Dismantling Gender Violence with Dr Jackson Katz
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Dr. Jackson Katz, welcome back to I Weigh. How are you? I'm great, Jamila. It's great to be back with you. Jackson, since the last time we spoke, you and I were talking about men's violence against women. We were talking about the fact that it was an epidemic. We were talking about a problem in the language around the way we discuss men's violence against women specifically. It felt like we were at a peak of how hostile the relations were between men and women.

And yet in the years since then, am I overreacting if I say that things feel like they've gotten significantly worse and at an unprecedented speed? You know, it's a good question. I think it's complicated. I think there's ways of

of looking at the complexities of social change and social interactions such that you can make the case that, yes, things have gotten harsher. The manosphere, the online manosphere has gotten more overtly misogynist. And I think it's become much more mainstream than it was even the last time you and I spoke.

And, you know, the recent reelection of Donald Trump is an example of just there's been a significant amount of backsliding and backlash towards, you know, by frankly, by men towards women's progress. And I think that there has been a.

an acceleration to a certain extent in the boldness that some misogynist men feel towards expressing some misogynist views, whether it's online or interpersonally or whatever other way. But on the flip side is that

the reason for the backlash is that women have made so much progress and, and, and men and others, in other words, in, in challenging and, and, and pushing back against thousands of years of patriarchal subjugation, if you will. And like the Barbie movie came out, for example, after you and I spoke and the Barbie movie, it got enormous worldwide energy that it, that it sort of tapped into and,

And again, I'm not saying that doesn't provoke a backlash because anytime you move forward in this society in terms of, you know, expanding justice, expanding freedom, expanding, you know, rights more generally, there's going to be a backlash. And so we are living in a backlash time. I don't know if it's possible to say that the actual incidence of sexual violence and domestic abuse have increased. It's hard to say because one of the things that we've always wrestled with in this field is, you know,

Most of the interpersonal violence that happens, especially the gender-based interpersonal violence, is never reported to authorities. So what you're dealing with in terms of a database to try to figure out if it's increased or decreased...

has to do with who comes forward and says that this has happened to them. And when you create a climate where women feel, and men and others, feel supported, in other words, they feel like it's worth it to report what has happened to them, you're gonna have an increase in reports.

When you create an environment where they don't feel where women and others don't feel safe to come forward, they're not going to come forward. And and I so it's so it's really a complicated picture to try to figure out how we made progress. Have we gone backwards? Is it is it push pull? Is it you know, I think it's all at the same time. We've made a ton of progress and there's a backlash and the backlash is manifesting itself in more places.

in overt and extreme ways in many cases. What do you think has led to the emboldening of shouting misogyny out loud, the way that people like Andrew Tate or all those kind of, you know, big manosphere, red pill pundits have put out into the world? What do you think is the reason for this? I think it's strength in numbers. I think that because they have a voice, in other words, because they have...

people like Andrew Tate, people like Donald Trump, articulating this in a public space, in a public space online or even at the presidential, you know, at the level of the United States president. I mean, because there's a public voice that articulates this and then other men and young men see that

you know, that they're not alone. In other words, that they can say these things, that they can get support for saying these things, that there's a community out there that they can connect to. That's all unprecedented. It used to be, you know, like when I was growing up without, there's no manosphere, there's no internet even. I mean, you know,

if you had lots of misogyny, but you didn't have men who were explicitly misogynist who could go online and then within, you know, three seconds connect to thousands, if not tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. Look at the millions of views that some of these guys get, you know, the Andrew Tate's of the world. So that,

so that men and young men know that they're not alone and that they have a community that supports them, that sort of has their back in a certain way. So it emboldens them to say these things. And I think a lot of men are performing for each other. I think a lot of the misogyny you see among men online and other places is men performing for each other. They want other men to think how cool they are, that they're, and how bro they are, that they can say these things and get away with it. And it's kind of a cool thing and,

It's pathetic. I mean, I think it's absolutely...

you know, despicable, some of it's just absolutely despicable behavior. But I think a lot of these men are just completely immature and abusive, and they're getting rewards for being immature and abusive. And I think one of the, for example, I think one of the signature reasons why Donald Trump was just reelected and what happens when he, you know, when he won the, you know, the vote, the electoral, not just the electoral college vote, but the actual popular vote is that it sent a message to

far and wide to men and young men all over the world, not just in the United States, but certainly here, that not only can you be misogynist and abusive towards women verbally and personally and physically and sexually, but not only can you do that, you can actually be rewarded with the highest level of power and influence in the whole world. People will look past it. People will make excuses for it.

In some cases, people will celebrate it, but I think most people who support Donald Trump don't support him because he's misogynist. Some do, but I think a lot of people support him in spite of the fact that he's misogynist, which makes a really powerful statement that misogyny doesn't disqualify somebody, a man, doesn't disqualify a man from significant cultural influence and popularity. And what message that sends, by the way, can I just say the message that sends to men who are abusive to women

like who have been abusive and who will be abusive, the damage is incalculable because the, because the men who are abusive want to think that what they're doing is normative and what guys do. In other words, that it's, that it's not just like they're somehow sick or pathological, but it's just the way of the world. This is how men act. Men are supposed to act these way in these ways. Men are entitled to women's bodies in the ways that, you know, historically men were. And,

by the fact that Donald Trump got so many votes and got so much support, it sends a message to those men that, you know what? A lot of guys are where I am. I'm not a pathological outlier. And I think that's a message that a lot of people haven't thought about, that they're sending that message to men who are abusive, including, by the way, Jamila, men who are what...

we call dad girls, men who care about their daughters, who have a big part of their identity is that they're men who support women, whether it's in their, if they're heterosexual, their wives or girlfriends, or if they have, again, children, including daughters, that they really care about those daughters.

It's just incredible, you know, the disconnect. Like, okay, so I care about, I'm a man and I care so much about my daughter. I love my daughter so much. I want everything for her. Yet I just voted for a man who is openly misogynist, who has been adjudicated as a sexual abuser, which the judge, by the way, in the E.G. and Carol case,

said that in New York state law, what was called sexual abuse is actually rape. So a man who was an adjudicated rapist by a jury in Manhattan is now the president of the United States. And I supported him. And yet I can reconcile that with the fact that I'm part of my identity is that I care so much about women and girls. And I take, you know, and I see that as part of my protector role. It's crazy, all of this.

But it's part of the crazy world that we're living in right now. Someone online said recently that women are...

are raised into real femininity and told, almost indoctrinated into what your role is as a woman within this world and how you're supposed to behave and how you're supposed to make people like you and how you can guarantee your safety. And men aren't really given any kind of manifesto of how to be a man. They're mostly just told how not to be a woman.

We don't really think about how we shape young men in this world. And I sometimes wonder if, you know, we spoke off the record about the fact that I have concerns that perhaps there is a slight branding issue around a feminist man that has not been addressed.

appealing to young men where the conversation is largely just around women which would make sense given that we are discussing feminism but that we haven't made men feel included in the conversation we haven't called men in enough we've called them out which is important and that's also part of your work but what I feel like you're trying to do in this book is

is reframe feminism for men. And it's not something that you're treating as an obligation or a burden. It's something you're treating as a leadership issue. Can you elaborate on what you mean by that? Yes. And I think you're right on point, right on point. I have to say, in the online manosphere and beyond, there's just routine mockery and ridicule

towards men who speak up and support women and women's rights and feminist issues more generally, even abortion rights. And if you listen to Jordan Peterson or you listen to Joe Rogan or you listen to, obviously, the Andrew Tates of the world, they just constantly mock and ridicule men who would stand and support women's rights and stand with women as they call people like me, for example, who they don't know, who they've never talked to, who they don't platform.

but they call us things like eunuchs and virtue signalers and soy boys and, you know, and wimps and beta males and all this. And I've been talking about this for decades in my, in my lectures, in my writing, how absurd this is on so many levels. It's like, and I say, I'll say this right now. If you're a man, if you're a guy,

Being one of the guys takes absolutely nothing special whatsoever. Being one of the guys and going along with the boys, you know, that takes nothing special. What takes strength and confidence and courage...

if you're a man or a young man is to turn to your friends and say, hey, that's not cool. That's not cool. Or treating women with disrespect is not going to get you my respect. That's actually the opposite, you know? And that takes so much more guts. And yet the one who speaks up, the young man or the man who speaks up gets called a beta and a wimp. It's just absurd. It's like a topsy-turvy land. It's the exact opposite. So I think

you're right, a lot of young men, certainly living in the online universe that so many do live in, if all they're hearing is that men who support women in this way, men who speak out about misogyny, men who stand with women on these matters, are soft and weak and beta males,

Of course they're going to not want to identify with them because so many men and young men are so highly impressionable and they're so looking over their shoulder. They don't want to be, they want to be respected. They want their friends to think they're cool. They want their friends to think they're one of the guys. And that's the last thing they want to do is be called God.

a girly. I mean, again, that plays on a deep stereotype, which is that men who don't evidence really sort of alpha male traits are somehow deficient and they're somehow like a woman. And in a patriarchal system where being like a woman is not

it considered a deficiency. And again, this has been all critiqued by feminist, you know, theorists and activists and writers and thinkers for like decades and centuries. This is nothing new under the sun on this, on this matter. But unless they, these young men hear from men who they, they respect and that they can identify with who are saying, who giving them a counter narrative to the narrative that they hear every day,

like on Joe Rogan, even if they do believe in their hearts that misogyny is wrong or that they see behavior around them that they know is wrong, they're not going to speak up because the penalty and what they know is going to be the cost to them is too high. And a big part of how I frame this to your second part of your question is I frame it as a leadership issue for men. And I say, the man who speaks up

and challenges his friend who just told a rape joke. He's not a beta male. That's actually an act of leadership and strength. And if you define it that way, that's aspirational and positive.

It's not wagging your finger at men and saying, stop doing bad things, stop treating women badly, stop making sexist comments. It's, come on, guys, we need more men with the courage and the strength to say, that's not cool. I'm not going to stand here and be silent. When you talk like that or when you treat your girlfriend like that, it's not okay. By framing that man or that young man as somebody who is strong and actually has leadership qualities, you're pushing them, you're calling them in,

to being better as opposed to calling them out for being bad. And I do think that that narrative has been missing. And I do think in my book, Everyman, I am reframing this. And I'm quoting Loretta Ross, who has a big book coming out in 2025 about the calling in versus calling out concept. I do think that we need to provide men and young men with positive,

motivations for doing the right thing rather than just negative sanctions for doing the wrong thing. And by the way, this is also true, though, Jamila, it's always, and I hear myself talking about, you know, young men and speaking up. Ultimately, this is about men in positions of power and influence, because it's not fair that adult men put the burden of leadership on boys and young men who are incredibly policed into conformist

you know, behavior because of the pressures on them. I think it's incredibly unfair for adult men, especially men who have influence. And I know that not all men have influence, but men who do, you know, cultural, political, business, you know, leadership, economic power and financial authority and everything else. Those men need to provide

the sort of the modeling, but also the permission structure for young men and boys, because it's much more likely that young men and boys will find the courage to speak up if they hear other men that they respect and who are admired speaking up. And this is a basic concept. I didn't invent this concept. I mean, the advertising industry has understood this forever, which is when you want to get somebody to buy a product, like for example, when you want a man or a young man to buy a product,

that has historically been identified as a woman's consumer product that women are interested in or something, the way to do it is to have men who are recognizably masculine promoting the product. And by the way, this is one of the ways that, I mean, on a related note, not exactly, but on a related note,

This is how condoms are marketed to young men. If you look at the names of condoms over the past half century, the major brands of condoms that have been marketed to men, Ramsey's, Trojan, Roman, these are all...

icons of traditional masculine warrior strength, because they know that the marketers and the advertisers know that a lot of men are filled with anxiety around the question of using a condom because it somehow undermines their sort of manhood. And so if you associate putting on that condom with being a Roman warrior, it makes it more masculine. This is not an accident.

It strikes me as potential fear, right? It's fear that's been masked. Because I know that men are terrified of other men. And men are the people who are the biggest victims, as in numbers, of violent crimes by men are other men. And I think they know on some level that...

It's fucking terrifying to stand up in a group of men and say, hey, don't do that. Don't be a dick. Don't talk to women like that. Going against the tide, going against the group is petrifying and they're scared of men and they're scared of men's violence. And I think it's been rebranded as like uncool, but actually it's because it's the safer bet.

It's the safer bet for you to look the other way because it's terrifying to intervene. And I think that we have to lean into the conversation around men's violence against men, which is not what we're here to talk about, but it is an important issue because I think that men's terror of other men and men's fundamental understanding of how dangerous men actually are is a big part of why they are not joining this conversation. It's not because they don't care. It's not because they're above it. They're afraid.

Absolutely. And thank you for saying that. One of the dirty little secrets of masculinity in a general sense is that men are afraid of other men and men's violence hangs in the air in men's psyches like

from the time they're children to the time that they're old men in many cases. And by the way, in my book, I talk about the triad of men's violence, which is a concept that my friend and colleague Michael Kaufman, who's the co-founder of the White Ribbon Campaign, which is the largest global movement of men working against men's violence against women. Michael Kaufman wrote an essay in 1987 called The Triad of Men's Violence, where he connected the triad, three parts,

The men's violence against women is connected to men's violence against other men, which is also connected to men's violence against themselves, because suicide is violence turned inward. And sophisticated people in the 21st century make the connection between these forms of violence. So when men will say about the subject of men's violence against women, what about violence against men? What about all the men who are victims of violence? Which men often say that.

It's like as if we hadn't thought of this, right? As if people like me and others who are working on this issue hadn't thought of men's violence against men as an issue and how it's connected to men's violence against women. Of course, we thought about it. And of course, it's connected. And one of the ways it's connected is men from an early age in our society and around the world in patriarchal cultures.

are trained to use violence. By the way, violence is not an end unto itself. It's a means to an end, right? So in other words, violence is what's called, it's used instrumentally with a purpose. And the purpose is typically to either gain or maintain control of a situation, to assert yourself.

to defend yourself. There's reasons why people use violence. Like, for example, in interpersonal relationships, men who are abusive don't just come out of nowhere and become abusive. They're usually typically using abusive behavior, physical or other forms of abuse, mental, verbal, financial, as a way to control their partner, in this case, in a heterosexual context.

context to control a woman or to punish her for transgressing against his authority. Usually the place where the violence flashes or where the points at which they act violently is when the woman is not compliant with his demands and he's using force to gain her compliance. So in other words, violence doesn't come out of nowhere. It comes out of the need or the felt need to

to do something or to achieve something, which is why, by the way, one of the solutions to thinking about, like they say, domestic abuse, is to think about the belief systems that underlie men's choices to use violence. Because lots of people have conflict in relationships, but a lot of men, if they feel licensed to use violence to get their way, if they're not getting their way in other means,

if they feel like they're entitled to use violence or the threat of it to gain what they think that they need in a relationship, then you're going to see that they're going to do it. If societies decide, no, that's not okay, and there's going to be penalties for this, social and, in some cases, criminal penalties for that behavior, then you're basically saying, no, that's not an acceptable way to address the issues that you have in your relational life.

By the way, that's one of the reasons why this underlying belief system question is why the feminist-led movement against domestic abuse for now almost 45 years has been working with men in court-mandated programs all over the world. Partly what you do in these court-mandated programs is help these men think through the ways in which their thought processes, their belief systems, what they've absorbed from the culture around them, from their family, from the media, from the porn culture,

has helped shape in a bad way their understanding of when it is okay to use violence. You know, what is their right or their prerogative to, you know, to gain advantage over a woman? And why is that? Why is it legitimate? Why is it not legitimate? If we don't have those conversations about the underlying beliefs and we just treat the symptoms, the actual acting out violence,

It just it's just like we're playing whack-a-mole. We're just running from one man to the next and trying to stop. Stop. You shouldn't have done that. Or you need to be punished for doing that. No, I know. It's it's what I'd also then think about all the women who get hurt in the meantime, the women and the men who get hurt in the meantime. It would be so much more effective to be preventative. So what happened with you then? Why, as a strong white man who's lived what appears to be a very healthily masculine life,

What led you to this lens? That's a really good question. I mean, it's... And I have to say that any human being has a complicated life story that, you know, family and historical context and epigenetic stuff, you know, that's deep in the psyche that comes from generations before I was even born. It's...

chance meetings, you know, educations, you know, a book that somebody read. I mean, there's so many factors and there's family factors. There's so many factors. So I can't do it justice. And I know that, for example, therapists,

would say if I was to start naming things that happened in my life without talking about deeper, you know, emotional childhood dramas and stuff like that, that I'm somehow, you know, not really getting to the root cause of these, of this question. So I, this, it's impossible to do it full justice in this context because

But I would say there's lots of factors that contributed to who I am or how I came to do these things. But I was a really good... For example, I was a really good American football player as a young guy, like really good. And so I got all the...

a claim for that in my small universe that I grew up in. But I grew up in a really, really prominent jockocracy. I don't know if you've heard that term, but it's where sports is like the center. And American football is by far the dominant sport in the United States. And I was really good at that. And my hometown was a real center of, you know, sort of football culture. When I was a young guy, for example, when I was like 12 years old,

There were three men from my hometown, 14,000 people in my hometown. Three men were playing in the National Football League when I was like a 12 or 13 year old, which is pretty extraordinary. And my town was really known for that. And I was in the center in a certain sense of that culture for a number of years. And so I could see the rewards that men received.

got in that world but i also knew that it was somewhat performative i was smart enough i think sensitive enough and i think um introspective enough to know that a lot of this was just superficial like there was there were men who yeah really good football players or really good athletes but

So what? That's good. They're a good athlete, but that doesn't mean that they're a good complex human being. And I was also someone who was, you know, intellectually inquisitive and curious from young age. So I also read a lot and I was more pensive and introspective.

And so I was, but I felt conflicted. So, so to try to wrap this up in a, you know, a little tighter bow here, I was a bundle of contradictions in high school. I had all kinds of family problems and struggles and challenges, but I also had public success and I,

and I was very uneasy with the disconnect between those two things. And so when I went to university, I took classes. I didn't have a mentor who taught me to do this. I kind of did it instinctively. But I took some classes in my first year that had gender in the title of the class or the description because I thought, you know what? I think I can learn something about the dynamics that I've been experiencing of some of the contradictions that I've been living.

And I didn't use the word masculinity or anything like that. It was just like, okay, gender, men and women. And back then it was binary terms that most people were using. So I was like, this would be interesting. And I took two classes in my first year. One was a contemporary American history class and one was an English literature class, both taught by men who were feminist conscious men and politically progressive men

in the historical sense, the historian gave me a much, you know, broader understanding of like the last, you know, number of decades of social change. And this is the late 70s, early 80s. And so I had, I was fascinated by the, you know, the 60s, you know, the 60s and 70s and the racial justice movements and the, you know, gender justice movements and the sexual justice movements and the anti-war movements and all these traditional, you know, excuse me, all these challenges to traditional society.

And by the way, when we say traditional power and we say those social movements of that era were challenging traditional hierarchies and traditional power, they were essentially challenging the centrality of white men's rule and white men's power. And as a white man, I wasn't threatened by this. It was more fascinating. It was like, wow, this is so interesting. And I happened to be born at a time of incredible firmness

ferment and transformation. And I immediately started seeing in feminist ideas, and by the way, taking man and woman in literature class, you know, in an English literature class, reading about families and reading women's stories and hearing women's narratives about their lives. I was a guy who had never been encountering that when I was a young guy. I wasn't reading feminist literature as a high school student.

And I was like, wow, there's a whole new way of thinking about a whole new perspective that I'm getting. And I'm hearing from women in my peer group about their experiences. And it was like, wow, it wasn't just altruistic concern for women. In other words, when I started really thinking about how women had been screwed over by patriarchal cultures and both violence and sexism more broadly, it wasn't just that, although it was that it was also,

gave me such great insight into men and masculinities and the struggles that men have and my own family and my own life and the men around me. And it was like, oh my God, feminist ideas are opening up a whole world of insight to me. And because I had had this football background, the sports background, I was right in the center of things in the traditional masculine way. But I had this feminist lens. I felt like the world is just wide open to me. And I'm looking around, I'm thinking,

who's got this insight? Who's talking about this? And the answer was not many people. And I also thought, where are the men who are speaking out about men's violence against women when this is such an obviously huge problem in the world, and including in my own society and my own immediate world, you know, my peer culture. And the answer is not many people, men, had been speaking out about it. And because I had this

confidence that came from being successful in the traditional male sense, I just ran with it. And I started speaking out and it went from there. Two things that we've touched on so far is men's fear, right? And I wonder if it takes a certain element of security to

In order to not feel compelled to participate in misogyny. You know, I wonder if, you know, all the men that I know who are very comfortable with women and very comfortable with women's success or women speaking back are all men who feel secure in themselves as to who they are.

and, you know, how skilled they are at something. It may not even be the most paying job, but they know fundamentally what their purpose is in this world. And that purpose doesn't revolve around being the seed or the protector for a woman. That purpose is just that they are in their own lane, doing their own thing. My partner of 10 years is incredibly feminist.

and also an incredibly powerful, very masculine human being who is very good at his job and a good friend and a beloved human. And I can't take anything away from him. He's not fearful that I will take something away from him because he knows I can't. He's not afraid of me.

And I think that it's a really important framing for this conversation is that when I look at these pundits and these men in the manosphere, these men, you know, you've got these middle-aged men on this podcast. I can't remember what it's called, but there's like four of them and then they always invite very young men.

uh sex workers young women who are sex workers on and they just berate and degrade these women they tell them they're low value and no one's ever going to want them and i always wonder i'm like god it's weird that you won't invite someone your own age on a show like this and you won't bring on someone who has the same level of education or life experience as you you're bringing on

pretty much children, and then debating them and degrading them for other middle-aged men to watch and get off to. To me, they don't look strong. They look very afraid. They look afraid that if I said I want to debate a man about misogyny and I brought on an 18-year-old boy and I'm 38...

I'd think that that would look very insecure of me. They look afraid, and I don't mean this in a mocking way. I mean that it's very sad. And when you talk about the triad of men's violence against women is connected to men's violence against men and fundamentally men's violence against themselves, and you look at the number of suicide figures that just keep going up every single year. You know, I've talked about it in this podcast before, but my shock when Neil Brennan told me that 60% of gun violence in the United States is men turning the gun on themselves is

You realize that we are in a crisis and men do not feel valued or they don't feel like they have any real control of their lives. And someone has told them the lie that if they control women, they will feel a sense of self-autonomy. But you're still just controlling the woman. You're still out of control yourself. To me, it feels as though men are very afraid. Again, you're right on this. That is exactly right. And and.

men's fear, it's social fear, it's physical fear. I mean, I often focus on the social fear piece, you know, and as you know, I'm one of the architects of the bystander approach to prevention, right? And I talk about this in the book, Every Man, where it came from. In other words, why, how did we develop the bystander approach? In other words, the bystander, meaning the friends, the teammates, the classmates, the colleagues, the coworkers, what can men and women and others do when they're not directly involved as either the, you know, the target of abuse or the

or the abuser, what can they do when they're around people who are being abused or who are being abusive? And by the way, I'm saying abusive in a very general sense. It can be the target of derogatory comments or it can be directly physically abused, physical abusive relationships or sexually abusive situations. But what do the people around the people involved do? Especially in this case with men and young men, what can the man do, a young man who's

friends are acting in misogynist ways to speak up and challenge and interrupt that abusive behavior. And the bystander who speaks up, again,

is somebody who faces the fear and sort of transcends it. In other words, a lot of men feel uncomfortable in those situations. But the one who says, hey, that's not cool, that's the person who has, that's why it's a leadership issue. That's why the bystander who speaks up, the active bystander, the empowered bystander is actually a leader, which is why when I do trainings and I do trainings all over the world with men, with women, but certainly in this case with men,

I'm it's a leadership training that's that's necessary for these men and young men, because the bystander who speaks up, the colleague who takes his friend aside in the workplace and says, hey, the way I've seen you make some comments about women around here. And that's not you know, I care about you, but that's not cool. You can't really talk like that around here. Well, that's not how we do things around here. And I just wanted to say I'm I'm concerned about you that.

that takes courage and strength and self-confidence. It's much easier to put your head down and say, oh man, I don't like what I'm seeing, but I'm just going to keep my head down because that's awkward and it's uncomfortable. And if I say something, it could come land badly on me. So I think that social fear rather than physical fear is one of the ways that men and young men are policed into silence. I do think that men are afraid of each other

physically in many cases. I do think that intervening, for example, when you're a man who intervenes on another man's violence, you have the direct possibility of being the target of that violence. And I have to say, when I was in university, a couple of times I did intervene in situations where men were being abusive to physically towards women. And I, again, I was a young guy and I was pretty self physically self-confident and I was a little reckless in a

even more so now than when I was young, there were so many guns in circulation, 400 million guns in circulation that people know that when they intervene in a situation, in public I'm talking about, when you don't know the parties involved, when it's strangers,

you're taking a risk with your life. And I think a lot of people know that. In fact, most people know that. And so they don't get involved. But what I often say is that the reason why people don't intervene in public situations, like in the tube or in the public transit or on the streets, is because of physical fear. Like if you intervene and you see a situation of potential harm or violence that, say, a man is abusing a woman, you're taking a risk with your life physically. But

What happens in groups in peer cultures when guys are with each other and hanging out in friends, friendship circles, the reason why they don't intervene is not because they're worried about their physical safety, that they're going to get killed by their friend in most cases, but there is a lot of social fear. And the social fear is this is going to be so awkward interpersonally. I'm not sure I know how to handle this. He's my friend and I like a lot of things about him. But if I say something in this case, this could affect our friendship or a lot of guys are

are status conscious within their peer culture. They think if I speak up in this situation and he has more status than me in this general group, then I'm going to suffer because he's more popular than I am. And so if I say something, it could go really badly for me. And is it really worth it? So what ends up happening to a lot of guys is they'll cease the situations and they'll make a choice to not do anything. And one of the ways, Jamila, that they reconcile

The fact that they made a choice not to do something is they'll say, well, it wouldn't have mattered anyways. You know, like it wouldn't have mattered what I said or, you know, he was just drinking. He had a couple of beers. And when he has a couple of beers, he acts in these ways and it's not really worth it. Or, you know what? Maybe I'm overreacting. I know he's a good guy. He says some stupid things and I don't like everything that he does. But, you know, he's a good guy generally. And so I'm just not going to I'm just not going to make a big deal out of this.

And so as a result of that kind of narrative that a lot of men and young men tell themselves, and again, this cuts across all the categories of race, ethnicity, religion, even sexuality. I mean, it cuts across a lot of categories. As a result of those sort of internal self-talk conversations that men have with themselves, collectively around the world, what you have is silence. Silence.

billions of men who see situations and they don't do anything or say anything, and you have this collective silence. And then you have women who are outraged. Why aren't men speaking up? Why don't men challenge each other? Why is it always women that have to be the ones who would talk about this? These outrages, these femicides that keep happening, these sexual assaults, it's outrageous, which it is, by the way, and I'm with them.

But what you're getting at in your question and your sort of line of reasoning here is that there are dynamics that are going on within male peer cultures and within individual male psyches that keep men from doing the right thing. And so I think if you frame it

Again, aspirationally and positively, like the man or the young man who speaks up is not soft and a beta male. He's actually strong and self-confident and he's he's encountered the fear, but transcended it. If you frame it that way, I think that a lot of men can hear it.

But if they don't hear men saying these things, if the only people they hear talking about this stuff is women, they can continue to say, well, they don't understand. They don't understand because they're not a man. That woman might make a lot of sense or seem like she's making a lot of sense, but she's never lived my experience of being a guy in lad culture and in bro culture where there's intense pressure on you to conform. And can I also say, because we have this platform, guys like Joe Rogan,

I don't think he's ever platformed a man that has anything close to what I'm saying as part of his work. In other words, I've never been on Joe Rogan. No one even close to what I'm saying has ever been on Joe Rogan. I wish you would. I know. Imagine if Joe Rogan would have the

the strength and the self-confidence to say, you know what? I think that young men should hear a different perspective than they're hearing every day on places like the Joe Rogan experience. And they should hear from guys like, not just Jackson Cass, but there's a whole bunch of others, men of color, white guys who are doing this kind of work, including, by the way, friends and colleagues of mine who are, you know, former professional, you know, football players who are speaking out. I mean, why don't, why don't you put them on and have, have,

and broaden the horizons of your audience's consciousness, even if you don't agree with every single point. Tribalism is at the heart of this, right? Tribalism is at the fucking heart of almost everything that's wrong with our society. It is a terror that you will be ostracized. You're talking about the terror that if a boy just interrupts banter or a man interrupts banter that is problematic, he's worried he'll be ostracized. He'll be left behind, left out of the group. It's like a deep anthropological fear

And that's why to continue to build on aspirational elements of men who are feminists, because it's who was it who said that, you know, if you don't care about women's rights, you're not just not a feminist, you are a misogynist.

It's not about adding the label of feminist. It's are you a misogynist or are you not? And that should be the way that we start to frame this. It's not extra. It shouldn't be looked at as like extra brownie points. It's a basic human right for other human beings. And it just...

Yeah, it just definitely strikes me as something that could be expanded upon. I do wish someone like Joe Rogan would have you have this conversation because I think it would be so meaningful. And I wish that men could talk about that social fear and that terror of loneliness. We are in a loneliness epidemic of young men, of everyone, obviously, but specifically.

Specifically of young men and, you know, all these reports coming out saying that, you know, it's so funny how the reports always focus on the fact that women of this age are single, you know, between kind of, I think like 25 and 40 are the most single they've ever been. And no one ever focuses on the fact that that means so are men.

And actually, the reason that a large part of this is happening is not because women don't love the company of men. Men are incredible colleagues, collaborators, best friends. Men are half of what makes my life wonderful. It's just that we are terrified of the direction in which the world is moving and we don't want to have our rights.

taken away from us. There's a rise of the 4B movement, you know, in which women are swearing off men altogether. This hasn't come out of nowhere. This isn't because women just grow up hating men randomly. I don't think women do hate men. I think women are afraid of men and I think they're sick of their shit and

And the loneliness is only going to get worse the more men push women underground. The more they punish us just for existing, they're just going to find themselves lonelier and lonelier. And one of the things I despair of most in our culture is the fact that we don't impress upon our society at large, all genders, is loneliness.

the importance of the friendship and collaboration between the genders because it's all about dating it's all about sex it's all about procreation and none of it is about the ways in which for example you and I know each other um

unlikely to mate. I think we can both agree. You're married. I'm in a relationship. Can be great collaborators, can be great friends, have wonderful conversations. Every time I speak to you, it's an explosive meeting of minds. And we don't impress upon our culture that there is a space for men outside of being our providers and outside of providing us with seed and outside of sex. So they do feel increasingly redundant and now they feel rejected and they feel lonely.

and they blame us rather than looking at the cause. They're looking at the symptom of us pushing them away, and they're blaming us for it rather than being encouraged by anyone that they look up to to investigate how we've gotten here. That's beautifully said. Another part of the heart of the matter is that

for example, the Andrew Tate's of the world, not only are they horrible for women, which Andrew Tate is horrible for women. He is basically licensing men's abuse towards women. But it's also horrible for men. And it's the worst thing that could happen to men and young men, including

including but not exclusively heterosexual men who want intimate relational connection with women. If you listen to people like Andrew Tate, if you're a young man and you listen to somebody like Andrew Tate, how is that going to contribute to your fulfilling relational life and your connection to other human beings, including women in your life? How is that in any way going to contribute to your happiness or to your fulfillment or your satisfaction?

to think about women in that way. And by the way, by framing it that way to men and young men, that it's not just, again, back to my own story, personal story, it wasn't just altruistic concern for women. It was, I wanted to have a better life. Like when I started listening, engaging with feminist ideas in my 18 years old, 19 years old,

at university, it was the initial impulse was I wanted better life. I wanted better relationships. I wanted to understand some of the issues in my own psyche and my own relational life better.

And then I became aware, okay, now in addition, I have a certain kind of social advantage as a white heterosexual man, and I need to use that advantage to advance justice and fairness. But the initial impulse was self-improvement and self-fulfillment. So I think part of the message to men and young men is that feminist ideas are not your enemy. They're actually pointing you in a direction for a

better life. They'll set you free. Yes, they'll set you free. They'll set you free 100%. And every man I know who's opened up about his feelings, which he's often found easier to do either to a female friend or a partner or a female therapist, has transformed their mental health.

We have spoken before about the fact that we don't know if men's violence against women is increasing or if more women are just reporting it. Similarly, you know, the amount of men coming out and saying, I think I'm suffering with depression. I think I'm suffering with this, that and the other. That has been weaponized against the feminist movement because women have made, in my opinion, women have made everyone feel safer to talk about their mental health.

and therefore more men feel safe to speak about the fact that they are suffering and they are struggling and they have anxiety or depression, etc. And then rather than think, oh, wow, how amazing, more men are reaching out and going and getting help and having therapy and getting medication. They are just looking at this as feminism happened, men suddenly, after years of thriving mentally and emotionally, have gone off the deep end. That's not

what happened. But again, it's impossible to qualify that, you know what I mean, specifically. But again, Jamila, I keep saying this, but you're so on point. I mean, one of the things that I say in almost all of my talks is that

Feminist women are the reason why we're having a more thoughtful conversation about men's emotional, mental and relational health. Like in other words, it didn't just come out of nowhere. Like you said, the movement now, the growing movement of men who are openly speaking out about their own struggles with depression and other sort of mental health challenges and the loneliness epidemic and the increased social acceptability of men talking about this.

Feminist women are at the forefront of this. And when we're talking about men's health, not just emotional health, but even physical health, you know, and sexual health, the feminist led women's movements over the past generation or two are the created the cultural conditions and, and, and with a, with a sort of pioneers of pushing us in that direction. And yet when's the last time you heard feminist women credited with creating cultural space

for a more thoughtful conversation about men's emotional, physical and sexual health and needs. You rarely hear it. You hear you hear like, oh, feminists, they care about women. They've had their movement. But what about men? It's like it's so ignorant. Some of this is just complete ignorance of history, of how social change happens, of the

of the influence of feminist ideas in men's lives. And I think men like myself, I have to say one of the roles that I play, and I think men should play this role and white men even more so, not exclusively white men, but white men because we have other advantages should be even more so, you know, opening up space for this conversation. We, those of us who are men need to be saying these things. It can't just always be women saying, we've been saying these things, we've been creating this space for men.

Men need to say it. And so in so many of my speeches and my talks, I start out with crediting women and women's leadership for not just improving women's and girls' lives, but improving men's lives and creating a new conversation about men. By the way, men have been abusing each other. Men have been living lives of quiet desperation for millennia. You know, most men live and die in the, you know, thousands of years of human history, right?

Just a shell of what they could have been in terms of their, you know, full life experience because of the strictures of patriarchal conditioning and culture and and social norms. And feminism is pointing us in a direction of how do you break out of that?

And by the way, I wrote about this about Ken, the Ken storyline in the Barbie movie. And it's like I walked out of that Barbie movie thinking not just what unbelievable, what an unbelievable cultural intervention that that movie was, how it brought to like to billions of people sort of basic feminist understandings. However, people might want to critique it. It was an unbelievable cultural moment, the Barbie movie. But I was also walking out thinking, oh, my God, how empathetic with Ken.

Ken storyline was very empathetic with men's striving to want to be seen, want to be felt, want to be in a relation and want to be something other than just an object or just a, you know, you know, and be emotionally sort of isolated. And then I started reading, I went home and I started, I went online. I started reading all these right-wing attacks against Barbie as like anti-male movie. And I was like, there, Piers Morgan, this, this movie hates men. I'm like, what?

What movie did you see? It's like you saw a completely different movie than I just saw, because I thought I saw a movie that was empathetic with men's struggles in patriarchal culture. Of course, it was centered on women. But I'm saying but but but the important but secondary storyline about Ken was very, I think, powerful. And yet the way that the right responded to it was so indicative of like a you

either a cluelessness, in other words, they have a very limited sort of... Or a deep insecurity, as we were talking about earlier. Yeah, 100%. Not to take this to the darkest possible place, but I think we have to. When it comes to what is possible when people don't check each other, the most extreme case we've heard of is the Giselle Pellicott case, right? Which is

who was being drugged without her knowledge by her husband and then he was inviting strangers from the internet to come into their home and while she was unconscious have sex with her without her consent rape her right and so uh

She, I think it was something like 70 or 80 men in total. And these are men who are, you know, not necessarily the outliers and pariahs of society. These are men who work in, you know, municipal faculties. We had firefighters. I think, you know, you're quite clear on the roles and jobs of these men in society. That many men are...

came and saw what this man was doing. I think only three or four turned up, saw that she was unconscious and got wind of the idea that this didn't seem consensual and walked away, never reported it, just kept quiet. But that many men just saw this, knew this man was doing it and allowed him to continue on and on and on. That's how bad things can get when human beings don't check each other, that someone can get away with, honestly, one of the most egregious crimes

crimes and betrayals I've

I've heard of in modern history. And thank God bless that woman for making this case public so that the world could really see this for what it is, that it is not just your scary weirdo in a van in the shadows who is the threat. It's the people who might be at your dinner table. It's the people that you work with. Will you remind me of some of the jobs of some of the people who were involved, some of the rapists? Business owners, forklift operators, journalists, soldiers,

firefighters. It was like a laundry list of just sort of traditional... Everyday men. Everyday men, which is, by the way, again, the name of my book is Every Man, right? Why, you know, violence against women is a men's issue. It's not an issue for certain individual psychopathic men or sociopathic men. It's for all men. And this...

sad and tragic case is emblematic of this question. It's average, everyday guys. By the way, which is why a lot of people are really uncomfortable with thinking about this because, including women sometimes are uncomfortable thinking about this because if you can't even trust

Normal average guys. In other words, the idea that monsters are the ones who are committing the most of the abuse, the monster sort of theory of abuse, right? The bad apples theory of social problems. It's just a handful of sick individuals that you need to like punish or isolate from the from the healthy group. And then you're going to be OK.

That's a naive understanding of a much deeper and more systematic problem. But part of the reason why people take comfort in thinking about the monster is because if it's just a monster who's the source of the problem, then there's not much we can do about it. But if it's the average guy, a normal guy, then all of us in some ways are implicated because if a normal...

otherwise normal guy is committing abusive behavior, then the question is, what does it mean to be normal? And how do the norms in that society get shaped? And what role does each of us play in either perpetuating the norms that produce these outcomes? Or what can we do to change those norms? But that has implications for individual action. Whereas if it's, and it says, basically, if you're a good person, you have to act.

Whereas if it's a monster who's an outlier, you don't really have to do anything about it because it's just something you can't really control. It becomes ethereal. It becomes surreal. Well, just as much as, you know, you talk about every man and any man can be an offender.

any man can participate in this change, in rebuilding our society. You end this wonderful book by talking about this. I think you have 21 immediate suggestions, which I think is very helpful because it's practical and accessible advice.

Would you tell me your favorite of those? Do you have a favorite that I can leave my audience with and then beg them to go out and buy this book, not just for themselves, but more importantly or most importantly, for all of the men that they love? I mean, yeah. I mean, I think part of the thinking of the book, Jamila, as I said earlier in our conversation, is yes, you want to analyze why this is such a big problem. You want to analyze some of the reasons why men don't speak up, some of the

within male peer cultures, both small and large, why so few men have been distinguished by being leaders on this subject matter. It's important. But the end of the book is really culminating

concretely, okay, we've talked about this, you know, now it's time to like act. Right. And there's, and, and, and, and I think in my trainings, by the way, my leadership training, we always end with action steps, right? Like, so in other words, yeah, we can analyze this all we want, but what are the takeaways? Are you going to do, you know, three to five specific suggestions of what you can do, taking away some of the ideas you learned in this training. Similarly in the book, the end is specific things. And by the way, the list of 21 steps and the

it could be a lot longer. We had to cut it down to 21. But the... It's a start. It's a start, right. So it's like, it begins with personal stuff. Like, in other words, have the courage to look inward and think about how your own attitudes and behaviors can potentially either be perpetuating the problem or in some ways can be part of the solution. But being introspective. And a lot of people, but certainly a lot of men,

are often uncomfortable with introspection. They're uncomfortable with thinking about that. That's one of the reasons why it's a harder challenge to get men to go into therapy. Because the idea that somehow being introspective or being self-aware and self-critical is somehow makes you vulnerable. And if vulnerable and weakness are seen as non-masculine traits, then you have a big disconnect here. And I think part of what we're working against with men is all the pressure to not be introspective and to be vulnerable

in that sense, vulnerable. So I would say it starts with that. Then it moves into what you can do in your peer culture. Speak up when you see a friend making a sexist comment or a misogynist offhand comment about a woman's body. Hey, man, that's not cool. She has a right to wear whatever she wants to wear, and we don't really have the right to judge her. It's not cool. And I'm not saying that everybody has the same language as someone like me. In other words, a lot of young guys aren't going to have

And not just young guys, older guys. Sure. They don't need that. They need to speak to each other in a language their friends are going to understand anyway. Correct, correct.

And this, and again, I'll say this again, this cuts across every social category of race, ethnicity, sexuality. Yeah, of course. So, you know, people can't just say that this is, well, some, you know, educated elite white guy in the United States is saying this, but he doesn't understand that I live in a different environment. No, I understand it. And I'm saying that this cuts across these categories, even though it's important to acknowledge there are differences that people have. For example, there's young men of color who are policed into conformist,

for other dynamics, not just sexism, but racism and a sense of sort of loyalty and group loyalty in the face of racist exploitation and vulnerability. And I understand that. But let's be honest, the status quo is not working. And women are pointing us in a direction, women of color, women, you know, yourself, but also women all over the world. I work all over the world in all kinds of different settings. And I know this. Women in every society that I know of have

are saying the same thing, essentially, which is we need our men to step up here for our community to thrive, not just for us personally, but we need it for our community to thrive. And by the way, that's another thing that I would say to men in my in the steps that you can take is if you're in a position of influence in your community, you have added responsibility. So, yes, you have a responsibility to people around you. But if you're in a position of cultural influence, you're a teacher, you're an educator, you're a coach, you're a

A principal of a high school, you're a business owner, you're a labor leader, you're a political leader at all levels. You have now added formal responsibilities to speak out, to create an environment that's supportive of victims and survivors, to challenge and interrupt abusive behavior and hold people accountable. It's not always legal accountability, but it's accountability, in this case for men, hold men accountable for misogynist behavior.

Those are important things. But in addition, if you're a leader in a formal sense, you have responsibility for setting the tone for the entire group or the entire organization and proactively, not just reactively once an incident has happened, but proactively, how are you setting the tone that makes it clear to the people that look to you for leadership, especially in this case, if you're a man, how do you set the tone that says to all the men and young men in that organization, on that team, in that group, that you're

This kind of behavior, abusive behavior, misogynist behavior is completely incompatible with our values as a group. And I, as the leader, am going to say that and I'm going to create a tone that everybody is going to then, you know, have to adhere to or they're not going to succeed within that group. Can you imagine if that was the case, if we if we normalize that among and did leadership training that people?

made that a requirement and an expectation of leadership. So all these men, all these men who would never voluntarily walk through the door for training on sexual assault prevention or domestic abuse prevention because they wouldn't. And I've been doing this work for decades and I know that that model has failed. It was failed 40 years ago, it's failed today. It can't be voluntary. But if you frame it as a leadership

expectation and requirement, then what will happen is all these men will walk through the door because they have to. And they might walk through the door with their arms folded and like, oh, we have to go through another sexual harassment training. They all hate men. I'm just going to sit there and listen to how men are so bad. It doesn't matter if they walk through the door with that attitude, because once they get through the door, what they're going to get is so much more than they thought. And they're going to learn so much about themselves and as well as women and others.

And then what will happen is some of those men will become passionate anti-sexist leaders. And I think that I've seen this. I've helped catalyze this in my own work for years. In other words, some of the unlikely men that I work with, and if you saw them walking down the streets of London or New York, you wouldn't say, oh, that man is probably an anti-sexist activist educator. But some of them are because you don't know from looking at a guy on the outside.

that he's committed to this as a basic form of justice and fairness. God bless you, Dr. Jackson Katz. Thank you so much for positioning this in this way. It is healthy, it's accessible, and I think it's genuinely aspirational. I really appreciate this work. I really appreciate this book. I really appreciate this conversation.

And you, to me, epitomize real masculinity. It is a masculinity that is not afraid of women. You are not fearful of us. You see us as equals who can only contribute to a better and happier society for you. It's not just for our happiness. It's for your own. Thank you for seeing that. Thank you for spending your life working towards this. I'll tag Joe Rogan.

in this episode and see if we can get you on that show because that audience needs to hear what you have to say. But for now...

Thank you very much. Jamila, it's a pleasure. It always is. And your IWeigh sort of initiative over these last number of years is an incredible contribution. And it's great to be in dialogue with you and in collaboration with you. And I hope it continues. Thank you so much. Thank you now and always. I will follow you into any fight or any fire. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Thank you so much for listening to this week's episode. I Weigh With Jameela Jamil is produced and researched by myself, Jameela Jamil, Erin Finnegan, Kimmy Gregory, and Amelia Chapelot. And the beautiful music that you are hearing now is made by my boyfriend, James Blake. And if you haven't already, please rate, review, and subscribe to the show. It's such a great way to show your support and helps me out massively. And lastly, at I Weigh, we would love to hear from you and share what you weigh at the end of this podcast. And if you haven't already, please rate, review, and subscribe to the show.

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