick explainer about that guy if you want to check that out and just take a few minutes of your time. Ultimately, it's an extremely enticing pitch to tell young men that all of their problems aren't actually their fault.

And then point to leftists and women and Marxists as the enemy inflicting these hardships upon them. They don't need to change, you see. It's the world that's wrong! Skinner meme! No, the other one. Take your pick, I guess. Of course, the problem is that the world isn't going to change for you, despite what the masterpiece ladyballers might want you to believe.

And so, resentment is the answer. Isn't a useful tool. There's nothing helpful in it. These people are basically saying hey young men I can help you if you listen to me and then their help is to just get mad at women It's like offering swimming lessons and then spending the [01:20:00] entire class Complaining about the ocean and of course the beauty of stuff like this is as you get madder and madder You're still going to need to tune into those god awful swimming lessons And like, hey, all you men out there, if you want to endure hardships and be strong, then maybe you need to endure the fact that women are not subservient drones and learn how to actually communicate with them.

Maybe it's actually manly to adapt. Where do you think your Y chromosome came from? And so when you think about the resilient futility of this manosphere message, the only use it has is to frustrate and indoctrinate young men. They want you to be bitter and isolated so you keep following them. It's a grift and a tool for extremists.

At the very least, it's a way to sell you crap. Heck, for some, that's the main goal. 

That's My Gus Walz Part 3 - Dear Old Dads - Air Date 8-30-24

 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Should we mock some of these weirdos before we sign off? All right. I'm going to start with my [01:21:00] favorite. This is Mike crispy head of America. First Republicans of New Jersey. Who tweeted the photo of Gus that we're all so familiar with with the caption Tim Walz stupid crying son Isn't the flex You raised your kid to be a puffy beta male congrats does baron trump cry Does he love his father of course That's the types of values.

I want leading the country doubt it 

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: I, part of me is like, yeah, he doesn't cry cause he's not proud of his dad. Yeah. Yeah. Like there's a big difference, right? Like if my dad was like, I accept the nomination for the Nazi party. Tom, when you get 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: that 34th guilty count, it's like, wow. Yeah. That's a lot.

That's impressive. You know? Okay. Let me say 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: something brave and from my heart. You could shoot Donald Trump through the face with a harpoon gun and then remove it using your foot as a lever against his [01:22:00] chest and Barron Trump would step back so as not to get splashed. That is the emotion Barron Trump feels for his.

Well, 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: forget about the older two. There's absolutely nothing. What happened? They don't care. 

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: No. No. Well, they are unfeeling robots. Yeah. They've never had care in there. They get programmed into the uncanny valley. That is their The smooth, smooth faces. 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: All right. Next up communicator and revised hair model for an off brand, like a Sheehan brand of toothpaste and culture brought back one of my favorite things that Republicans are mad about saying, quote, talk about weird and quote.

And I love that. And let me say why I love this, right? Because it's not just her once again, right? Because she is broken character a couple of times in her life. She actually did it once on Bill Maher. She was just like, hey man, like, I'm just a horrible, [01:23:00] evil this for a living. Like, I don't know what you want me to do, right?

Nobody wants to buy my children's book, Bill. And he was like, ah, good point. Uh, but like the thing that's amazing about them being mad about the weirdness thing. Is that Tim Walz so beautifully communicated that they know that this is a, that they've gone haywire. 

MUSIC: Yeah. 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: That they like, somehow we were following, we were grasping the iron rod of conservatism.

It's like you're 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: playing a game of werewolves and you're the werewolf and you know that they're, oh fuck, they're going to get, and you're like, oh no, but that person over there is looking really Exactly. 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: This is exactly what it is. It's the desperate cry because you just you're at the end of your rod and you're like, Oh, I'm talking about cat litter.

Like I'm a crazy person talking about cat litter. This is not where I started. So when Tim Walz, the social studies teacher is like, it seems odd that you're focused on this. He's like, your kid loves you. Like I [01:24:00] just love Yeah. Fucking weird. How mad they are. 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: But to be fair to them, it is very weird in those circles to have your kid love you.

They must be like, that is fucking weird. Right? Everybody. Y'all are. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. No, my kid, I actually had a heart 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: attack in front of my kid and he did this funny bit where he didn't call the police. So yeah, normal. You 

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: have to wonder too, like how much they like focus group and workshopped. I know you are, but what am I as a response to this?

Like, uh, what about, uh, no, uh, no, we tried. I'm rubber in your glue. It's good. Again, when you're the werewolf, you're all of a sudden 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: you're trying to do too many calculations at once. You know, fucking no illusions knows you're the werewolf at the, at the pajama party. And you're like, yeah, but, but Lydia, did you see her?

She's, she's lying. She's lying. Liar. 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Or if you're a Heath's, uh, fiance, we just automatically assume you're [01:25:00] here. So, uh, next up is convicted felon, Dinesh D'Souza, who said the kid might have mental problems, but he's acting just like Tim Walz. So what's 

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Walz's 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: excuse? 

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Now wait a minute, just for clarity, did he write that himself or did he plagiarize it?

Yeah, no, it's hard to say who wrote 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: that one. 

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: He's a plagiarist, guys. 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: And then, and I obviously, I didn't include any of the just fuckin rando blue checks who gave Heil Hitler six dollars or whatever it is. Uh, Jay Weber? Conservative radio host who I think is going to lose his job over this, which is super funny.

Yeah. Oh, really? Uh, yeah. Said, sorry, but this is embarrassing for both father and son. If the Walz is represent today's American man, this country's screwed. Meet my son, Gus. He's a blubbering bitch boy. His 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: mother and I are very proud. Jesus fucking Christ. So, what I love about this, and I say that, uh, ironically, obviously, but I do think [01:26:00] it's important.

Again, I think it's okay to be uncomfortable by the ugly crying, as somebody who ugly cries. I get it. Sure! That's okay. But I do think that there's an important point to be made, that It's one thing to say, Oh, yeah, his neurodiversity may be a reason that this happened. Sure. Sure. I think there's a level that people are explaining that away in a way that makes me uncomfortable, where it's like, this guy, for example, went from that, that horrible fucking hate crime of tweet.

Oh, I didn't know he was neurodivergent, my bad. I didn't know he was neurodivergent. Right. Which tells me like. That's not it, man. I don't think, I don't think it's like, okay, any behavior like this is downright just something you can mock and ridicule in horrible terms, unless you find out there's a label you can put on the person and then you got to begrudgingly be like, Oh, I guess I'll just think those things and not say them out [01:27:00] loud.

You know, I thought I was being cruel to a, 

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: uh, perfectly neurotypical teen person. Yeah. I thought I was just attacking a 17 year old, just a normal 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: child. Also, I almost created a subcategory, but we didn't have time for it in the episode and I didn't want to divert us. The followup that all of these people have done is there's a clip of Walz kind of pulling Gus.

Out of the way of a camera because Guz is so overwhelmed and so excited that they're on stage He brings the whole family and so he sort of like yanks him very gently out of the way because he's about to walk right into a fucking standing cam And they have sped that up, right? The same thing they did with the reporter lady, right?

We've sped it up to make it look like he's trying to fucking judo toss sure his son, and they're like, shame on you for treating your disabled son that way. 

MUSIC: And the fact 

ELI BOSNICK - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: that, and like that first guy I read has done it. And like the fact that every single one of them have then tried to switch a roux [01:28:00] around to be like, he's not very nice to that son, you all apparently don't like it when I'm not nice.

Yeah. He's not 

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: being nice to this person. I'm actively being in a public space. 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: Like I love that. We just don't give a shit about that anymore. Sorry, Tom. Go ahead. I just love that. I feel like as a society we've been like, Oh no, you're being a fake piece of shit. We don't care about your fake arguments.

Yeah. Yeah. I, but 

TOM CURRY - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: like I, when I watched this, I was thinking like, God, I would love to live my life such that my kids were this proud ever. That's all any healthy person should think. Like what a win. What an incredible win as a dad to have ever done anything in your life to where when you're being honored for it, or you're being noticed for it, or you're being seen for it, that your kids are this full of pride because they love you that much.

Like if we don't live our lives, not just as Gus, but as Tim to be examples like that, like that should be what we're all working toward. Like I have no idea if my kids will ever see me and [01:29:00] feel that much pride, but like, I'm gonna really try. I'm going 

THOMAS SMITH - CO-HOST, DEAR OLD DADS: to really give it hell.

Are Men Okay Part 3 – SOME MORE NEWS - Air Date 5-22-24

 

CLIP: I can tell you right now, they talk about why does men not want to get married anymore. Men don't want to get married anymore. They come up with all these elaborate reasons. The main reason men don't want to get married anymore is because their girlfriend was with me.

for free. So why are they gonna marry her? That's that's the bottom line of it. Why would you? A white dress means virgin. Marry who? A girl from the club who your friends have been 

CODY JOHNSTON - HOST, SOME MORE NEWS: with? Oh yeah, you know how when men are like, I can't find a good woman to be my wife. They're talking about women who go to the club and have sex with Andrew Tate.

You know how like, there aren't any women who aren't those women. But also, what does it say about Andrew Tate that he considers himself some kind of blight on women that degrades their value if they come in contact with him. Like a social canker sore they should warn kids about at school. So, what Clearly not someone you should [01:30:00] listen to about meeting women.

And yet Andrew Tate has managed to take this grift to a cult like level. He offers his Hustler University that gives paying members access to special chat rooms that do nothing but create an echo chamber of men complaining about women. This language of simps and betas and alphas and cucks. This isn't how most of the world speaks.

Like yes, you might hear people using it at first ironically to make fun of you, And then it kind of seeps into their real language, but unironically, it's this weird esoteric terminology designed to isolate men further from mainstream society, almost guaranteeing that they will never successfully find a partner and be forever caught in their manosphere.

And if they do, they'll probably resent the word partner because it implies some sense of equality. So I guess more accurately, Almost guaranteeing that they will never successfully find a pet slave. There's a pretty telling article about a reporter who took one of these [01:31:00] Manosphere programs who noted, quote, Despite paying for a course dedicated to meeting more women, few of the men I talked to in LA seem to enjoy their real life company.

What they want more than anything is to be admired by other men. This, in the end, is the true purpose of all this acquisition and abundance. Women are viewed as a resource on a par with sports cars and infinity pools, something to show off and deploy to convey your alpha status to other men. So basically, these men sign up because they are lonely, and join a cult designed to make them more lonely.

This, in turn, makes them even more susceptible to the cult and its spirals. Meanwhile, they're pushing crypto almost as their own internal economy, and heavily tying this manosphere to the promise of economic prosperity. In fact, did you know that Hustler University offers commissions to their members if they get their friends to sign up?

I'm sorry, let me rephrase. In fact, did you know that [01:32:00] Hustler University is a pyramid scheme, as in, it's very explicitly that. It's a cult. Did you know that for the low, low price of 5, 000, you can join Andrew Tate's special war room, his secret club where you can, I don't know, prepare for some kind of war.

War, I guess. It sounds silly, but it's made Tate millions of dollars doing this, which is probably why that YouTuber Sneeko also got in on this, selling a creativity kit for 50 bucks a month to help other people go viral. 

CLIP: It's time to stop scrolling and start monetizing. These are the sheep, the bots I yell about.

This is the clientele that give all their money to the people at the top advertising while we sit here and scroll. Do you want to waste your time and sit here? I don't know why these people are here. Do you want to sit here all day or profit off of them? That's all I know how to do from scripting, writing, live streaming, being comfortable talking in public, vlogging.

That's what I want to teach you 

CODY JOHNSTON - HOST, SOME MORE NEWS: on this [01:33:00] course. I'm sorry, but before we get into stuff that is way more relevant. You don't know why people are there? I don't even know. It's a crowd of people sitting in like an arena type environment. Look for a sign, dude. I bet there's a sign that says why people are there.

I don't want to harp on this. There are more important things to talk about, but I'm going to because man, this guy is so f ing silly. I don't know why people are even here. Look around. Ask somebody. Hey, are you tired of being online all the time? Well, you got to get out in the real world. So here I am, but why is everybody else also here?

Oh well, hey online people out there, I don't know why these people are out in the real world, but they're sheep. Like, this is just a theory, but maybe men are lonely because they're incapable of asking a stranger Hey, what's this crowd of people doing here? Anyway, the actual point of me bringing up this Creativity Kit from a [01:34:00] guy who I don't even think could define the word creativity, and if he were to ask someone why a bunch of people were sitting in an amphitheater, it would only be for content with a capital C, because he capital sucks s Well, the actual point of showing you that is that it's just scam stuff.

It's scam, it's just scams. It's that Riddler guy you saw in 3AM infomercials. They aren't actually good with money or even women. There are sex workers who have talked about how these guys will hire them to pretend to be their sexual conquests. One of these grifters, a Twitter account called Shades of Game, even admitted that he would go to clubs, pay for a VIP table, and invite women to take pictures with him.

It's just. A grift. It's so laughable and obvious, but according to these guys, the fact that I'm saying this is just another victory. To quote this article about Andrew Tate, In one guide, Hustlers University students are told that attracting comments and [01:35:00] controversy is the key to success. What you ideally want is a mix of 60 70 percent fans and 40 30 percent haters.

You want arguments. You want war. It's a war, you see, for attention. Though to them, it's for the culture. And by framing it this way, by working the haters into your grift, you've made yourself bulletproof from anyone laughing at your obvious lies and bulls t. The more people laugh, you see, the more Successful you are, after all, a huge portion of this manosphere economy is simply attracting any attention as we just talked about in our last episode, they ultimately just want engagement and they absolutely don't care how they get it.

In fact, I'm not sure they even think about the harm they are doing to young men and they are doing a lot of harm. Like, get ready for the saddest clip in the world, sadder than the ending of Homeward Bound where Shadow gets trapped in the hole. 

CLIP: What did you take? F the woman. [01:36:00] F the woman. What? No, no, no. No, no.

Wait, wait, wait. We love women. We love women. But not, not like transgenders. Yes, 

CODY JOHNSTON - HOST, SOME MORE NEWS: sir. We love everybody. No, no. F it. That there is Sneeko, meeting some of his fans, and perhaps realizing the extent to which he's ruined these extremely young boys. For money. The culmination of his grift. His legacy is a handful of shitty children screaming hate at him at a baseball game.

And I don't know, if that doesn't haunt him for life, I'm not sure what would. So, you know, f k that guy. His name sounds like a Star Wars alien, and that's the best thing about him. Also, f k Andrew Tate, obviously, and f k all the other weird Manosphere grifters. Or rather, don't f k them. They're gross. Young men are lost, and they are selling them maps to nowhere.

SECTION C: THE FALL OUT OF STOICISM

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: Next up, Section C: [01:37:00] The Fallout of Stoicism.

“BoyMom” Author Looks at Raising Sons in an Age of “Impossible Masculinity” Part 3 - Amanpour and Company - Air Date 7-9-24

 

MICHEL MARTIN: It seems like what you have found out, um, in both in your book and in an excerpt that has appeared in the times that has gotten.

A lot of attention is that boys are hurting sort of describe kind of like the top line surprise for you about just what, how much boys and young men are hurting. 

RUTH WHIPPMAN: Yeah. So I interviewed many boys of different backgrounds, you know, economically, racially, uh, geographically, and The theme that kept coming up over and over again that really surprised me was just how lonely they were.

Um, and partly that was to do with like actual isolation and that showing up in a lot of data as well about boys spending a lot of time on screens and replacing that kind of real life socializing with, um, with a screen based socializing. So boys are becoming material and materially more isolated. Also, even [01:38:00] the ones who did have a lot of friends who did hang out with them felt that they couldn't really find that kind of intimate connection.

They couldn't talk to their friends about those intimate, personal, sort of more, um, you know, more vulnerable things. And those were kind of the old scripts of masculinity that were very much still in circulation. So I think the top line was kind of learning this, but also I think these boys felt very shut down.

You know, they felt shut down from that old system of masculinity, which was like. Man up be tough. Don't show your feelings. But also from these new kind of more progressive voices where it was like, you know, you're a man, you're privileged. It's not it's not your turn to speak. You need to be quiet and let somebody else have a turn.

So they kind of just really didn't know. How to be how to express themselves. Tell me some about some of the boys that you met. There's a really, really wide range, not just in terms of, you know, economic and social and racial backgrounds, but also just in the kind of type of kids that we're talking about, young men, you know, some of them were.[01:39:00] 

very sort of isolated and slightly socially awkward. Some of them were, you know, these popular cool kids. But what was really interesting was more of the similarities in what they were saying than the differences. I think they all felt quite hemmed in and quite oppressed by these ideas of masculinity that were being forced on them.

So they all felt that it was very hard for them to, like, express their emotions. And Even for them to kind of name their own emotions to themselves. So it wasn't even they found it really hard, even to get to the point where they could figure out what they were feeling, let alone, um, tell their friends about it.

So that was one thing. They felt kind of isolated. They felt like they couldn't talk to their friends. A lot of them used the same expression. You know, kids from very different backgrounds used the same expression with me, which is, you can never let your guard down. They used the exact same phrase to describe what it was like to be a boy amongst male peers.

You know, that you were always on the verge of, like, getting knocked down or saying the wrong thing [01:40:00] or saying something that would, like, emasculate you in some way. 

MICHEL MARTIN: So is there a particular age group that you found? To be sort of most in distress. 

RUTH WHIPPMAN: Yeah. So I think what I was looking at was this kind of micro generation of boys that were really hitting puberty, right?

As me too happened and then went through the COVID pandemic, which obviously accelerated a lot of these kinds of trends, but you know, they were in evidence before. And that sort of micro generation is now of voting age there of college age, you know, so if you were 11, um, when me to take off, you're 18.

And I think that generation we're showing that they're moving to the Right. Politically, they're becoming isolated. They're becoming resentful. I think they don't know their place in the world. They're dropping out of college or not going to college. Um, in the same way that girls are, there's this whole problem with failure to launch that this is becoming increasingly serious.

You know, that, um, while kind of young women are doing things like finding partners and going [01:41:00] to college and leaving their parents houses. Young men are increasingly being left behind, so it was that generation that I really wanted to look at and just see, you know, what's it like to grow up in this moment, you know, this very complex and very fraught cultural moment.

MICHEL MARTIN: One of the points that you make is, is that a lot of these constructs just don't mean anything to kids that age, 

RUTH WHIPPMAN: right? So I think this idea of privilege, you know, it's a very real thing. And we need to educate our boys in the history of patriarchy, the history of privilege, the history of gendered violence, and all of these things.

But they are children, you know, they're not actually responsible for those things. things that happened. They didn't do this stuff. And so I think, you know, when they look at their female peers, the concept of privilege doesn't really mean so much to them. They're sort of like, well, where is all this power that we're supposed to have?

You know, this idea that you need to be quiet because you're so privileged. And they're looking at themselves, their high school kids, they have no economic capital. It doesn't really mean so much to them that [01:42:00] somebody on wall street. Who's male will get a better job or a better salary than somebody who's female on Wall Street, you know, is just so remote to them.

And I think that those those very blunt, very sort of broad brush ideas of like privilege and power and oppression. I don't necessarily apply to teenagers in quite the same way. 

SECTION D: DATING LIFE

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: You've reached Section D: Dating Life, containing discussion of sex as well as violence.

Rough Sex is the New Normal Nearly 2/3 of Women Have Been Choked During Sex! - Rena Malik M.D. - Air Date 5-10-24

 

RENA MALIK, M.D. - HOST, RENA MALIK, M.D.: Let's talk about porn How is porn contributing to this rise of rough sex and how is the availability and accessibility of porn in your opinion?

Or based on science and some I know you've looked at how people learn about sex through porn. How is that affecting? 

DEBBY HERBENICK: Pornography is so widely available and just like many parents don't know that rough [01:43:00] sex is increasing. Many parents, not all, but many parents don't know what today's porn looks like. When they think of porn, they might think of something that they saw in the 80s or 90s or early 2000s.

It's a 

RENA MALIK, M.D. - HOST, RENA MALIK, M.D.: really good point. 

DEBBY HERBENICK: And porn has changed. And even though there is still porn, still some really nice high quality stuff out there. I mean, 14 year olds are not looking for like queer feminist porn. And even if they're finding it, they're not, they don't have the credit card to pay for it. Right. So there are differences with what is available on the internet, freely available, freely available in really being like pushed on you.

Right. And so the sort of free widespread mainstream stuff is really, really important. really aggressive. And so there's lots of research showing like, lots of aggression, especially directed toward women, um, for like porn that features men and women having sex. Like women again are often going to be the targets of like the choking and the hitting and the punching and the spanking and the name calling, like the really, [01:44:00] really, um, derogatory names that some of the women in our studies.

Say has been more harmful to them than some of the physical stuff that's happened because they may be called a name that triggers up memories of being abused either physically or sexually when they were younger, or that it just suddenly, even if they don't have abuse histories, they might, the name might feel so bad to them that it suddenly like it like flips a switch and things, wait, is this like an okay hookup or is this person going to hurt me?

Because why would like a. Person who liked me called me this horrible name. So there's all these things that they, that are happening in pornography and pornography is seen at really young ages. There was a common sense media report that came out in 2023 that showed that on average, kids are seeing porn at around age 12.

And I think we really have to think about that. Phrase on average, it's even earlier if it's on average, that means there's lots of seven, eight, nine, 10, 11 year olds too. And yes, there's 13 and ups also, but there's a [01:45:00] lot of children, elementary age school children who are seeing pornography. And we also know that teens are waiting on average longer to have partnered sex.

So what does that mean? If you start seeing porn when you're eight or 10 or 12, But you don't have partnered sex till you're 16, 17, 18, 19, 20. Well, it may mean that you are watching pornography and kind of soaking in these like lessons and scripts about how to have sex for five to 10 years before you ever kiss somebody.

So what we hear from a lot of young people is that those early experiences when they do have partnered sex are often really rough. They are sometimes scary. They are sometimes very much what many of us would consider to be assault. You know, it can take time to realize like what you want. It can take a lot of experience and education and confidence to feel like you can assert, I don't want this anymore, or I don't like this, or here's how I would rather be making out or having sex.

[01:46:00] So even though some young people are standing up for themselves and saying, I don't like this, it can take time. So they may have experiences that really don't feel well for three months, six months, a year, two years, five years, you know, before they really develop in a way that they can create a better sex lives for themselves.

So I really, you know, and I want to say, know much about that path yet. We are starting to see some studies. There was a study out of Sweden a couple years ago where they interviewed 16 and 17 year old girls about pornography. It wasn't about rough sex. It was about pornography. And the authors came at it from the perspective of, Hey, this is like, Sweden's a feminist country.

What does it mean to be a young woman in a feminist country? Feminist, like very feminist identified country and yet to be like watching porn. And so it was really focused on that. It was really interesting, but you could see some evidence in those, these young women's interviews where they would say, yeah, I mean, my boyfriend and I, when we start, you know, when we got together, we were doing all of these things.

And in one young woman's own words, she [01:47:00] said, you know, that we're not normal, like choking, and then they kind of looked at each other at some point and said, We don't want to do this anymore. Like this doesn't feel good to us. So I think we've got to keep in mind that pornography is very widely and freely available.

It is often seen by young children. It's often seen by accident by young children. They're not always looking for it when they are looking for it. They're sometimes finding it because they just wanted to learn about sex. Like maybe somebody told them like really good information about like how babies are made, but they were like, I can't figure it out, right?

So they wanted to see like, how does that happen? Or they wanted to see breast or vulvas or penises. But for lots of reasons, kids are getting access to adult materials and not just adult materials, but ones that are really aggressive. And we need to think about that. I think, you know, one of the things I advise and yes, your kid for parents is even for like, elementary school age kids.

If you're dropping your kid off for a play date or a sleepover, talk with the other parents about what device access is going to look like during [01:48:00] that play date or sleepover. If you're getting kids dropped off at your house, make sure that they're not on devices. You don't need them to be like accidentally, you know, stumbling upon porn and getting a phone call later from the other parents saying, why did my kids see?

So we have to like have these conversations with kids and often at younger ages than many of us who are parents thought we would be having those conversations, but it's better for it to come from us for us to prepare them and so that they can know like, Oh, if I see this, I can walk away. I can talk to you because even though you didn't want me to see this, I'm not going to get in trouble.

You know, I can come to you with questions like we want that. for our kids, that they can come to us and we can help them sort it out and answer questions about what they might have seen and how they feel about it. But we can't pretend it's not out there and that it's not happening. 

The emotional toll of dating apps and why they're no longer about finding love - The Conversation Weekly - Air Date 9-5-24

 

GEMMA WARE - HOST, THE CONVERSATION WEEKLY: So now we're talking today about dating apps and the way they're influencing [01:49:00] the behavior of the people who use them.

This is based on a story that you worked on a little while back, but what got you thinking about 

NIHAL ELHADI - EDITOR, CONVERSATION: this topic? I was interested in the ways masculinity and what it meant to be a man was changing, mainly through social media. The internet. So I commissioned an article from Trina Orchard, who's an associate professor in the School of Health Studies at Western University in London, Canada.

And Trina's book, Sticky Sexy Sad, looked at her experiences in online dating. And she does this particular 

GEMMA WARE - HOST, THE CONVERSATION WEEKLY: type of research called self ethnography. Some people might not really know what that is, so how would you 

CAROLINA BANDINELLI: describe it? So Trina is trained as an anthropologist and ethnography is a research methodology that examines how a specific culture engages in their particular customs and practices.

Self ethnography centers the researcher with it and locates them within that culture. And so what [01:50:00] Trina was doing was using her own personal experiences. with online dating and dating apps and then using her critical skills as a researcher to analyze and explore what she was experiencing in real life.

And she had some fascinating 

GEMMA WARE - HOST, THE CONVERSATION WEEKLY: findings, so we're going to hear about them, but thanks Nahal for coming on and introducing her. Thank you for having me.

CAROLINA BANDINELLI: I started using dating apps in late August of 2017. I had been I've been single for over a year by my choice, and had done a lot of personal healing. I had been sober for about three or four years by that point, and was ready to get back out in the romance situation, environment, and that's why I began using dating apps.

GEMMA WARE - HOST, THE CONVERSATION WEEKLY: At 45, Trina found herself in a position where few of her friends had tried dating apps. I am such an 

CAROLINA BANDINELLI: old fashioned stone age person, and it was quite terrifying thinking about doing dating in a totally different way than I had for the [01:51:00] majority of my life. So it took a lot of courage to make that decision to even download an app.

GEMMA WARE - HOST, THE CONVERSATION WEEKLY: Over the course of her dating life journey, Trina had to learn to adapt to the social codes that people use to communicate with on dating apps. 

CAROLINA BANDINELLI: And people were advising me to develop a thick skin because it's just a game and people are terrible and don't take it too seriously. But I wanted to connect and so I was taking it 

GEMMA WARE - HOST, THE CONVERSATION WEEKLY: seriously.

Trina's day job as an anthropologist quickly proved useful. Rather than simply participating in online interactions, she started to see them as a valuable opportunity to study online dating culture. 

CAROLINA BANDINELLI: I'm trained to look for patterns as a scholar, and I just found it so bewildering and fascinating that it quickly became a situation where it was, yes, I was on these apps to meet people, but I was also very fascinated by them as a culture in the palm of my hand.

And so I began to Look at it also as [01:52:00] a kind of project and that helped me, um, survive it, frankly, because I stayed in the game longer than I probably should have, because I was really dedicated to understanding as much of this cultural environment as I could. 

GEMMA WARE - HOST, THE CONVERSATION WEEKLY: Her experiences eventually led her to publish her book where she shares and analyzes her interactions and sheds light on online dating culture more broadly.

So you recently wrote a book called Sticky, Sexy, Sad, Swipe Culture, The Darker Side of Dating Apps. What do you mean in that darker side of dating apps phrase that you've used in your title? 

CAROLINA BANDINELLI: The darker side of dating apps refers to the widespread misogyny. It's streamed through these platforms and the people who use them, it refers to the way that the algorithm really shapes users experiences and it's quite addictive using these things, swiping and the way that users are rewarded for being extra productive on dating apps and also punished when we're not, [01:53:00] because you're getting people you've already said no to, as opposed to all the fresh kind of new matches in the area.

Yeah. And in terms of the darker side of dating apps, the profound amount of labor, emotional, technical that is required to find success on dating apps. At least that certainly was my experience. Yeah, it was bewildering because they're a microcosm of our society. You know, they're not. a totally different enclave or this little distinctive bubble that's just fun and games and love quite to the opposite.

GEMMA WARE - HOST, THE CONVERSATION WEEKLY: Some of these experiences left lasting impressions both for better and for worse. 

CAROLINA BANDINELLI: A couple of the men I met, they'd morphed into really significant relationships. I didn't fall madly, deeply in love with all of them, but there were shades of love, and that was really important to my evolution as a woman who was coming into herself, as a sober person, who was also finding different kinds of success [01:54:00] in my intimate life.

GEMMA WARE - HOST, THE CONVERSATION WEEKLY: To protect the identities of the different men she stated as part of her auto ethnographic research, Trina uses colours to refer to them throughout the book. 

CAROLINA BANDINELLI: The book is full of different vignettes, 13 different men who I feature as a way to trace the evolution that I went through in my dating app experience, from the first time I got ghosted to what dating was like during the pandemic.

Tell me about that first time you got ghosted. Well, it was mortifying, wasn't it? Right? Being ghosted is terrible. In the vignette, I traced The first hot kind of interactions that I had with this individual and how I was very excited and hopeful, also a little bit of trepidation, but I wanted to go for it and I wanted to meet this individual.

And then he vanished and I have no idea why, but in this instance, I was able to gather a little bit of additional information because he then matched with me three more times in the course of a month. And [01:55:00] I kept matching with him because. I wanted to meet him. It was the only way that I could connect with him to try and ask him, why are you doing this?

And I mean, the answer was woefully unsatisfactory. It was just like, Oh, I'm still in something with my ex. And it's like, yeah, but why are you connecting with me then? That has nothing to do with me in a way. I didn't get any kind of good answer. And then they just disappear and you have no recourse. You can't even text them or ask them why, because they don't exist anymore.

And a lot of people laugh about ghosting. Oh, yeah, it's just, you know, part of the game. And it's true. It is part of the game, but it feels terrible. And so that vignette is funny. And it's also really embarrassing because when it happened, I emailed Bumble customer service. Because I didn't know that I had been ghosted.

And people laugh whenever I read this one, but then they also, they remember the first time it happened to them too.

Rough Sex is the New Normal Nearly 2/3 of Women Have Been Choked During Sex! Part 2 - Rena Malik M.D. - Air Date 5-10-24

 

RENA MALIK, M.D. - HOST, RENA MALIK, M.D.: [01:56:00] This is, I mean, I'm, I'm just, I'm, my mind is a little bit blown today. Um, you know, you did do a study in 2021 where you looked at how children and, Teenagers used porn for education and I want to share the stats. So in terms of learning about sex when it was adolescent age, it was about 8. 4%, which is still a high number, but it went up to almost a fourth, 24.

5 percent in the 18 to 24 year old group. One in four young adults who don't have fully formed brains are learning sex from porn alone. Like, that is insane. 

DEBBY HERBENICK: Or primarily from porn. Primarily. Yeah, like that's a big influence. And it's, it is, it is astounding because we always say too in sex, in sex education, like, who is the best person to teach you, like how to have sex with them?

It's that person. It's not pornography because everyone varies. And what one person likes in terms of how they are kissed or how they're touched or how they're licked or how you have intercourse or whatever. It will [01:57:00] vary from person to person. And so, so many young people, I think, feel like they have to be, you know, a great partner, right?

They have to be impressive. And there's a lot of pressure on young men to be, like, really good at sex and to somehow have this knowledge just, like, naturally imparted. Like, right away. And it's, it's not how it works, right? And so, so we really need to have, make more space for development, for trial and error, but for people to feel figure those things out with the support of books of like really good sex education because porn is something that many young people will go to or rely on or somebody sends them a link and they check it out.

I mean, I've, I remember one of the most heartbreaking ones, and I think I wrote about this and yes, your kid, cause it was so impactful to me. Was a young woman who shared in an interview that we did. It was about choking and rough sex. Pornography came up and it turned out she had started to look at it like an elementary school.

And it would be because there was a boy that was like, you know, her boyfriend, they weren't sexually active at the time, but he had shared with [01:58:00] her that he addicted to porn and elementary and elementary school. He felt like he was addicted to porn and she was so curious in her words, kind of like what these pornography actresses had that she didn't that elementary school elementary school that she went online to learn this.

And that was her introduction to porn. And it just blew my mind like that. She was a kid, you know, I think like fifth or sixth grade or something. And she was a kid and thinking, What does this adult pornography actress have, you know, that I don't, and she was comparing herself to those women who are actresses, I mean, who are adults and her and, you know, sexually explicit, you know, pornographic films and, and just, I mean, it broke my heart and, you know, and she was like, uh, Really smart kid from actually a very like wealthy like highly educated like somewhat conservative community that I'm familiar with.

So I mean, I knew where she was from. And I thought, you know, there are a lot of people who would say, Oh, no, like, you know, not [01:59:00] my not my kid. And that's actually why like, the book is Yes, your kid, because so many people think that whether it's choking, or rough sex, or pornography, or taking sharing images, many of us aren't familiar with the world as it is today, because it's not the world as it was when we grew up.

Yeah. And it is. It's so easy to think, Oh, it's just kids who are vulnerable to exploitation or abuse. And we have to say, you know, this is the world and we need to be a part of these conversations so we can support our kids. 

RENA MALIK, M.D. - HOST, RENA MALIK, M.D.: Yeah, it is. It is so important. And I think, again, digging your head in the sand and acting like it's not there is not going to fix the problem.

I always share this because I think it's so important. It's really impactful for people who grew up our generation or older when we grew up watching porn was challenging. Like you had to find a tape, find a VCR, find a room where no one was and actually be able to watch that. Right? That was one. Two was you'd have to find a magazine, hide it somewhere where nobody would find it.

Find it, be able to again, find a quiet room where no one is going to walk in on you and [02:00:00] look at it. Whatever it is. It was extremely challenging to obtain, whereas now it is so easy, so easy to find freely accessible porn that is also very alarming. And you talk about this in your book, but it will talk about like incest and we'll talk about with siblings or mother in laws or whatever, like just very things that are, you know, Not normal and not appropriate, right?

Like incest is not appropriate and there's a reason that it's not appropriate, but like it's wild to me, right? And I get that some people like they see the forbidden thing. I think when you're an adult, you can see that this is not, this is just for entertainment. It is not real life and you can differentiate that.

But when you are not fully formed in your brain, you can't, you don't know. It's wild. 

DEBBY HERBENICK: Yeah. And you know, I have not seen a lot of this here in the U. S. yet. There's also not really good research on it, so I don't know. But I do have colleagues in, you know, Australia, New Zealand, who have shared that in terms of the incest issue, that they have seen increases.

And, you know, they're hearing this from [02:01:00] counselors who work with kids and teens, that they've heard it from like youth workers, from law enforcement, who have seen increases in the number of young people that are, are having kind of, you know, incest experiences and non consensual ones, and that. you know, having watched incest porn seems to be connected to those.

And so they are doing, you know, some of the, my colleagues are doing a really good job of trying to like educate parents and communities and schools around these issues around like pornography. Cause it is, it's a, it's a popular genre for some people. And, um, and so what messages that sends kids that that's who you're supposed to, you know, explore with sexually, like it's, it's not healthy.

It's not. Okay. Um, it's really harmful to a lot of young people. And so we have heard, I mean, I've heard a little bit about this in the U S, but I don't think we've had enough attention on it. Um, here. So I don't know how much it's happening here, but I think it's so important to be mindful of because yes, the genres are things like that.

There's other genres, genres that are like, some people can't believe these things are real, [02:02:00] but they are. You know, like gagging somebody with a penis to the point where like you vomit. Um, and I had a very small role in working on the documentary Hot Girls Wanted, like a, you know, nearly a decade ago. And that was one of the genres, you know, that came up and, um, and I think one of the things again, being like in the sexuality field for so long, like I have met people who were involved either as like onset photographers or as actresses in pornography in the eighties and nineties.

And when you hear those people's stories, they say like, We weren't doing any of these things back then, right? Those of us who, you know, anybody who did like happen to see a magazine or a video in the 80s or 90s and stuff, like that stuff wasn't even being shown. And many of those actors will say, yeah, we were never asked to do those things.

Or even if you did, like you might've been paid such an extraordinary amount of money because it was so And so stigmatized and not Oh, you know, in some of these things just didn't happen. So whereas now there's such a competition and like the online doing it for free. [02:03:00] Yeah. And that like a lot of people who work in that industry now say, Oh yeah, we've had to like be sort of harder and rougher and more shocking to get the views.

And so the stuff that's out there. is trickier than it was 20 or 30 years ago. 

SECTION E: SOCIAL EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: And finally, Section E: Social-Emotional Development.

Rethinking Boyhood What Moms Should Know (with Guest Ruth Whippman) Part 2 - What Fresh Hell Podcast - Air Date 6-17-24

 

AMY - HOST, WHAT FRESH HELL PODCAST: You talk about the social time that boys have when they play with each other, that, um, as screen time has taken over more and more of our kids lives, that, uh, boys are even more likely to displace social time with screen time.

Um, and having two boys and a girl, that's definitely true in my house, I would say, that the, the two children who are more married to their screens, um, are my two male children. And again, do you think that's something that's essentialist or do [02:04:00] you think that's something that's socialized or is it a little bit of both?

RUTH WHIPPMAN: I mean, I don't, I think, I, I, I can't say for sure, but I know that the socialization piece is a big one and that's the one that we have control over. But the essential piece, you know, the nature piece, we'd. You know, we don't really have a lot of say over that, but there is a big socialization thing in the screen time thing.

Cause I think it's very easy for boys to use screens as a social crutch. So I don't know how old your boys are, but I think in like teenage culture, it's like playing video games online and like, um, having a friend over and being on the PlayStation. Cause I think that kind of face to face contact is quite hard for boys.

They're not socialized to do it. They're not given the skills to kind of really like talk. In that kind of emotional face to face way that girls are taught. And so these screens come along and it's really easy to just like, Oh, okay, a screen, this is going to smooth the kind of anxiety of the situation.

So you are seeing this like displacement phenomenon [02:05:00] is like quite significantly worse with boys at the moment than it is with girls. Boys are spending more time on screens than girls are, and they're spending much less time socializing. And I think it's something we really need to correct for. 

MARGARET - HOST, WHAT FRESH HELL PODCAST: So in the book, you have a lot of practical suggestions about, um, What we need to be, especially modeling, I think, right?

For our boys, a lot of this work, unfortunately, as we always say, we'd love to just tell them something or give them a pamphlet. We need to model this stuff for them. And one of the big things we need to model is, um, emotional intimacy. So let's talk about that a little bit. Why boys need it. And what it looks like from, from our 

RUTH WHIPPMAN: model.

Yeah. So I think this, this starts right from birth. There's all these, this research that shows that parents sort of unwittingly project all these like masculine qualities onto boys. So when a baby boy cries, the parents [02:06:00] and people are more likely to see him as angry. Whereas when a girl cries, they see her as sad and that sort of fascinating.

Yeah. And like people handle boys more roughly. They sort of rough house with them. You know, and people have, mothers especially, have much more kind of emotionally involved conversations with their daughters than they do with their sons, right from the beginning. And they tend to speak to boys in these like shorter sentences, even a different vocabulary.

They don't use so many emotion words, they use like competition words, winning words, those kinds of things. This is frightening because as you're 

MARGARET - HOST, WHAT FRESH HELL PODCAST: saying it and my house, I'm like, yeah, that tracks, that tracks. It's all perfect. 

RUTH WHIPPMAN: Yeah. And, and me too. I mean, and I, I don't have a daughter, but I can imagine it would just be so much because this is what's been modeled to us.

And most of these things that we do are unconscious. So I think the first thing is like becoming aware of those patterns and just thinking like, Oh, do I do that? Looking inside ourselves and thinking, Oh yes, that, you know, that seems right. And then trying to correct for it. So I think really [02:07:00] engaging with boys about their emotions, which means listening to them.

And I think, you know, especially in this time of this sort of the culture wards and it's sort of like, Oh, you don't want to listen to any of boys problems because you know, they're so privileged and actually we should be listening to girls, but it's. It's really about hearing what they actually say, empathizing with them, talking to them about feelings, using that emotional vocabulary, exposing them to role models of good friendships and relational stuff between.

Boys and men, so whether that's in life or in art, you know, art being, you know, books, TV shows, movies, and just sort of keeping this all in mind. And then the other thing is just kind of nurture, you know, as I say, I think, um, it's settled, but there's like a real measurable difference in the kind of like nurturing care that baby boys and young boys get and young girls get, you know, it's like, we tend to see, you know, boys as sort of bad, not sad.

You know, that's one of the [02:08:00] phrases that I use in the book, but it's like, that starts, you know, from the angry baby boys and goes on through discipline problems in school and, you know, behavioral issues and the way that teachers deal with kids. Um, you know, and I think if we can actually look at the emotions that are driving boys behavior and sort of see them as these emotional relational beings and see ourselves, you know, as part of that, then I think that's, You know, a huge part of it.

AMY - HOST, WHAT FRESH HELL PODCAST: There's a quote, uh, from this book that I, uh, put in Borg's. I loved it so much. He said, I'm willing to be annoying in service of this project. And the project that you're talking about is sort of questioning. Now, why is the boy not the one who can, uh, you know, be the good friend to the girl who's lonely, you know, that you question the little things and you're willing to be annoying.

You're willing to have your kids sort of roll your eyes at 

RUTH WHIPPMAN: you. You become a bit of an eye roll with all this stuff. And, you know, my mom is like a feminist in the seventies and eighties. [02:09:00] You know, there was a lot of conversation about, you know, that sexist and, you know, I couldn't have Barbies and I couldn't have pink and all of that.

And I, I'm not that extreme with my boys, but I think it's like calling these things out, like just naming them. You know, we were watching the babysitters club on Netflix the other day. I don't know if you know that series and it's like, you know, all the babysitters are girls and they sort of say quite a lot of negative things about boys just in passing.

And it's like, you know, if Netflix were making a show about, you know, that was like Based on a book from the eighties that was called like science club and it was all about boys. Um, you know, so they were like four boys in science club in the like 2023 or 24 reboot of it. There would be some girls in science club But like in babysitter's club, there's no boys.

So I think, you know, I want to say to my boys, look, you babysitter, you know, it's a great way to earn money. It's a great way to care for kids. It's really fun. And like, why do you think there are no boys in here? Why do you think they're saying these negative things about [02:10:00] boys and just like pointing out because otherwise it just passes by, you know, just applying that critical lens.

MARGARET - HOST, WHAT FRESH HELL PODCAST: I really like that approach because it feels sometimes when you have these conversations, it feels like. Well, someday all of society will change or we'll just be stuck here. And, and those kind of conversations feel to me very accessible. Yeah. Very, I mean, I, I'm definitely having conversations about gender and expression that I never had as a child with my kids.

Uh, the world changing and the conversations are changing, but also just modeling that you are available to question things, I think is so smart for kids in such a wide range of areas because it says, I'm not even sure the answer, but let's ask this question together about whether this role is correct, because I think you talk about in the book, uh, which we haven't [02:11:00] really touched on.

Some of the, like Andrew Tate influence the kind of masculine influence that is starting to affect boys, that boys are kind of falling under the, uh, influence of some influencers who are far right in cell. And I think one of the solutions is the constant willingness to have conversations about masculinity and what it looks like.

Because if you don't have them, these conversations are going to come to you at some point, because I don't know many boys who haven't at some point come home and said, actually, what if the world is this other way? 

RUTH WHIPPMAN: Oh, absolutely. And you can understand why they think that, you know, it's like, why don't we have men's history month or, you know, what, you know, it's a complicated time to be a boy.

It's like, they didn't know the history, you know, they weren't there for the whole history Patriarchy and oppression against women. And I think it's like, we've got to treat those conversations [02:12:00] kindly. I think it's, um, you know, that, that I think that you can kind of panic and be like, well, you know, shut up, you know, that, that isn't open for debate and, you know, a good, and, and I think, um, we should listen to those feelings, you know, I think it probably is quite hard right now to, to be a boy and hearing about everybody else's like marginalized experience and not your own.

We have to give them the context and help them to understand why it's happening like that, but also I think there is a space for their feelings as well. 

Credits

 

JAY TOMLINSON - HOST, BEST OF THE LEFT: That's going to be it for today. As always keep the comments coming in, I would love to hear your thoughts or questions about today's topic or anything else. You can leave a voicemail or send us a text at (202) 999-3991, or simply email me to [email protected]. 

The additional sections of the show included clips from Dear Old Dads, [02:13:00] Some More News. Amanpour and Company, Raina Malik MD, The Conversation Weekly, and What Fresh Hell. Further details are in the show notes. 

Thanks everyone for listening. Thanks to Deon Clark and Erin Clayton for their research work for the show and participation in our bonus episodes. Thanks to our transcriptionist quartet, Ken, Brian, Ben, and Andrew for their volunteer work, helping put our transcripts together. Thanks to Amanda Hoffman for all of her work behind the scenes and her bone show co-hosting. And thanks to those who already support the show by becoming a member or purchasing gift memberships. You can join them by signing up today at BestOfTheLeft.com/support, through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcast app. Membership is how you get instant access to our incredibly good and often funny weekly bonus episodes, in addition to there being no ads and chapter markers in all of our regular episodes, all through your regular podcast player. You'll find that link in the show notes, along with a link to join our Discord community, where you can also continue the discussion. 

So [02:14:00] coming to you from far outside, the conventional wisdom of Washington DC, my name is Jay!, and this has been the Best of the Left Podcast coming to twice weekly thanks entirely to the members and donors to the show from BestOfTheLeft.com

 


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