Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:16] Speaker B: Welcome to but why? Real Talk on Messy Minds and Messier Systems, the podcast where two psychologists overanalyze everything so you don't have to. We're here to unpack the weird, the worrying and the wildly unjust with just enough existential dread to keep it interesting.
I'm Dr. Kristin and Dr. Laura is not here today, so you're going to have to deal with just me and our awesome guest, Dr. Randall Blazik. Well, who I will introduce properly in a sec after a quick note that Laura will be taking at least a brief break or stepping back from the podcast because she's focusing a lot more on applied work. We're both so busy, so it's quite difficult to keep track of the podcast and work. We did do a kind of changeover transition episode, but that's not ready to release yet. And this was so interesting of a topic that I just really needed to discuss this. With that said, let's dive into the mess.
[00:01:10] Speaker A: Right?
[00:01:11] Speaker B: So Randall is awesome. I don't know if you, if you're on our social media, you might be following both of us at the same time. He is a sociologist, a researcher of right wing extremism. So. So I'm sure everyone who listens to this podcast thinks it's a no brainer that we would have Randall on.
And today we're going to be discussing the Manosphere podcast, Into the Manosphere, that came out recently. But yeah, I thought I'd give you a chance to introduce yourself real quick and then we'll just go from there.
[00:01:41] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, my work has been on right wing extremism, especially with regards to hate groups and hate crimes over the years. It's a little bit of my biography because I grew up in a rural town in Georgia that was the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan. So I started doing ethnographic research before I ever realized what I was doing. And so I was at Emory University working on my dissertation when a group of racist skinheads set my Vespa scooter on fire. And then I decided, I'm going to study these guys. This is how I'll get them back. I'll spend the rest of my life trying to understand right wing extremism and hate groups. And so I started about a five year field study of racist skinheads undercover in the US and Europe, including interviewing neo Nazis in Berlin, which was chilling to say the least.
So that work, you know, when I started doing that work, and we'll get into this, I increasingly realized that gender was a factor you know, that gender was really driving. There was a reason that these hate groups were all male dominated. There was a reason that, you know, the, the white supremacists thought the only role of white women was having white babies.
And so I became kind of, in the process, a feminist scholar. And there was a point while I was working on my dissertation, and I'm at Emory University in Atlanta, where it just sort of hit me that gender was a factor. So I walked into the local feminist bookstore, cherished books, and I just said, I'm a dude and I care about gender. I'm not coming in here to harass you.
I need some guidance. And they just loaded my arms up with books, most of which are up on that shelf up there. And I just started, really, really started at how gender was the front variable, that a lot of the stuff, including the racism, was behind that. So I, I came out to Portland, Oregon in 1995, which was known for its skinhead violence, and started doing this work here, including in prisons. I did a 10 years of prison research on white supremacist prison gangs. I'm the chair of the Oregon Coalition against Hate Crimes and, you know, have built sort of a scholarship looking at the far right through a gender lens. Yeah, that's a little bit about me.
[00:03:49] Speaker B: It's so fascinating. That's just such interesting work. And it's always really interesting for me to hear about how people choose their research identities and how they get into the research they're studying. Especially for those of us that are coming from a point of privilege in our lives, just obviously being white people in America helps. Right. With. With our privilege. And so I really love hearing when people do research for the right reasons and not because, oh, it's the next up and coming thing. It's actually. This is my ethical standpoint. This is wrong. Why the hell are you doing this? I need to understand what is going on.
[00:04:28] Speaker A: I have to tell you that I was a first year graduate, and a lot of times first year graduate students are partnered with a professor and they're doing his or her research. So I was working on a project with a great world systems theorist named Terry Boswell, looking at the origins of the global economy.
Fascinating, but also highly boring for me as the little troll in the computer lab.
And then before the skinhead set my scooter on fire, I saw a documentary about Appalachian quilt makers. And we had no qualitative research methods program in our department. It was heavily quantitative.
[00:05:04] Speaker B: Wow.
[00:05:04] Speaker A: I was. Yeah, I was doing moving average analysis. It was. And I Saw this documentary about quilt makers in the Appalachian Mountains, and I thought, I'm going to go study them.
But then the skinheads set my scooter on fire, and I have to think how different my life would be if I become a scholar of quilt making instead of. Instead of fashion.
[00:05:25] Speaker B: Well, I feel like on many. On many, many levels, it would probably be less stressful.
[00:05:29] Speaker A: Yes, well, it's safer. I'd be comfier for sure.
[00:05:33] Speaker B: Be much cozier. Yeah, you'd have some more quilts to go with your cool coffee mug that you've got. If you're listening on the audio, he's got a coffee mu that says definitely not coffee. So we all have to question the
[00:05:43] Speaker A: origin of this is. At my college, I had sort of some running conflicts with the dean, which is why I'm not teaching there anymore. But I got in trouble for having a glass of wine on a Zoom Zoom class during the pandemic.
Apparently there's some rule about not drinking and working at the same time. It was the pandemic. So every time I had a meeting with the dean, I bought this in Savannah, Georgia. This was the coffee cup with a little bit of whiskey in it. Just a subtle story now, now, Exactly.
[00:06:14] Speaker B: Oh, my God, I love that subtle jab. Okay, so just trying to orient myself because it's really hard when you have, you know, for the audience. You've got two researchers here. This is our area of special interest and expertise. And so the two of us could probably talk for hours and hours and hours about really complex, nuanced things. So I'm trying to have a through line of our conversation. Right. So what are we going to be addressing? Try and keep us relatively on track, though. You know, there's going to be a tangent, but I just. So we're talking about the manosphere documentary more generally, but I just think it's really interesting that it looks more like a culture that's forming rather than like an ideology. Right. And it feels to a lot of people like self help, because every time I criticize the manosphere, I get men and men and men constantly going like, well, no, it's not about misogyny. He's helped me through X, Y, Z, which we did see on that documentary.
But from my point of view, it really functions like a decentralized and heavy, quote, extremist organization or ideology.
And I feel like that's why it's so effective, because it's so decentralized and it looks so different.
So, yeah, that's just, I guess, how I Thought I would kick things off because for me, what was so weird, I was going into it expecting to have my mind blown by the insight. And I found myself laughing a lot because I was like, this is so familiar. It's not shocking. Yeah, it was. It's very obvious. I wanted to get your thoughts on that initially to kind of get us going.
[00:07:53] Speaker A: Yeah, it was, it was very familiar to me. It reminded me of the same rhetoric in hate groups. I mean, the skinhead rhetoric about women and masculinity is virtually the same. You know, it's all built in this hegemonic notion of men don't have to share their emotions, they don't have to see women as equals. Violence is a legitimate expression. So it seems just like a new version of an old thing. Like, is this a new thing that's happening or is this just the social media version, the 2026 version of what's been battling there all along? I have an 11 year old daughter and I immediately grabbed her and I said, I need to talk to you about this. You know, are the boys.
And she was like, dad, we're in Portland. The boys are all cool. They're not out collecting stacks of chicks. That's what she said. Like, well, I'm glad among your, like middle school peer group. But I do know that there is a resonance with some young males about this. And for me, the most heartbreaking part of the documentary was not the guys that were the feature, but the young like high school kids that glommed onto these guys and wanted to do selfies and said, you're my hero and all that stuff. That, that's reflected in the fact that 56% of young men voted for Trump. And there's this sort of cleaving that's happening instead of everybody moving together towards a. You know, I mean, I, I'm from the era of Star Trek where I had this sort of linear picture of the future. The past was bad, the present's getting better. In the future, you know, they don't have any divisions except for all the women wear miniskirts. But other than that, you know that there is this sort of progress, but in fact there are these backlashes and we're in this backlash right now. And this sort of really fits in with that Susan Faludi notion. I don't know if you're familiar with her classic third wave book, Clash.
[00:09:44] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:09:45] Speaker A: I mean, she wrote some of that in Portland and I've been, I ran into her once at Powell's Books, but I've been dying to like, where's Susan Faludi? We need a new version of this book. That book came out in 1991. We need.
But there is this backlash. I mean, the great book that is out right now that I'm currently reading is Man Up Since Any Miller, the New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism.
We're reading it together on my Instagram channel, if you want to join. Cool. Yeah. And so she actually uses the term backlash in describing this. But that it's, it's, it ties into this larger trend and I'd love to be able to get more in depth to that. But, you know, the, to address kind of your first concern is that it is, it is sort of the same old, same old. But it's also a scam, right? These guys are making money off. They're monetizing it by getting these, you know, teenage boys to take their lawnmower money, invest, invest in crypto or buy these into these pyramid schemes. So there is.
So that means that maybe that these guys who focus on this don't even believe it themselves, right? That when the cameras are off, they're, you know, they step backstage and they're like, man, I'm going to milk this thing as long as it goes. Because.
But the reason they have an audience is because of what's happening, the larger picture with regards to, to the shift in gender that they are freaking out about.
[00:11:11] Speaker B: I firstly love the fellow D book and I cite her a lot in my research. So. So my research functions in high performance environments where a lot of these gendered issues are compounded because it's just sport culture is hyper masculine. It was designed to exclude women, gay men, just anyone who doesn't fit with that kind of colonial status quo. So I cite her work a lot and we actually did a episode on this like maybe a year ago.
The story of women is two steps forward, one step back. Because we're constantly experiencing this backlash and it's very frustrating to see because we know that this backlash is harmful on everyone. And it's, it's very frustrating to see. But you see this in even primates. Don't you like primates that aren't humans? So for example, I'm aware of research even just with gorillas, where the, the head gorilla, I don't know the terminology for, for it was constantly given double what other gorillas were given in terms of food, was consistently given the same amount of food. And then when the other lesser in the hierarchy, gorillas were given just a Bit extra food, not even matching the amount of food this gorilla had. He started becoming violent. And it's this crazy notion that we should have progressed through at this point. It's 2026. Right. We should be able to overcome these very basic instincts with rational thought. But it's just so ingrained that if you don't have these critical thinking skills, if you haven't been to therapy or developed emotional intelligence, that this feeling of, like, hierarchy that you're in, you're so afraid of somebody else getting something because it psychologically feels like you're losing something.
[00:12:56] Speaker A: Yeah. You know, and that was the core part of my initial finding with my first skinhead study. I mean, it's all about this notion of the binary. You know, we're on one side or the other. We can't. You know, certain brains are more challenged to handling complexity. But what I spent 13 months with a group of skinheads in Orlando, Florida, and what the initial piece before I kind of added the gender component, was all about de. Industrialization. And the idea in the 80s, you know, with Reaganomics, we started seeing all these manufacturing jobs being offshored. And if I'm working at a factory, you know, I've got a pretty good wage. We've got a negotiated raise every two years. I've got health care, I've got a pension. I could maybe buy a house. I might be able to send my kid to the state college. And then all those jobs disappeared because they were all offshored. And then I needed somebody to blame. And so in my study, you know, these white supremacist groups would come in and say, it's the Jews, it's immigration, it's affirmative action, it's feminism. You know, it's all these things taking away the thing that you were. And so you were here, and now you're here, and so you're. You're. You're in a panic because of the people that leave the middle class. In the 1980s, two thirds moved down. I mean, it was a pretty significant drop from the middle class. So people were looking for. Some people were looking for an explanation. Everybody was looking for an explanation. But some people were getting an explanation that, you know, that was the scapegoating. I mean, I remember sitting there thinking, if this was the 1960s instead of the late 1980s, somebody from the Black Panthers or Students for Democratic Society might have showed up with a little, you know, Chairman Mouse, Little Red Book, which is also up there, and said, you know, this is capital. This is how capitalism works. They might have gone Left wing. But the explainers were the right wingers and we the explainers now are the right wingers. You know, they're Fox News, they're the manosphere. And the political spectrum is skewed so far to the right that, you know, Ronald Reagan would be a libtard by contemporary standards.
So that means those ideas have a lot more access to us. And what sort of mainstream, you know, liberal policies is now called the far left? And you're a communist, you know, if you're a Democrat, which is, blows my mind. Yeah, that, that is skewed. So that expl, that explanatory power has been co opted by the far right. So surprise, surprise, they're doing the victim blaming and the scapegoating and, and that's where we see in the manosphere all that anti Semitism that pops up, which was to me the most shocking part of that, were how easily they just start talking about the Jews, right? And that's a same old, same old. I mean, I've heard it, I heard it in, at Klan rallies that I was attending in the early 90s that the Jews are behind feminism and they're behind weakening the men. And the book that Timothy McVeigh uses, his guidebook for the Oklahoma City bombing, it's called the Turner Diaries, says liberalism is inherently feminine. Right? That's, that's the mentality. So to be masculine you must be right wing.
[00:15:57] Speaker B: And it gets, I mean. Oh, there's another point I want to address because I kind of like why is it, why it feels so true to the men who are experiencing this, right? Because we do have issues around us that need to be fixed. But I just love this concept of masculinity and Feb. No, not love it, but I find it very interesting that this concept of masculinity is so fixed in problematic expressions of it. Because I genuinely believe there are expressions of masculinity, femininity being gender neutral, that are just harmless. They're just expressing your own human experience with gender, right? And they automatically assume when you say something like patriarchal masculinity that you're talking negatively about being a man. And there is such a link there because I mean, the world has killed nuance, right? Like we were just talking about neoliberalism, which I could go on about for ages, you know, gut education, gut critical thinking, all so that it would be easier to engage in culture wars and manipulate the population and things like that. And so the quick line from a descriptor and then the word masculinity to all men is just wild. To me, it's such a leap that people make these quick judgments. I mean, we know about attention span issues because of social media and everything.
But I'm just curious if that. Because I do want to go back to neoliberalism and how some of these reasons why people are feeling down are definitely legitimate. But you just made me curious about whether that's always been a thing or whether it's just become less nuanced as we've experienced the rise of the Internet.
[00:17:40] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, our brains have been trained for these simple solutions to things and the lack of complexity. I mean, you know, what you said made me think about how these people have misheard the phrase toxic masculinity. And it comes from legitimate research on prisons, Cooper's research. I mean, when I was doing my research on prison gangs and I just was reading about masculinity, I was reading McConnell and all that, and then I came across this little article about toxic masculinity. I'm like, oh. And it had. Here's the six points of toss. I mean, it's a very fixed version of masculinity. You know, it's hyper sexual, hyper misogynist. It's competitive. You know, it has these sort of characters. It's not the only version of masculinity out there. I mean, does anybody out there remember metrosexual?
Yeah, I mean, there are other versions, including, like, parenting as a form of masculine. You know, there's all these sports masculinity, queer masculinities. I mean, there's. There's multiple masculinities, but they heard toxic masculinity as max. Masculinity is toxic, and they're off to the races.
So. And it's been, you know, I always. Whenever I talk about it, I have to say this is one type of masculinity. And it's problematic not just for women who are the victims of it, but for the men who think they have to be in this tiny little box and then wonder why they're alone, wonder why, you know, they're depressed, you know, why they feel like a gun in their hand is the only way out.
There's some aha moments when you're. I'm also a criminologist when you're doing research. And there's a real profile of mass shooters, like people who go on work shootings. They tend to follow a real similar pattern.
And we used to call it going postal, which is not fair to postal workers. But There was a series of postal shootings in the late 80s that kind of tagged this. But there are men who usually, they were married and their wife leaves. So the wife defines them. You know, they have a woman, they lose their job.
Right. Their job also defines their masculinity.
And there's lots of men that go through that, that don't go on a shooting spree. But the third thing is they don't have any friends. They don't have a friend network. They're all alone. People are like, he always kept to himself, you know, that healthy men have networks. So if you lose your wife and you lose your job, you can go have some beers with your friends and you'll get through it. That these socially isolated men and the research on, like, the alpha wolves is not about, like, the strongest survive. It's about the wolf that has relationship with other wolves. But we. But we have a culture now because of this, you know, where we are isolated, where we're not connecting with our neighbors. And so it just adds to that.
That thing where we were in this. This narrow picture of masculinity that ultimately is going to get us in trouble. The guys in that manosphere thing, if they're still doing that three years from now, you know, they're going to be so depressed and so sad and be like, I had it all and I don't understand why they left me, what's going on, you know, and they're going to be on a cliff because they're not going to understand what they missed out on. And, you know, this is. I'm on my soapbox here. But, you know, this is normal in male culture. As a male academic, feminist, sociologist, I've been guilty of that, too. I've been like, you know, I'm in my lane. I don't, you know, I'm doing my own thing. I'm charting my own course. I'm the autonist, high plains drifter. And then the, like, the Clint Eastwood music plays, like, all that. And then I'm like, oh, crap. You know, what I should have been doing during that time is building relationships, including with women as people. But I've been like, solo, dude. And I've made some mistakes in my life because of that. So I don't think it's just these guys who are these anomalies. I think it's. That's normative in the way that we socialize men in our culture.
[00:21:39] Speaker B: We. This is the other thing is when you critique patriarchy, people have internalized patriarchy so much that they Think you're attacking individual men. And I love how you described, right, you've got a wife and you've got a job and you lose them because very patriarchal, ingrained in patriarchy. Men look at those two things.
They don't look at the woman as a human, like you said, they look at it more like an object. So the object and the job are status symbols, not things that they either engage in as a vocation or like something you're doing for a living or not a human being that you married. Right. And then so when they don't have that third thing to rely on, which is friendships, that is hugely damaging. I mean, just as a. From my psych background looking at different models of mental health, we know that if you remove the social aspect, that's a whole section of your well being that was probably supplemented by your partner before they left you for who knows what reason. It just came, the divorce came out of nowhere. You've heard that a bunch, haven't you? These men are relying on their object person, maybe probably wife, partner, to fulfill all of their social needs. We are social animals. And so it's. No, it's, it's. Of course your mental health is going to deteriorate if you haven't manifested your emotional intelligence. You haven't designed your friendships. And that's why women tend to live longer, especially after their partner passes away or leaves them. And I think that's a really good, interesting way to segue us into kind of like why this feels right to the men who are in it. So they are lonely because like you said, our phones have isolated us more than ever. Overall loneliness, overall perceived rejection. Right, because not all rejection is real rejection, but people are being perceived. I don't know if you've seen these manosphere dudes are going around with like the Google glasses and recording women, recording them, just going up to random women asking for a date. And women are just kind of like, no thanks. And then putting that as content online as real. Like women suck. They're just rejecting them. Right. So I, and, and we've also got all these other problems created by neoliberalism. We've got problems with the economy, access to jobs, access to housing. Just all these issues created by people who aren't women. Well, some of them. Margaret Thatcher was a huge issue back in the Reagan era as well. But it's not created by a gender that's women. It's created by the system and some other aspects that are going on. Billionaires, but they're just there's putting it in the wrong place, obviously, with coaxing from said problematic people and systems.
[00:24:22] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, it is. There is a sociological term that was something I got in my intro sociology class that I have come back to so many times. And it's this concept of anomie, which is a French term from this guy, Emile Durkheim, who did a study on suicide in 1897. And he was referring to the rapid changes in Europe going from agrarian to industrial, going from farming to urban, going from monarchy to democracy. And anomie refers to the sense of normlessness, like when the rules are kind of thrown out. Like, you don't know what the rules are anymore. And, you know, I studied that academically. And then in 1994, when Kurt Cobain shot himself on April 8, Time magazine had a little box on the story and talked about Durkheim and Annomie. And I was like, woo, this is back. And so I started really seeing how that concept of normlessness is really applying to life now. Like, we are moving so fast.
Technology, I mean, the technology. You think this is something. What's this going to be in 10 years? Right. The gender roles have changed dramatically. The racial complexion of America has changed. By 2042, white people are going to be less than 50% of the population. The economy has changed dramatically. Like, we're not working in factories anymore. We're working for Uber.
The sexuality has changed. When I was a kid, we knew they were gay people, but they were in this place called San Francisco. There were surely no gay people in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Like, all this lightning speed has changed really quickly. And that anno me can produce either an excitement, oh, things are changing. Like, my gay friends can now get married and adopt a kid. Yay. Good for them. Or it can create a pushback.
And this is the success of Donald Trump in this one phrase, make America great again. Because in 2015, when he started running, CNN said, well, you're saying America's not great, but when was it? And he very clearly said 1950.
And he may have been referring to some, like, trade policy, but people heard that as like, oh, that was the peak of Jim Crow. That's before second wave feminism. That's before Stonewall and disability rights and having to know people's pronouns. And men had a job at the factory and women were home taking the care of the kids. And the world made sense. Now I'm experiencing all this anomie, all this change that's happening. I don't know what's going on.
And then especially around you know, gender issues, like a lot of men's brains are just exploding. So take me back to a time that made sense and reassert my authority and everything will be good. Of course, the past was great, but also was super crappy for a lot of people, especially for non straight, this gendered white male, you know, and the future is good, but the future or the president is good, but the president's also crappy. Like, it's always a mix. I mean, whenever I'm having this talk with people, I'm like, yeah, there were some great things about the past. But I remember what my television set looked like when I was a kid and I used to have to hold the rabbit ear so my dad could watch his golf game. I like my flat screen Samsung, thank you very much. Like, I don't want to go back. I don't want to go back because, you know, but there's this, and this is. It happens in fascism is that there's this hyper nostalgia thing that happens that we become overly romantic romanticizing of the past. Everything was great. Everybody had dinner on the table at 6 o' clock and all the kids were well behaved and above average. And, you know, everything was great. There were no problems.
And so we create this cartoon version that, you know, we desperately want to get back to. And so, you know, one of the ways of doing that is through violent misogyny. I'll tell one quick story because I know you want to jump.
[00:28:04] Speaker B: No, no, no.
That's the thing.
[00:28:06] Speaker A: Listen to your lane. So I know you've got a lot to add to this, but let me just. This was a really illuminating moment. And I also get to name drop.
I was in New York City at the Lincoln center, and I was on a panel for a documentary I was in about getting people out of the hate movement at the Lincoln Center. It's really great. The Fordham University right there. Little, little wine and cheese party before the film screening. Screening. And then the panel. And into the party walks Gloria Steinem.
[00:28:37] Speaker B: Come on.
[00:28:37] Speaker A: And of course, she's immediately iconic. Like, you know that there's nobody who's like, oh, she looks like Gloria Steinem. That is Gloria Steinem. So I'm there just kind of like. And my friend who was the filmmaker knew her and invited her. Randy, go over and talk to her.
Just sort of pushed me and I just went over and I'm like, hi, I'm Randall Blazek, I'm a sociologist coming on and I'm talking blah, blah, blah. Like, I'm just fawning over her, right? And I realized I should ask her a question.
We're probably never going to have this moment again, so I should ask Ms. Einem a question. And so this is 2018. So this is Trump's first administration.
And I said, gloria, can I call you Gloria?
And I have a picture of us together. I made sure I got a picture.
I said, how do you explain Trump? I'm sure that people ask you all the time, this guy, you know, this is after the Access Hollywood tape and all the accusations, like, how did this guy. And then. And I assumed that this was her response to other people. She said, randy, when a woman is abused by her husband and she wants to escape him, she is as likely to be murdered escaping him as she is if she stays with him.
America is trying to escape its abuser right now, and it will either kill us or we'll be free. And it just gave me chills to think about that moment. It's like, this is an inflection point. Are we going to be dragged back into the past with the abusive husband, or are we going to break free from it? You know, and in 2018, like, we're really. I mean, that was right before the BLM protest. I mean, we're really, really on that razor's edge right there. And I feel like that's where we are right now, that this misogynistic husband, this wife beater, is trying to drag us back to 1950 and beat up the gay son at the same time, or we're gonna burst through it. And to me, I'm taking it little metaphor with me thinking, we got to get out of this place.
[00:30:40] Speaker B: That's just made my brain go in so many different ways. I'm trying to figure out which. Which way to go. Because firstly, 2018 is such interesting context because like you said, right before BLM protests, it was right after the MeToo movement. And protests in 2017 was when it gained the most momentum. And so since then, we have regressed a bit. And I feel like Covid definitely didn't help with that because of the isolationist aspect. So when people are really loving the idea of going Back to the 50s, the context of that was right after marginalized groups had gained a tiny bit of power from the war anyway. Like, women were out, out in the world, working. You know, we didn't really have great rights established in our government, but there was some more individual freedom to do things. And so it's definitely not lost on me that that is. I don't think he's smart Enough to draw this parallel. But that this is the parallel that was drawn is the time just after our society, to put it, like, with little nuance, decided that it was unacceptable for these people to have rights and decided to engage in a systemic drawback of women, people of color, just any marginalized group to put them back in their place in heavy quotes. And that obviously led to so many mental illnesses, deaths of many people, women stuck in the home, things like that. And so it's really not lost on me that that is what he was harking back to is already the period of after progress, the regression period. And I do think, do really find that analogy of you gotta escape this husband or was gonna destroy us. I find that very interesting because I feel like we're so close at that point. Especially the 2018 context is really interesting there. And then so much happened has happened. I can't believe that was eight years ago. You know what I mean?
[00:32:42] Speaker A: Yeah, there is. You know, the 50s were Faludi's second backlash. You know, her first backlash is after women get the right to vote. The second one is after, you know, Rosie the Riveter and women had their own money.
And she talks about all the, you know, all the great movies that featured strong women that these women, as the men were off at war, would go and see.
And then, you know, they get hit with the Marilyn Monroe kind of, you gotta be a housewife or a glamour Queen in the 1950s. And I think that era is so romanticized by us. You know, I used to show my students scenes from TV shows like Leave it to Beaver or Father Knows Best and say, like, this is how people thought thought of the world. Like, let's look at gender, let's look at sexuality, let's look at whiteness in this world. And this is sort of the mythical golden era. And now everything is. And it's always, you know, it's. There's always joy and amazing things happening. And also, you know, but we've. We've created this hyper mythology mythologizing of the 50s, and then the isolation builds on that. I mean, this is the big thing. I just finished reading Hannah Rent's the Origins of Totalitarianism, somebody who I had to read a lot of in graduate school. And it's like 600 pages that basically says that fascism needs people to be isolated and lonely. And then it gives them something to connect to. And it's like this. This book comes out in 1951, but it could be, you know, right now, like this idea of people feeling alone. And not connected. And when I'm doing anti fascist work and people are like, Dr. Plazak, what can we do to fight fascism? Like, the best thing we can do is build community relationships, get to know your neighbors. Like, you don't know your neighbors names. Go out and say, let's talk about the weather and then talk about the fascism. Like, let's go out and build those connections.
[00:34:35] Speaker B: This is my, we need that on a T shirt. Talk about the weather, then talk about the fascism.
[00:34:40] Speaker A: Yeah, you can use that. Like, how's the team doing this week? Oh, by the way, you know, the Gestapo is rolling down your street. So. Yeah, so yeah, I mean, I'm really trying to push this idea of normalizing dissent, but to the step before that is having conversations with people that were.
And this is all part of neoliberalism, right? I mean, we're meant to be alone. We're meant to be solo consumers and just sort of, you know, getting out our credit cards to get, get the stuff off of Amazon.
[00:35:10] Speaker B: Yeah, it's just made me go again, just like, I love these conversations because I've gone in so many different, different directions here. But I 100% agree. And this is. As somebody who being autistic is generally quite antisocial, I. The lack of community is huge. It's huge here. And like I just. We know obviously, you know this from a psych point of view that fear and loneliness are significantly related to right wing belief, especially fascist beliefs. And so it's easier to look at the solution as a cultural issue rather than a systemic issue. Which believe me, guys, there is a difference between the two of those. I guess I feel like I've accidentally strayed from like the area of the, like the manosphere. And you talking about it comes back to that.
[00:35:56] Speaker A: I mean, those guys are preying on, they're profiting, profiting on and preying on the loneliness that men feel in this system that has socialized a certain narrow version of masculinity. And they're missing. It's just, it just breaks my heart. And as someone who's, who's been on this journey of discovery in my own life, what you miss out on in relationships with women as equals, it's just heartbreaking because women are things, right? They're, they're women in bikinis for content, right? They're, they're this thing. And like, where are those women? I mean, there's a whole nother part of me, my feminist brain, when I was watching this or my feminist training, I should say, you know, wanted to say. And, and where, and what of the women? Like, what is the story of the women in these, the girlfriend, the bikini models and all that stuff? Let's, let's do another documentary about their emotional lives and how they're navigating because, yeah, in the short term, they're in a nice place condo in Miami. But where are they five years from now when they've been replacing this one way monogamy of that whole part, you know.
[00:37:00] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah.
[00:37:02] Speaker A: But again, here's the thing where this is not new, which is we reward women for supporting patriarchy. Pam Bondi being an easy example. Right. Pam Bondi is covering up for a bunch of rapists. I mean, she, but she's still rewarded for it. She's on tv, she gets her nails done. I mean, she gets to like all this thing that, you know, protected women are supposed to have. So of course. And there is also, I mean, we haven't even gotten to this issue about what the role of abuse and trauma might be playing in this. You know, I have a woman who's experienced abuse and trauma. I'm, I might gravitate towards the strong guy who's going to protect me from the next abuser. So you can see why people go for Daddy Trump as the protector. You know that, that what, you know what, why do women support Trump? Why do women support Trump? Well, you know, if you frame him as the protector, then you can see why a lot of women, because, you know, we know how epidemic abuse is, especially among women, among everybody, but especially among women. So we can see that mentality going for that guy.
Kamala Harris isn't going to protect me. Donald Trump is going to protect me. If I'm of a woman who's experienced violence in my life. So that, so there's a, when we're looking at the manosphere, it's just easy to be like, these people suck. They're evil. But there's all these pathologies woven into it.
[00:38:23] Speaker B: And you can see in practice through what you're saying from like, for example, with all the white women voting for Trump. Pam Bondi, the Mom in the manosphere documentary how patriarchy literally trains you to ignore everything bad about the man involved.
If it can activate some form of safety and you. It's not conscious. Like I say to the people all the time, a lot of this isn't a conscious decision. We're socialized into all of this. Right. But I did want to talk a little bit about the women in that documentary because my first, again, like, as a Feminist. My brain was like, well, why isn't he talking to the women? Why isn't he doing X, Y, Z? Not censoring them enough? I actually quite, after I reflected on it, liked this because firstly, we know no one's listening to women anyway. So he did this about women affected by the manosphere. We've been saying that already for eight years, seven years, whatever it is. No, it's not an issue now. Centering these men and just very simply pointing out how ridiculous it is, I think was quite a good strategy and very Louis Thoreau as well. Like, it's just what it does. I thought the most interesting woman there was the mom, H.S. tikitaki Harrison, some. Something his mom telling him what to do, like cleaning stuff like that. Very just a normal mom parent thing to do. Like you've spilled that on the floor doing that. But then how she jumped in through hoops to try and justify and rationalize what he was doing. And that is an exactly perfect example about how women, especially white women, there's definitely a version of white women feminism. She was against being homophobic. She was against misogyny. She was against xyz.
She has a son that is one of the leading misogynistic manosphere dudes in the world. And somehow she's like, but I support him.
I just. That just really was a very interesting and obvious.
Yeah, as long as he's Hitler's mom said, as long as he's happy, he's my boy. He's my boy.
Yeah. And like you said, it probably does relate to trauma, abuse of some sort. We saw he had a terrible relationship with his dad. And I don't know about you, I can spot a man that has deep, deep troubles, has insecurity behind his eyes a million miles away. Because that's my job to do. And it's not some like weird intuition thing. It's behavioral analysis. Right. It's not like, oh, a woman's intuition. No. And the main thing I saw behind most of these guys, especially the Harrison guy, was fear and insecurity. That's what in his body language and the way he presented himself and what he was saying. And I just, yeah, that's what I was seeing throughout the documentary is just a fear of loss, just general insecurity.
[00:41:14] Speaker A: There is a real fragility to these men, you know, and the fear of dropping, you know, like one step down, you know, economically or in terms of social ranking. And that's just a dead end street, you know, that you don't end up in a Good place, if that's your path. So it made me sad. It made me sad because these men are. Not only are they missing out, there's a whole bunch of victims of this thing that they're sorry that they're. That they're pushing, that are, you know, gonna. Gonna continue that cycle of socializing other men and on and on and on.
[00:41:53] Speaker B: Yeah, it is really sad to see.
I guess I want to kind of bring it back to your expertise on fascism.
Like, what. What the manosphere is looking like right now, because I just think that people are having a hard time spotting it because it looks different than what it did in the 30s and 40s. And I just think people really struggle with that. Even though we can see it's the exact same thing happening. We can. We can talk about gender binary. We can talk about insecurity and fear. We can talk about how discipline is used to control people and things like that. It's all the same thing, but it's packaged differently. So I just kind of wanted to get your general thoughts about that.
[00:42:35] Speaker A: Well, you know, there is sort of this pendulum that swings.
You know, the backlash is sort of an example of that.
The 50s gave way to second wave feminism, and then the supermodel backlash that Flutie writes about gave way to third wave feminism, and then we get maga. So the hope is, you know, there's going to be a fourth wave that brings men in. This has been my argument. Talking to other male feminists is like, look, if we're gonna have a fourth wave of feminism, let's talk about how patriarchy hurts men and not have it led by men, but have men be a part of the conversation where we can say, like, hey, this thing hurts us too. And if we want to liberate ourselves, we got to bust out of this hegemonic masculinity, toxic incel culture that just gets us killed and. And gets our daughters sexually assaulted and, you know, goes to war for stupid reasons. Because you want to be a war fighter. I mean, Pete Hegseth, you want to
[00:43:35] Speaker B: exist in the fog of war.
[00:43:37] Speaker A: I know. Like, he is, like, he is bro culture, right? He is. Is the manosphere, and he is proud of it. But in the meantime, you know, villages in Tehran are being wiped off the map. So to bring men into this conversation in a way that men are fragile. So we have to do it. We have to be careful. That says, you know, yeah, women are experiencing all this stuff, and they've been experiencing for a long time.
If you want to better your chance of living longer. Why do women live seven years longer than men? Like, there's all this data that we can say that this stuff, you know, has, has hurt us to be able to have that conversation. And it's happening. It is happening. It's happening in, in places you wouldn't expect, like gang outreach programs that are talking to young men about black masculinity in the city. That is happening in prisons, los hermanos programs in prisons, talking, trying to counter the toxic masculinity of the prison. Like it's there, it's just, it's just pushing against this massive thing that is the for profit social media sphere where people can monetize the most toxic, simplified messages. So it's, it's like, you know, I mean, we used to talk about the marketplace of ideas, but in, you know, in a certain context, it's not a fair free market. Right. It's just so there is this need to reframe this. And typically, you know, this happens from credible messengers. I mean, if you want to go to the Malcolm Gladwell model of like a tipping point when you start getting people.
I don't expect Donald Trump to have an aha moment and become, you know, become a feminist advocate. You know, significant voices in those circles.
I mean, I think of somebody like Terry Crews, who was this action hero guy who is, you know, talking about sexual violence, including against men.
If we get enough of those voices, we can start shifting the trend back. You know, I've given up on the notion of the Star Trek vision of the future where we're just on straight line to enlightenment and liberation.
They'll be back, back and forth. But we can sort of reclaim the narrative in this sense to not censor men, but highlight the damage done to men by, by the manosphere.
[00:46:03] Speaker B: And I think that's a really important point. And I like how all the examples you gave are of men doing that work because a lot of the men that are in the movement now, we're brought in by women doing the extra emotional labor and physical labor and things like that. And I think that there's a lot of people saying that we need to bring men into feminism. Yes, that is absolutely true.
But men need to bring themselves into feminism, and that's why it's so hard to do it, because that requires labor and a lot of insecurity and vulnerability to examine yourself, examine how you've been complicit in systems. And it's like you said, it's very much possible and it's, it's ethical to do And I think it's really difficult as well because of the way the system frames what's happening to boys. So it makes them even more antagonistic. So, for example, you know that phrase boys are falling behind, and that measurement isn't taken off of, okay, well, boys have been, you know, on this trajectory, and all of a sudden that trajectory is dropping.
It's actually taken from the trajectory of boys and girls at the same time. And all of a sudden the boys are staying this, like, same or similar trajectory. And women have just, like, upshot because all of a sudden they've got all these opportunities as well as being raised with things like emotional intelligence and perspective. And that's. That's a huge harm on boys and men, I think, to not be raised with those fundamental things that make you human. And I hate it. But the way things are framed often to men are, oh, well, you're following falling behind, not. Women have stepped up. Right. And so I think it's really important to examine that. And I do like your idea of, yeah, we need to. We need men in feminism. Otherwise it's going to be. It's going to be tough to make it work because that's like half the population.
And I, like all the examples that you gave were like Terry Crews of men being the example of how to do that.
[00:48:03] Speaker A: And part of that is breaking through this binary, this notion that men and women are opposites.
[00:48:10] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:48:10] Speaker A: Men are strong and women are meek and, oh, a mouse. And, you know, like that. That sort of binary is increasingly silly to people living in the real world. Right. I mean, see, women in sports and women in politics, and I don't know when it's going to be that America can have a female president, but the rest of the world has pretty much already done it, including, like, Pakistan.
Right. So that binary seems increasingly silly, but the problem is that the binary has been turned on its side to give men power. Right. We take opposite men are from Mars and women from Venus thing, turn it on its side to give men power. And so when we break through the binary, it's the zero sum game, and men feel like they're losing power. And, oh, no, that's a bad thing. In fact, that it's a good thing. It's a good thing.
Let women run the show for a while. Let's let women be cops and let me watch some women play basketball. And, you know, I mean, ultimately it's a good thing, but we've been trained to see this as that loss of power is a bad thing. And that. That is problematic. And so having men be able to see that and be able to relinquish that because it's, it's good to be the king. As, as Mel Brooks once said, you know, it feels good to have power. Nobody wants to give up power. White people don't want to give up power. Cisgender, you know, it's, it feels good even if we're not consciously thinking about, I have power, I have white supremacy, but it feels good to have a world that looks like me. And, you know, this, this. I do these webinars on this topic. I'm currently doing a webinar called Patriarchy and Practice, a sociological reading of the Handmaid's Tale. And one of the things we talk about is that to get into historical roots of patriarchy, you know, there was a time when we didn't gender God or we didn't see God as a white man on a cloud. For most of our human existence, God has been feminine. But there was a shift about 8,000 years ago. And then, you know, if God is man, then man is God. Like, I'm automatically given power by this definition of the sacred. And so it's all rooted in that, which seems like a good idea when you're a dude because Eve's the original sinner and Jezebel. And like, all this sort of stuff is given sacred permission, but in fact, it's, it's killing us.
[00:50:25] Speaker B: Did that timing end up being when capitalism was starting to be introduced?
[00:50:31] Speaker A: Well, no, it's, it's before that. According to Rhianne Eisler's Chalice in the Blade, it's when the goddess worshiping cultures started settling down and growing food from the fertile earth.
They weren't into war, they didn't have walls. A lot of the stuff that anthropologists or archaeologists thought were weapons were plows and things like that. But the nomadic tribes who had to move around and kill other people started invading them places like ancient Crete and started rewriting their culture of the God, the warrior God. This is the chalice, which is the womb, and the blade, which is the phallus. The phallus starts invading the, the womb and rewriting all that culture. And all of a sudden we get this shift. But there are these clues, you know, like there's a movie coming out about the Iliad and the Odyssey, about the Agamemnon. I mean, she makes a point that that's a period in Greece that's shifting from goddess to God. And if you remember the story of Agamemnon, when he Needs to go find out what's going on. He goes to the Oracle of Delphi. Oracle of Delphi. I remember my high school history class, you know, the priestess. Like, there were sacred feminine people in that story. And so there was a shift over, you know, thousands of years from peaceful goddess cultures to male warrior God cultures. We could go on and on about this topic. And in that is, men are given power, and we've held onto it ever
[00:51:58] Speaker B: since because it's hard to.
If you're relying on a almost violent approach versus an approach that presumes peace, then who do you think is going to win?
[00:52:10] Speaker A: Right.
[00:52:11] Speaker B: The thing that some men will try to do is argue that that's evolutionary.
Now, I would 100% disagree with that, being an evolutionary psychologist myself.
Socially constructed.
Yeah, exactly. And like you said, it just takes away. The binary just takes away from us. It takes. It sucks the humanity out of us. It puts us in boxes that we were not evolved to be in. And that's where our mental health struggles. That's where our general, like, experience being human just starts to really deteriorate. And then, so now we end up with the manosphere, which is training boys to put themselves into those boxes themselves.
And that. That's a acceptable. It's almost the exact same thing, like you were saying looking at from, like an archaeological point of view is it's just like progressing from one group of men to another and slowly kind of taking over. But this is via the Internet instead of nomads.
[00:53:10] Speaker A: That's a great parallel that we are being invaded. We are being invaded. Progress that we made is being invaded by the barbarians at the gate, which are, you know, the people who profiteer off the algorithms to put us back in our boxes.
It's dystopian because it could go to a very dark and kind of like Gloria Steinem pointed out, you know, we could end up with, like, this serial abuser, and we can't get out of the house.
And that is where the world of Christian nationalism and the Hegseth and the Peter Thiels and, you know, they want to take us back to a feudal state where we're serfs in the field and we can't even break out of. Out of our economic box, let alone our gender box. So that's true. We're.
[00:54:01] Speaker B: It's just so, so wild because they've admitted to that on video.
[00:54:06] Speaker A: Like, we have enlightenment, the dark enlightenment. They want to go back.
They want to go back to a feudal state.
[00:54:14] Speaker B: Yeah. This isn't just us guessing that is Their words literally. They've said it multiple times. I follow an account on Instagram that's just every day post something wild that one of the owners of AI companies says. And it's just so bleak. I'm like, maybe I should just not follow this because it's very stressful. I want to make sure that we've chatted through everything that you wanted to like. If there was any other like, topics or perspectives that you wanted to dig into on like the manosphere, documentary, masculinity and extremism, things like that.
[00:54:48] Speaker A: Well, I like to give a little plug for a webinar that I just came decided I was going to do yesterday. I'm going to do a webinar in April. It's a one day to our webinar called, called Dismantling the Manosphere, where we're going to, we're going to talk about what we've been talking about, but also how, how we get through this, how we get through this moment.
As someone who has spent a lot of time pulling people out of hate groups, there, there is a path, there is a pathway to take. People who are the most, you know, hardcore misogynist, incel type characters. I'm doing some mentoring with a teenage boy right now who got in trouble with the feds.
And you know, you don't drag people out of this movement or tell them they're stupid. You sort of walk them out and give them an alternative place to go. So there are strategies for, on, on a, on a very individual basis that we can scale up to, to get, to save men. Which sounds funny to say, but, you know, this is a very, you know, a very corrosive world. And so, yeah, so, so I, I wanted to give a little plug for that because I've been doing this work for years explaining how people get into it and then I kind of had hit a switch. I'm like, right now it's time we know how people get into it. Let's get them out.
[00:55:58] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:55:58] Speaker A: Let's pull them out in a way that's loving and productive and gives them something other than a lot of shame for having wasted years in some stupid subculture.
[00:56:10] Speaker B: It can be very tempting to focus a lot on what the problems are because there's so many of them. And especially having researcher brains, we've trained, both self trained and trained with, you know, our universities to identify a problem. Right. And then sometimes I feel like we don't get to the second part into, okay, maybe we've figured out how to solve it. But let's disseminate that information. Let's talk to people. Let's do that. So I absolutely love hearing that. Where can people find it?
[00:56:38] Speaker A: They could just go to my website, Randy Blaszak dot com. There's a little button for webinars on there.
[00:56:43] Speaker B: Cool.
[00:56:44] Speaker A: And just click that and you'll see the webinars that I'm doing. I'm going to do another anti fascist sociology webinar in the spring and it's a great chance to have conversations with people from around the world. The current one, I'm doing Patreon practice. We've got people from India and New Zealand and you know, everybody's sort of sharing what's happening in their culture with regards to their version of the manosphere. So it's a great way to both sort of process the moment that we're in, but also develop some intellectual critical thinking tools to deal with it.
[00:57:14] Speaker B: So that's so interesting. Do you notice any big differences or even subtle differences in what people are noticing in various different aspects?
[00:57:24] Speaker A: Well, you really get that as happens in the globalist society, as goes America. Then there's another version of it in India, there's a version of it in Australia. Like they're sort of imitating what works and it spreads like a virus. So we're trying to create an anecdote to that.
But one of the things that's, you know, as a sociologist, I'm always, you know, analyzing the demographics. Women want to have this conversation desperately. And you know, these webinars have a lot more women than men. And so I'm happy about that because these are the people who are experiencing. But I really want men to get the word that it's their job, their job to do it. You know, it's just like it's not people of color's job to end racism. White people are the ones that benefit it. So white people need to be doing the anti racism work. So I'm really trying to like pull men into the conversation. And I'm going to do, I'm going to do a, another webinar in the spring called Mansplaining Patriarchy for Men Only.
I mean, anybody can sign up. I mean, I'm not going to put like a sign that says no girls allowed, but it's really, I really want to have a conversation just with men about this thing that is, that is eating us alive.
[00:58:40] Speaker B: I absolutely love that I see this all the time with most of my research being on gendered experiences. And I'll go to a lot of Women's focused conferences. Now, I want to explicitly note, these conferences aren't only for women. They are about women's issues in sport science. Right? And every single year at a couple of these, it's hundreds of women and maybe a few men. And there's an increasing frustration that, like, we're, okay, well, at this point, we're, we're shouting into the void. We're in our own little echo chamber here. What's going to happen? And the nice thing is it gets bigger. There's more women every year, things like that. But if you go to any other sport conference, it's mostly men. So I really love that idea of, okay, well, that's how you bring them into the conversation because. And it's, it's tough from, from my point of view. I've had some conversations with men there who will say things like, oh, but it's real. It's really vulnerable for me to have to go to this women's conference. I was like, why? Why is it vulnerable for you?
Because I'm the only man? Well, why don't you just bring some friends next time? How do you think the women who are in coaching science feel when they go to a football conference and it's 98 men? You know what I mean? So it's just, it's that acceptance, that vulnerability is just part of that process, whether you're deconstructing anything, racism, sexism, any of the problematic structures. Right.
[01:00:10] Speaker A: I think it's funny how. And it says a lot about power dynamics that when we say gender, that means, oh, we're going to talk about women. When we talk about sexuality, oh, that's going to be gay people. We're going to talk about race. You know that, I mean, just pop into any women's studies class at a college campus and you might, you're gonna see a couple smart guys there, but they're like the ones that are like, yeah, I'm a gender too. I'm a gender too. And I know some women, so maybe I should, you know, take this class so I can better navigate the real world. But it's, it's, you know, power reinforces itself. So it's like a privilege for me not to have to think about gender or race or sexuality. Like, that's, you know, that's, that's your work. That's not my work. Like, that's the mentality. And again, that ends up hurting us. And, and yeah, the piece about the vulnerability is such a part of it because the, you know, the most toxic of Masculinity is. When I was doing prison research, I spent 10 years studying white supremacist gangs in prison, spending a lot of time in prison and in Oregon and Washington and Texas, which is a whole world. And this one guy, this one inmate was telling me that he started having a conversation with a prison guard, and the prison. He'd heard that the prison guard was going through a divorce, and he'd gone through a divorce. And so he started to commiserate with the prison guard. And then he was like. He realized that other people were seeing him be vulnerable with a prison guard, which is a big no, no, and be like a human being talking about something that was challenging. And he had to get, like, super, super misogynistic and say that he was gonna, like, go after the guy's wife. And, like, he had to, like, pivot in that moment. And I was like, oh, that is so. That is so the whole thing right there. Like, so revealing, vulnerable moment with this guy who has authority over me, but he's, you know, going through something very similar that I can identify with, but other people are watching.
So my response to it is misogyny, Violence.
[01:02:06] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:02:06] Speaker A: And I thought, to me, that was like, that's.
That's the moment we're in. Like, what if he'll continue with that conversation instead of having to pivot to same old, same old?
[01:02:20] Speaker B: That's insanely revealing because, like, obviously masculinity makes you be not vulnerable. Like, that is. That's a huge no, no. And in that it keeps people isolated, it keeps people fearful. And you can just see how that just tracks so directly to right wing extremism, to getting into the manosphere, to misogynistic beliefs.
[01:02:43] Speaker A: Yeah, it is. It is corrosive. And it just. It's sad because the I. I had this. I had this.
I'm a little bit older than you, so I have, like, the sense of, like, the big picture. And there were some moments of high school reunions before social media ruined high school reunions for everybody, of going back and thinking about me in high school as a teenage boy in Stone Mountain, Georgia.
And the female. The only females that I thought about were, like, the cheerleaders. Like, the next grade up. Like, I'm in 10th grade. I have a crush on an 11th grade cheerleader. the reunion, I met these women who are in my class who were doing these amazing things, who were accomplished and cool, and I'm like, why didn't I ever talk to you in high school? Like, I could have had a relationship with this cool, you know, nerdy punk rock chick. But I was focused on the drill team.
[01:03:39] Speaker B: Yeah.
[01:03:40] Speaker A: You know, the training, because I had Charlie's Angels on my wall. And then I had like the cheerleaders doing splits for the, you know, for the boys. Right. I mean, this is the whole high school sports misogyny, you know, and we get out of class on school on Fridays because what's more important than learning? Going to support the football team and the women are there to, you know, delight us. Okay, one more quick story.
[01:04:05] Speaker B: Go for it, please.
[01:04:06] Speaker A: My school, this is. I'm a qualitative researcher. So I just collect all these because they're so meaningful. I had, and this is another like, oh moment when I was in high school. There was an informal rule at my high school in Stone Mountain, Georgia, that you weren't allowed to wear shorts, which seemed like a stupid rule. It wasn't in the county code.
And because I was like a problem maker, I decided, I'm just going to wear shorts. I'm going to wear shorts because there's no rule. There's no official rule. And so I, I'm in my folk guitar class and I. The intercom, will you send Randy Blazek to the vice principal's office? And I'm like, okay. So I go into the vice principal's office and I'm like, look, there's not a rule. He's like, no, this is a school rule. You can't wear shorts. And I said, well, why not? Because it's distracting. So I then I had the, you know, the wherewithal to say this. What about the cheerleaders on Friday? They're here in their, you know, their little mini skirts. Do you think that's not distracting? And this is what this, like 35 year old, a vice principal said. Do you really want them to cover up?
[01:05:08] Speaker B: Ugh, yeah. Gross.
[01:05:09] Speaker A: But he was creeping on the teenage girls and they, they were there to be looked at. Right. That was a mistake. Like not my hairy 15 year old legs, but the cheerleaders were there for us to ogle.
Like this man basically spelled it all out, like right here.
So that was, that was the beginning, I think, of my feminist journey. That vice principal's office.
[01:05:33] Speaker B: It doesn't take much though, does it, to just point out the hypocrisy. And I think, I mean, this is another thing we could get on a tangent. And it's, it's so, it's so tempting. But part of the point of all this Manafere stuff is hypocrisy because then it's hard to work out. You were provided with a very obvious situation and you had the wherewithal to point out the hypocrisy and noted that this vice principal didn't have a answer that was acceptable. Right. But the manosphere and these right wing extremist groups push out so much hypocrisy on a daily basis within the same sentence that people are finding it hard to even identify that anymore. Um, and I feel like that was one of my big takeaways from that podcast as well is like no one's their entire audience. They're getting at them too young. Because like you in high school is very different than the 12, 13 year old boys. Your prefrontal cortex has developed a little bit more that are getting this content who might not be able to spot. They don't won't know what hypocrisy is at that point. Whereas our teenage brains are pretty much programmed to identify hypocrisy as long as we're not socialized out of it. So I find that a really interesting anecdote because I think it links so well. It's where we are now.
[01:06:49] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. I, you know, there were a couple moments in that documentary that were sort of windows, including when I can't remember the one of the guys where he was, you know, talking to the girlfriend. Louis was talking to the girlfriend. And you find out later that she split. She's like, I'm out of here. Like it was came up on the bottom of the screen that she's like that. There's a whole story there that we didn't see behind the scenes where she had like her own aha moment. It's like, you know, so that was
[01:07:19] Speaker B: after the, the one way monogamy conversation that was. Yeah. And it was, it's so funny to me because you could just see the insecurity because he obviously doesn't speak that way to her. And she even said in the documentary, he's not like this at home. This is just, you know. And then so Lou did a very good job and very ca. Bringing up like, well, he says he's going to do this. You say you don't want this. Eventually those two paths will merge. And then the guy, he backtracks so quickly and says, well, maybe I just want one wife. One wife. I don't know. And it's just so interesting how I love how they included at the end of the documentary that she was just out. She left.
[01:07:58] Speaker A: I cheered in front of my TV screen.
[01:08:02] Speaker B: We do need those positive moments, don't we?
Yeah, it's a win.
Well, thank you so much for coming on. I appreciate that you've just taken up a part of your morning. It was so good to chat, and it was actually hard to stay focused because I could have gone on so many. You could probably see my eyes going, oh, we could go this way. We could go this way. We could go this way. So, so many interesting points made. You guys go check out the webinars on your website. Right. I'll put the link for that in the bio as well. But thank you so much for the work you do. Thank you for coming on.
It was really interesting to chat. We should definitely chat again if there's any other topics that you want to chat through. So anything else you want to say before we go?
[01:08:41] Speaker A: I think. I just think this year is going to be a real challenge, and it's kind of as Gloria Steinem said, you know, we're at a fork in the road, and so we're really going to have to engage people. And I would encourage, you know, people to just become more involved in building those social networks to know people and having conversations, including impolite conversations. What did you think about the man? Did you see the manosphere? You can ask somebody at the, you know, the grocery store and just to normalize our dissatisfaction with how things are going, that we want to make dissent polite.
[01:09:17] Speaker B: Yes. Yes.
Love that.
Yeah, Normalized dissent, normalized vulnerability. I think those are the two big takeaways because I think we're so socialized into not expressing or even internalizing and feeling either, just because we think it makes life easier. So, yeah, normalize those very human things. Okay. Well, again, thank you so much for coming on.
[01:09:42] Speaker A: Of course. I loved it. It's always good talking.
[01:09:44] Speaker B: It was really fun. Yeah, it was really good fun. It's always fun to talk and pick somebody's brain who's like an expert in an area. Like a similar area, but very different expertise and very, like, it's hard to explain to, like, the. A non, like, researcher how areas can be very related but also distinct. Very different areas.
[01:10:05] Speaker A: So talk about sampling methodology.
[01:10:08] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, yeah. And qualitative research as well. No joke. Like, what is your philosophical paradigm?
[01:10:14] Speaker A: But we would have lost a few people.
[01:10:16] Speaker B: Yeah. Including me. Okay, guys. So thank you guys so much for listening. As usual, we probably left you with some more questions than answers. But that's kind of the point of this podcast, because it's called but why? But we love digging into the very messy undercurrents of the manosphere. If you guys have any thoughts, questions, rage, we want to hear it, please drop us a comment. You can scream into the void, but that's not super effective for us. But if you there's a topic that you want us to dig into next, please do get in touch. We're always up for a new rabbit hole and you can find all of our social media links, everything like that on the but why Instagram page and the YouTube page. Head to the bio for everything. And remember, the first step to understanding is asking but why?
