Does Psychology Have A Negative View Of Masculinity? - Dr John Barry

Dr John Barry is a Chartered Psychologist and Professional Researcher, Co-Founder of The Centre for Male Psychology and a leading expert in male psychology including men’s mental health. Men and women both need help with their mental wellbeing, now more than ever. Yet there seems to be a particular blindness when it comes to men's mental health and how to treat it, plus how to effectively communicate with men about their issues. Expect to learn why traditional masculinity is seen as problematic by the American Psychological Association, the most important factors that impact the wellbeing of a sample of over 4,000 men, the unique challenges that male psychology poses, how important it is for men to have a partner in life, whether men staring at women should be made illegal and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 5 Free Travel Packs, Free Liquid Vitamin D and more from Athletic Greens at https://athleticgreens.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get 20% discount on House Of Macadamias’ nuts at https://houseofmacadamias.com/modernwisdom (use code MW20) Extra Stuff: Check out The Centre For Male Psychology - https://www.centreformalepsychology.com/ Follow Dr Barry on Twitter - https://twitter.com/MalePsychology Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom #psychology #masculinity #mentalhealth - 00:00 Intro 00:18 The Need for a Centre for Male Psychology 08:09 Does Male Gender Blindness Exist? 16:05 What Therapists Are Taught About Traditional Masculinity 22:39 Dr Barry’s Thoughts on the Term ‘Toxic Masculinity’ 29:00 How Society’s View of Masculinity Impacts Male Well-being 40:38 When Did Psychology’s Negative Bias Towards Men Begin? 44:14 Outcome of Boys from Fatherless Homes 47:19 Unique Challenges for Men in Managing Mental Health 57:16 The Rise & Consequences of Loneliness in Men 1:06:59 Where to Find Dr Barry - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Men are shockingly misrepresented in the media and academia and the way that people presume that men are, I think is a million miles from it. We take the examples of the worst possible men, the worst possible behaviour, and we generalise it to all men. And then we go around to schools, warning boys to not be that guy.

• 0:18Chris Williamson?

  Why did you found the Centre for Male Psychology?

• 0:22Speaker 00

  There's a couple of reasons. One is the general need for more accurate information on men's psychology. And the other was because we had already got a male psychology section of the British Psychological Society that was facing the professional people dealing with psychology and men's mental health. But we also needed to have something that was more public facing. Because I've found over the years, I've been doing this about 10 years, 12 years now, that there's actually a lot more interest and awareness, funnily enough, about men's psychology in the general public than there is within the profession of psychology. I was quite surprised when I'd started to understand this.

• 1:06Speaker 00

  But not only are people outside psychology more interested in male psychology or men's mental health, but there seems to have more insights than a lot of people who are in psychology. I say that and I feel a bit embarrassed for my profession.

• 1:20Chris Williamson?

  Why do you think that is?

• 1:23Speaker 00

  Well, I think that there's a lot of it is the education, in inverted commas, that we get about gender, especially in psychology. Part of it is that we, there's a bit of a blind spot in that we don't really even focus on men as a topic of interest at any level of psychology education. The one exception now is the University of Sunderland has got a module, an undergraduate module on male psychology, which gets brilliant feedback, but it's the one piece of a module in the world that focuses on male psychology. So we have, on one side, a blind spot to even looking in that direction. But also, when we do look in that direction, we often have a kind of, see it through a

• 2:08Speaker 00

  particular lens that sort of distorts what people see. So we tend to... Um, see men as as being really the architects of their own problems. Um, there's uh there's a fair bit of what you could call victim blaming that happens. So if if men have mental health problems and they fail to seek therapy or any kind of help and they don't speak to people because they're too manly and stoical, well, it's their own fault kind of if if they end up, um, you know, ending their own lives. And there's that kind of, I mean, I actually, on my undergraduate's degree back in the nineties,

• 2:49Speaker 00

  um, when we were discussing male suicide, which was, uh, was discussed in the space of about two minutes compared to to talking about, um, lots of other topics in mental health, including women's depression, which we just, uh, really went into quite some detail. When it came to explaining male suicide, um, given that women are twice as likely to have, um, uh, uh, severe depression than men are, um, but men have three times more likely to commit suicide than women are. Um, but, uh, the explanation given was that men are better at D I Y. So they just construct better methods of getting rid of themselves. And, uh, uh, in my seminar group, that got a little kind of ripple of laughter.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  And I was kind of, I was sitting there thinking, well, you know, I'm not, I I'm I'm here to learn. Um, but I'm just, I'm not really sure I'm I'm learning anything very good here. There's no theory behind here. It's almost like we've just had a little bit of stand up. And outside afterwards, um, uh, we had a break and someone came up to you and said, it was a woman, so, uh, you know, well done. I don't know how you managed to sit there through that and say nothing. And I, and, uh, I mean, I just, as I said, like, you know, and lots of students are, I think, the same, you know, you you're there to learn, you you you absorb this information. You think that it's a professor telling me this, it must be true. And, uh, you know, so we we just don't get enough accurate information about men's psychology.

• 4:18Chris Williamson?

  We hear, especially when it comes to medicine and vaccines and such like, that the male default, that there is a form which is used, most drugs are optimized for the men, the the male body, most vaccines are optimized for the male body, we have different immune responses, so on and so forth. Are you saying that this male default or whatever hasn't been ported across when it looks, it it comes to studying psychology?

• 4:42Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, most definitely. Um, especially when it comes to to therapy, then you you very much got a female default. But i- in terms of um e- examining men at all, no, it doesn't. And in terms of medicine, I mean, I I think it's it's sometimes unfairly characterized characterized as being, well, it's a man's world, so, you know, it's it's it's uh medicine for men by men type of thing, which is not really true. I think that um when it comes to um testing experimental medication, uh it's a bit like being an experimental uh pilot and experimental fighter plane or something like that. You know, it's a dangerous thing. You don't know what's gonna happen.

• 5:23Speaker 00

  There's some horror stories like recently, or well, ten years ago, there was um the what they called the the guy who's, I think they call him the Elephant Man because he's he took some experimental drug that was supposedly okay, but his his head had kind of expanded up to to some very terrifying um shape. Um, now, men go in for lots of dirty, dangerous jobs, and I think being the the guinea pigs is one of them. And there's a good reason for that, too. I mean, like, uh, nobody, I mean, I think men tend to be protective of women, so so there's that. But there's a good reason. I mean, it's very often a woman who's of childbearing age doesn't know necessarily know when she's pregnant. If she's taking a medication that no one really knows what the effects are,

• 6:06Speaker 00

  that might damage the fetus, and we have no idea what the consequences of that might be. So there's very good reasons why, uh, you know, ma- uh, women should be protected, and their their unborn children protected from that sort of process.

• 6:19Chris Williamson?

  Why is there a difference in psychology studying the female brain when medicine appears to be studying the male form? Like, what's the reason for it being that way around?

• 6:30Speaker 00

  Uh, well, I don't think we're studying the female brain. It's it's not so much a biological thing. It's it's a lot of bad um behaviors more than brain. I mean, if you're you're trying to go on a A fishing expedition to to find all the differences between men and women in their brain, that that can be a really subtle and and controversial trip. Um. But what we're looking at more is the way that, for example, in in in terms of therapy, the the ways men and women tend to respond differently to to stressful situations. And that that's a really key thing. So we have the we've got the the model that really applies quite well for women. So um when we think about somebody who's depressed, we think about somebody who's maybe cries and kind of, you know, they feel sad and down

• 7:15Speaker 00

  and and they might want to talk to people about how they're feeling. Um. And that applies more so to men than women. And of course, we have to do the caveat here of, you know, there's different distributions of behaviors and things and types, and not all women are the same and not all men are the same. But by and large, um, I think it's important to recognize that that what we do when we're dealing with patients uh um in in therapy tends to to be more modeled on what women like and respond to than what men do. And so women do tend to fit into this. And it could be, you know, some people suggest it might go back to Sigmund Freud, who his client group were almost all women.

• 7:59Speaker 00

  And uh and that kind of model um has sort of just become the default from there. I mean, how true that is, I don't know. But it's certainly one that we have to this day.

• 8:09Chris Williamson?

  Is this what you call the male gender bias?

• 8:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, this is um this is part of male gender blindness is is something that Martin Sieger, a consultant clinical psychologist who who really started the the male psychology movement in in the in the UK, um, he coined this phrase male gender blindness, which it tells you about um just this cognitive distortion, really, that we have. Like, it's it's not something that people do intentionally, and people might be very fond of of men in general, but they tend to have a sort of a blind spot to being able to see when men are having problems, or even when boys are having problems. We see it much more readily when when it's problems are happening to women and girls than we do men or boys.

• 8:57Speaker 00

  So and I think this this is borne out quite a bit, actually, and this is the the as a psychologist, obviously, I'm interested in in psychology and and where male blindness, male gender blindness tends to to be most obvious is in the in the therapy room.

• 9:14Chris Williamson?

  What's beta bias and gamma bias?

• 9:18Speaker 00

  Right, um, so, uh, well, I'll start with alpha bias. Alpha bias is is something, it relates a bit to what we were talking about with um, trials of medicines. It was has been said, and it is still said quite a lot, that there's a bias in favor of looking at that stuff from a men's perspective. And alpha bias in in research and psychology was said to be the tendency to look for sex differences in any research that you do. This this was a focus of interest and and magnifying differences between men and women and kind of male rats and female rats, you know, that was that was a big thing.

• 10:01Speaker 00

  And then beta bias is um, uh, the the opposite, really, it's minimizing differences between men and women, and that's what we've got, really. And it's another way of expressing male gender blindness. It is we have a tendency to minimize any differences that we see between men and women. So when we have a therapy and it works well for women, we don't really question whether it might not work for men, because we're we're saying, well, there's no real differences between men and women. And in fact, you know, the the saying about this is there there are more similarities than differences between men and women, which is absolutely true, and absolutely true. But then again, you could say that genetically, there's more similarities between

• 10:44Speaker 00

  men and or people, humans and mice. There are, there's like, we share ninety five ninety five percent of genes. But there are differences, and those differences make all the difference. And I think that's what gets missed with this. This, I think, in many ways, way, many ways, a well-meaning. A view of of people like there's men and women are more or less the same, so we shouldn't treat them differently. And the fear is that if you do treat men and women differently, that you're going to, you know, you're going to lead people back to the days of patriarchy and things, ideas like this, it's gonna, it's gonna end up disadvantaging women. And I I just don't think that's true at all. And I I think that we've, we've come to the

• 11:28Speaker 00

  point when we have to discuss things in terms of the fact that that men are committing suicide three times the rate that women are and, and all sorts of other problems that, that suggest that men are having unresolved mental health issues like man, you know, substance abuse at two, twice the level that women do and homelessness, much, you know, rough sleeping, much more, the prison population, you know, ninety five percent. But there's, there's many ways in which you, you see that, that men are having issues that aren't being dealt with by psychologists or therapists, they're, they're going, they're, they're, they're being overlooked. And a lot of this is male gender blindness and this beta bias that

• 12:11Speaker 00

  we have. And gamma bias is then a kind of an elaboration of, of the idea of beta bias. And again, Martin Sieger is the person who identified gamma bias. And this is the, the tendency to, for example, when, when people do things that are good, sort of things that, that, you know, you would normally applaud and, and, you know, think that they might get prizes and things like that. We tend to, when it, it's done by a woman, we tend to emphasize the fact that this is a woman achieving this award or, or doing this great thing. But if a man does it, we tend to, to, to not emphasize his gender so much. It's

• 12:55Speaker 00

  just kind of like it kind of goes in the background. It's a woman, though, it's, oh, look at this brilliant woman. And this, it becomes more of a serious issue when it happens in terms of.

• 13:06Speaker 00

  Negative things, like for example, a topical thing is violence. When violence is done by men, we tend to to emphasize the fact that it's a man, it's a violent man. Uh but if violence um is done by one, we tend to play down that, like, you know, somebody got stabbed or something like that. The the fact that it's a woman might kind of disappear to the end of the story if it appears at all. And there's, this this is quite important, I think, um i- in many different ways, but because we we then, I think, as therapists, um we uh one one very important thing in therapy is to have empathy for your client.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  And if we're uh if if we basically don't like our client all that much because we're presuming really negative things about them, I think that's very likely to interfere with what's called the therapeutic alliance. And one of the the the things that makes makes the difference between therapy being successful or not is therapeutic alliance. It's it's the thing that most consistently explains the difference between therapy that works out and therapy that fails. And if you have people who presume that they, if your client is is male, they they've got male privilege, they might have had an easy life much easier than women if if they, and if they say something, and this is not uncommon, if if they're

• 14:32Speaker 00

  if this my client says that the reason he's there is because he's depressed, why depressed? Well, you know, I you know, I get into fights with my wife. Well, it's very easy to presume these days that, but well, you know, he's he's the guy who starts the fights. Or if she's hit him, why, what did he do to deserve it? You know, what's he done? You know, people fall into this sort of mindset. And I I think it's really important that, um especially for therapists. I mean, if if we're supposed to be trying to uh understand people, meet them where they're at, um not trying uh kind of impose the idea that they should be able to talk about their feelings more than they might want to.

• 15:14Speaker 00

  Uh you know, for therapists, we we should be able to to make a much better um uh you know, day's work out of dealing with men than I think that we do. And I think it's not surprising that men don't turn up for therapy because lots of men just they they they understand this, that it's it's fairly obvious to them.

• 15:34Chris Williamson?

  Is that the gender empathy gap? Is that another way of describing it?

• 15:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, gender empathy, all of these, these ideas are kind of overlapping. I mean, that is one of these sorts of things where you've had different people in different places come up with a similar sort of idea and it gets a slightly different but the gender empathy gap is, I know you have a very good book, but also describes this kind of condition that we we tend to sympathize with with women when they have problems more than we sympathize with men.

• 16:05Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a difficult one because we want to try and get to encourage men to open up. You want to try and give women the opportunity to achieve parity in education and employment and independence and financial achievement and so on and so forth. And it's difficult to not have that done at the cost of accusing males of tyranny and patriarchal oppression and stuff. And I saw you share something about the guidelines from the APA and dangers of traditional masculinity.

• 16:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there's the, one of the things that's been quite controversial in recent years is the American Psychological Association released guidelines on doing therapy with boys and men. And a lot of people were very pleased that these came out until they read them. And then there's, I mean, broadly speaking, they're quite good. There's 10 guidelines in there. Most of them are good. Guideline number nine, which is about how to do therapy with men, is actually really good. I mean, I would stand by that. But there are a couple of guidelines there that really mess up the rest, the whole of the guidelines. It's one of these things where, you know,

• 17:23Speaker 00

  okay, so I'll describe them. So guideline one is About, um, it makes the presumption that masculinity is a social construct, which is a very popular idea, and it seems to make sense. If you look at the way men behave and dress around the world, that, you know, men behave and dress and talk differently, you know. Um, on the other hand, there are some commonalities there, um, uh, which tend to get overlooked. I mean, so we're told that the reason men, uh, or any differences between men around the world are due to socialization. Um, so if you're, uh, you know, if you're in a country that tells men that they should have long hair, well, then they have long hair

• 18:06Speaker 00

  and because they're socialized to have long hair. And if it's short hair, a culture that tells them a short hair, well, you know, people just fit into those sorts of things. But there's, um, there's a lot of evidence. I mean, and, and it's very unpopular to bring this up, um, in social sciences these days, mainly because we've spent about the last thirty, forty years, um, you know, talking about all the ways in which, um, socialization of men has been bad for men and bad for women. Um, but we overlook, um, you know, some really obvious, um, evidence, very hard evidence, actually, that, um, that there's biological correlates to, to lots of things about, uh, men's behavior.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  So there's things about masculinity that are hard to, to get away from the biological, um, influence of. So for example, if you take, um, something like, um, uh, the impact of testosterone on fetal development, um, this, this completely, uh, week thirteen, the Y chromosome, uh, triggers the release of surge of testosterone. And so the fetus, um, will experience similar levels of testosterone to a adolescent boy, so high levels of testosterone. Um, and this changes the, the, uh, the fetus entirely. So that they are programmed then for the development of things like, um, a different bone structure, larger muscle mass.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  And and then, I mean, there's other psychological things that that are kind of more controversial, but may well be true, like they they may well be programmed for a a better ability at a mental rotation of things. In other words, a kind of ability to to see things in three dimensional space a bit, but better than women do. Certainly in adults, there seems to be some differences there. And some studies have found correlations with testosterone in adults.

• 20:02Chris Williamson?

  I found from a conversation I had a couple of weeks ago with David Putz, at the age of three, there is a fifty percent accuracy disparity in throwing precision. At the age of three.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:15Chris Williamson?

  So if you get toddlers, boys and girls, you split them into two groups and get them to throw. This isn't to do with power. This is before testosterone from puberty's kicked in. This is exclusively due to that. And it seems like this predisposition toward mental rotation. Now, what women seem to be better at was remembering the location of things within a smaller area. So this would have made sense. This would have been adaptive, right? If you're a forager and you need to know, let's say you've got a one kilometer radius around wherever the current tribe is situated, and you need to remember where's the good route, where's the bad route, where's fresh water, where's bad water, where's the bush that's got lots of berries, where's the bush that's got less? And it kind of plays into the trope, but like lots of cliches are born out of genuine

• 20:57Chris Williamson?

  biological predispositions. It's why guys always lose their keys, but women can't remember the directions to get to their their office or whatever. It's like when you're talking about a broader range of things, a broader distance, men appear to have a better ability at being able to remember that. But when you're looking in a smaller area, like around the house perhaps, they seem to be pretty useless. And the converse is true for women.

• 21:19Speaker 00

  Interesting, yeah. I mean, the the throwing thing, I mean, there's the prenatal surge at thirteen weeks that goes on for for several weeks. Then there's a postnatal surge too, in boys, again, another very high surge of testosterone that happens in the months after they're born. I don't know how much that has an effect on on throwing ability. But there's loads of these. Things that we think of as being stereotypes and tropes that are in fact true, they're real. I mean, the stereotype comes about for a reason in lots of cases. And so like people, I mean, I hate to say, use the term, you probably didn't use throwing like a girl.

• 22:00Speaker 00

  I mean, did that, Danny, but because instantly now loads of people just turned off. They've just stopped watching the video. But there's something to that. I mean, you know, and people shouldn't get worked up or feel bad about it unless they want men or women just to be exactly the same for some reason.

• 22:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 22:17Speaker 00

  I don't have any problem with with just people valuing differences completely. Totally no problem. I also have no problem at all with with everybody being allowed, given opportunities to to do whatever they can do in their life. So if they want to, if a girl wants to be a pitcher in for the New York Yankees or something like that, she should absolutely have every opportunity to do that.

• 22:39Chris Williamson?

  What do you think about the term toxic masculinity?

• 22:43Speaker 00

  Obviously, well, not obviously, okay, because a lot of people think that's perfectly reasonable to use this term. There is some sense to it, but I think what's happened is a term that was originally used by some

• 23:01Speaker 00

  the mythopoeic type of guys back in the eighties and nineties. They started using this term to describe young men who had not been initiated into the tribe. And if if for whatever reason, a young man was not, didn't go through the initiation ceremonies, which would help them to become a member of the tribe. They would kind of go off and kind of go a bit wild. They wouldn't kind of feel any affiliation with the tribe. They'd be a nuisance. And so this was called toxic masculinity. And, you know, there's, you know, different suggestions of how to rein them back in. But basically, they were. There was a, it kind of made some sort of sense. However, this, this term has been

• 23:43Speaker 00

  used out of context and it just becomes like it, it gets thrown around in the media quite a bit. And it just gets used in a generic way to describe any behaviour that men do, like, you know, so-called man-spreading or whatever it might be, or even men staring at women on the Tube, which is now illegal in London, you know.

• 24:05Chris Williamson?

  Men staring at women on the Tube is illegal in London.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 24:09Chris Williamson?

  We need to dig, we need to dig into this, John.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. If you, actually, it's one of the articles in the Male Psychology Magazine, which is on the, the Centre for Male Psychology website, a very good article written recently by Jenny Cummings-Night, she's a psychotherapist over here in England. And she, she's written a very good piece, lots of people have liked it. It's pointing out the, the, the idiocy, really, of having a law, an actual law that can put men in prison for looking at women in a way that's interpreted as being sexual harassment. Now, this is a very subjective thing, obviously, like, and, and so Jenny points out all the different ways in which

• 24:56Speaker 00

  a man might be staring at a woman or apparently staring at them. He might, he might be blind. Actually, somebody came up with, with an example of, of this where a, a, a blind guy was, was in the gym and he got, he suddenly found some woman was, was shouting in his face about to stop staring at him. And he's saying, I'm, look, sir, I'm blind, you know, I'm not staring at you. Stop, sir, if you don't stop. And she brought the manager over and he was saying, look, I'm blind, I'm not staring, I can't speak. Showed them his card. And still, he, I, I, you know, people just presumed that, that's, that he was doing something bad because he was apparently staring at this woman. Well, in London, on the, the London Underground and other public transport, it is, you can now go to jail if you're a man and you do that.

• 25:40Chris Williamson?

  A senior police officer has urged everyone who witnesses intense staring on the London Underground to report it amid concerns it could be an early sign of unhealthy sexual behaviour. Posters have now been placed in the Tube train stations across the capital stating intrusive staring of a sexual nature is sexual harassment and is not tolerated.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, the thing is, I mean, uh, there's so many ways in which you can go wrong. For example, I mean, I had someone from Spain saying, actually Jenny wrote about it in the article. That that in Spain, you can stare at people, it's not considered to be threatening or or sexual harassment at all. People just often stare at each other all the time. It's just eye contact is not a bad thing. On the London Underground, I mean, of course, um, you know, probably the same lots of confined spaces. It it does feel a bit more intense and intrusive is if people look at each other, especially if they're looking in right and directly in somebody's face. So I can understand that people would feel uncomfortable about it.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  But in the current climate, I think that of of um, of really, I think that there's a lot of just, you know, this idea of toxic masculinity.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  All men got, and this is one of the problems with the term toxic masculinity is is that it's it's it's sort of tars all men with the same brush. And and although people say, oh, no, we don't mean all men, we just mean the men who do these things. Well, when you use a term like toxic masculinity, it's when you you tag toxic onto masculinity, it inevitably is just it it poisons the whole, um, the anybody who's possessing masculinity gets poisoned, which is men, basically.

• 27:23Chris Williamson?

  Well, by design, it's a catchall term, right? It's a catchall term for any behavior by a man that you deem to find distasteful or objectionable. So Richard Reeves was on the show a little while ago, and the school that his kids went to in Washington DC, there was a um, an incident that occurred where some of the boys in class had created a ranking system of all of the girls in class from most attractive to least attractive. And that had been deemed as something that was toxic masculinity. You go, I mean, it's distasteful, but let's not forget that that's literally the website that Facebook was built off of the back of.

• 28:03Chris Williamson?

  Like, Facebook was that very website incarnate, and now it's one of the biggest companies in the entire world. Like, is it toxic masculinity for boys to re? Like, if girls did it, would that be toxic femininity? I don't think it would be. But yeah, it's, I I understand the concept creep of wanting to um,

• 28:23Chris Williamson?

  Create a label, the desire to memeify anything in the modern world and be able to bring it under an umbrella because it makes it sound more official, it makes it sound like something that's got legitimate, scientific, rigorous, intellectual, academic backing. It's not, it's just, it's just a term that you've decided to use to smear any behaviour from guys that you don't like.

• 28:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think one of the problems with this is that we don't know what the impact is on, on boys growing up of, of hearing about these sorts of labels and this general narrative about men being bad, or at least potentially bad.

• 28:59Chris Williamson?

  Didn't you do, you did a new report about the factors that predict wellbeing in 4,000 men, and that had some tie-ins with their views of masculinity. What did you learn from that?

• 29:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, so this was on men rather than boys. I mean, I am more concerned about the effect on boys because I think it might be more, have a more powerful negative impact. But this was on, you know, 2,000 men in the UK, 2,000 men in Germany, very similar results in both countries. And we found that, or I found that, that some of the most significant predictors of their mental wellbeing were how they thought that masculinity affected their behaviour. So that men who thought that masculinity made them recycle less and be less environmentally friendly, this sounds silly, but, men who, and men who thought

• 29:55Speaker 00

  that masculinity made them inclined to be more violent to women and made them less inclined to talk about their feelings. These men, this, this kind of set of ideas was strongly correlated with them being, having a less positive mindset. And this, when I say less positive mindset, this, this questionnaire that I used, the Positive Mindset Index, is itself strongly correlated inversely with suicidality. So when you say somebody is lower, a lower positive mindset, you're saying that they're probably going to be more suicidal in their thinking. So basically, men who think that masculinity has a bad effect on their behaviour are, you

• 30:39Speaker 00

  know, have worse mental health, you could say, in a nutshell. And we found the converse was true, but only in the German sample significantly.

• 30:49Speaker 00

  That's men who thought that masculinity was good for their behaviour, so made them more protective of women, made them want to be better dads and, you know, better providers in their home. These men had better mental health. So I think, you know, although we're talking about a correlational design here, there is some reasonably good smoking gun evidence that's having, being exposed to a negative narrative about masculinity and internalising that then and thinking that masculinity is a bad thing is going to make you feel worse.

• 31:28Chris Williamson?

  Well, why wouldn't that be the case? You know, you're kind of born, it's like it's basically the same as original sin. It's the same concept as original sin. You know, you're born as this fallen creature. There is something innate in you that is a part of you that you didn't choose, but is also somehow toxic or damaged or insufficient.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, at least with original sin, there's redemption. You know, I mean, I guess certain therapists might think that they can redeem you, but I'm not sure. I just, I'm very worried about the impact on boys. A lot of people are too. We did a survey a couple of years ago that found that I think eighty to eighty-five percent of people thought that we're concerned that that's the narrative around toxic masculinity would have a negative impact on boys. We really, like getting back to psychology as a profession, we need to be more interested in this. We're not even a little bit interested in this. This is one of the terrible things. We're interested in finding out all the ways

• 32:28Speaker 00

  in which masculinity is bad for men and bad for society. We're not interested in really examining that idea and seeing whether.

• 32:39Speaker 00

  This idea of toxic masculinity or hegemonic masculinity, any of these ideas are really just social constructs that psychologists and sociologists have come up with, that we impose on people's behaviour and then all we see is evidence that confirms our preconception about them being bad and having this masculine original sin. We really need to be more like scientists and investigate these things, challenge hypotheses and look outside our usual, what's called a kind of narrow paradigm fixation, which has been used to describe the way that a lot of research in masculinity has been for the last thirty odd years.

• 33:24Chris Williamson?

  You also found personal growth, age and health satisfaction as some of the other most important factors that impacted the wellbeing of men in that sample. Just what's that as a high level? What are those things?

• 33:37Speaker 00

  Well, so personal growth is just an interest in your own personal development was the strongest predictor of men's mental wellbeing.

• 33:46Chris Williamson?

  Wow, that seemed, I mean, I know that, is that kind of like being your own doctor in a way? Is that that you're taking a greater appreciation for the fact that you should be improving, you're more of a self-assessor when it comes to what are the areas of my psychology, my health, my relationships that are insufficient and that I need to work on?

• 34:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, basically, yeah. So it's kind of, I mean, I'm overlooking this. I mean, there's lots of things in this report that suggest that men are anything but toxic. Like, the thing that makes men happiest is when they're satisfied with their own personal development. Another thing we did in that survey was ask men what core values they thought were most important. So the core values of being adventurous and being athletic were at the bottom of the list of things that they thought were most important. The things I always thought were most important were being honest, reliable, dependable. And this was the same across UK and Germany. We'd asked men previously in the States, five thousand

• 34:48Speaker 00

  men in the States, exactly the same results. I mean, this is, talk about curing the replication crisis, exactly the same results. And again, when we asked two thousand men in the UK in 2017, the same results. These are the things. Men are not, you know, they're desperately trying to be. The best that they could be, which is actually funny enough, a tagline for a Geledad back in the day. The best that a man can get. But, you know, it's, it's, I think men are shockingly misrepresented in, in the media and academia. And the, the, the way that people presume that men are, I think is a million miles from it.

• 35:31Speaker 00

  We take the, the examples of the worst possible men, the worst possible behavior, and we generalize it to all men. And, and then we go around to schools, warning boys to not be that guy. And not realizing that these sorts of campaigns, they're very easily backfired. Like the, the psychology is full of these unintended consequences. You, you take this, what I would say is half-baked idea, an idea that's not properly researched. You, you've got the best of intentions. Everyone says, hooray, sounds like a great idea. Let's go out there and do it. You do it, and actually you find that, so in, in student populations in the States, they've tried these, these sorts of things where you, like, don't be that guy.

• 36:16Speaker 00

  Don't be the guy who goes around sort of harassing women and being nasty. And what they found is that, overall, it seems to work. Yeah, overall, on average, it seems to work. But actually, if you look down, drill down into the data a bit, you find that the guys who already were the nice guys are, are just as nice as they were before, maybe a bit nicer. The guys who, who weren't impressed with any of this stuff in the first place have now got worse. So you've just made the problem worse. You've just, you've, you've maybe.

• 36:44Chris Williamson?

  How would it be the case that you would get good outcomes from this kind of a campaign? If the good guys got better and the bad guys got worse? If the good guys weren't going to do anything in any case, how do you get better outcomes?

• 36:58Speaker 00

  Because ninety-five percent of, of the, the people in that study are good guys. So when they all improve, these guys kind of get worse. It's it's these the the bad guys get kind of um uh you know, they disappear in the data because on average, everybody is improved a bit.

• 37:15Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, this was the insight from David Buss's Men Behaving Badly, right? That was one of the the the big insights from that, which is that almost all sexual assaults that are conducted by men, perpetrated by men, are are done by a very small number that are repeat offenders. You know, you have a a small number of guys that are complete assholes. And then you have this big wealth of of guys that that behave in a perfectly acceptable manner toward women. And the problem is that when you do take this broad strokes brush, you end up causing most men, most of whom are well behaving, to feel fearful, ashamed, guilty, disgusted, whatever about their own masculinity.

• 37:57Chris Williamson?

  I remember I I was reading an article that you shared a little while ago, uh and this, I think, was in Ian Brower College in Australia. Parents and male students were left mortified after the school forced them to stand in assembly and apologize to their female classmates for sexual assaults committed by males. Brower College in southwestern Victorian town of Wa- Wornanbul, I'm not even going to try and say that properly, held an assembly on Wednesday where boys were told to stand up in a symbolic gesture of apology to girls and women. My 12 year old has no idea about rape and sexual assault, and he was made to apologize, and he doesn't understand why. Earlier, 12 year old Levi, who had only been at the college since since the start of

• 38:41Chris Williamson?

  the year, said he was forced to apologize to many of his classmates who he hadn't even met. They told us to stand up and turn to a girl in our class and say, sorry, Levi told Current Affair. I don't think it's okay to be sexually assaulted. I felt a bit under pressure to stand up, and if I didn't feel like I was a bad person. Another student named Vinnie said that there were several girls in the assembly hall that began crying because they'd been revealed in front of everyone as having been victims. I had girls behind me crying because they'd basically been exposed to the entire school, and we had to apologize for stuff we didn't actually do.

• 39:13Speaker 00

  What a mess. I mean, what an absolute mess. And this behind, I mean, so the mayor of London is rolling out workshops to to sort of help boys be better people around women and be less sexist and everything like that. I mean, I don't know what's in these workshops, but if it's anything like what you just described, who's it gonna help? I mean, who's gonna benefit from any of that? Nobody.

• 39:37Chris Williamson?

  It's public struggle session.

• 39:39Speaker 00

  Exactly. And, you know, the worst thing is, of course, the guys who are already going in that direction, they've just, you've just justified them being, you know, as bad as they want to be. They just, they hate the whole thing.

• 39:51Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, you see this, I, you know, this is an N of one, but I see this online on the internet. The guys that spend the most amount of time learning about gender dynamics are the ones that want to push back hardest against this sort of, whatever you want to call it, like hyper egalitarian or hyper sort of equal view of the world, because they do, they feel like they're being preached to, they feel like they're being told how to behave. And if in that cohort of people, you have some people that were already, some men that were already going to be assholes, they're going to feel, I don't know, like virtuous backlash, or that you're

• 40:33Chris Williamson?

  gonna have that, that sort of rebound effect, so to speak. But when did this negative view of masculinity start in psychology? Is it always been there?

• 40:43Speaker 00

  No, not at all. It's, I mean, it used to be, like, as I said, men haven't really appeared very much in psychology over the years, until around the 80s and 90s. And then from sociology, really, came this idea of hegemonic masculinity, started up in the 70s, reached psychology around the 80s and 90s. And hegemonic masculinity kind of cast men as being very competitive, very aggressive, kind of domineering, you know, misogynistic.

• 41:18Speaker 00

  Uh homophobic and um and this was adopted in uh by some people in the States uh and uh and we developed then, you know, just snowball from there. So men went from being uh considered as being athletic and uh energetic and and domineering and and aggressive uh you know, physically aggressive to being then all these things like they became homophobic and and sexist and things. And so we we have definitions of masculinity that are used in psychology. Now, not not everyone in psychology uses it because it's still sort of a, it's not a mainstream part of psychology. Uh the media's picked up on it a lot more. Um governments have picked up on it unfortunately, they they, you know, including the UN

• 42:01Speaker 00

  um and associated organizations like the World Health Health Organizations. They they tend to have adopted this negative uh view of men and because the media have run with it. People like it's it's just a general thing. It's kind of part of our atmosphere that we we tend to think of that there's something wrong with men, that you know, that there's they're at the very least privileged. If they've if they've got wealth, they haven't really earned it, you know, they've they've had a kind of a, you know, head start over over women. I mean, it's it's it's a recipe for just poisoning um people against each other, which I think is awful. And another bad thing is that that of course it's you for these guys who do engage in these horrible

• 42:42Speaker 00

  uh sexual behaviors and uh bad behaviors, um it doesn't solve that problem by just saying that that that it's caused by masculinity. You're not going to solve the problem by by saying it's masculinity. You'll only solve the problem um by actually getting to the roots of the problem. And the roots of the problem are usually for people like this, um uh uh early trauma, child childhood trauma. Um sometimes sexual trauma, like for for sex offenders, sexual trauma. And and there has been some research by uh Naomi Murphy, who was a a uh clinical psychologist, worked with prison populations with some very serious offenders.

• 43:22Speaker 00

  Um that's that some of the the very worst um sex offenders, um they did have uh as their their the the kind of. The background to the offending, being sexually abused by female adults when they were children. So you have the, so, but who wants to look at that? I mean, you know, we're so far away from being able to deal with that reality. We'd much rather, and I guess if you're a politician, how, you know, how are you going to change somebody's childhood like that? It's so difficult and the therapy takes an awful long time. But how are you going to change the circumstances which could involve social deprivation?

• 44:03Speaker 00

  What Barn Farquhar calls dad deprivation, like lacking a father figure to steer people so that they're, they kind of, you know, that they're socialized more easily.

• 44:13Chris Williamson?

  What's the, what are the outcomes of fatherlessness? Because obviously, you know, I can hear all of the wives tales and sort of myths that I want. But what are the kind of outcome changes that you get for boys when they grow up in a fatherless home?

• 44:30Speaker 00

  And again, so we have to start off saying not everyone is affected in the same way. Everyone's different. Some people might thrive from that and lots of people will have very good experiences with, you know, positive, you know, role models who are women in their lives. But if, there's, there certainly seems to be evidence that if you don't have some sort of, like, not having a father, actually, the research is interesting because they never make a distinction between

• 45:01Speaker 00

  fathers and stepfathers or and father figures. But if you, if you don't have a, a useful sort of father figure, or absent father, absent families basically have more likelihood of having delinquency. You know, so, and this, this applies to women to some extent too, but certainly for, for men, it can, it can be something that you. Um, people drift into a life of crime. Well, some it's often not a life of crime. It's often a a decade of crime or, you know, up until their twenties before they grow out of it and start learning to control themselves a bit more. But, um, yeah, the the risk, I mean, there's plenty of evidence that the risk of of boys and families

• 45:45Speaker 00

  that don't have dads um are more likely to drift into to delinquency. And loads of them don't, um, um, but unfortunately, it's true. I mean, like, you know, it's again, when people talk about smash the patriarchy, um, you know, you have to kind of wonder what they're talking about smashing because there's, I mean, the patriarchy, if it exists uh in the UK or the States or Australia, Canada these days, is the worst, most useless organisation ever. Because, I mean, I'm not sure what the the advantages are that that men have these days. So like with boys seem to be failing in education at a terrifying rate.

• 46:25Speaker 00

  I mean, men are are kind of, um, you know, drifting, uh, uh, you know, into homelessness, um, you know, into into prisons at an alarming rate, suicide levels, drinking themselves to death. You know, the the patriarchy doesn't seem to have done very much uh good for anybody. So when you're talking about smashing the patriarchy, uh, you know, who is the target? I mean, I I know that people are saying smash the the dad in your family, but I think that that's that's the only patriarch that's really left. And and I think a lot of dads, I mean, they get depicted in the media as being, you know, silly or pointless and things like that. I think that that there's just so much that's that's kind of, uh,

• 47:09Speaker 00

  again, as I say, I worry about children growing up, um, you know, with dads or without dads in a culture that that really is so happy to demean anything to do with men.

• 47:18Chris Williamson?

  What challenges are particularly unique to men when it comes to managing mental health?

• 47:24Speaker 00

  Ah, I don't know if anything would be particularly unique. But with this, there's barriers that men have to overcome a bit more than women. So I think a lot of men already, they, they, um, we've done some research on this and it's borne out by other people's research too. Men, when they got, um, uh, mental health issues or they feel distressed, um, they, the first thing that they want to do is, is not necessarily talk to somebody about how they feel about it. In fact, they might not really feel very much like doing that. They want to fix the problem. So if it's, um, that they're depressed because they haven't got work, they want to find money somehow or other.

• 48:08Speaker 00

  You know, they want to fix the problem. They won't want to fix their depression about not having work. They want to go out and get money somehow or other.

• 48:16Speaker 00

  And whereas women, and we're back to our kind of, uh, the, the way that the therapy, um, our, our, our style of therapy that's on offer for people these days is more suited to women. Because in general, when women are distressed, they'll, they'll want to talk about their feelings. They'll, they'll want to do that. And, and it will help them. And actually, men can be helped a great deal by talking about their feelings too. But, uh, it's not the first thing that they want to do. And, and when they look around for, for somebody to talk to, you know, you know, it, it's not hard for them to, to, to, to realise that that it's, then, you know, they can't just talk to anybody.

• 48:55Speaker 00

  For example, getting back to, to, um, a male victim of domestic violence, and about a third of, of victims of domestic violence are men.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  Who is he going to talk to about this? I mean, a lot of, of therapists, unless they, they have knowledge or experience of this, might presume that if he's involved in domestic violence, that he started it, uh, you know, that he's the problem. And of course, the police traditionally are very similar. Actually, this is starting to change, thanks to, to people like Mark Brooks and the Mankind Initiative and, uh, and other people who are, uh, you know, spreading better information, like, you know, Mark Brooks is very good at getting, um, onto the television and telling people about the, the facts about domestic violence. And, um, So if a man is suffering from domestic violence, he knows that he can go to the Mankind Initiative

• 49:46Speaker 00

  and he can phone their helpline and he knows that he's not going to be presumed to be an offender. He knows that when he talks to somebody there, they will accept that he may, you know, they will not presume that he's doing anything other than telling the truth about his experience. But a lot of other places that men can go, they can't necessarily make that assumption. And lots of men know this. I mean, I have to say, I mean, I'm a bit embarrassed. I have tended over the years to end up doing research on things that actually most of the general public already knew about. So when I did my research, finding that

• 50:29Speaker 00

  when distressed, women want to talk about their feelings and men want to fix the problem. No one was surprised except psychologists who I talked to.

• 50:39Speaker 00

  And there's so many other things, I mean, but.

• 50:42Chris Williamson?

  Well, isn't that strange? Isn't it strange that you're having to reverse engineer an ideology out of the discipline which is supposed to know what the public is already aware of?

• 50:52Speaker 00

  Again, it's terrifying in one way. I mean, we're supposed to be the ones who kind of know, aren't we really, you know?

• 51:01Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're supposed to be the tip of the spear and downstream from that is the general public that are learning off the back of. I mean, yeah, it's a strange one. I suppose especially when we're talking about men getting into therapy. I had this guy, Adam Lane Smith, on the show, psychotherapist from the Midwest. And he really sort of red pilled me about this, about saying, look, men want to be able to fix the problem. Men want to be able to feel capable and in control and you want to give them the path out of it. Now, women are happy to talk about the. Their emotions, but that doesn't really make men feel any more capable. You know, it might make them, it helped them to open up and understand what's going on, but it doesn't fix the fundamental sort of listlessness vulnerability that is,

• 51:47Chris Williamson?

  I guess, a cause of a lot of shame. And around this, you see, I don't know, like if a, if a guy is to open up about something that he's struggling with, a man who is going through a difficult breakup, let's say, is sort of told that they should get on with things. A woman that's going through a difficult breakup is deserving of sympathy. Now, that's not to say that, again, on average, blah, blah, blah. But it doesn't seem to help the situation. It doesn't seem to help the situation massively.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  No, it doesn't. And it's, I mean, again, like when you mentioned the red pill community, I mean, there's all sorts of, of places online that are kind of, you know, they're ahead of psychologists in this, that they know it. And, and guys know it, like they, they will gravitate to these places. And they might not always get the best help that they need, you know, from these places. I mean, that, so what we need, we need some sort of combination of what a psychologist can offer in terms of, of the years of, because psychologists are usually very good at dealing with a lot of issues, I have to say, just when it comes to, to men these days. It's, it's, it's not worked out so well, but they do need to, to, to be,

• 53:04Speaker 00

  to be more open to, to, to what they're hearing from the internet, not dismissing it as being the manosphere and things like that.

• 53:11Chris Williamson?

  Well, the problem, the problem that you have, if you don't have a, an authority, which is not necessarily regulated, but is more rigorous with its methods and stuff. If you don't have that available for men to go to, they will go to Reddit communities and Discord servers and YouTube channels and stuff like that. And that's great, up until the point at which audience capture and the incentives of audience capture encourage those creators to make ever more outlandish claims that can become toxic in their own right. There are 100% incredibly toxic, negative areas of the red pill, manosphere, black pill,

• 53:50Chris Williamson?

  incel community, online, that are, the world would be better if they didn't exist, right? Now, the problem is, and it's the same reason as to why. When people ask about how come the right appears to have captured most of the conversations around around men, it's like, well, because the left doesn't care. The left isn't having a conversation with men about what it means to be a man. They're not presenting any positive role models for either men to grow up into or for masculinity as a concept generally. So you've just left this world open. And it's the exact same dynamic that I'm seeing with regards to psychology and the manosphere, if you want to call it as like one just big group. Psychology and psychologists haven't spoken to men in a way that gives them a firm

• 54:35Chris Williamson?

  footing for them to stand on, that helps them to understand their own programming, their own nature. So I'm going to go somewhere. I go to this place on the internet, but then we have a lot more perverse and contra incentives that are going to cause those people to take information and run, play liberties with what it is that they can say. They're not beholden to, you know, any rigors of academia or anything. There's no regulations at all. And that is how you end up with this sort of intensity spiral that creates an ever more aggressive and sometimes negative community.

• 55:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. And psychologists failed there. I mean, we should have never adopted this negative view of masculinity. We should have been always more open to what men need when they've got mental health issues. For some reason, we've just, I mean, as Martin Seger described it, male gender blindness, we've just not been able to see it. We still, even though we have a male psychology section of the British Psychological Society, and it's out there and it's, it's, you know, it's, it's giving the right messages. I mean, who's listening? I mean, I just really, really wish that more people within psychology would

• 55:52Speaker 00

  pay attention and, and be open. I mean, unfortunately, you know, there's a lot of people who will just, as soon as you mention. Helping men, they switch off, that they think that that's a, you know, it's like, um, you're certainly gonna go back to caveman days when men dragged women around by the hair or whatever cavemen supposedly did. Uh, but it's not about that. It's if, if you leave men who are mentally unwell to their own devices, they're gonna be not very productive members of the community, to say the least. If, you know, so the cure for toxic masculinity, if you wanna call it that, is to, to actually listen to these guys, to help these guys, to be open to these guys,

• 56:35Speaker 00

  to understand what the cause of their problems is and not be afraid to do that. I mean, cause it's a big challenge, a big challenge. Like, your peers might reject you for wanting to help men, but also it's a big challenge. Um, like when you're face to face with, with some guy who's angry, who's, who's hurt, he might wanna hurt you, he might reject you entirely. That's a big challenge. Like forensic psychology is one of the, the, the biggest challenges that anyone can get involved with. I have huge respect for people who are working in these areas, uh, but we really need to, to, to, to get real, be realistic, that not fall for for the, the, the narrative and the ideology that we've been fobbed off with for too long.

• 57:16Chris Williamson?

  How worried are you on this rise of sexlessness and loneliness, uh, lonely, single man?

• 57:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, uh, it, it's not gonna go anywhere good. I mean, so, um, a couple of the previous, uh, reports that I've done, I've looked at, um, I've found that, that men who are in stable relationships are like that much happier than men who are single. Okay, so, so this is, and this is borne out by lots of different studies. So being in a stable relationship makes you happier, whether that's marriage or, or just being going steady over a period of time. But, uh, so being single, I mean, It gives you some opportunities for dating, but I mean, actually, most guys don't do that well on dating apps and things like that. It can be pretty tough.

• 58:05Speaker 00

  Um. So what do you turn to? I mean, like, there's porn and stuff like that. I mean, lots of men turn to porn when they're distressed. We've we've done some research on on this too. It's a kind of a way way of dealing, way of coping, like women tend to to comfort eat more and men tend to go to for porn more for to relieve stress. And um, no, it's not going to go anywhere good. I mean, it's it's um, you know, we as a society are stupid to think that this isn't something that we should be paying more attention to. And not in a punitive way, but actually just help these guys a little bit. And I'd say one of the first things we could do is is recognize that

• 58:44Speaker 00

  a lot of the messages that that we're um, sending to men through our, you know, through through things like laws like about men staring at women on the London transport, or things that talk about toxic masculinity, or headlines like why it's okay to hate men. Or on the internet, this idea of like kill all men, like this, you know, kind of a phrase that that's flies around. I mean, it's ridiculous to think that this is not going to have a bad effect uh on men. And it's also naive to think that this is not going to rebound on all of us at some point.

• 59:17Chris Williamson?

  It'll rebound on women as well, because fundamentally, women require a partner who is worthy of them. You know, women, fifty point one percent of women for the first time in history are childless by thirty. A report that came out by Reuters a couple of months ago said that for the first time ever, forty five percent of prime working aged women between the ages of twenty two and forty five will be single and childless by twenty thirty. All of these stats suggest that women are struggling to find a mate that they can contend with and are attracted to, and I went out, maybe a year and a half ago with a friend and we were in a bar in London. And he's single and I sort of nudged him and pointed to a group of girls over the far side

• 59:59Chris Williamson?

  near the bar. And I was like, why don't you go over and talk to one of those? And he looked like I'd suggested that we go and dismember one of them. He's like, I've been told that I should never approach a woman in a bar, that that's incredibly dangerous for me to do. And he's Gen Z. So he's what, maybe 12 years younger than I am. And for me, coming from the background that I had, which is like back end of Laut era, like Larry British lad culture in sort of 2006, 2010, that would be just unheard of, right? There was no, absolutely no concern because you didn't have this panopticon of technology constantly surveilling you, you know. But then on the other side of this, I can see why you could say that era that I was in where men were going up to women would have

• 1:00:44Chris Williamson?

  meant that women had more approaches from men, that they had more opportunities to find a good mate, you know, evidence seems to suggest that women want to be approached by men. But then you also get negative externalities, you know, a woman that says no, that rebuffs a man one times in X many hundred or thousand is going to end up in a situation that she feels very uncomfortable. And then you have the Me Too Renaissance that was absolutely needed. But then what happens when you overshoot? And it's this, it's this very black and white sort of mono view of the world, that everything is good or everything is bad. It's significantly easier to see people in those regards. One of the things I wanted to actually mention that I've come to realise

• 1:01:28Chris Williamson?

  or believe over this year that was kind of interesting is there's often stories about how when you have societies with a high preponderance of single men, men without partners, that that is just before some huge instability that causes its downfall, right? And there's some evidence throughout history that seems to suggest men get into a relationship, testosterone drops, men have a child, testosterone drops again, they are part of a community, blah, blah, blah. They're domesticated essentially by their partner and their family. One of the questions that I was toying with for the back end of this year is where are all of the incel killings? If it is the case that we have the highest rates of sexlessness

• 1:02:10Chris Williamson?

  amongst men aged 18 to 30 ever in history, why aren't there roving bands of miscreants outside pushing over granny and spray painting stuff and causing havoc? And I've come to believe that what's happening is that rather than those men going out with a bang, they're going out with a whimper, they are being sedated through porn and video games into retreating away from that status-seeking behaviour that may have got them a little bit of attention, which ultimately could have led them to get a partner or raise up in their standing within the community. And I don't think, you know, whatever, five years ago or so, some of the concerns, the Elliot Rogers of the world, you know, we're going to see this happening

• 1:02:51Chris Williamson?

  more and more and more. We just haven't. You know, it is not going up in line with the rates of sexlessness and singleness amongst men. So you have to presume that something else is happening in order to be able to sedate men out of that behaviour. And I think that it is this porn and video games thing. Now, if you were to give me two worlds, one in which you have constant mass shootings done by disaffected guys, and another in which that doesn't happen, like, I'll take the one that it doesn't happen, but that's, you can't say that the number of men playing Call of Duty and smoking weed is in any way also, like, useful. That's still not good. It's just less bad than them taking the gun from the video game into the real world.

• 1:03:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. As I said, it's not going to end up well for anybody. You love these guys who have unfulfilled lives. People who would have been their partners will have unfulfilled lives. I have worked in the field of women's mental health too. And one of the things that I saw a lot of was how distressing it is for women, men also, but how distressing it is for women to have problems with conceiving a child. I mean, like, the amount of money that's spent on IVF and how much stress that they will go through is unbelievable. And it's, I mean, it's hard to appreciate when you're younger, how much stress you're going

• 1:04:16Speaker 00

  to have when you get older, because it's, I mean, again, we're back to tropes and stereotypes. But like, the idea of the biological clock for women is, I mean, in my experience of Dealing with women in these situations, it's it's true and it's a tragedy and we we should we should be trying to help everybody, I think, to um to, I mean, in an ideal world, you know, we would have people kind of meeting up in a kind of an effortless way um and and and kind of matching off with each other and and having happy lives and happy families. I I think that would be a good result for everyone. But we're, I think we're we're scaring women away from from men these days and and men are just sort of feeling rejected and backing into a corner and and that's not good.

• 1:05:00Chris Williamson?

  No, and I wonder whether a world in which most of your experiences of the real world can be mediated by social media and news, you actually end up experiencing many other lives, right? The stories that you hear about other people's lives as opposed to your own. And if we've got a world in which remote work and more social isolation comes through, what you actually end up doing is getting your model of the world, especially relationships between the sexes, and you take that from news, but news isn't a representative sample of the things that are happening. By design, the news articles that come out are the ones that are the most egregious. It's the the woman that divorces the man and takes his brother and leaves him for dead and all of his money's gone and she's taking the dog

• 1:05:43Chris Williamson?

  and the dog won't even see him again. Or the the the reverse, you know, a woman says no to a guy in a the the copy room at work and she ends up being chopped up and put in the freezer and he eats her for chili and stuff. Like, those are the sorts of stories that you hear. And if you have fewer and fewer interactions in the real world that can disprove that, what do you end up with? Well, you end up with that being your model of the world, which feeds into the anxiety, which makes you less social, which means that you've got less real world experience to disprove the stories, and the cycle just continues.

• 1:06:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, in a way, everyone needs to get out more, you you could say, and to talk to each other more, too. Like, there's some some really good things happening, like in terms of men's mental health, men's sheds, a really good idea, just getting men together, put around to X, Y, Z activity, it doesn't really matter what it is, and they get to just chat a little bit, and that's brilliant for their mental health. And there's sort of Andy's Man Club and things like that, where men get together. And these things, you know, kind of getting outside, being out in the real world, finding out the reality's not as bad as it is. And the same for women, too. Like, men are really not as bad as you might think. There's loads of brilliant guys out there. They might be stuck on their Xbox at the moment, but, you know, just dust them off a little bit, they'll be brilliant.

• 1:06:56Chris Williamson?

  Look, Dr. John, I really appreciate you. Where should people go if they want to check out the stuff that you do online?

• 1:07:01Speaker 00

  Best place is probably the Center for Mail Psychology dot com. And we've got, they can sign up to our newsletter, which is free. And they get the monthly magazine, which you've talked about a couple of the articles in there. Yeah, we got, they're very popular, very good. If you're a psychologist, go to the the Mail Psychology section website on the British Psychological Society. And you'll find that there's some, oh, the Center for Mail Psychology too, a great place. We've got loads of articles, academic articles too, as well as sort of more general magazine articles. So, and we have questionnaires that you can use, like the Positive Mindset Index and things like that. So, yeah, go to those places.

• 1:07:44Chris Williamson?

  All right, John, thank you.

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 1:08:02Speaker 00

  What would happen if I stopped going? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 1:08:06Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:08:10Chris Williamson?

  I'm not the first daddy.

• 1:08:11Speaker 02

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.