The last time Cynthia Miller-Idriss was on Democracy Works, we discussed how political extremism was making its way to the mainstream through a variety of channels. This time, we're looking at how misogyny and gender-based violence have become mainstream and the implications for our democracy.
Miller-Idriss write about this trend in her new book, "Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism." The book draws from her work studying political violence and extremism, but also from her experience as a female public figure who regularly receives death threats and misogynistic comments directed at her. We talk about both in the interview, as well as organizations that are working to address the crises among American men and boys.
Miller-Idriss will visit Penn State to present a lecture on "Man Up" and sign copies of the book on Thursday, October 23 at 5:00 p.m. in 114 Welch Building. The event is free and open to the public.
Episode Transcript
Chris Beem
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University. I'm Chris Beem.
Cyanne Loyle
I'm Cyanne Loyle.
Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle and welcome to Democracy Works. This week, we are excited to have back on the show for the second time. Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who is a professor at American University and the author of the brand new book, man up with the new misogyny and the rise of violent extremism. For listeners who are local here to Penn, state, Cynthia will be visiting campus for a lecture on October 23 you can get the details of that in the show notes, but the last time she was here, she was just starting to work on this book, I think maybe laying some of the research foundations for it. But what came out of it? I have to say, I'm surprised. This is a much more personal book than her previous work, but I think is really well suited to what she's covering and the way that she wants to talk about it.
Chris Beem
Yeah, I completely agree with that. Jenna, I mean, you know, we were quite confident that we are the company of a very accomplished scholar, and her research is, is, is peerless, right? But this book is not just about research. There is there's a frankness to it and a level of emotion, because she is experiencing this misogyny directly, and it's painful and it's confusing, and it's puts a frame around all this data, which shows that it's not merely painful, it is also dangerous. And so that's what we get. That's what this book gets us.
Cyanne Loyle
And I think there's often a temptation, particularly as a woman scholar to dodge questions of gender, right, just because of both kind of the personal connections often to the topics, but then, yeah, not wanting to be the woman in the room who's telling the story. I'm particularly interested in this argument about whether or not or conceiving of misogyny as a gateway to violent extremism, right, right? And so whether or not we're at a place where a misogyny that's probably are always existed, right, in a patriarchal society, is somehow getting us closer to violence. And so it got me thinking about a lot of questions about whether or not, you know, misogyny is a form of extremism in the first place, right? Are we already kind of down that, that rabbit hole? And then also thinking about the relationship between some of these toxic masculinities and violence and then violent extremism. So in preparing for the interview, I was reading through some things that Cynthia has written in the past about kind of mixed martial art fight clubs and things like that, and the ways in which kind of teenage boys are participating in what doesn't necessarily need to be a misogynistic activity, but the violence of those fight clubs then get linked to the misogyny that then gets translated into exclusionary ideologies, right? So clearly anti women, often clearly pro white, and just kind of what comes out of those. And so that is also part of the piece, right? It's, it's both gender, but it's wrapped up in all of these kind of political processes that we've been talking a lot about on the show that really kind of piqued my interest.
Chris Beem
And and economic realities too, right? You you get sense that some of this, you know, just as an empirical matter, is driven by a sense of loss and resentment among among young men in America and probably throughout the world, for that matter, right? There's a sense that the things they wanted and the things that they expected when they, you know, became adults, they don't have they don't have job security. They don't have, you know, spending money. They can't live the life they want. They don't have good relation, you got solid relationships. Certainly don't have a family and children, and and you know it. And for those who don't have a job or don't have a career, I you know I've been out of work, and I know what that's like. It is very hard on your sense of self worth and identity, and it's, it is just human nature. I mean, we all do this when there's something that goes wrong in our lives which stops us from getting what we want. We look for reasons. We look for explanations, and our self worth pushes us to find those explanations elsewhere, and to push. With them somewhere, and so it's not a surprise that you have this feeling of unhappiness, that you are looking for explanations for that, and you say, oh, it's because it's women's fault. It's it's because we have lost this sense of manhood that used to occupy, that we all used to agree on, and because that's gone, that's why I'm in this position. And I don't think that's, you know, remotely true or accurate or fair, but I do think it kind of accounts for some of this, not just animosity towards women, but actually violence.
Cyanne Loyle
And we see this decline, this decline in status linked to all sorts of other outcomes that we've talked about, right? So this is the rise of populism. This is the rise of white supremacy. It's the changing status, right? The declining status that really kind of calls these, you know, these emotions into question. And then I think there's two things going on. One, you've got influencers that are saying your plight is because of women, right? So you could easily replace the other there with other people and with, yeah, yeah, absolutely, current administration, right? This is the fault of immigrants. This is the fault of trans people, right? Chris, I really like your point about it's not just being out of work, right? It's not just a self worth issue. It's a self worth issue that's tied to century old understandings of what it is to be a man, right? So think, I think it hits differently when you interact some of those economic and political changes with, you know, a historical view of the role that that men are supposed to play in society, right? If you're supposed to be a provider and you can't provide, then what, what are you bringing to a relationship? What are you bringing to your community? And I, I think the the point is it doesn't have to be that way, and so it requires a reconceptualization of what it is to be a man in society in a way that I think I don't know for certain portions of the population we're not ready for yet.
Jenna Spinelle
I think Cynthia definitely hits on I think both the causes as you two have just been talking about, but also some of the solutions. So we'll get to both of those in the conversation. Let's go now to the interview with Cynthia Miller-Idriss.
Jenna Spinelle
Cynthia Miller-Idriss, welcome back to Democracy Works. Nice to have you joining us again.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
It's great to be here. Jenna, thanks for having me.
Jenna Spinelle
So this this book comes in part from the research that you've been doing for some time now, but also from your personal experience, I wonder if you could share a bit about that laying of things.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Yeah. I mean, I think you know, as a woman in the field, I who has spent my whole career interviewing and studying boys and men who are violent or on the fringes of violent scenes, I had thought about gender. I thought about my own role as a young woman, in particular when I at the time, I was doing interviews with young men in schools in Berlin as an advantage, because that it was a little bit different for me to be in conversation with them. It was maybe a little less threatening. It also was an advantage to not be German, for example, to be an outsider. And so I was an outsider in many ways, and I could ask them to explain things. So I did think about gender, and I thought about masculinity in particular, and the pressure that they felt to be and the desire that they felt to be part of something bigger and better than themselves, a kind of brotherhood, sailor, soldier, Warrior, Rule Breaker, rebel. I mean, I talked a lot about those tropes as they relate to being a young man and the readiness to be violent that they often describe. That's a one word in German, gevalt, which is really a very common description of what they felt they had to be in the world. Is ready to be violent, whether they were violated or not, they had to project the sense that they could be, and that was very much being a part of a young man for them. So I had thought a lot about that, and I had thought a lot about women's role in extremism. So Trad wives on the more mainstream side, but also women who supported white supremacist extremist movements, Q Anon, all kinds of things like that. But I had somehow never looked at how men view women, right? Or misogyny itself, the policing of gendered norms and expectations, aside from masculinity itself. And so, you know, it's surprising to me that I didn't do it. It's like my own blind spot in the field, maybe my own hesitation to look closely at something that also had affected me personally quite a bit over the course of my own career. So I opened the book with, you know, an anecdote about something a lot of young women experience, and I wasn't even that young when it happened to me in my 40s already, when I call. Pig tried to kiss me in an elevator at a conference. That's a common thing, surprisingly, that has happened to a lot of women I know. And when I pushed him away and and he sort of said, What kind of games are you playing? I hopped out of the elevator, and I called my sister, who said, your problem is you're too nice. You have to be more of a bitch. And so I start with that anecdote talking about this tension and what happens when you are more of a bitch. Some men get very, very angry and unpredictable ways. And so really using that anecdote as a way of talking about this navigation, even stories about my mom's experience, you know, being in a generation that that didn't have the legal right to open a bank account, right? So we have seen real progress in just 50 years, right? Of that's inconceivable. The idea my mom went to the same university that I went to, and her father said he wouldn't pay for it because she was a girl, I can't imagine that, right? And it's unimaginable that that she applied to go to Cornell, because she said it was the only Ivy that would accept women at the time and so, you know, and the fact that she just soldiered through all of that, it was a really different experience than I had. I never had that feeling that my own career was held back in any way, that my own learning or work trajectory was changed, except, you know, challenges around being a working parent, but that, I think a lot of people feel that, but not like what my mom went through, not like what previous generations had to fight through,
Jenna Spinelle
And the way that, you know, individual actions can sort of scaffold on to one another, right to lead to something bigger. So, yeah, that's that's thank you for, for including those stories, for for sharing them so so publicly. I think a lot of folks will will resonate with with what you write, but moving from the realm of of the personal in into the political, to the extent that you can separate those two, I suppose, but that's a whole other conversation. You also write that the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer was was an influence for you. I remember we talked a lot about that on this show, yeah, that was all unfolding. So what? What was that sort of lightning moment for you?
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Yeah, I think I was super irritated at the time. And it turns out that being irritated is a good motivation to write a book, and that was one of two things that really pushed me over the edge of deciding I had to write the book, because it had been percolating for a while. I saw that I had ignored it too much in my own career, in my own work and writing, I felt like we're seeing rising misogyny online documented since 2011 and so you're seeing these things percolate, the manosphere emerge, the violent incels, the attacks on women, spa workers in Atlanta. I mean, all of the kinds of things that were showing up on the violent end of the spectrum. And then we have this kidnapping and live streamed execution plot against the sitting governor that used extraordinarily misogynistic language in the ways that they talked about her, and in fact, the original title of this book was just grab the bitch, which is the book. It went it got submitted in its final form with that, and I fought hard for the title. My editor fought hard for that title, and eventually the marketing department dinged it, and for good reason, because they actually did a survey of independent booksellers who had very mixed views on it, and also felt that, why are we centering the views of, you know, the words of violent men. Let's not do that. And so in the end, I did like the idea of centering more of the messages that men get that can create those conditions. But in any case, you know, one of the things that happened with that Gretchen Whitmer case is that Gretchen Whitmer case is that in the actual trial, the defense attorneys described those words as just big talk and blowing off steam, so essentially dismissing them as locker room talk. So that was irritation number one. And the second one, I'll say faster, which is in the spring of 2021 not long after that case, after January 6, the US government issued a new classification system for domestic violent extremism in which they really tried hard for good reasons, to get away from the idea of far left and far left violet or far right violence. So they had a category of sort of identity based harms that include, you know, both racial white supremacist extremism, kinds of things, but also animal rights extremism, environmental extremism. So issue driven and identity based. And then they had an anti government column, which includes anarchists and anti fascists, but also sovereign citizens and unlawful militias. So really trying to create these categories, then they had this category, like, you can't make this up if you tried. It's a category called all other extremisms that really says something like extremism is related to gender, sexuality and religion, which are like the three, like everything. It's also the three fastest growing areas, like anti LGBTQ, misogyny, you know. And violent in cells. And anti semitism and Islamophobia are like, so, you know, they're just going so fast, and they don't even get a category, like the animal rights extremists who had six attacks in like, 14 years with no lethality. Like, they get a category which means there's like expertise tied to it. There's like, FBI divisions and hearings, right? Like these things matter categories, matter funding, right? I mean, yeah, the potential funding, but in and like, divisions of law enforcement that are assigned to it, so all other extremism, like that. So that became the title of the first section of the book, which is called othering gender. Like, we can't just stick it in the other category of gender and sexuality and think that we're going to be able to take it seriously as a mobilizer to violence and to violent extremism. So that was the final I was like, that's it. I have to write the book. Yeah, yeah. Well, and you know, I was surprised to read when you when you talked about misogyny as as a bridge builder of sorts, for bringing people of color into what we traditionally think of as as a white movement. Yes, more about that connection? Yeah. I mean, there's two separate ways that misogyny becomes intersectional. One is, as you're saying. I mean, there's something called the Black manosphere. We have a project right now in partnership with a team at Howard University, my research lab that's looking at issues of of hate as it gets fomented on historically black colleges and universities, but also other predominantly black institutions, like community colleges, where you often have anti LGBTQ issues happening, but also sort of misogyny being directed toward black women who far outnumber black men on campuses. And there's that whole ecosystem online. And so misogynoir, as black feminist writers have described for a long time, is this intersection of misogyny and racism that's directed at Black women and more broadly, at women of color. So you have that whole type of thing happening, but you also have the fact that misogyny is an entry point to lots of other forms of hate, and it's very accessible at a moment when influencers who peddle very misogynistic ideas for subscription content, and you know, products that they're selling are have approval ratings among teenage boys of as high as 20% and so you have very accessible content, often accessed through innocuous ways like fitness or dating advice or financial advice, you land on these influencers. You find this very anti feminist, misogynistic content that scapegoats women for the problems that very real problems that men face. Let's let's be clear about that there are real crises of loneliness, etc. But then that it's very easy to introduce scientific racism once you're talking about, like, brain size, right? You start to see scientific racism creep in. You start to see anti semitism at this intersection. Because there's this ridiculous part of the conspiracies that says, well, like, feminists are bad, but they couldn't have done this on their own because they're not smart enough. So it must be the Jews, right? And so it's the conspiracy, right? So the Jews are actually the ones in charge of the feminists who are causing the problems for boys and men. So you get this tight intersection of and so one of the things we've talked to about in our anti semitism work on the prevention side in my lab is like it does no good to build walls around Jewish communities or other minority communities to protect them. If misogyny just tunnels right underneath and delivers, you know, the harm anyway, you have to also address misogyny, which is, you know, in some ways the biggest and most ubiquitous form, because it's, you know, directed against half the population, plus gender policing for boys and men as well, right?
Jenna Spinelle
And so the goal of all this, or one of one of the goals is, is not to, you know, get rid of women, or don't necessarily hate women, but it's more about control.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Is that exactly right? In fact, you know, another anecdote I have, because there's so many, you just can't make this stuff up like that. The conclusion, I open with an anecdote when I was talking to a funder who I have a ton of respect for, who does really good work in this field, and anti semitism, and I was talking to the funder about the new book I'm writing on misogyny, and he said, misogyny, but that doesn't have anything to do with white supremacist extremism like and he said, then it's not as if these guys want to eliminate women from the Face of the Earth, right? And so I thought, Okay, if that's the standard by which we have to judge problematic behavior, right? We're not counting exploitation, we're not counting control or coercion. We're not counting abuse or violence, right? It's just elimination. Then we have a problem, because all these other forms of harm and exploitation and erasure and punishment and control are also problematic, even if, yes, white supremacist men need white women to reproduce, you know, society and have white babies with so it's, you know, part of what I argue is that exploitation. In the form of child sexual exploitation, as we see like Neo Nazis constantly getting arrested for child pornography, for example, sex trafficking, as we see, white supremacist groups often getting involved in being arrested for drug trafficking, but not for sex trafficking charges, even though the DEA says those always go hand in hand, essentially. So you know, those kinds of things. The The goal here is to shed light on it, to call at least for more data collection and for more awareness of it, but also acknowledging that there are a wider variety of harms than just elimination or segregation and separation are not the only things that can be done at the hands of extremists and of violent, violent men, in this case, who are enacting harm.
Jenna Spinelle
And this, this idea of control, makes me think about some of the ways that these ideas have made their way into the political mainstream right and the sort of the post roe landscape. And I'm thinking about people like JD Vance, who espouse a very particular kind of masculinity. So what? What are the ramifications of this ideology, this world, coming into our politics and for our democracy and the institutions that comprise it?
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Yeah, well, when we're talking about a kind of defense of the patriarchy, if you will, right? Which is the patriarchy is a power structure of that you know, ultimately, that that gives more power and control to men at the hands of other men and who don't adhere to the norms and women. And that defense of the patriarchy is done through kind of sexist attitudes, but also through misogynistic actions and behaviors, and those are kind of the law enforcement mechanisms that I'm talking about here that are defending the patriarchy with either legal means or social norms and control and attempts to belittle, dehumanize or enact violence against women and the LGBTQ community, and in some cases, boys and men who don't adhere to those norms, through bullying, through um slurs like you throw like a girl, or gender policing that puts boys and men in their place if they don't adhere right to these kind of macho norms. All of that, one is a defense of the gender binary, right? Really trying to make sure that we adhere to very fixed ideas of men and women and that there are very clear rules for being men and women and boys and girls that have to be adhered to and have to be policed. And that filters into an idea that of submissiveness and control, of power and of the execution of that power, and who should hold it that that bleeds into things like reproductive rights, same sex marriage rights, voting rights. When you start hearing people calling for one household, one vote, when you hear people arguing that women shouldn't have the right to vote, and you know that, go back again to what my mom faced. And women of that generation, even privileged white women, who went to college right, had no right to open a bank account or a credit card without their husband until, in her case, she had three children already in the mid 70s. So those are the kinds of rights that we take, in all honesty, my generation takes completely for granted. I can't even imagine a world where I couldn't open a bank account without a man's signature, but it was not that long ago that that was the case. And so those are the kinds of rights and the legal restrictions that are forms of control. But there's also social forms of control that I'm talking about in this book.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, and on that idea of kind of the economics of it, I have to say, as I was reading this, I thought a lot about the connection to globalization and the push toward white collar work, away from, you know, blue collar types of jobs. You know, I went to high school in the early 2000s and at that point, like, if you went to the bow tech, as we called it, like you were, you were a loser, right? You were at the bottom of the social status. And, I mean, I would think that, like, you know, that phone meant some, some kind of feeling of wanting revenge, or feeling like you're at a loss, or something like that. And so when Andrew Tate comes along, it's like, oh, he's speaking to those people.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
And Andrew Tate, you know, he opens every single video saying, men are suffering. And I'm the only one that will talk about it. And to be honest, he was right for a long time, like, I think we're getting better at talking about the problems that men and boys face, but, but you do have to, and I tried really hard in this book to emphasize that these are real problems. Sometimes they're perceived grievances, but there are also real problems. Men have three quarters of the deaths of despair in this country, which is suicides, overdoses, deaths by alcohol, 40% of of college attendance now or graduation, rather, there is massive loss of traditionally male jobs. So when you're talking about that kind of economics of that, what it intersects with, though, is a culture of mass. Masculinity, right? That is sometimes called Man box culture, that says that men are failures if they're not providers and protectors. And if that provider role in that culture is then removed, it makes sense that the protector role, which is a little bit more violent or ready to be violent role, right? That idea of dominance and aggression as hallmarks of masculinity being a part of that is going to surge, and that's what we've seen and so but instead of addressing the fact that the provider role a is part of an imposed cultural norm that maybe was never fair to begin with, and B is being removed because of the loss of traditionally male jobs without structural replacement or opportunities to retrain in careers that are that are thriving, and sometimes in part, because of gendered norms about things like nursing or caregiving, where there's surges in hiring, But men are not following in scale. So you know that those things are real, but instead of addressing the structural things, we're scapegoating instead women, feminists and others for taking our place, for making it too hard for men, or for going too far, right, this idea that women's rights have gone too far, which, like surprising percentage of men in this country, believe. Now I don't have it in front of me, but it's cited in the book. It's, it's like half in in some cases of the demographic,
Jenna Spinelle
Could they like name, what specifically those rights are? Do you think, or is it just women's rights?
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
I think in general, it's this sense that circulates online, often, that women are getting a leg up, are getting a head they get an advantage, everything's easier for them. They're like, more likely to get the interview, that they get promoted, that it's everything's hard. And I've heard people say this, like educated, well educated, informed people say, My son can't get a job because all these other people are in line ahead of him, basically. And I think that that sense, even if statistically, it's still actually not true. When you look at pay rates, etc, there's a strong sense that that white boys and men are discriminated against now in the job market, that kind of narrative at the hands of feminist immigrants, people of color, others, and so that's the kind of scapegoating. And then this idea that women's rights have gone too far, you know, does come on the heel of decades of girls can code Girls on the Run, like trying to promote girls access to things where they had been excluded, while not thinking about, how do we maybe capitalize on helping boys also have opportunities to experience a fuller range of human emotions and capacity and focus on their well being and not just on their sense sometimes they get, as I've heard from boys and men my whole career, that they feel like people see them as inherently dangerous or bad.
Jenna Spinelle
Well, yeah, and on that the boys and men problem. I'm thinking a lot about Richard Reeves, who started the Institute for boys and men. And I get some eye rolls sometimes, right? And people were like, we've been talking about boys and men for time immemorial. Why? You know, why do we need to kind of focus on that? I get that too.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
People get angry sometimes. In the audience. You know women in particular, when I start saying this because they say like, well, and it's true, women are still paid less. They still, you know, receive the bulk of violence directed in sexual assaults, and you know, not to boys are also bullied and harmed at the hands of older men in their families, but not at the same rates of girls in terms of sexual assault, the likelihood of being raped in your life, the safety issue, the unequal pay issue, the lack of opportunities, the challenges of caregiving, of no parental leave, to speak, of the cost of childcare, all of which drives women out of The labor market at higher rates than men at key points in their career. All of those things are true and and you can still have a real, an emerging problem of boys and men that shows they're backsliding and going down, even if it doesn't mean things are worse for them than for women. It's a, you know, it's like a both and problem, not an either or problem. And so that's what I try to say.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, well, and it seems to me that the solutions then need to be both and Exactly,
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Yeah, you can't. I mean, it's, you know, Richard Reeves center, aquamundo, like these organizations that have been really focusing on boys and men's wellness. Governor Newsom in California just passed an executive order that has real effort, and I think in Maryland too, there's new efforts on to look at boys and men. I mean that is those solutions have to be there. They shouldn't take the place of efforts to promote, protect and safeguard girls and women, particularly at a moment when we're also seeing the highest rates of online. Misogyny and things like sex toys being thrown at WNBA players during basketball games. Right? Like this is there. That problem hasn't gone away, and, in fact, in documented ways, has also gotten worse. But those solutions have to address both types of problems.
Jenna Spinelle
Yeah, what about on the on the media front is, as we've discussed, the manosphere, these ideas resonate, and they're very financially viable, like what I don't expect you to have the be all, end all for this. But are there any examples you've come across, or any trends from your research that show a path for how to get a different version of masculinity and, frankly, feminism and femininity out there in a way that's as compelling.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
So there's a burgeoning men's wellness world out there that it's doing incredible work, places like the good men project, who I partner with in my lab from time to time, and other men's world men's wellness worlds that have taken a strengths based approach to men's wellness, but also looking at things like what men have lost by living in this man box culture, and what does it mean to try to build connection, because men get isolated. So Mark Green is running this walking, talking men program now that's picking up across the country. That is really literally just men going for walks together in the evening and having more intimate conversations, because the research shows men lose that kind of intimacy around puberty because of the fear of being portrayed as gay if they are being intimately close or emotionally close, to their to their male friends. And that's, you know, that's a huge loss. And then you have this tremendous loneliness data among young men saying, you know, 25% of men under 30 saying they don't have a single friend. 50% of American men saying that their online lives are more rewarding than their offline lives. So that kind of stuff has to happen. You know, on the girls and women's side, there's a couple of different things that I think are awesome, like one is this burgeoning world of women's sports bars, right? So for one example, and I'm doing an event with one of the women's sports bars later this fall as part of the book tour. And it turns out there's a lot of interest in the women's sports world on these issues because they face so much misogyny. So a lot of former women pro athletes who I've been in conversation with over the last course of the last several weeks, to engage in these types of conversations with up and coming girls teams and athletes. And I think, you know, we've seen a lot of like women's empowerment marketing on the part of like dove or corporations like Nike, and one of the things I hope to push is calling on them, not just for women's empowerment funding and approaches, but also for protection of women, right? And girls like, let's how do we combat this kind of misogyny, and not just say like, you can be anything you want, and then guess what? You're gonna have to face like rape threats and stalking and harassment online as an athlete or femicide like the Kenyan marathoners, you know when they go home. I mean, there's just terrible consequences to empowering women without also finding ways to protect and safeguard them and change the culture in which violence against women seems perfectly acceptable to a lot of men.
Jenna Spinelle
Sure, sure. You can't empower your way through things. It seems to me that, but that is a scapegoat, maybe just as much as on the, you know what we talked about, on the kind of the male side of things, yes, the last thing I want to ask you about, I know that your lab does a lot of work with schools and trying to equip educators and parents to talk about these issues. Are you doing any work there on these topics?
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Yeah, we do a lot of education. And what I find is that often the people who approach me first at the podium afterward are boys who are so eager to have a conversation or to have space for a conversation about as one of them described to me when he asked me, what, what I thought people didn't know about boys and men after all the interviews I've done, and I turned it on him, I said, What do you think people don't know about boys and men? And he said, I don't think people realize what it's like to suddenly discover that the world sees you as dangerous, right? And then a girl spoke up and said, Well, I don't think boys know what it's like to suddenly realize the world sees you as a sexual object. And so I was like, maybe the two of you should be in conversation, right? But this is why I love it, because they just like they they don't have these opportunities. So a lot of what I do is encourage schools and teachers to integrate conversations about online worlds and content and gendered content, including things like violent porn, which we know is having terrible outcomes for all kinds of things like choking behaviors, asphyxiation, higher stroke rates among women under age 40 now, into health education classes, into digital media literacy classes. Yeah, and we also do a lot of work with parents. So we have a guide with the Southern Poverty Law Center called not just a joke, preventing and understanding gender and sexuality based bigotry. There's an abridged version of that guide in the back of my book, along with all the resource lists. And those are free, all those tools are free. And we have work on higher ed campuses. We're doing work now in Kenya and Jordan and Canada as well, in my lab on issues of gender based violence and the connection to violent extremism and issues of misogyny in E gaming and E sports clubs on campuses. So there's a wide variety of work. I would just tell people, we get funders to pay for it, and then it's all free to the public after we've tested it. So it's at WWW dot peril research.com, people can find those tools, download them, share them with their communities, and hopefully find a space to have more conversations about this.
Jenna Spinelle
Great, yeah. Well, we'll link to all of that in the show notes and to your book as well. And I hope that our listeners who are local here to Penn State will come and see you in person at the end of October. We'll put all those details in the episode notes as well.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
It's my home state, as you know, so always happy to come back.
Jenna Spinelle
Yes. Well, Cynthia, thank you so much for your time today.
Cynthia Miller-Idriss
Thanks for having me. Jenna, I really appreciate it.
Chris Beem
All right, I promise I would tell this story quickly, so I'm going to tell it quickly, but it immediately came into my mind as I was reading this book. So I'm sure you've heard of a no hitter in baseball. Well, there's, there's something that's even more rare, which is called a perfect game. And a perfect game means that the pitcher not only there's no hits, but there's no walks and there's no errors, and I think there's 24 in the history of base Major League Baseball. That's how rare it is, right? And it was like, Oh, I don't know, 2010 let's say I think that's right. Actually, this pitcher, Galarraga, was had eight innings of a perfect game and two outs in the ninth right, and there's a play at first base, and Jim Joyce is the umpire, and he's a very well respected umpire, and he called him safe when he was out, it was obvious on replay that he got the call wrong right, and so he ruined this guy's perfect game and and completely his fault. All right? Jim Joyce finds out, sees the evidence, and he not only goes before the press and says, this was my fault, this was the most important play of my life, and I cracked the bed, and I have no excuse. And then he went and talked to Galarraga, man to man, and apologized. And I actually, when I was coaching baseball, I told that story because I said, that's what a man does, and that's what I think of when I think of man up, and I get that, you know, there's a lot going on there, and baseball is a very guy oriented world. But I just I'm not entirely happy about creating a world in which this concept is no longer viable when you can't say something like man up. So what I would say is that we have operative right now, a world in which man up has come to mean something almost pathetic. It's not Manning up. But that doesn't mean the concept is illegitimate. That's what I want to see.
Cyanne Loyle
All right, so I'm not going to disagree with you, Chris, but you are getting my hackles up a little bit with the story. Good, all right, good. And I think that maybe what I'm reacting to is is the same thing that have that has happened to many linguistic concepts, right? Which is, I think what you're alluding to, the very notion of what it is to man up has become so conflated with violence, with anti feminist attitudes, with a way of behaving and functioning that isn't dignified and honorable, right? I mean, I I think you know the Jim Joy stories is a brilliant story of compassion, of owning your mistakes, of you know, taking care of other people, of you know, of taking responsibility for your for your own actions. So one, I don't think it has to be inherently male. No, it doesn't right. But I also when you it's just the term right, as soon as you say it. That other way, I'm like, wow, I don't know. Man, right? Like it just, it doesn't, it doesn't feel right. And I think that that that may be at the root of a lot of the things that Cynthia is trying to talk about, which is that we, we have kind of bastardized masculinity in the US to such a way.
Chris Beem
The other thing I wanted to say about this story is, can you conceive of a circumstance in which Donald Trump would behave this way when he'd say, that's on me? I made a mistake. I'm sorry. It's out of the question. And so part of the problem here is that the concept of masculinity that people see in Donald Trump is just, to my mind, farcical. It is so far off the mark that it's like, I don't know what concept you're creating in your head. It's not just that he won't own up, he won't accept responsibility of any kind, he won't tell the truth. He wears makeup. I mean, where do you stop with this? This is not someone that you would say, oh, yeah, that's, that's what a man does. And so the idea that, the idea that, that, I guess, what I would say, is at the core of the concept as it is operative in much of American culture right now is so far off the mark that maybe we do have to kill it, because that's the only thing we can do. But it's, it's just, it is just a categorical mistake to call this, that kind of behavior, manly, that's all I would say.
Cyanne Loyle
And again, I would just expand it, right? It's also not the definition of a good leader, right? And so it's a core crisis of leadership, independent of what gender you assign right to the behavior. And I guess, I guess my challenge is, in some ways, what Cynthia then offers as solutions, which is the yes and problem, right? I think that we can acknowledge crisis of masculinity. I think we can acknowledge problems with with a lack of clear role models behaving, you know, in in a kind of historical way of, kind of, I don't know, being a good man. I'm still, yeah, I get it. I get it. I'm like, trying to wrap my head around it, but it, but it doesn't in any way negate the harms that are still being experienced by women, and the way in which, you know, the these kind of faltering masculinities are still harmful. And it, we started to talk about it in the beginning, but, you know, we're seeing this kind of decline right of male power and and the same we see the same thing with white power in the United States, and that that decline is what is causing rises of populism and rises of different ideologies and attitudes and and we see this happening, but, but I think Cynthia makes a really core point that even on the decline, we still have gross gender inequities, incredible amounts of violence perpetrated against women. I thought her closing story about female athletes was so telling, and that's because I've been really excited recently about the rise of women's sports, right, of female WNBA stories and yep, but then to hear Cynthia tell the story, right, these athletes are still disproportionately affected by sexual assault, harassment, death threats, and so they're paying a huge cost for the kind of first mover advantage of being the the group of individuals that are ushering In this, this new excitement around sports and and paying the price for all the increased notoriety and attention that those sports are getting. And so that's kind of my my yes and moment, it's like, I think we can talk about threats to masculinity. I think you know, many of the the statistics about the proportion of men that are experiencing or the proportion of the American population that is male that's experiencing deaths of despair and things like that are shocking and right and troubling, but it it's still in my head, doesn't offset this, this other component, which is that we've got a crisis of women too, right? And women are still disproportionately affected by domestic violence, yeah, and just violence in general, in society, I think that that fear is real.
Chris Beem
I absolutely agree with that.
Cyanne Loyle
I loved the call for yes and programming, right? So, so I think that one of the things that we can do relatively easily is is think about the types of programs and the types of processes that support everybody, right? So we put a lot of energy and resources into girl empowerment programs, women in STEM and things like that, but we can also think, but that doesn't mean that we have to do that at the exclusion of programming that addresses loneliness in boys and young men gendered male partners.
Chris Beem
And it's all driven by. Money, you know, the fact that it's undermining a child's life. Well, you know, that's, that's too bad. But, you know, I only have 4 billion. I need five or whatever. I'm, you know, I'm, I'm absolutely, you know, on the soapbox. But it does just shock me how indifferent people are to creating this world that they know is harming harming children. And not only that, they're like trying to figure out how to form children better, how to be more effective at it, right?
Cyanne Loyle
And that just blows my mind. And we will have so much time this season to get into our critiques of late stage capitalism.
Chris Beem
Well, let's hope so, because there's nothing else to talk about, right? All right, anyway, so thank you to Cynthia once again. We look forward to welcoming her on campus. Thanks to Jenna for for yet another great interview. I'm Chris Beem.
Cyanne Loyle
And I'm Cyanne Loyle. Thanks for listening.