Shownotes Transcript
This episode was recorded on Camaragal land. Hi guys, and welcome back to another episode of Life Uncut. I'm Laura. I'm Brittany. I'm stressed. Why are you stressed? It's got a lot going on. I'm just kidding.
Can you come to work with a good attitude, goddammit? Do you know what I've started trying, actually? What? Meditation? A couple of days. No, hemp gummies. Oh, for fuck's sake. Yeah. Yeah, I'm a hemp gummy girl. I'm a gumper. Are they like the proper THC ones? Can't be sure. I'll get back to you. But I think they're good. I used them the last couple of nights because I don't sleep very well. I never have. And it's more now, you know, like we're close to the wedding. We're like within the next eight weeks. Just like that out of my head.
Britt doesn't want anyone to know exactly when the wedding is. So she's being very obscure around it. Just cut that out. To be fair, I sometimes don't know. I have to go back into the invitation that's in my emails, find it and check the date. Because do you know what's happened? Britt's like, just cut that out. We're not, we're keeping it all. It's been stressful because I have quite a few trips coming up for, you know, I've got someone else's wedding overseas. I've got my own wedding coming up. I've got a trip with my sister. There's a lot of little things going on. But I've had a few people that I have mentioned that
in the last week where I've said, what are you going to wear to our welcome drinks? Like just friends that I've chatted because, you know, we're having welcome drinks for the wedding so people can meet and stuff. Don't ask me because I haven't planned anything yet. You probably don't even know. I don't know what it is. I have to check the invite. But this is what's stressful is because they've said, what welcome event?
Because there's so, I'm going to be honest, there's a lot of events. There's not bullshit. Three days of events. No, that's not why though. It's because the invitation didn't send to everyone. I had to go back through and I was like, why are some people not getting it? Some people I didn't know didn't receive the whole schedule. The whole schedule. I make it sound like it's not this huge affair. It's not. She's just admitted to the problem. The royal schedule. No, but on like a, I mean, every,
Everything's online, right? Invitations are all done online for weddings. You sign up to an account like you did, Laura, where you put the invitation as Dress Sexy. You sign up to a wedding account. You put all your details in and it sends the invitations out. For some reason, some of the people just did only about five because I've had to go through every invite and check what they received. I was like –
this is so unnecessary, but they didn't even know about it. There is nothing. Actually, I'm going to rephrase that. I was about to say there's nothing more annoying. There's lots of things. But something that is also annoying is when someone can't be bothered to actually click the RSVP to the invite and then you have to go through and manage your RSVPs manually. I don't have the organizational bone in my body. So when that happened to us, when people just didn't RSVP to our wedding, we had to do the ring around to all the ones that we didn't know if they were or weren't coming. Yeah.
And some people got missed. I don't know if they got the invite. They weren't at the wedding. Actually, it's all Ben's friends, a lot of Ben's friends. And I'm not pointing fingers. That's not your job. No, but there's a lot of the athletes of Ben's friends. So like a lot of Ben's friends were really good that weren't athletes. And the footballer ones that he's invited from like past teams or they're all hopeless. They're like, hey, I just can't confirm yet. And I was like, well, you sort of, that's not how it works. It's within a timeframe that you need to confirm. I'm like, you're
Like you sort of need to confirm. But something really funny did happen. I've spoken about how I haven't given Ben that many jobs, mainly not because I don't trust him, but also it's too hard. We're on different schedules. I talk to our wedding planner more, but I have given him a few little jobs. Now, one of them, because I had to go through it every invite to see who didn't get an invite,
I'm sick of looking at that list. And I said to him, can you, your job is to go through and look at what everyone wrote for their allergies for food and get those allergies across to our wedding planner and the caterer to make sure. Because like part of an RSVP is what are your food allergies? Oh yeah, what can't you? Doesn't the wedding planner just have access to all this? Well, I've given her access now. Yes. But I also wanted to give Ben a job. So that was Ben's job. So he went through the list.
And I said to him, how did you go with allergies? Did you send them all off? And he goes, yes, I did. I went through every single one and I wrote them down. So I said, you need to be like so careful with this. Do not miss anyone. Check the list twice. Make sure you've sent every single thing because I can't have someone dying at my wedding. Imagine the headlines. All press is good press. No, not a shellfish death from my wedding. No. Anyway, he's like, I got it, babe. And I was like, thank you so much. A bit later on in the conversation, he goes, that Mitch is a bit of a character, isn't he?
Mitch Turi. Mitch Turi. We all know Mitch Turi. I said, what do you mean? Because it was a bit left field.
I was like, yeah, he's very funny. He's like, oh, he's just always cracking jokes. And I was like, what's happened? And he said, oh, well, when I went through the allergies list, he had written mango, kingfish, avocado. And I said, yeah, babe, they're his allergies. He's allergic. He's like, no, is he? And I said, yes, Ben, he's highly allergic. I said, did you not send those off? And he's like, no, I thought it was a joke. I excluded it. Why did you?
Why did you make that assumption that he would joke about anaphylaxis? To be fair, Mitch is a very funny man, but it's a hard punt to assume that someone's joking about allergies. But if you were to assume, Mitch would be the person that you'd assume would joke about it. Yeah, but a weird thing to assume. And I said, okay, did you not think maybe you should just like check? Check.
Anyway, Mitch, if you're listening, crisis averted. I have gotten your allergies to the wedding people, but I was like, what a weird thing to assume was a joke. Well, look, I like that every time you do talk about Ben and the small tiny jobs that you give him, the fact that he hasn't been able to complete one of them successfully. He is the best. I do hope that he shows up to the wedding now that he finally knows what date it's happening. You just said before.
that you're like not sleeping and you're riddled with anxiety. I am not sleeping but for a very different reason at the moment and I toyed around, I tossed it around whether or not to talk about this because I am erring into territory of things people don't care about, right? Like I'm well aware. Let me just warn you. But the reason why is because I –
I know that no one cares about what you dreamt about, right? Like I know no one cares. I know. That also feels pointed because I've brought a lot of my dreams to the podcast in the past. Sometimes we edit them out, friend. Oh, you think I don't notice? You say no one cares about dreams. I would say a large percentage of the population don't. People care about their –
own dreams. There is not a single person in this world that wakes up when their partner wakes up and goes, oh my God, honey, I had a big dream last night. And they're like, oh, tell me. Tell me every detail. The only time I do that is if the person says, I had a dream about you last night. I'm very selfish. I love dreams. Do you? Yeah. I love people's dreams. Remember we tried to do a dream episode, didn't make the cut.
Okay, so just to like lift behind the curtain a little bit. Not too much. Sorry to laugh so hard. No, not too much. Rarely. It is so rare that we do an interview where we're like, you know what? That didn't work out the way that we thought that was going to work out. And there was a period there where Brit went through having like quite severe night terrors. You were having like crazy dreams. You sound like a toddler. I really was. I was having night terrors and I had nightmares.
no one to hold me. You saying you wanted to do an episode on dreams and there was a lot of like, you know, we tossed it around for a long time and eventually we were like, you know what? Let's do it. And we did it. I was like, that is not airing as well. Like, I don't want anyone to think that. No. No.
It's interesting, right? Because there is a bit of psychology behind like, why is it that you dream about the things that you dream about? Like, what is the reasoning behind it? Is it because that some manifestation of things that you're stressed about during the day? Is it hormones? Did you eat cheese? Like there's lots of different theories out there. And I'll
Obviously, like some people have like reoccurring dreams, which might have some sort of deeper meaning. And I don't want to like, I'm not here to poo poo any of that. No, it's fascinating. Yeah, it really is. And everybody has had different versions of it, right? And their own unique experiences around it. But no one cares about those experiences as much as you care about them. If you're the one who's experienced it is what I would probably say. Do you think my most common facial expression on this is this?
the dog eyes. I screenshot it and sent it to you the other day and I just sent the gif of the dog squinting on The Simpsons. I also think I have too much Botox now and I don't cover it well. You can't squint. No, I'm not. Is that it? I have to.
I haven't had an eyebrow lift. You're spreading false rumors. No, sorry about that misinformation. No, look, the reason why I want to talk about it is because it is a really common symptom of pregnancy. Also something that I'm sure lots of people don't care about. But I have hit that point. I've hit the point where I'm not sleeping because I'm getting kicked all through the night. The kicks only just started recently, like in the last week and a half. And this is one active baby. I'm getting kicked all the time. Talk about produce occasion. Talk about trimming some podcast stuff. Yeah. And then
Secondly, sorry, you guys can make an executive call. And then secondly, I am having the most out of control wild dreams. So now we can talk about it. No, it's because it's not just one dream in the night. You know how most people like hit REM sleep and that's when you have your dreams. It's that twilight phase when you are probably hours off waking up in the morning. It's that's like kind of when you slipstream into like that really lucid dreaming state. Mine is continuous throughout
all night and I had forgotten about this pregnancy symptom. I'd forgotten that like the dreams are so vivid, your sleep becomes so disrupted and then it's just like these very wild movies play out in your head. And last night it was like a horror about gorillas and they were coming for us all, okay? It was a lot. I literally woke up and I was like, wow, I really could write a sci-fi movie about that dream but I'm not going to and we'll move on now. So just wondering where that story was going. Yeah.
I was going to tell you about the gorillas, but then I thought that I'm going to give you really quick. Decide whether you delete this. Oh, now we're getting the story about the gorillas. What did the gorillas do? Hear me out. We lived in an alternate reality where we all lived harmoniously with gorillas. Gorillas were everywhere. But at five o'clock on the dot, the gorillas tried to kill you. And so all of the humans had to go and hide in like their houses or hotels or bunkers or whatever. Couldn't make noise. Couldn't have light.
Otherwise the gorillas would find you and they would kill you. Yeah, fucking sci-fi, that shit. So this is interesting. Steven Spielberg, take that dream. This is interesting. You know how you just said, and you guys would know this if we were allowed to speak about dreams more, but you said you dreamt about this all night. The average dream...
lasts only between five and 20 minutes max. Like that's how long a dream goes for. Sometimes you'll feel like you've had this whole story in a dream and it's five minutes. I think that is really interesting. I understand that because when you think about, I say this because it's probably very rare in your waking state that you would have one continuous thought for 20 minutes or one continuous storyline. Definitely don't.
The both of you, I reckon, have got about three seconds. But it's true, right? So like when would you ever have one continuous storyline that plays out? Keisha's like, not unless I'm medicated. But that's the problem. Whereas when you're dreaming, it gives your brain the ability to make space to do that. Okay, we can move on from the dreams now. One last thing. In the Facebook group last night, I was talking about this with some people and melatonin because everyone's like, if you don't sleep well, take melatonin. Melatonin makes me have the most lucid, weird and wacky dreams ever.
And apparently a lot of people experience it. So it, and cheese and chili. Okay. So can I just say, I actually had the best weekend and I don't say that often. Well, best one day, actually it wasn't the whole weekend. It was one day. On Sunday, my sister Sherry and Jay and Maya moved back permanently from Scotland. So they've been in Scotland for over two years. I'm lucky that I started dating Ben who happened to live down the road. Otherwise I wouldn't have been seeing them so much.
But I picked them up from the airport. They're officially back. They've gone up to Port Macquarie. Maya's meeting all the family for the first time. But the funniest thing happened that showed me, I think I present a certain front on Instagram when I'm with Maya.
I have her the whole time. Like I'm obsessed with her. I feed her. I'll bathe her. I'll do whatever. I don't change nappies. That's just what I haven't done. When she changes a nappy, Sherry's always there because I don't babysit her on myself. It's also not your responsibility. I don't think that Aunty Judy's pertain to the necessity of changing a nappy. Oh no. I don't.
I don't think that it's expected. Yes, I agree. But I also think you can take all those duties. I think it's fine. Like, but I've never needed to. If I had her on my own, I'm not going to let her stay in a stinky nap because I'm like, unnies don't change nappies. Anyway, Sheridan's always there. So she's like, I'll change her. So I didn't have to change her as such, but I did bathe her and then I had to get her dressed. And, you know, I loved that time with her. She was like all gooey and garring. We're about to put her to bed. And so I bathed her, got her changed, got her dressed, put her to bed.
And then the next morning, so just on Monday morning, Sheridan's like, what the hell from another room? She's like, what's happened? And I was like, oh my God, what's happened? And I ran in and I was like, what's going on? She's like, I don't understand. Like there's poo everywhere. Like there's an explosion all through her cot everywhere. And I was like, what's happening? She's like, hang on a minute. She's like, did you put her nappy on last night? And I was like, yeah. She's like, you put it on backwards. Yeah.
Pooh, she did the biggest turd. And because it's backwards, I guess I didn't know. She was wearing a nappy G-string. Keisha did the exact same thing when she minded Lola when Lola was a baby. It's interesting me that anyone could think it would be intuitive to put the tabs at the back. Like you've got to wrap them behind the baby in order to do that rather than just wrapping them to the front, which seems like very much the way to do it.
I get confused because the two times I did it, because I didn't do it just once with Lola. I did it once and then I was told that it was backwards. And then the second time I went to change her. She doubled down. I was like, this is so confusing. I know I got it wrong last time, but I can't remember which way I did it last time. I think I did it so that it looks like underwear.
That's what I did. But for some reason, the biggest part of the nappy, it doesn't look how it's supposed to to the untrained eye. I agree because mine wasn't like a frivolous change. It was a conscious decision. I knew that it had to go the right way and I looked at it and I did the same thing. I looked at it this way and then I looked at it this way. You guys also know that it often says back on it. How would we know that? Yeah.
I put a nappy on Delilah once when I got her snipped. That's it. But I also, when I changed Lola and put her in clothes, I couldn't find anything that looked like it would fit her. So I just saw something that I'd seen her in before. It was, it was too small. It was, it was, it was a cropped onesie. But it's so funny to think that like, I'm a 37 year old woman. I've been around kids. I have a degree. I'm intelligent. I've lived on my own. Like I'm independent. I'm independent.
The littlest things, I didn't know how to put a nappy on a child. And then it makes you think of how every parent ever has said, wow, like it is such a learning curve because everything is something you've never done before. That's how I felt even just putting the nappy on. I was like, I'm not made for this. For me, it was leaving the hospital with a newborn baby for the very first time. And I was like, this feels criminal. It feels criminal.
criminal that there is an expectation that I'm going to keep this child alive and not fuck this up. Zero help. Like why isn't someone supervising me? I got supervised more when I worked at McDonald's. But no, genuinely, like I have been supervised in every other aspect of my life except for parenting. And we just go on our merry way and we're expected to do it. It's wild. Crazy. I went home after eight hours of having a baby.
And then I just had to figure it out. Let's just put the nappy aside. It's forgotten. Actually, she didn't tell me how to do it. She didn't teach me. So I do have to relearn that. But the other reason I had the best weekend is Ben had probably the biggest and most important game of his career. Like the biggest game he's ever played. He's now in the Italian league, which is like quite high up. And his team were playing the number one team and he was making his Italian debut.
Which nobody wants to make a debut against the best team because they were expected to get absolutely whipped. Like they were expected to lose dramatically. Kind of good to play against someone when you're expected to lose because you can only impress. If they expect nothing of you, you can't disappoint them. Set the bar low. I feel differently. Surprise and delight. That was my motivational speech to him. I was like, babe, this is the best case scenario because you're not expected to win. Like your team, no one expected them to win. Like Sportsbet was like, no, they're going to get whipped.
But he played so well that he was up for person of the match. They ended up drawing, which everyone was like, wow, this has thrown a spanner in the works for the whole competition. And it just could not have gone better for him. So I
I just feel like I was just sitting on the lounge at 4am and I was like screaming at the TV. I was so happy because it could have gone either way. So it was a really, really big moment in his life. And I guess our life, because it can make or break our future if he did really badly, which I knew he was never going to do, but he did better. In terms of him being re-signed in Italy. In terms
of being anywhere. Just like showing everyone what he can do. Yes. So that was just like a super proud fiance moment. And that was the other reason I just had the best weekend. I feel like Sherry and Jay came home. We all watched the game together as like a family and it was really cool. How does it go with you celebrating that with him? Because...
I have a little bit of insight into this, but I'm not sure how it works over in Europe. Obviously, when sports people go onto the field, they have to surrender their phones and stuff. There's all like sports betting and there's a lot of shady shit that can go on. So they try to avoid it by like having their phones off of them for X amount of hours beforehand. When does he get it back and how do you guys communicate after it? Oh, minutes after. So I'm watching on the TV and the second they walk off,
In the locker rooms, they can have their phones again, but they have team meetings. But a lot of the team were going out to celebrate and Ben wasn't going out. And I said, babe, why aren't you going out? And he was like, I've got too many death threats already. Already. Because they're saying he was like such an imperative part of the
of the match. Wow. And so he's like, it's not, yeah, he's like, it's just, I'll just go home to bed. It's so gross how normalized that is in sporting culture. Especially soccer. Yeah. I mean, cricket as well is really, really bad. It's largely connected with gambling. They lose so much money that they get so aggressive about the fact that they've lost so much money and they take it out on the person who caused them to do so. But there's also been so many reports about how deeply personal it becomes. I mean, like Candice Warner has come out and talked about it being the partner of someone who,
You also become subjected to it. And I know like, Britt, you haven't experienced it as deeply as maybe someone like Candice might have. But you have still experienced versions of it. No, I think I spoke about it at one point and I'll never forget this, but it happens really bad in tennis. And I got a lot of it on the back end of dating Jordan.
I would get people message me saying that they were going to come find me and put me on a spit, like kill me, like literally put me on a spit and cook me like a pig. They're the kind of vile messages that you would get after every match. They play a match like every single week. I think people would be shocked if they knew how prevalent this kind of response was privately to athletes and athletes physically.
families in the sporting industry. Well, it's also there's lack of consequences. You can shoot off a message like that saying that you're going to put someone to spit and nothing happens. There's not even, I mean, you get blocked maybe by that person, but there's no consequences. You know why? Because it's almost not treated as a serious threat or a legitimate threat. Because if I feel like if you took that to an authority and said, hey, I'm getting these messages, they would say, oh,
It's reaction. It's reactional. It's off the back of a sporting match. Like we're not going to take that seriously because they don't take normal domestic violence complaints seriously. So it's one of those things where if you are in the sporting industry, unfortunately people say it's expected. It's part of being in the public eye. It's part of being an athlete, which we know is incorrect, but it is just part and parcel with being any kind of professional athlete.
All right, guys, there is a piece of content that is popping off currently on socials. Also, because I have been getting very ragey in the comments, I would like to admit. Now it's from another podcast that is called The Pocket with the host, Chris Griffin. If you haven't seen this, I really do want to admit when I first saw this reel without the context of knowing the full backstory of who this podcast is or who the host was, I did feel a lot of rage when I saw this one specific reel. And the reason why it showed up in my
algorithm specifically is because of the very delightful Laura Henshaw. She shared it to her Instagram calling out the host for some problematic views around this ideology of feminine versus masculine powers of like women leaning into the feminine, men leaning into the masculine and of the traditionalist roles that we have in our relationships. Yeah, I saw Laura's as well and I made the comment, you just said she called him out. She absolutely did. Well, I made the comment to you. I said I really like how
Laura has a really gentle and intelligent and structured approach to the way she does it because it's not aggressive, but it is to the point. It is firm, but she's not trying to cause a pile on. She's trying to educate. And I really like that because we definitely see a lot of different types of calling out and calling in online. Well, let me tell you, it's just as effective is what I would say, because when you have a look at the comments and like, we're going to play the reel for you, we're going to unpack it, you know, in quite in depth.
But if you go and look at the comments on this reel, there are so many influential influencers from Australia. There are so many women who have jumped on this to communicate how they feel off the back of it. Now, I really want to make this clear because we have been sent this reel countless times now. However, we tossed back and forth whether or not we were going to talk about it. And the reason for that is because...
We didn't want to contribute to a pylon that's happening over a single piece of content because people can put great messaging out into the world and get it wrong one time. And that is undeserving, I think, of a pylon. It is deserving of a correction. The reason why we're talking about this is because after we all collectively went down the rabbit hole of the content of this podcast, we realized actually this is not one outlier piece of content. This is a current and continuous theme that is running throughout
the pod and throughout the messaging. Now, if it was a tiny podcast, I wouldn't even give it the time of day or the airtime, but I think it's important because Chris Griffin, who is the host, he has over 350,000 followers himself. He's only 22 years old, mind you. He's very young. The podcast
Instagram page has over 80,000 followers. The TikTok has over 90,000 followers. These are predominantly men who follow him for his advice on how to be a better man, how to deal with quote unquote mental health, which we will unpack that as well, but also how to show up within relationships. I want to play you this reel, which is the one that Laura Henshaw took particular issue with, as have we. And then we're also going to unpack a couple of other pieces of content from this pod as well. Have a listen to this.
I don't want my partner working unless she wants to work. If you feel the need to go and work to make money and then you come home and you're complaining about your day when we don't need you to make money because we're sorted. If we've got four hours to spend in the afternoon and I ask you, how was your day today, babe? I want your eyes to light up with excitement with whatever the fuck it was. I'm going to make you four postcards.
today. And that's energy too. It's so good. It's the calm. It's the harmony. It's the peace and love that a man that's got a busy life that's chasing his dreams needs when he's trying to wind down. This is why I heavily encourage hot girl walks. I would love my partner to go on a hot girl walk with her friends every day. She gets this feminine energy. They get to talk their shit and then they get to have a bit of excitement
and about their day. I don't think a girl needs to go through challenge, pain and hardship to be an amazing girl. I think she can fill her days with passion-filled things and still be amazing. The music, it's the piano music underneath. The music has me laughing. Hashtag insightful. What I want, well, the music is there to lead you to believe that it is deep and it is insightful and it is thought-provoking and it is beautiful and wholesome, right? It's absolutely not. My initial thought to this, I watched it.
And I disagree wholeheartedly with almost all of it. But I thought, you know what? Let me just have a look at this person's page quickly and see what we're dealing with. And I just sporadically at random picked a few of their reels, had a little look. And I thought, you know what? This
Guy looks like he's really trying to put some good messaging into the world because he does a lot of like mental health. He's sort of leaning into mental health for men. He gets some really good guests on. He gets some very questionable guests on, which we have discovered. But the reels that I picked, I could see that he was trying to do good things. And we had this conversation between us and I said, you know. Yeah, I was raging and Britt was slightly more leveled and was like, she was like, I don't agree with the content, that piece. Yeah.
But I don't want to just annihilate this individual because maybe not all of his views are problematic. Exactly. I was like, let's have some grace, right? People are allowed to get things wrong and we are allowed to call them in and correct them. And so when I sort of trawled through his socials a little bit, I was like, it doesn't look that bad. I think he has gotten it wrong with a semi-decent intention behind it.
What we discovered on a deeper dive, like I went very deep through his reels this morning before we had this conversation, and I found that this is an ongoing theme of the podcast. And I switched my tune a little bit then. Let me be clear on this. I think he has good intention. I think he is well-meaninged.
I think he has absolutely no idea how deeply entrenched the misogyny is in what he is spewing. Because this idea, and he says it at the start, he says, if my partner chooses not to work, that is how he's originally set this up. And he's using that as the antidote for the rest of the things that he says. However, he's then put in the specifications that he doesn't want her to come home and complain about her job. He wants her eyes to light up when she walks in the door because he's
He has had a busy day chasing his dreams. He wants her to do things that fill her with joy. Things that are very, very condescending, like collecting postcards or going on hot girl walks. I actually can't believe he said collecting postcards. And there are so many parts of this that are so problematic because it is not a woman's responsibility to create harmony and to have her tail wagging when a partner walks in the door because he's had a hard day. Space should be held for both parties.
My problem with this so much is that we are dressing up this idea of modern masculinity and it is just another version of toxic masculinity. And I really want to unpack this conversation that's happening online at the moment between the masculine and the feminine, which seems to just be a modern take on traditional roles.
This idea that there is a masculine energy that is withheld and that masculine energy are things like taking action, achievement, logic, assertiveness, whilst feminine energy calls into things like intuition, receiving, nurturing, compassion. The problem with this is that he has gendered
those energies, right? He has said masculine energies are for men, feminine energies are for women. The reality is, is that every single person has this complex duality between masculine and feminine energy. And that is the antidote to toxic masculinity. Recognizing the fact that men can also have an incredible presence of feminine energy, recognizing the fact that women can have an incredible essence of masculine energy, recognizing
These two dynamics were never meant to be gendered and everybody is supposed to encompass both. But what he is teaching and what these ideologies teach is that men have one and women have the other. And unless they are leaning into their feminine, then they are not fulfilling their role as women. Well, so this is one of the issues that I took from this. He
He's 22 years old. He's very young, but he has a very big social media following as we've established. He is influential and a lot of young men are following him, women as well. I don't think he has enough lived experience and I don't think he has done enough due diligence about the things he's talking about. This, I believe, probably hasn't even registered with him. But by saying you want your female partner to...
stay at home and be happy for you and just go on hot girl walks and collect things that make her happy. It is a form of financial control. She is not earning an income. She is not earning superannuation. She's not setting herself up for the future if that relationship collapses. If she chooses to leave, there's nothing for her retirement. Whatever it is, unless you are saying...
babe, if you choose to stay home, that is all good. I'm going to split my salary with you. I'll pay you a salary. I'm going to put money into your superannuation. Like unless you are setting her up financially, it is not enough to say, babe, I've got this. I'm going to earn our money and I'll give you what you need because we know that relationships don't go down the gurgle. We know that women need to leave and absolutely should have financial independence. One thing that's like really interesting
just so reassuring and solidifying is go and check out the comments section because like there are so many incredibly intelligent women who are doing their best to educate probably more eloquently than I did when I jumped in the comments section. One of them was Victoria Devine who runs She's On The Money and she brought up that exact point, Britt. The reality is like the fastest growing population of homeless people are women over the age of 55 and it's all well and good to think that you're being –
altruistic in your relationships and that you're providing this sense of equality by saying, you do whatever you want as the woman, I will provide, you provide the home. And that's okay for the now, but I absolutely agree with everything you said, Britt, unless you are committing to the financial future of that woman and putting money away from a superannuation perspective to safeguard them in the instance that this
financial security is gone, the man providing is gone from that equation, then there is no security in this arrangement. And I guess like,
Ultimately, the thing that really is quite shocking about this is like when we sent this around, we're talking about it last night. Keisha, your first reaction was I genuinely thought this was satire. I thought it was a joke. And it's shocking that a 22-year-old who lives in Bondi, who so many young men look up to for advice on the right way to go about modern masculinity, are being fed these very
And they are extreme traditionalist ideologies. This idea that women, the most important and powerful essence that we can bring to a relationship is to be nurturing, loving, unchallenging, the warmth embrace around the man who has such a hard and stressful job, but they are going to take that from us to be able to protect us.
The other thing that really irked me was this underlying message that women don't have dreams. Like women don't want to go chase things because he's like, we are working hard to provide for you, chasing our dreams, getting out there, earning the money. Like the best you can do is create a happy environment for us. What?
that is saying is that women don't have anything that they want to chase. No, I would challenge that. And I've looked at Chris's response. He has responded on that social media thread. He said, you know, look at the first part of my video, exactly what we unpacked. I said, if they didn't choose to, the problem is, is that it came with a caveat. You can chase your dreams so long as you have a smile on your face at the end of the day. So long as you don't complain about the fact that you had to chase your dreams.
Now, anyone who runs a business or who does anything that is ambitious, has a job that's stressful but also fulfilling, are going to have days where things are actually just fucked and they want to come home and they want their partner to hold space for their complaining. I do it all the time. I love my job. I love how fulfilling it is. I love how financially rewarding it is. I love the stability it creates for my family. But you better believe that there are days where I come home and I do nothing but
complain to Matt. Probably more than not, to be honest. That's the society we live in. Like work is hard, whether you're chasing your dream or not. But the thing is, is in this equation, he is allowed to have space to be held for when he's having a hard day, but she is not. And maybe we are reducing it down because we only have what a lot of this conversation stems from is this one minute social media clip. Oh, I listened to a little bit more of the podcast and I would say it was a bit of a reoccurring thing, to be honest. And because of his age, I want to give him...
I want to give him the benefit of the doubt that he has without knowing a complete lack of acknowledgement of things like his privilege. And I don't think he realizes that his unevolved version of choice feminism is actually very regressive. And what I thought was really interesting about this type of messaging is that we are seeing this shift
back to more traditional gender norms, more conservative values, but it's coming in a form of soft patriarchy. It's not coming in the form necessarily of this really harsh women belong in the kitchen, go make me a sandwich. It's in this more soft, I want to be a provider for you and I want to set you up with a good life and I want to treat you well and do good things and support you in that way and you're not going to have to worry. I'm going to look after you, which are all great things. It's things that you want in a partner.
But we also know that statistically it's not the case. Yes. And also it lacks, firstly, the acknowledgement that there is only a certain type of woman who can have a lifestyle like that. And it's one that is incredibly privileged. There's also only a certain type of man that can provide that. And it's one that comes from immense privilege.
And again, I don't want to come down too hard on him because he is young. These are ideas and concepts that I didn't wholly understand until I was in my 30s. So I don't expect for a young man who doesn't experience the patriarchy in the same way to have an evolved stance on this. I just don't think that he realizes that by implying that being that provider for a woman and saying that you can have the choice of
of not working and just being a family man, being there for me, being, you know, my calm when I come home at the end of a stressful big day. He's actually sprouting a lot of the messaging of this very conservative, let's go back to a better time where women didn't have to work and women didn't have to go and do these things.
But guess what? Women also didn't have the right to fucking vote. They didn't have the ability to leave their relationships if they wanted to. Well, it's very romanticized. There is actually a really great comment in the trenches of this post, and it's from a person named Nicola Carter. And it just said, choice isn't something a man grants. It's something a woman owns. Autonomy isn't a favor. It is a right. And that is what I think is the missing link of this conversation is
It's as though this ideology bestows choice upon a woman to be able to live the life in whatever version she wants so long as it is always showing up happy and with a smile on her face because ultimately the messaging is at the end of the day, your obligation is to make this household peaceful and that's what you bring to the relationship. So do a good job of that.
It's funny because in the last 24 hours, Keisha, I have done a flip. I started out by saying he is only 22. Like, let's give him some grace and say, you know what? You just haven't lived enough. You haven't done enough due diligence. You haven't spoken to enough people. Then when I went down the rabbit hole and saw how many conversations he's having on this topic, I thought 22 is old enough and you do have a responsibility when you have a platform as big as he does.
I 100% wholeheartedly agree. And also there are other parts of this that we wanted to share. Like there are a couple of other reels on here, like this reel, which is an interview with a man named Mark Rolton, who is the guy speaking. And this reel is captioned, a woman's role is far more valuable. Episode 65.
What a woman can provide and bring to the family, you and I just simply aren't capable of that. You might turn around and say I can make a million a year, a million a month. That's terrific. That's wonderful. I think that's a meek measure against what a woman can bring to the family. You can bring calm, harmony. You bring love. You bring a place of peace. And that's
what a man. I'd rather go in money. I find her role far more significant than none. Now, this is playing the role of masculine and feminine. That's the model that you're tabling here. Women today, feminists will argue, they'll scream down your podcast and say, we're equal, we're the same, we deserve to have the same amount of money. Right. If that's what you want, knock yourself out.
But a feminine woman won't be looking for the markers of finance and commerce and economics as a measure of her worth. If it's a woman smart and intelligent, she'll realize she has far more to offer in her power of bringing love, bringing that connection, being deliberate about who she is, her loyalty, her purity. That's what a woman has to offer.
This was the reel that absolutely sent me. Into orbit. No, I sent me out of space. I was Katy Perry. I was like, it's a woman's world. He really drove it home with the final statement, which was a choice for them to include and publicize as the messaging of the reel that a smart, intelligent woman will know that she can bring peace, love, loyalty, harmony. Purity. Purity.
Look, I think it comes back to something that I said at the very beginning around this idea of masculine versus feminine. And it has been hijacked and it has been turned into something that was not the intention. Now, it would be absolutely remiss of us to not touch on the thing that a lot of these male-focused podcasts seem to circle around. And that is that suicide is so high in men. 75% of suicides are men within Australia. Yeah.
That is a fact. Toxic masculinity exists. This is not the antidote to it. That's the problem. And it's being dressed up as the antidote. It's being dressed up as the solution, allowing men to lean more into their masculine quote unquote, and women to take more of a role of the feminine so that people have defined roles and men know how to lead and they know how to take autonomy. And I say this because this is
literally Chris's quote. He has responded to the overwhelming backlash that he has received. And part of that response says, I also don't think it's fair to label traditional masculine values as toxic. Wanting to provide, protect and lead with strength doesn't make a man toxic. It makes him grounded in his role. What is toxic is weakness masters masculinity, insecurity, control, emotional suppression. That's not what I stand for. We can all agree with that. The truth is
We have too many weak men out there, men who don't lead, who don't take responsibility, who don't make the women in their lives feel safe. And when women stop feeling safe, they are forced to lean out of their natural feminine and into survival mode. That's how we end up with quote unquote toxic femininity and hyper independent. I don't need a man culture.
It's not empowering and it's doing more damage than good, but no one wants to talk about that. Men and women are equal, absolutely, but we are not the same. Pretending we are strips away our natural strengths and creates confusion instead of connection."
It's all well and good to talk about equality. When you say a man's role is to provide money, power, security, stability, and all of the things that our society deems as the most important functions of a person, and a woman's job is to provide all of the things that have no monetary value, love, care, nurturing, then you create inequality. And that's what he's not understanding. The way that they have reframed
you know, the value of what a woman can bring to the relationship. I think in that video, he actually said, you know, it's a higher value than what I can provide. The thing that they lack is that there's a hierarchical structure. He is still positioned at the top. He's the head of the household. And this is why I call it soft patriarchy. It's not saying this is the only thing that a woman can, you know, she just belongs at home raising the kids.
It's almost this language of like, I'm empowering her by acknowledging that what she's bringing to the table is more than what I could ever do. And I'm a high value man. And therefore I want a high value, pure woman in my life. You know what this screams to me? You guys remember the speech that was done by the Kansas City Chiefs kicker, Harrison Butker? And I find
And I fucking got riled up at the time. Fair enough, right? So look, if you don't remember it, the speech was at, it was a Christian college. It was at the graduation college, like university graduation. And the speech started off with saying, some of you may go on to lead successful careers in the world, but I would venture to guess that the majority of you, this is directed at the women,
are most excited about your marriage and the children you will bring into this world. He then went on to say that his wife's life truly started when she began living her vocation as a wife and as a mother.
I think it is absolutely insane that someone would get up and say in a graduation speech when someone, every single person who's sitting in that room has just spent years dedicating themselves to their education, that the biggest success that they're going to have in their lives is being a mother and a wife. The last thing I want to say on this, and I think it could be possibly one of the most important parts is off the back of something that you just said, Keisha, you said this is like a soft opening into a more dangerous world.
It is not a soft opening. That world is here. I want to talk to you about this study. Young men are going backwards in their view of gender norms and increasingly believing they should be the breadwinners while a woman's place is at home, a new study has found. Though Australians of both genders have generally become more progressive in their opinion of gender roles over the last 25 years, analysis conducted by policy think tank E61 Institute
found that since 2018, men aged between 15 and 24, so our next generation, and Chris, have veered back to conservative direction. The research used household income and labour dynamics in Australia's survey to gauge the level of support for traditional gender roles based on how greatly they agreed to a series of statements. These are some of the statements.
On the whole, men make better political leaders than women. It is better for everyone involved if the man earns more money and the women takes care of the home and children. Possibly my favorite statement from the survey, it is not good for a relationship if the woman earns more than the man. It's not good if you're in a relationship with a man who is easily emasculated. That's the reality, right? Anyway, like Chris, I hope you listen to this. I really do too. And I hope you realize it's not an attack.
I think he will think it's an attack and that's okay. It is kind of an attack. It's an attack on the values that he holds. But he is 22 years old and there is a lot of life to learn. My worry is that sometimes being called out doesn't push people in the direction of being open-minded to learning. They double down and they become even more
more steadfast in the views. And I hope that that is not the case. That is specifically why I have a problem with this. It's the soft opening where they start to have these traditional value kind of conversations, but they're dressed up as wellness and they're dressed up as what's going to be best for you as a woman, what's going to make you happiest and feel the most secure. And the more and more that they hear from the, and I'm quoting them, angry feminists,
They just think it's ridiculous and they invalidate it. And then they find more comfort and more sense of belonging in these more like red pill men's type of communities. But I don't think a lot of people have the context around this type of messaging and why it can be so problematic because it's delivered in such a palatable way. We do have such a huge female base of listeners aged from age, I think, 17 to 60.
To anyone listening, if you don't already know this, the most important thing that you can have in a relationship is financial independence or access to money, whatever that looks like for you. Even if you are a stay-at-home mom, like that is absolutely fine, but make sure there is no financial dominance in your relationship. Make sure you have a shared account where you have access to money. I just want to drive home. If you want to choose that life, that is absolutely fine. Have access to money. You will 100%.
percent need it. Exactly as Laura Henshaw's mum has pinned to her fridge as we all found out from the stories, a man is not a financial plan. Let that be a lesson to you all.
It's time for Suckin' Sweet, our highlight and our lowlight of the week. Why don't I kick it off? I've already said it, but it is the absolute highlight. My sister moved back, so that's it for me. I finally got, my sister's my best friend. You guys all know Sherry on the pod. She's come on multiple times. You've seen her, but it's been really hard having her overseas and have a family and start that next chapter of life. So she is back officially on Aussie ground after two years living overseas. So that's very exciting that she's now far more within reach. She will be an hour flight as opposed to
26 hours. My suck, and I don't know how this is going to sound. I think you're meant to do it the other way around, just FYI. You are. Well, my suck, and I don't know how this is going to sound. I'm worried. No, well, I've had so much on that I have forgotten to do something extremely important that I shouldn't have forgotten to do and I've only just remembered.
So next week I have to fly to overseas to a wedding and- Not her own wedding, just FYI. I'm flying overseas to a wedding and Ben had said to me, he's one of Ben's friends, and Ben had said to me, Wendy Land. You forgot to book your flight. I haven't got booked a flight. I forgot to book a flight. That's fine. I went to look for my flight and I was like, hang on, how did I miss that? How did I book, how have I done everything else? I've got booked hire cars over there. I don't even have a flight.
In one week. And I was like, oh my God. So anyway, that's my suck. I'm going to get across that. But imagine if he hadn't asked me.
Would I have just assumed that I had a flight? You would have figured it out eventually because you would have thought, when have I got to get to the airport? Well, because I know the flight time. It's always the same flight time. So I wonder if I would have just, I don't know. I am a person and I don't know if there's common, I don't think it is, but I am a last minute everything gal and I will book an international flight two days before I have to go. Well, I'm giving you more. I don't recommend it. It's usually more expensive, but I just don't have the capacity to be organized. I still haven't got accommodation for like two,
the time that I'm going to Bali for work. I don't have everything sorted yet. So like, anyway, whatever. No one cares about me and my lack of organization. All right. My suck for the week is that I have the most raging indigestion even throughout this entire record. I have had to stop down to spew burp in my own mouth. So, and I'm at the point now, I need some, I need some Rennies. I need some Gaviscon and I keep forgetting that I need to have it on me all time because
Sometimes I think it's just a morning thing or a night thing. It's an all day thing now and it's an all the time thing. I even had to take my bra off halfway through this record because I got so fired up over feminism, the patriarchy. I didn't even wear a bra. That I had indigestion, god damn it. So that is definitely my suck. And then my sweet for the week is...
that it was Mother's Day, as you guys know, last week. And the girls are at an age now, so they're five and four, and they're at an age now where they actually can make Mother's Day really, really special. And they get so excited about it, so it makes it a big thing. You know, the schools and the daycares, and I joke because they put on so many things that you have to go to. So I had to go to the primary school Mother's Day breakfast lunch, and then I had to go to the daycare afternoon tea thing. Sounds like a
And I was like, why are you killing me and torturing me with all this admin? But actually it was so freaking cute. And Lola was just so excited. You guys know, I mentioned it earlier in the year that she was having a really, really hard time at her new daycare. And she's finally, after like almost six months, found her feet there. And she was so proud to show me around. So it was really nice to see like the night and day between where she was at in January to where she is now with it. But yeah, Mother's Day this year just felt really special. And it wasn't because we did anything big.
it was because the people in my life, you know, took the time to make it feel like it was something that was important. And, you know, I saw some people on Instagram kind of talking about how the people they loved in their life did fuck all. That was subtle. Yeah. I mean...
I'm not going to tell you who it was, but yeah, it really reminds you that like it's one day and as a parent or as a mom, like being made to feel special on a day that seems, you know, it's only as special as the people around you make it. And I feel very, very grateful that like Matt and the girls really went out of their way not to do big, grandiose things, but just to
that Matt did everything from like the cooking and the cleaning that day and he made dinner and then he cleaned up after dinner. Like they were small, thoughtful things, but it meant that like my mental load was so minimal that day and it was really, really nice. So yeah, that was my sweet. Anyway, guys, that's it from us. If you love the episode, if you have your own thoughts on it,
If you maybe you listen to the podcast and you think something different, maybe you've seen a lot of the positive messaging that's come through that pod and hadn't really considered this very specific conversation that we have had today. Love to know your thoughts. Love to know your opinions and slide on into the DMs. Send us your ask uncuts and everything else at Life Uncut Podcast. You know the drill. Tell your mom, tell your dad, tell your dog, tell your friends and share the love because we love love.