00:02:13.980hi nick astor oh hi hi thanks for thanks for coming on today to talk about you know i love it
00:02:26.980you do you do uh to talk about a very serious subject which is the fact that i think that
00:02:33.480real men cry and saying otherwise is complete bs yeah yeah and so no debate there no debate there
00:02:42.360But I wanted to have you on because we don't have many men on this show.0.59
00:02:46.140And if we're talking about men crying, who wants to hear two women talking about men crying?
00:02:51.120We're talking about this because at last week's Democratic National Convention, Gus Walls, Tim Walls, vice presidential candidate, his son, cried, weeped, really, with joy while watching his father's speech.
00:03:09.180I mean, I just, like, I loved that raw emotion that he had.
00:03:15.120But there were some people who didn't love it.
00:03:17.940There were a lot of conservative pundits out there who said, Ann Coulter said it was weird.0.99
00:03:24.900Another iHeartRadio host who has since been fired called him a blubbering bitch boy.0.95
00:03:31.140And I just think that we have to talk about how we got to be in a world where that is a reaction to watching a man have an emotion.0.98
00:03:42.120Yeah. You know, I think that it's more than just that. I think that there is, for whatever reason, there's a tendency among the right, those on the political right, to not only make fun of a man who might cry or show emotions, but to make fun of almost anybody, including women in particular.
00:04:08.220It's a common trope to point to them as, you know, dramatic liberals who are full of emotions. And, you know, the idea of being somewhere in this in this personality type is baked in this kind of, you know, don't show emotions, be tough.
00:04:25.660And maybe it's sort of male driven. Maybe it's more complex than that. I don't know. But, you know, it happens. It happens a lot. It's more than just, you know, laying into some kid that got emotional during his father's speech.
00:04:40.860Right. No, of course, of course. But, you know, emotions are not absent from from what we're seeing on on the right. We see a lot of rage over there. And that rage seems like the only emotion that is at all valid.
00:04:57.820And, you know, I interviewed Peggy Orenstein a little while ago. Peggy has written so many great books on raising boys and raising girls in the age of social media.
00:05:12.840And one of the things that as a journalist and as someone who has interviewed so many children, one of the things she's worried about the most is that we don't allow, and we as in the culture, we don't allow male children to have a full spectrum of complex emotions.
00:05:33.800uh we say that you can experience rage you can experience jealousy but we we we tell them not
00:05:40.540to be sensitive we tell them not to cry we don't you know we are not letting them experience you
00:05:48.520know all all of the things that we think it's okay for girls to experience yeah i think i think
00:05:55.600that uh that i don't know who we is exactly in that statement either but um it is a common trope
00:06:02.940that uh you know the culture is less positively receptive to men in general being emotional it
00:06:10.460happens it happens a lot it's a problem it's a problem it's right I mean you don't cry that much
00:06:14.980that's true um I think that men naturally are are less inclined to uh for whatever reason
00:06:24.520I don't know if I do not know I do not know if that is true I do and I have no idea but I don't0.53
00:06:30.800know if that's true because male children cry just as much as female children. I will tell you that0.99
00:06:36.380for sure. I watch little boys crying on the playground all the time. I see our own son crying
00:06:42.260out of things that happened to him and also things that happened to his sister. I'm going to ask him
00:06:49.920if we can use this story on the podcast. But we were recently in New York City and our four-year-old
00:06:57.520daughter lost her favorite stuffy her buppy um buppy who has traveled all over the world with0.85
00:07:04.220us buppy who's disgusting and smelled so bad and we hate buppy so much but she lost it oh we don't
00:07:09.840hate buppy i hate this puppy i do but he was a problem yeah buppy was a problem okay and so
00:07:16.040we told her not to bring buppy out of the hotel room buppy came out of the hotel room and buppy
00:07:20.920subsequently got lost on the mean streets of new york city um and is likely in the bottom of a
00:07:26.560dumpster somewhere. And she was very upset. She was crying. And our son was crying with her
00:07:30.920with empathy, with beautiful empathy. He's like, it's okay. It's going to be okay. He was just so
00:07:36.900sad that she felt so sad. And he's like, another child probably found Buffy. Buffy's fine. That is
00:07:42.680not true. No other child wanted Buffy. But I'm so happy that he had that reaction. And I tried to
00:07:50.640encourage it as much as possible. I was like, okay, thank you. Thank you for feeling right
00:07:55.860along with your sister. I do think that often boys after a certain age are told not to cry.
00:08:03.700It's like, buck up, don't be a P-U-S-S-Y. And I also want to say for a second, how in God's name1.00
00:08:11.420did being a P-U-S-S-Y become an insult for being weak? Because that part of our body0.74
00:08:19.180squeezes out babies and goes through more pain than most men will feel in their entire lives.0.82
00:08:25.860Right. We should use the word as a, man, that guy's really tough. He's a real P-U-S-S-Y.
00:08:31.640Right? Like, look how tough that guy is. He's as strong as a vagina.1.00
00:08:39.100Right? I mean, I just, I do think that men want to have the same amount and breadth and variety of emotions as women.
00:08:51.640And frankly, it scares me to see that reaction online on social media to Gus Walls because so much of it was filled with rage.
00:09:05.180Oh, yeah. Well, here's the thing. Those people are scared, you know, and the world is full of change right now and people handle it in different ways.
00:09:16.020And I don't know if it's just that people are wired differently or if it's indeed a cultural thing in terms of how people are raised or it's probably a little bit of both.
00:09:25.180But, you know, some people's reaction to change is fear.
00:09:28.940And that fear manifests as this defensive anger, which is quite prevalent.
00:09:37.060You know, I'm not going to get too political about this, but it is more prevalent on the right wing.
00:09:42.240this is all written about by um that book don't think of an elephant um i've forgotten the author
00:09:48.560we should google this but um you know back in the first bush administration or second bush
00:09:53.320administration um you know whereas those on the left are you know supposed to supposedly more
00:10:00.360wired to be more more emotional and you know about fear you know um and this is a common
00:10:09.060political, you know, common emotional response to change in the world, you know, react with fear
00:10:15.920and, you know, button yourself up, or, you know, try to be more open to it.
00:10:23.440Yeah, I mean, I just, I do think that maybe it was fear. Also, you know, seeing an actual
00:10:33.160loving family on screen uh probably made them nervous because let's be honest watching the
00:10:39.780trump family is like watching succession my skin crawls every time uh oh it's pretty it's pretty
00:10:47.240bad yeah although i'll give him i'll give him one point for baron i mean he was he almost had
00:10:53.800my sympathy for about 20 seconds when he called out baron and he said oh this is my boy i mean
00:10:59.540he certainly wasn't anybody crying but there was there was a smidgen of possible emotion there
00:11:05.320was there was a smidgen a smidgen a smidgen i mean i don't know i i just like i think that when
00:11:13.820you raise boys uh to strip themselves of all emotions but rage you end up with someone like
00:11:21.380donnie trump who you know is is going off and paying people to allow him to go shoot an innocent
00:11:28.140lion because oh yeah that's what makes you feel like a real man i want to business it's a bit0.98
00:11:34.180yeah like i i will only feel like a like a powerful masculine man if i can kill a lion who
00:11:41.000is unable to attack me yeah it's that's it's a very that's a very strange manifestation of it
00:11:47.040but it's certainly one of them yeah yeah um all right we're going to take a quick break here and
00:11:51.400when we get back, I want to talk about the fact that, you know, this is actually nothing new.
00:11:59.840We've been trying to talk about cultural shifts and men being able to show emotions for a long
00:12:05.080time, for 50 years now, because you were 50 years old. And for some reason, it's just not breaking
00:12:09.680through okay we are back with my sweet sweet husband Nick Astor uh before he goes how nice
00:12:23.420I know before he goes and picks up our son from school from his first day of of school of which
00:12:30.540we were we were on that playground this morning and I saw a lot I saw a lot of I saw a lot of
00:12:36.860emotions from a lot of male individuals. I saw sons crying because they were scared to go into
00:12:45.920school. Totally natural, totally normal. I saw dads so joyful on the playground to be there
00:12:53.380with their kids, to see them go to school. And I mean, I thought drop-off was really nice this
00:12:58.840morning. Oh, it was great. People cheered when the teachers came out. It was pretty cool.
00:13:03.380People cheered when the teachers came out, as we should every day, because teachers are amazing.
00:13:11.860Now, there is one album that we play a lot in our house.
00:13:16.320We play Free to Be You and Me quite a bit here.
00:13:20.060It was something that you listened to.
00:13:51.140And it does, when you say this goes way back, I mean, this goes back for thousands of years. But like, you know, at least in terms of modern U.S. culture, you know, that turning point in the late 60s and 70s, when people started talking about this stuff more openly, you know, manifested in all kinds of different ways, which, you know, the way cultures change, I mean, the nature of culture is it doesn't just change overnight.
00:14:17.040It's a slow process and like a river flowing, you know, it runs into eddies and flows back on itself and, you know, has all kinds of friction and, you know, it's complex.
00:14:28.240But that album, Marlo Thomas, you know, was a collection of absolutely terrific music and anecdotes and poems and so on, most of which had some kind of intent to positively spin gender, you know.
00:14:46.860and how we think about gender, challenge the stereotypes of gender, so on and so on.
00:14:51.400Mel Brooks thinks he's a girl, things like that.
00:14:54.760Anyway, the song, one of the songs that always made me tear up, Rosie Greer.
00:15:00.180He's still alive. He's a football player.
00:15:02.080I forget which team he played for. Real big, tough-looking guy.
00:15:05.680And he sits down with this little boy with a guitar and sings this song called It's Alright to Cry.
00:15:12.180And if I could push a button and play it, you know, you guys would all tear up.
00:15:16.080it'll it'll it'll soften anybody i mean maybe not down trump but hey you know it's uh it's very
00:15:23.640simple this is the kind of thing that you know if we had this in the culture more um you know more
00:15:32.380um more visibly i think we're making a huge difference i think for you and me made a huge
00:15:37.360difference i mean i know a lot of kids who grew up with that that can speak to it and the impact
00:15:42.000that it made i don't know what the equivalent is today but um you know there ought to be more
00:15:47.060i actually maybe it's that um inside out movie which broke box office records last week the one
00:15:54.280about the emotions and the feelings that seems like the only equivalent that i can think of
00:16:01.080right now because the real danger here is when we don't let boys have emotions they still have them
00:16:07.940They just don't show them and they bottle them up.
00:16:11.300And when they're all inside them, it creates anxiety and depression and turns some of them into gun wielding sociopaths, which is the last thing that we want for society.
00:16:24.420So we it's just we we must we must allow our boys to have as many emotions as our daughters.
00:16:31.360I think so much about something that Gloria Steinem said years ago, and she said it again when I saw her. I was lucky enough to get to go to her apartment and have a talking circle with her. And she said, look, we've come so far in raising our daughters like our sons.
00:16:50.800you know girl power you know you can be anything you're a girl boss girl girls girls can do
00:16:56.900anything boys do uh but we have so much further to go in raising our sons like our daughters to
00:17:02.860have a wide variety of emotions to be caregivers I agree well I mean maybe we should maybe we should
00:17:11.500watch free to be you and me tonight we were gonna we were gonna finish goodies you know also has
00:17:19.540you know here's an interesting thing about Goonies and Footloose uh old Footloose not new
00:17:26.400Footloose which is also I like new Footloose but we were we watched the first half of Goonies
00:17:31.040last week down the Jersey Shore because our hotel was having a movie night which was chaos
00:17:36.880just chaos of kids and in watching that show which is about a bunch of young
00:17:43.620pre-teenish teenish boys and a couple girls um but the boys in that are so loving with each other
00:17:52.980uh was what something i noticed and i probably you know i didn't notice when i was watching as
00:17:56.640a kid and now i notice because i have a little boy but the boys are always skipping together
00:18:01.700they have their arms around each other a lot there's a lot of hugging uh between the two
00:18:07.480brothers like the brothers fight a lot but there is a lot of hugging and love um and hugging with
00:18:12.940the with the kids and that was just that was really nice because I don't think it's something
00:18:17.800that we that we still see a lot of in movies which is you know male affection to each other
00:18:24.380so it's the Goonies is is surprisingly tender for young boys as is Footloose because you know
00:18:32.060when we were watching that and you know I mean our kids love movie musicals all right uh the Ren
00:18:39.840and um chris penn's character his name i forget you know they're they've got this intense like
00:18:47.200wonderful bromance where you know they're they're also constantly hugging and being
00:18:51.880sweet to one another like both of those movies show men having such positive male relationships
00:18:59.040that are just sweet and tender i think you're absolutely right i like it when my husband says
00:19:06.700that i'm right you're usually right oh i am um well we're gonna take one more cook break uh
00:19:17.620actually no you're gonna have to leave because you you have to go to school i am i better get
00:19:21.380going yeah because real because you know what real men do real men pick up their kids from
00:19:25.320school oh yeah yeah they do it's hot super sexy yeah yeah woo uh but we'll we'll continue this1.00
00:19:33.360conversation and then figure out how we can turn the word vagina into another meaning for a strong1.00
00:19:40.100strong ass mofo it's like look at you you freaking vagina you're so strong you're so powerful you're1.00
00:19:49.320a vagina um all right on that note uh go have fun at pickup love you1.00
00:19:54.780and that is all we have for today go watch footloose you won't regret it you won't and0.99
00:20:04.120then go have a dance party we had one last night with the footloose soundtrack and it was it was
00:20:10.000epic it was a good time as always if you love this podcast please leave us a review in all of
00:20:17.020the review places and share it with a friend also i'd love to hear from you so if you have any ideas
00:20:23.240for Under the Influence, just shoot me an email, joe.piazza at gmail.com, or slide into my DMs.
00:20:32.120Now go do something nice for yourself. You deserve it.