Richard Reeves is the founder and president of the American Institute of Boys and Men, a group that focuses on the growing problem of men and boys feeling disengaged, disconnected, and depressed. In this episode, we talk to Richard about what he s done to address the problem, why it s happening, and what we can do to fix it.
00:18:50.880Anybody who thinks like that shouldn't be in the conversation.
00:18:53.120But on the other hand, we shouldn't let the natural, in fact, honorable discomfort that we feel, and honestly, that obviously women are going to feel much more strongly.
00:19:12.860It should be something that we get into the room that we say, of course, this is difficult.
00:19:17.020And of course, there's more we need to do with women and girls.
00:19:19.260And there's also this bunch of issues for boys and men.
00:19:23.460And my experience of this, and I'd be interested to see whether you agree with this, is that if you frame it that way, actually, there's a huge appetite to have this conversation, including among the most feminist women out there.
00:19:35.680Because they have sons, they have brothers, they have husbands, as long as there isn't this fear that this is going to be used as a way to go back on women's rights or to negate the ongoing work of women, as long as people trust you, that that's not what you're doing, then I have discovered the appetite for this conversation is huge.
00:19:58.180The Stuff You Should Know guys have made their own summer playlist of their must-listen podcasts on movies.
00:20:03.700It's me, Josh, and I'd like to welcome you to the Stuff You Should Know summer movie playlist.
00:20:08.680What screams summer more than a nice, darkened, air-conditioned theater and a great movie playing right in front of you.
00:20:14.500Episodes on James Bond, special effects, stuntmen and women, disaster films, even movies that change filmmaking, and many more.
00:20:21.400Listen to the Stuff You Should Know summer movie playlist on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
00:20:28.560Just like great shoes, great books take you places.
00:20:31.780Through unforgettable love stories, and into conversations with characters you'll never forget.
00:20:37.400I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of, like, butterflies.
00:20:41.960I'm Danielle Robay, and this is Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, the new podcast from Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts.
00:20:48.920Every week I sit down with your favorite book lovers, authors, celebrities, book talkers, and more,
00:20:54.360to explore the stories that shape us, on the page and off.
00:20:58.020I've been reading every Reese's Book Club pick, deep-diving book talk theories, and obsessing over book-to-screen casts for years.
00:21:05.520And now, I get to talk to the people making the magic.
00:21:08.820So if you've ever fallen in love with a fictional character, or cried at the last chapter, or passed a book to a friend saying,
00:21:15.700you have to read this, this podcast is for you.
00:21:19.800Listen to Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:21:28.020The X-Ray Vision Podcast is your home for reactions, recaps, and roundtable debates on the biggest pop culture moments of the summer.
00:21:36.180We drop four episodes a week, and every Friday, we're popping out the popcorn and breaking down that weekend's big box office draws,
00:23:24.560I think at the end of the day, it's business, it's all competition.
00:23:27.580And of course, our personal stories and opinions along the way.
00:23:30.580This isn't just a podcast, it's a movement for fans who live Musica Mexicana every single day.
00:23:35.040Listen to Augusto Papa as part of the My Cultura podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:23:43.300Hey, I'm Radhi Devlukia, and I'm the host of A Really Good Cry podcast, and I have the opportunity to talk to Dr. Julie Smith.
00:23:49.820Julie is a clinical psychologist, a best-selling author, and one of the most trusted voices in mental health online.
00:23:55.900She was one of the first therapists to use TikTok as an educational platform.
00:23:59.760And since then, she has built a global audience of nearly 10 million people by making emotional support accessible, honest, and deeply human.
00:24:08.020You know, resentment isn't something that the world owes you.
00:24:10.980It's something that you need to work on.
00:24:12.940I would say with this stuff is look out for those feelings of resentment, because they're a sign that there was some sort of boundary that wasn't held before.
00:24:21.960You know, that if you're not asserting your own desires or wishes or needs, and then resenting your partner or your friend for filling the space for you, then it comes back to, okay, well, what do you want that's not this?
00:24:37.660Listen to A Really Good Cry on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:24:45.840But laying that foundation becomes critical, and that's a central part, I think, of creating that, as you said, that permission, that space where we can have this dialogue in a constructive way.
00:24:55.900That said, as well, I mean, there's been that reaction, you know, we've got, you know, people like Josh Howley writes a book on manhood and seem to go, again, in a direction that a lot of folks online have gone.
00:25:08.300You expressed one of the, or at least highlighted one of the more extreme voices, Andrew Tate, in this space.
00:25:13.640I think you've written about and talked about even your own kids' relationship to Andrew as it relates to their algorithms online.
00:25:22.260Even Jordan Peterson, who, you know, has had his own evolution or devolution, depending on how some people view his perspectives on a myriad of issues.
00:25:32.040But this issue, you're right, has really come to the fore.
00:25:35.040I think about it, you know, with my wife, we have two boys, two girls, and my wife is now the bigger crusader on this, saying, what the hell has happened to our boys?
00:25:51.700He talked, I'm smiling, because when you were writing about this, Jordan Peterson, he's telling me about Jordan Peterson before I knew much about Jordan Peterson.
00:25:59.200My kids were telling me about Andrew Tate, my youngest son, who's now 23, said, when I was finishing my book, he said, Dad, you have to write about Andrew Tate.
00:26:08.420And I said, who the hell is Andrew Tate?
00:26:11.060I looked briefly at him, decided that he wasn't a big enough figure to worry about, didn't mention him.
00:26:15.620But of course, you know, of course I was wrong.
00:26:19.360And it's very interesting how the, let's just assume for the sake of this argument that you and I are both middle-aged, right?
00:26:27.780That might be flattering both of us, but let's go with it.
00:26:44.920I think that was a moment where this sort of gauzy, blobby thing over there was just hard to decode.
00:26:53.160But as you get closer to it, you understand that within it, big differences.
00:26:57.340I even, I've actually come to think that the term manosphere is not helpful because it's just, it just lumps together people who are doing very, very different things in different ways.
00:27:09.600And the young men who are the disproportionate consumers of a lot of that content, they understand the differences.
00:27:15.360And so if we don't sound like we understand the differences, then we just sound like, you know, old men shaking our fist at the world.
00:27:25.300And so I don't know how to do this yet, but it's almost like a brosphere, which is more like Rogan, certainly Chris Williamson, who I like quite a lot, and maybe even Theo Vaughn, I've been on his podcast.
00:27:38.560And then there's the kind of misogynosphere, or I don't know what to call, do you know what I mean?
00:27:42.500And they're very different, and it's quite important to keep that difference in our minds, because otherwise people think they're all the same, and they're really not.
00:27:53.020What they are all doing is trying to come up with answers to the questions that many young men are asking, and they're doing so with various degrees of openness and fidelity, and you can't throw them all together.
00:28:06.120And to do so is to, again, make a similar version of that mistake we were talking about earlier, which is to cede all that ground, right?
00:28:14.100I love what you just said is extraordinarily important, and what you also referenced I think is important.
00:28:20.200What are these young boys looking for?
00:28:23.740I mean, you know, we see how they fall prey to the algorithms, and, you know, you've written obviously a lot about, you know, what, you know, these kids and their body images and issues related, you know,
00:28:34.700six-pack abs, or, you know, maybe they're on gaming, and all of a sudden then, you know, they're on an Andrew Tate.
00:28:42.700You know, they're asking their parents for $35 to become part of his Andrew Tate Masculinity University, or some hybrid version of that for someone else.
00:29:43.060And so in the space of a very short period of economic history, we have transformed the economic relationships between men and women in a way that is wonderful.
00:29:52.600Arguably, the greatest economic liberation in human history as it rolls around the world, still far from complete.
00:29:59.220But like, is that like the fact that my wife has had opportunities that my mom could only dream of?
00:30:09.020And it has put a question mark next to the role of men.
00:30:13.820Because the traditional role of breadwinner has to a very large extent now disappeared.
00:30:21.600For the very good reason I've just identified.
00:30:23.460But we shouldn't be naive about the fact that it doesn't actually then put a big question mark.
00:30:27.060And we shouldn't be naive about the fact that will leave some men at least hungering for the world where you knew what it meant to be a man.
00:31:15.880And just, you know, the consent story and so on, too.
00:31:18.880And to be clear, in case it needs to be said again, all good.
00:31:24.280But I had this experience with one of my kids came home from, I guess it was middle or early high.
00:31:28.180And they'd done the social skills class or the relationship class or whatever Orwellian term is being used to describe the kind of social emotional skills, how to get by in the world class thing, right?
00:31:42.440And, sorry, that was very unfair to say it was Orwellian.
00:32:14.400So for reasons that I understand but I am increasingly impatient with, there's been a reluctance to set out a kind of positive vision of modern masculinity.
00:32:26.280One that's compatible with gender equality but is still appealing to young men for fear that that will somehow send us down this slippery slope back to the 1950s again.
00:32:35.900But what that means is that we've done a really good job of setting out the curriculum of what not to be without anything positive to take the place of the old script.
00:32:46.780So we've torn up the old script of masculinity, which was based around protector, provider, breadwinner.
00:34:04.900And I still love that idea, but I've really come to believe partly as a result of my own experience as a parent more generally, that that is naive, that we do actually still need a way to talk about men and women overlapping and distinct, but still beautiful.
00:35:04.300And to be clear that I, just that description, I mean, I'm a, I'm a proud US citizen, have been since 2016.
00:35:09.780And that pioneering spirit, that sense of optimism and growth and possibility is, I used to work here before this too.
00:35:16.820I used to love, love, love that about this country.
00:35:20.500But do you think there's a sense that at its worst, there's this movement online, the men going their own way movement, which is literally just men decoupling from society and becoming, they're sort of male separatists, essentially.
00:35:31.840Just saying we need to separate ourselves away from society.
00:35:34.260But even a bit less extreme than that, there's this sense of like, men are supposed to be independent.
00:35:40.280And if men are going to get married, it's because, you know, a woman will sort of trap him into it.
00:35:47.800Well, actually, it turns out, in the most recent surveys, men think being married is more important than women do.
00:35:52.780And that's because men know something.
00:35:55.760And the truth is that masculinity, properly defined, has always been relational.
00:36:02.020It's always been about service and surplus.
00:36:05.620I came across this definition in the literature for anthropology, saying that actually, in a lot of societies, the marker of going from boy to man was when you were producing more of something than you needed for yourself.
00:36:23.040And that's because just in the natural environment, like, it takes a long time to raise kids.
00:36:28.340And that's very demanding on the moms.
00:36:30.020And so it was masculinity was literally defined by service, was literally defined by giving more than you get, producing more than you need.
00:36:39.520Now, what that thing is going to be will change.
00:36:41.800That's very important to say, because, again, this can sound like we're calling for the old system.
00:36:47.280But I still love the idea that actually the way that you can tell if someone's a man is how he is with other people, how he is with his own kids, other people's kids.
00:36:58.220If he's a teacher, my middle son is now a teacher in Baltimore City.
00:37:03.000And, like, watching him, big guy at the front of a classroom, and he coaches soccer, he coaches a girls' soccer team.
00:37:09.860Just there's something about that which is beautiful.
00:37:12.180And I'm not suggesting, of course, that women don't also do that, to be clear.
00:37:16.040But there is something about this idea of what I would refer to as relational masculinity as opposed to lone ranger masculinity.
00:37:24.540I think a man going his own way and only looking out for himself is actually not a man.
00:37:31.320That's the least masculine thing you can do, is only look out for yourself.
00:37:36.760And that's been true throughout human history.
00:37:46.000And so I've really been disturbed by this strand of separatism and stark autonomy that you see online, which is like a real man is a man who answers only to himself.
00:38:10.360I mean, I saw that being played out in my own childhood, which was like he was the guy that defined himself by his very embeddedness in his community, not his separateness from it.
00:38:20.880And I really worry about the isolation that's gripping many of our men now.
00:38:25.080And I think it's because of this false idea about what it means to be a man.
00:38:28.140The Stuff You Should Know guys have made their own summer playlist of their must-listen podcasts on movies.
00:38:37.040It's me, Josh, and I'd like to welcome you to the Stuff You Should Know summer movie playlist.
00:38:41.840What screams summer more than a nice, darkened, air-conditioned theater and a great movie playing right in front of you.
00:38:47.660Episodes on James Bond, special effects, stuntmen and women, disaster films, even movies that change filmmaking, and many more.
00:38:54.340Listen to the Stuff You Should Know summer movie playlist on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
00:39:01.980Just like great shoes, great books take you places.
00:39:05.380Through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget.
00:39:10.540I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of, like, butterflies.
00:39:15.120I'm Danielle Robay, and this is Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, the new podcast from Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts.
00:39:21.920Every week I sit down with your favorite book lovers, authors, celebrities, book talkers, and more, to explore the stories that shape us, on the page and off.
00:39:31.420I've been reading every Reese's Book Club pick, deep-diving book talk theories, and obsessing over book-to-screen casts for years.
00:39:38.680And now, I get to talk to the people making the magic.
00:39:41.660So if you've ever fallen in love with a fictional character, or cried at the last chapter, or passed a book to a friend saying,
00:39:48.860you have to read this, this podcast is for you.
00:39:53.020Listen to Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:39:59.100The X-Ray Vision Podcast is your home for reactions, recaps, and roundtable debates on the biggest pop culture moments of the summer.
00:40:09.340We drop four episodes a week, and every Friday, we're popping out the popcorn and breaking down that weekend's big box office straws, including Superman and Sinners.
00:40:18.880Rosie Sinners, what an incredible cinema experience.
00:40:23.240I went in, and I was expecting Coogler, I was expecting horror.
00:40:27.380What I didn't expect, there was just this unbelievable, sprawling cinematography.
00:40:32.700This is a movie that gets better the more you think about it.
00:40:36.260From Star Wars to Fantastic Four, we're covering all the biggest movies, shows, and stories in fandom,
00:40:41.760including interviews with none other than Superman and Lois Lane themselves, David Corrensweat, and Rachel Brosnahan.
00:41:15.000Welcome to Agusto, Papa, the go-to spot for everything Musica Mexicana.
00:41:19.100We're proud Mexican-Americans who live and breathe this music.
00:41:22.480We started this podcast to share and discuss our views on Musica Mexicana.
00:41:26.460Whether you like Peso Pluma, Los Alegres del Barranco, Ariel Camacho, or Ivan Cornejo when you get in your feels, then this podcast is for you.
00:41:57.720I think at the end of the day, it's business, it's all competition.
00:42:00.740And of course, our personal stories and opinions along the way.
00:42:03.600This isn't just a podcast, it's a movement for fans who live Musica Mexicana every single day.
00:42:08.520Listen to Augusto Papa as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:42:16.460Hey, I'm Radhi Devlukia, and I'm the host of A Really Good Cry podcast, and I have the opportunity to talk to Dr. Julie Smith.
00:42:22.980Julie is a clinical psychologist, a best-selling author, and one of the most trusted voices in mental health online.
00:42:28.700She was one of the first therapists to use TikTok as an educational platform, and since then, she has built a global audience of nearly 10 million people by making emotional support accessible, honest, and deeply human.
00:42:41.100You know, resentment isn't something that the world owes you, it's something that you need to work on.
00:42:46.560I would say with this stuff is look out for those feelings of resentment, because they're a sign that there was some sort of boundary that wasn't held before.
00:42:54.840You know, that if you're not asserting your own desires or wishes or needs, and then resenting your partner or your friend for filling the space for you, then it comes back to, okay, well, what do you want that's not this?
00:43:11.080Listen to A Really Good Cry on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:43:16.180In this notion of community versus, you know, this disconnect that people are now, you know, deeply lonely, that I imagine is at the core of why 80% of suicides are men.
00:43:32.100I mean, is that the trend line or is it something deeper?
00:43:34.420Is it just self-worth, feeling worthless?
00:43:36.560Is it the fact that, you know, I've no longer had value because, you know, my physical strength, my physical capacity is no longer the advantage in a sort of cognitive world in terms of the economic shifts and realities?
00:43:56.000And I will say that the thing that I didn't know until we dug into it more recently was that it's really swung to young men.
00:44:03.180So up until 2010, it was really middle-aged men where we saw this rise in suicide, which I think was consistent with the story of deaths of despair, what was happening in the economy and so on.
00:44:13.460But since 2010, the rise has basically all been among young men under 30.
00:44:16.960And we honestly don't really know why, but it's a huge rise.
00:44:21.520And I'm sure it's connected to some of these conversations that you've been having around what I call neededness, for want of a better term.
00:44:31.880Yeah, I just think there's, like, I've come to believe that a human universal is the need to be needed.
00:44:40.520And that feeling unneeded is, in this case, almost literally fatal.
00:44:45.720A very good study by Fiona Shand and her colleagues looked at the words that men used to describe themselves before taking their own lives through suicide.
00:44:53.640And the two most commonly used to describe themselves were worthless and useless.
00:45:01.540We also know that the suicide rate among men goes up very significantly after a breakdown, a marital breakdown or a separation.
00:45:42.300And I've actually been struck, this is something I, again, I learned recently, is that there's a huge lack of men volunteering in many civic institutions.
00:45:50.320So I just signed up to be a big brother.
00:45:52.100I'm a big fan of big brothers, big sisters.
00:45:53.780And now that I've empty nested, maybe I'm also trying to fill a hole in myself too.
00:45:58.400But I was shocked to discover that the waiting list for boys, where I live in East Tennessee, for a big is 12 months.
00:46:07.520Because they have at least as many boys being referred as girls, and they have so few male volunteers.
00:46:13.060And I look around, and people should look in their own area, and they will almost certainly discover that there is a massive shortage of male bigs.
00:46:20.960And so big brothers, big sisters is becoming big sisters by default because of a lack of male volunteers.
00:46:27.980And at the same time, we have a lot of men who maybe lack some structure and purpose in their lives.
00:46:33.100And so there's got to be a way to make that call, but it has to be to men.
00:46:36.900That's the thing that sounds a bit socially conservative about this, which is that I think you've got to make a specific call, which is like, guys, we need you.
00:46:48.320If guys are told like we need guys, they're much more likely to turn up.
00:46:51.940And we could argue forever about why that is, but it just seems to be true.
00:46:54.600And so there's something quite deep in our culture here.
00:46:58.920As men, we, like as fathers, that's obvious maybe in the workplace.
00:47:03.800But if we start to doubt whether the tribe needs us, I think we fade away.
00:47:09.280Is this, do you assign these trend lines to deinstitutionalization, the conversations we're having today around reshoring and manufacturing?
00:47:21.100Are you seeing these trend lines globally along those same lines?
00:47:25.640Is it now because we're online more and it's algorithms that it's getting exacerbated?
00:47:30.780What, I mean, what are the, what are the sort of, or is it just the ascendancy of, of the feminist movement and, and sort of that friction, that dialectic that's, you know, that we're not expressing or at least discussing as much?
00:47:44.200What, what, what do you attach this to?
00:47:53.440But I, I do think that the way I think about this is that it's like the, if you think of the culture as like a kaleidoscope, I think it's been shaken very significantly and the pieces have not settled again yet.
00:48:05.720And some of those, some of the forces that have shaken our culture have been really good, like the economic rise of women, right, which we mentioned earlier.
00:48:13.860Now, the economic rise of women is a profound fact about modern societies.
00:48:18.200It is a wonderful thing and it has also massively destabilized the way we think about male and female role.
00:48:26.020And we've got to acknowledge that if we want to keep making progress.
00:48:29.780I think like a big thing here is you can have a huge step forward, which still has some turbulence around it, right?
00:48:36.020So finding a way to take men with us on this journey, that's huge.
00:48:39.380But as you just referred to, it's also, also true that while that was happening, that de-industrialization, some of the issues around trade just disproportionately hit working class men.
00:48:52.440And then right towards the end of this period, we're seeing the rise of online culture.
00:48:56.720Now, we focus a lot on the negatives of online culture.
00:49:00.740I sometimes wonder about the potential positives because in almost all of human history, having more men who don't have that much to do, have time on their hands, has predicted much higher crime rates and much higher social unrest.
00:49:20.640That seems to, it's almost like a fixed law of societies, right?
00:49:25.740And I think it's plausible to suggest that that might be because the men have something else to do with gaming, with pornography, with whatever the online content is, etc.
00:49:39.300And so, now, I'm not arguing a favor of those things when I say this, but it is nonetheless striking that these trends in young male, particularly young male disengagement, which would almost automatically produce higher crime rates in every other era of people, because they'd be kicking around on the streets, they'd be trying to figure out what to do, they'd be getting into fights, they'd be like, that's not happened.
00:50:02.240And so, in some ways, what's happened instead is a male retreat.
00:50:05.440And so, I've ended up being more worried about the men who are checking out than the men who are acting out.
00:50:14.360Now, of course, the men who act out get all the headlines, and I don't in any way want to diminish the problems around men acting out, but I see a much deeper problem here, which is just this withdrawal, this retreat, this passivity that many men feel because they can retreat to this online world, which wasn't there.
00:50:33.420It wasn't there when I was growing up or when you were growing up in the same way, but it is there now.
00:50:38.320And so, what it gives men is an alternative world to escape to.
00:50:42.540And the question is, why are so many of them wanting to escape?
00:50:46.420And that, I mean, it's a rhetorical question for you.
00:51:11.600I mean, or can you literally mark, is there a cultural moment that really sort of, where you saw this trend accelerate, this trend line became this headline?
00:51:21.240The way I think about this is that you see these cultural trends happening relatively slowly in terms of a human lifespan, right?
00:51:29.480But they're like, you know, the tectonic plates shifting around.
00:51:33.360And then you'll get, once they hit a certain point, then you'll get the earthquake or the volcano.
00:51:38.580But beneath the surface, and this is very much your state, so you understand this better than most governors,
00:51:44.320it's like stuff, the ground is moving beneath the surface, and then that will create this kind of eruption.
00:51:49.560I think the ground has been shifting for at least half a century.
00:51:53.580It's been shifting economically, with a shift away from blue-collar, male-favored jobs.
00:51:59.200It's been shifting in terms of the relative position of men and women, with women going from being essentially economically dependent on men
00:52:06.660to being economically independent to a very large degree.
00:52:11.040And in the education system, we've seen this massive reversal of the gender gap,
00:52:15.740so that boys and men are now way behind women and girls.
00:52:19.560When they leave school or when they leave college.
00:52:21.320I mean, at college now, there's a bigger gender gap on college campuses today than there was in 1972 when we passed Title IX,
00:52:37.760And then I think this online culture has intersected with this in one way, just talked about to kind of give men a place to retreat to,
00:52:44.520which I think is bad in the long run, but also to start weaponizing, to use the term used earlier,
00:52:50.120some of these grievances, some of these issues.
00:52:51.840And so I think it takes quite a long time to neglect issues that have been built, but I think they've been coming for quite a while now.
00:52:59.320It's just that they've broken through the surface now into our culture and into our politics in a way that's made them very hard to ignore.
00:53:06.780But I honestly think they've been building for many decades now.
00:53:09.400So speaking of politics, I mean, obviously the Trump campaign did not ignore this space.
00:53:15.460And I don't think they ignored it for, you know, four, eight years prior either.
00:53:19.940But they seem to have really been the beneficiary of more focus on young men on some of these trend lines.
00:53:28.100Obviously, the amount of time and energy the campaign spent targeting young men, targeting men broadly, that paid huge dividends.
00:53:36.680I think there was a 15 point shift from 41 percent, 56 percent men under 30 that moved towards Trump campaign.
00:53:47.300What do you make of of his approach to these issues?
00:54:10.860At least I had a privilege of having him on the podcast.
00:54:12.980Scott Galloway, close friend of yours.
00:54:15.440Scott talked about the DNC and he talked about going on there, DNC, what we care about.
00:54:21.280And it was every single thing that's out there in the imaginable, except 26 percent of the population that the DNC didn't seem to care about.
00:54:30.360And at least at all, at least based on their own their own website and their own priorities and policy.
00:54:37.720What what do you think of Trump's efforts in this space?
00:54:40.540Yeah. So the way I think about this is that in politics, something almost always beats nothing.
00:54:46.060And what there was from the Democrats on issues around boys and men was was nothing.
00:54:53.120There was this. It was the sound of deafening silence on these issues.
00:55:00.380And I think for the reasons that were identified earlier, which is the Democrats were very determined to be seen, particularly by women, as the party that were supporting them.
00:55:08.600And they felt that any moves to acknowledge the issues, the challenges of boys and men would somehow undermine their claim to be the party for women.
00:55:19.360I think that was a fatal miscalculation.
00:55:22.040I also think, honestly, it was somewhat insulting to women because there are plenty of women out there and we may know some in our own lives, governor, who are simultaneously worried about the issues facing women access, for example, to reproductive health care, justice at work.
00:55:38.980And they're desperately worried about their son's mental health and they're very worried about their brother's job.
00:55:44.260And so a party that managed to do both, I think, would have been pretty unstoppable.
00:55:49.280But there was nothing on the Democrat side.
00:55:51.560On the Republican side, there was really, I would just put it as meeting men where they were, especially young men.
00:55:59.340And if you look at recent work from David Shaw, the Democrat pollster, it's very striking that it wasn't just like men under 30.
00:56:05.140It was men under 20. It was men under 23.
00:56:07.680The younger the men were, the more they swung.
00:56:10.500And I think that is partly because that's the micro generation who grew up with terms like toxic masculinity and mansplaining and the women's movement.
00:56:19.700Toxic masculinity was only invented really in 2016 for public use.
00:56:24.460But if you were 20, you were 10 when that happened, if you were voting for the first time in 2024.
00:56:29.660You were in high school when that happened, if you were 24 when you were voting.
00:56:34.080So I think what's happened was that there was this sense of young men coming up for grabs.
00:56:37.860They didn't hear anything from Democrats.
00:56:40.400And in the end, I think the Republicans did a better job of signaling to young men, we like you.
00:57:15.940The Republicans managed to convince young men that we see you and we like you.
00:57:22.400And I don't think there was anything more to it than that.
00:57:24.400But I don't think the Democrats did a very good job of making young men feel the same way.
00:57:29.080If anything, Democrats struggle with the idea that men might have problems because too many of them are still convinced that men are the problem.
00:57:39.560And until Democrats get past that, until they can acknowledge that there are real problems facing boys and men and issues facing women and girls, they just couldn't get past the zero sum.
00:57:51.640It's very frustrating, especially when Tim Walsh came on the ticket.
00:57:55.040I had this fantasy speech in my head where Tim Walsh would go out and talk about the need for a first public school teacher to run for such high office, coach.
00:58:03.340I had a speech he was going to give, and it was going to be all about the things we're going to do for women as the Democrats.
00:59:08.320Just like great shoes, great books take you places through unforgettable love stories and into conversations with characters you'll never forget.
00:59:18.420I think any good romance, it gives me this feeling of like butterflies.
00:59:22.600I'm Danielle Robay, and this is Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club, the new podcast from Hello Sunshine and iHeart Podcasts.
00:59:29.960Every week I sit down with your favorite book lovers, authors, celebrities, book talkers, and more to explore the stories that shape us, on the page and off.
00:59:39.020I've been reading every Reese's Book Club pick, deep diving book talkers, and obsessing over book-to-screen cast for years.
00:59:46.540And now, I get to talk to the people making the magic.
00:59:49.840So if you've ever fallen in love with a fictional character, or cried at the last chapter, or passed a book to a friend saying,
00:59:56.720you have to read this, this podcast is for you.
01:00:00.200Listen to Bookmarked by Reese's Book Club on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
01:00:07.200The X-Ray Vision Podcast is your home for reactions, recaps, and roundtable debates on the biggest pop culture moments of the summer.
01:00:17.220We drop four episodes a week, and every Friday, we're popping out the popcorn and breaking down that weekend's big box office straws, including Superman and Sinners.
01:00:26.760Rosie Sinners, what an incredible cinema experience.
01:00:31.460I went in, and I was expecting Kugler, I was expecting horror.
01:00:34.900What I didn't expect, there was just this unbelievable, sprawling cinematography.
01:00:40.580This is a movie that gets better the more you think about it.
01:00:44.140From Star Wars to Fantastic Four, we're covering all the biggest movies, shows, and stories in fandom,
01:00:49.640including interviews with none other than Superman and Lois Lane themselves, David Corrensweat, and Rachel Brosnahan.
01:10:54.000When I brought my book out, I made the proposal that moms and dads should each get six months of paid leave at a very high replacement rate.
01:11:05.580And one of my friends says, what are you, European?
01:11:08.060And I said, well, actually, by background, I am.
01:11:10.420But I get it. It's like wildly utopian.