00:00:00.000hey y'all joe here and you're listening to under the influence i had a totally different
00:00:10.360episode planned today in fact i had totally different episodes planned for the next couple0.99
00:00:15.760weeks but uh we're gonna do something a little bit different no woman i know is okay right now
00:00:24.980The stories coming out of Cornell are just completely dominating our brains, dominating our group texts, dominating pretty much every conversation we're having right now.
00:00:35.280If you haven't been following the story, you are lucky.
00:00:38.340Like, wow, I applaud you for not having this in your brain.
00:00:47.400Seven members of a Cornell fraternity have been accused in a lawsuit of sexually assaulting a fellow student.
00:00:53.080And while this is sadly nothing new, these allegations are particularly horrifying.
00:00:59.340Because the fact is, this young woman had absolutely no way of giving consent.
00:01:03.860And these boys allegedly had her upstairs in a bedroom.
00:01:07.820This young woman was so intoxicated, she had absolutely no way of giving consent.
00:01:12.680And these boys just completely took advantage of her.
00:01:16.880The group text is what keeps getting so many of us.1.00
00:01:19.920We've seen their group text where one of the young men texted to the rest of his fraternity, free pussy, that free pussy was available upstairs.1.00
00:01:28.740I just keep thinking about the guy that texted free pussy, what his mother must think right now.1.00
00:01:34.840I mean, is she like, oh, my gosh, I really failed here.1.00
00:01:38.840Or is there anything that mothers can do to raise boys that don't end up doing this?
00:01:44.940because it just seems like this has become such a part of our culture that we just accept it. We
00:01:50.380accept things like the Epstein files. We accept things like the Gisele Pelicott case. And now we
00:01:55.180accept things like the Cornell 7. And one of the things that I keep coming back to is for all the
00:02:01.140progress that we thought we'd made, have we actually gotten any better at teaching boys to
00:02:07.060become good men in the world? Now, I love good men. I love my husband. I have a son. And I think
00:02:13.900it's really important work to raise a boy who grows up into a good man. But if the world isn't
00:02:18.700going to change, that often feels sort of impossible. So I wanted to run a conversation
00:02:25.120that I, so I wanted to rerun an episode today. It's a chat that I had with Peggy Orenstein.
00:02:31.440Peggy's the author of the book Boys and Sex. And she spent years researching how boys get
00:02:37.220indoctrinated into toxic culture and how we can possibly deprogram it. And honestly,
00:02:54.020I'm going to rerun some of my other talks about men, toxic masculinity, boys, and what
00:03:01.280we can do about what honestly feels like such an insurmountable problem.
00:03:13.300There's so much that young men and young boys can find on social media that is absolutely terrifying.
00:03:20.980The stuff that is being served to young men is extreme and misogynistic.
00:03:26.240And frankly, so much of our parenting job of parenting young men is now to manage the media that they are being shown.
00:03:34.100And it's hard because our kids are way ahead of the curve when it comes to this.
00:03:38.800As the mom of a son, this conversation freaked me out.
00:03:43.300But it also brought me hope because knowledge is power.
00:03:46.860And if we know what is out there, then we can at least make a plan for how to help our kids work through it.
00:03:52.340Andrew Tate is this Internet phenomenon who talks about, like, masculinity as this sort of, you know, men must be like the worst kind of of fragile, rigid masculinity that he's trying to convince young boys about.
00:04:08.180And it's been it's a it's terrible thing.
00:04:11.100and um and he's super popular with teen boys and young men um he's like the masculinity version of
00:04:20.000white supremacy oh he was arrested he was in jail yeah i know i see the look on your face you're
00:04:24.700going oh oh because i'm looking him up and his net worth is something like 700 million dollars
00:04:30.060yeah it's very he's very bad very very very bad and um and and it's something you know that you
00:04:38.020have to if you have if you had older kids you would be talking about it hopefully with them
00:04:43.580girls too because they need to know what's going on with this guy and what how the influence he
00:04:49.240might be having on boys so he has a tremendous influence on a fairly significant segment of
00:04:55.020boys and it's uh just on a whim looked up andrew tate roman empire and yeah it turns out he loves
00:05:01.460the roman empire for you know and because these boys who who watch him or listen to him they don't
00:05:07.000know anything they're uneducated so he's saying like the roman empire was the pinnacle of men
00:05:12.860being men and being control and once and and once they you know the the cycle is they get in control0.99
00:05:19.580and then they get lax and then they become pussies and then somebody comes and takes them over and1.00
00:05:23.400that's why it fell because men became pussies and that was i mean those that's his language not mine0.99
00:05:27.920And that, so, yeah, so that is, so there was also a, I don't like to really use the phrase toxic masculinity, but in this case, I think it fits that there was a toxic masculinity piece of it, not for, you know, men like my nephew or my friend or my brother, but that is definitely a piece of it for a cohort of younger men, I think.0.97
00:05:52.900now now i'm really i'm about to go deep down an andrew tate rabbit hole which will probably
00:05:59.220make me feel upset and later on but we started this conversation to talk about the roman empire
00:06:07.640but i do have to talk about this really quick now that it's it's you've brought it onto my radar
00:06:12.560i did not even realize that this was such a thing on tiktok bombarding these young men with these
00:06:19.640kinds of misogynistic videos i do i also i also have a son i have a six-year-old son and this is
00:06:24.640terrifying yeah and he was he was charged in romania with rape and human trafficking and yet
00:06:31.660he continues to have this um really intense hold on a lot of um boys and young men and so it really
00:06:40.720is something because you know like anything with media they watch it they want you know at first
00:06:44.880they watch it because they think it's like funny or weird but those ideas get into their heads
00:06:49.140and it's something that you know with for parents because you know we look at that stuff and go like
00:06:54.880well that's ridiculous but it becomes not ridiculous to them you know it becomes part of
00:07:02.020their world in those and you know there's a lot of research i talked about this in boys and sex
00:07:06.320about how uh when you embed false facts in stories people's first response and this is not specific
00:07:14.120with Du Bois. This is just humanity. Your first, and this tells us a lot about like fake news and
00:07:19.380what's happened on the internet. Your first response is to go, oh, that's not true. But then
00:07:23.700over time, even if it's not told to you again, like they did these experiments with college
00:07:28.220students where they put false facts into stories, like exercise is bad for you, like something that1.00
00:07:33.920stupid, right? And they go, well, of course that's not true. And then they asked them two weeks later0.99
00:07:38.020after they've read the story and they're like, yeah, no, I read something that exercise is bad
00:07:42.040for you. And it actually becomes more, those false beliefs become strengthened over time
00:07:46.380after they're told things. So if you are, if a boy is sitting and watching Andrew Tate,
00:07:52.900because he thinks it's, you know, hilarious, as boys will say, when something, you know,
00:07:57.320and I have a whole, a whole deconstruction of the word hilarious, what it means in boys' lives,
00:08:03.500but they watch it because they think it's funny or it's hilarious or it's goofy,
00:08:07.420but they will, it starts to implant beliefs. And that's not to say that they're all going to be
00:08:11.500horrible misogynist rapist or anything like that, but it starts to skew who they are in the world.
00:08:16.060And we have to really, you know, it's a world that the online world, so much of the online world0.95
00:08:21.500wants them to be super polarized, wants them to be extreme, wants them to be, you know,
00:08:28.380misogynist. And you have to constantly sort of like upset that and talk to them about that and
00:08:33.900work with that. Yes. And this Andrew Tate, he's not an obscure personality. I feel like a lot of my
00:08:43.780listeners probably haven't heard about him either because his video has been watched 11.6 billion
00:08:50.040times. Yeah. No, it's not a little thing. I'm not talking about some weird corner, dusty corner of
00:08:56.280the dark web or something this guy's mainstream and this is my boy's really because he makes you
00:09:03.840feel better about yourself and when you're a young man and you're like insecure like we all are when
00:09:10.140we're young you know it gives you sort of like some tools he he's supportive he and then slowly
00:09:17.060it flips into this like really deep misogyny we are going to take a quick break here when we get
00:09:25.560back, we are going even further into this Andrew Tate rabbit hole and more terrifying things that
00:09:31.540boys and young men are being shown on social media. I didn't know that this is where the
00:09:36.560episode was going, but I'm really glad we went there. Happy about it. Be right back.
00:09:42.060i feel bad for young men for a lot of reasons but they want to be
00:09:53.380encouraged and led and they want role models yeah i really try to avoid the phrase toxic
00:10:00.120masculinity because i think it puts boys in a defensive crouch and i don't want them to think
00:10:04.800that who they are like their their their personhood is toxic and so i try to use words
00:10:09.980like rigid masculinity or fragile masculinity or you know conventional masculinity like words that
00:10:15.760are less loaded um some of the boys like when i was writing boys it's like some of them use that
00:10:21.840phrase because that phrase obviously is in the culture and they all know it um but but i and
00:10:26.020and i'm often you know people say like that i use it but i actually i actually try to not
00:10:30.780use that because i i feel like when i talk to boys it was so interesting talking to boys
00:10:36.420honestly joe they they because first of all they um would say people would say to me like
00:10:44.120how'd you get poised to talk to you like that and say i asked you know because really nobody asks
00:10:50.960them and if you ask them they actually talked more sort of emotionally and deeply in some ways
00:10:57.640than girls did because they never had the opportunity and they were so and i would say
00:11:03.720like, you know, what, tell me, you know, when I would ask them to, like, what was the question
00:11:11.960I would ask? What's the ideal guy? You know, it was like they were channeling 1955. They would
00:11:18.840immediately go into this, like, you know, athletic and sexual conquest and, you know, rich and all
00:11:25.020these things. And they really wanted alternatives and they really wanted ways that they could be
00:11:30.800a fuller person, especially around emotional suppression. They were really in pain around
00:11:40.400all emotional, around the ways that they would always say that what they had learned
00:11:46.140by the time they were really the age of your son, what they had learned was that they were
00:11:51.240allowed two emotions, happiness and anger. And when that's it, after a while, you really
00:11:59.020becoming capable as we you know a lot of us adult women can attest to in some of our relationships
00:12:04.140with men they don't have a big emotional range anymore because they have lost it it has it has
00:12:08.880become it has gone away because they didn't practice it they didn't learn it their brains
00:12:12.360don't wire that way so what i always say the best thing you can do with your little boys
00:12:16.180is to name emotion as broad a range of emotions with them as you can so you know it seems it
00:12:26.000seems like you're feeling frustrated it seems like you're really sad about that it seems like
00:12:28.700you're very confused. It seems like you're feeling a lot of joy around, like the whole range of
00:12:32.200emotions so that they don't just go to happy when they're happy and everything else, anger. Because
00:12:39.460anger's, you know, that's where it starts with boys. We don't want them to be acting that anger,
00:12:44.480that constant anger out. But if sad goes to anger, if frustrated goes to anger, if confused goes to
00:12:49.960anger, if everything goes to anger, you can see why that can become a dangerous situation. So it's
00:12:54.720really important as mothers but also as much as possible men in their lives to really like
00:12:59.800pinpoint emotions so that they can name the emotions in themselves and that allows them
00:13:04.480to hang on to them when they get as they get older such that's such good advice we we just
00:13:09.840went through something where my son who has a lot of wonderful emotions but he's been clashing with
00:13:18.000his dad because they're very similar they have very similar brilliant fascinating brains and
00:13:26.360he started writing him notes that say i hate you daddy i'm leaving them all over the house
00:13:32.380interesting really in creative places and there was one on the toilet seat there's one
00:13:37.920under like under his side of the covers over there uh but he and i had a talk about it and
00:14:07.240So I wrote him a spelling guide for other ways to tell his father he's unhappy with him.
00:14:14.260i'm annoyed with you i'm confused by you i'm sad um and now he's using a lot more a lot more
00:14:22.320verbs isn't that great i mean great for his vocabulary but also that's exactly what i'm
00:14:28.120talking about you because hate is anger right and usually under hate is not usually a primary
00:14:34.300emotion there's usually something underneath that there's hurt there's sadness there's pain
00:14:37.960there's something else so how do you help i mean i think that works for girls too but
00:14:41.780Girls aren't discouraged from learning what the range of their emotions are in the same way.
00:14:48.980I mean, it may be that they don't for whatever reason, but it's not considered part of their gender identity to cut themselves off from feeling.
00:14:56.880I always say that girls, boys, girls, the work with girls was about learning about how girls cut themselves off from their body and the work with boys, although it was also about sex and all of that, but it was really fundamentally about how boys cut themselves off from their heart.
00:15:29.220It is true that, you know, around those issues of, you know, development of emotion, other things that are going to eventually.
00:15:36.700scaffold into being about their relationships with a partner both emotional and sexual are
00:15:44.740things that we plant the seeds of when they're very very young whether it you know how we talk
00:15:49.220about their bodies or it's how we allow them to express emotion or how we teach them to behave
00:15:54.100with others on the playground you know all these things are going to they're going to bring into
00:15:59.300their human relationships and you can't really just start talking about the issues that you know
00:16:05.380that become that when they're, first of all, once they hit puberty, it's really hard to talk to them
00:16:09.540anyway, like entering into those conversations that, you know, 13, 14, 15, good luck with that.
00:16:14.120Not that you can't if your children are already that age, but it's, it's just a lot harder.
00:16:18.080Whereas if you are already talking about like, you know, emotions when they're little, if you
00:16:23.200get those, you know, there's all these, there's great books on, um, sexuality for, you know,
00:16:28.720for four-year-olds that are, are wonderful. Um, Roby Harris's books are wonderful. Sex is a funny
00:16:33.920word is wonderful they're on my website which is my name but you know there's to have those books
00:16:38.280in the home and to have those conversations sort of neutrally when they're when they're little
00:16:44.080i mean i can remember my daughter loves when i talked about her like this i'll tell you
00:16:47.660um but i can remember you know like when she was seven um we were sitting at dinner and all of a0.94
00:16:53.400sudden she was like eating and all of a sudden the fork like paused halfway to her mouth and she
00:16:58.000kind of looked up, you know, into space and she said, well, I know it takes a sperm and an egg
00:17:05.960to make a baby, but how does the sperm get into the uterus? And my husband like gave me this look
00:17:13.660like, and I, without, because I was, I knew I had prepared for this moment already. We had planted
00:17:19.980the seeds even up to that point. And I, without missing me, I said, you know, honey, that is such
00:17:23.940a good question after dinner let's read your book and we can look at that part and you know and we
00:17:29.520had the ruby harris book and we looked at the part and they had you know and and and it just
00:17:33.380helped us with no and then of course then what happened was she had she had a friend who had
00:17:38.500two moms oh yeah and she was so she was she was like what about gideon and you're like different
00:17:46.900different science it's like well you know they uh gideon's moms had a helper um who who gave
00:17:54.780them some sperm and she said how and i said well you know they went to the doctor's office well
00:18:00.380how did the doctor get and i was like okay let's have a cookie that's enough of this conversation
00:18:04.700today i love it yes we we haven't got into the sex conversations but what but being ready for it
00:18:14.840But being ready for it, being ready for it.
00:18:17.360Having the books like those Roe v. Harris books, they have just lovely little cartoons and they're not, they're appropriate, they're age appropriate.
00:18:23.380And, you know, so that you're never making it something that feels, you know, dirty or taboo or unspeakable when they're little.
00:18:31.800And then as they get older and things do become more complicated and there are, you know, all the things start happening, they know that they can come to you for somebody who they can talk to, who will not be judgmental, who has already shown openness.
00:18:50.540Because, man, you know, it gets harder, you know.
00:19:18.260I mean, I don't want to, I don't want to scare you too much.
00:19:21.800I really think that as much if in a community of parents as you can keep your child from that as long as possible.
00:19:31.040And then once they are going to I mean, it's a drive because, you know, they need to be online to do their schoolwork and all these different things.
00:19:37.840So, you know, our tool of our work or our academic life has merged with the tool of our entertainment.
00:19:44.540And that's tricky for all of us. Right. For all of us.
00:19:48.040um but for kids i think you know what i'm finding out i'm doing a project right now
00:19:55.100and we don't have to go here because that's going to scare you even more but i'm doing a project
00:20:01.800right now in young people in pornography and um the a lot of there i mean there's the whole point
00:20:09.860you know there's the whole like porn of it all that but a lot of what they find initially is
00:20:14.840more like on youtube or social media all and so it's really to it's it's it's i think hard for us
00:20:23.880because we didn't grow up with it as in the same way but to be aware that these the you know the
00:20:30.300algorithms they take them down these rabbit holes and they'll keep feeding them and feeding them and
00:20:34.220feeding them more extreme material um and and we there just needs to be a lot of conversation
00:20:40.020as much, you know, blocking or minimizing as you can do, um, for a little, for younger kids,
00:20:48.000um, I think it's really important, um, because the stuff that is going out to boys,
00:20:52.420uh, is, is extreme. Um, it's massage, it's really misogynist, um, and, and it can feel
00:21:00.820initially empowering um so i i just i i really i feel like for our generation of parents and
00:21:12.200even a generation of parents behind me because my daughter is you know in college now but um
00:21:16.320that we didn't we were completely unprepared for how much of our parenting job was managing media
00:21:25.040you know i mean i think that has become like an enormous part of our parenting job and something
00:21:33.060that we that that's hard to do because they're kind of ahead of us on on that curve um but we
00:21:38.600it makes it all it's like why i i just was um oh some some reporter in the pacific northwest called
00:21:46.480me because some sheriff had gone into the public library and seen a book called um like deal with
00:21:57.520it i think it was called it was a book on female puberty from 1999 uh decided it was obscene
00:22:05.780checked it out the library and not brought it back as a as a and some other book too and it
00:22:10.920was like first of all i was like okay the books from 1999 has been there since 1999 why is he
00:22:16.800suddenly doing this and why and like it's completely outdated anyway i would pull that
00:22:22.760book from the library for different reasons because you know social media hadn't even happened
00:22:26.200uh so what is you know like it's not even helpful um but and i'm not sure kids go to the library
00:22:35.640anymore because they're all you know like like who but but and and and all of that i mean the
00:22:40.260the book banning thing as part of this national coordinated effort and this guy, whether he
00:22:43.680is actively part of that effort or passively just, you know, himself consumes the media that gives
00:22:50.160him that idea ends up being part of the effort. But the, but the larger issue was, I was like,
00:22:56.040you think that you, by taking some sex ed book out of the library, you're stopping kids from
00:23:02.820encountering this information because guess what? They've got a phone in their pocket and that phone
00:23:10.160is putting them in touch with so much that, I mean, you think if you don't talk to your child
00:23:16.400about sex, they're not going to find out about it or they're going to find out about it in some
00:23:20.280like natural, healthy way or, you know, figure it out. That's not going to happen. The way that
00:23:26.700they're going to find out about it is online and you don't have a choice. And that's the same thing
00:23:31.200with boys and masculinity and emotion and all that stuff. They are finding out such massive
00:23:36.480misinformation about so many things online that so much of our job as parents is to counterbalance
00:23:41.020that at this point and to make sure that we're inculcating them with positive values, with love,
00:23:46.340with kindness, with caring, with real human. I mean, I think I like most of that negative stuff
00:23:51.380on the internet. It's about undermining our humanity. And, you know, it's not whether it's
00:23:58.800the masculinity stuff, the sex stuff, whatever it is, it's all about undermining humanity and
00:24:04.060human connection and compassion and listening to others and all the things that are so important
00:24:11.040to us. So just reinforcing those things constantly in our kids' lives becomes a big part of the task.
00:24:17.620You can't get rid of all the stuff online. It's whack-a-mole, but you can keep really strongly
00:24:24.400reinforcing your values and reminding them and educating them that what they see online is
00:24:30.000there to sell them things, whether it's an idea or a product.
00:24:36.860Time for a quick break. When we get back, we'll talk about finding positive
00:29:10.340in COVID land and I can't be in touch with anybody anymore and I'm going to learn how to do a Laura
00:29:16.040Ingalls Wilder thing and I learned to shear sheep and process and I did this like whole thing
00:29:20.740but it became so much about more than that it just and that's why I think I mean you don't have to be
00:29:25.380a person although I think a lot of us do do handcraft and as women it's a really important
00:29:30.720thing and craft ties into witchcraft and like there's all these resonance um to it but um it
00:29:38.540just became a lot for me about confronting transition in my life as a woman. And my dad
00:29:46.860was dying. My mom was dead. My daughter was leaving for college. I was in kind of disarray.
00:29:53.720That's why it's called unraveling. You know, the world was falling apart around me. It was also
00:29:58.940about learning to, like, we think, we think about our food so much now, you know, so consciously and
00:30:04.080eco-consciously, but we don't think about our clothes. Like, why don't we think about our
00:30:06.880clothing, the way we think about our food. So a lot of it became about looking at the environmental
00:30:11.180impact of our clothing. It became about thinking about what creativity means in both like personal
00:30:16.100ways and larger ways. It became about all this history and lore and why, like I said, why the
00:30:21.560Greeks don't see blue and all this stuff. So it was like all this stuff that ended up being
00:30:24.920in this book that was so much more than like a book is a braid and there's the part that you
00:30:30.500more, but more than three strands. There's the part that you know, which was that I was going
00:30:34.520to do this project. And then there was all the strands that I just didn't know. And, and all
00:30:39.840that ended up being like so much, not, I want to say more interesting, but more surprising and not
00:30:45.820even more surprising, just different and relevant and women's work and the, and like even the,
00:30:50.520the history, like what did women do, Joe, when Trump was elected president?0.99
00:30:56.700We, we knit, we made pussy hats out of yarn.0.98
00:31:00.480And there is a reason for that. There's a reason that the first thing that women did was pick up knitting needles. Historically and culturally and across economics and across ethnicities, our handcraft has been a way that women, traditional handcraft, has expressed both dissent and patriotism politically and continues to be.1.00
00:31:23.880craftivism is a really big thing. And that, learning that whole history of women's labor
00:31:30.480was incredible. So there's like all these aspects of this book that were just
00:31:33.860super fun and interesting and kept me from complete despair during the year of lockdown.
00:31:43.220Peggy, I have a great, I have a great plan for getting Unraveled Into More Hands.
00:31:50.000have you listened to our other podcast wilder yet oh i have wait do you do wilder is that you
00:31:59.180uh glennis mcnichol is the host of wilder and i created it with her so i'm the executive producer
00:32:05.220of it oh my god yeah i i haven't i got it you want to know why i haven't yeah i'm so jealous
00:32:11.460that you thought of that idea that i i have not been able to bring myself to listen to it
00:32:15.800because I can't believe I didn't think of it.
00:35:28.920I'm really sorry about subjecting all of you to this man, Andrew Tate, this man who is now in my feed, and it is some of the worst shit that I have ever seen.0.97
00:35:39.680I hate that he's online. I hate that young boys are watching him online.0.98
00:35:44.800I hate everything about it. I do. I do.