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Cynthia Miller-Idriss, "Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism" (Princeton UP, 2025)
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welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
This is Lillian Barger with another episode from the New Books Network. My guest is Cynthia Miller Idris, a sociologist and professor in the School of Public affairs and the School of Education at American University. Her new book, man up the New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism, published by Princeton University Press, is the topic of this show. Mildred Idris, an expert in right wing violence, shows how multiple forms of extreme violence are directly connected to misogyny, a fact often overlooked in understanding the motivations behind such incidents. Here is my conversation with Cynthia Miller. Idris hello Cynthia.
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A
Thanks for having me. I'm happy to be here.
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B
Okay, so tell us about your background and how you came to write Man Up.
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A
Yeah, this is, you know, I open the book with sort of an apology to the field in the national security side for not paying attention to this more vigilantly, more thoughtfully. Earlier, I was originally a comparative education professor. I've spent the first 15 years of my career studying school based responses to resurgent hate and anti Semitism in Germany and became an accidental expert on kind of how teachers and educators engage with these issues, which later became relevant in the US After Charlottesville Unite the Right rally. And then people started asking me to explain some of the things I've been studying in far right youth culture. So I was interviewing boys and young men in and around violent scenes really for my whole career and had thought a lot about issues that they talked about related to masculinity, like sense of brotherhood and belonging and wanting, a sense of purpose and meaning and things that were bigger and better than themselves. But I never really asked them about how they treated women or their views about gender, LGBTQ issues, or how men in their lives had treated the women in their lives like their mothers. And so it was something that kind of came to me gradually as I started seeing more and more media coverage of things that felt blatantly misogynistic to me in political violence contexts, like the kidnapping plot of an execution plot of Governor Gretchen Whitmer, where there was a ton of misogynistic language used and it just really wasn't covered in the media. So eventually I, you know, sort of belatedly and reluctantly came to see that there was a role for writing a book that would. That would kind of lay this all out. And that's why I wrote the book, to basically make it impossible to keep ignoring, both for myself and for the field more broadly.
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B
I would say, well, you begin by citing so many statistics of mass violence is, like, overwhelming. They're so. Can you give for the audience the extent of the problem?
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A
Yeah, I mean, and this is. I. I sort of felt like the introduction should be a chapter where if you read your way through that, you can no longer deny in any way that this issue exists, that that gender based motivations and misogyny itself are foundational and foundational components of all violent extremism and political violence. And so, you know, I really, you know, just as one example, in all mass attacks in the US since 1949, 60% of those mass attackers have a documented history of domestic and intimate partner violence. That's a criminal record, and that's in a world where less than half of domestic and intimate partner violence is reported to begin with. And it doesn't include things like stalking or harassment or sexual assault or rape threats or rape itself. So when you add. And it doesn't include any of the online misogyny that I talk about, you know, in terms of trolling or. Or things like belittling and harassment. I mean, essentially, it's. It's very, very hard to find a case of a mass shooter or an ideological shooter in the US an attacker who does not have a history in some way of abusing women or the LGBTQ community. And so it's just one of the most obvious predictors. And then the data on political violence itself shows that misogyny or hostile sexism is the top predictor or among the top three predictors in support for political violence and willingness to engage in it. And that's across a wide variety of surveys in the US and in at least six other countries. And so once you start seeing those data points, it becomes very obvious that there is a predictor that we just look right past.
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B
So it seems to me like when law enforcement is looking at an incident of mass violence, they're always looking for things, but are they missing the misogyny?
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A
So they don't always miss it, but they don't see it as related. So, for example, in the Charlottesville trials, the trials of the neo Nazis in the Charlottesville unite. The right trials, Every single one. And there's dozens of perpetrators on trial there. Every single one of them had a criminal history of domestic violence. And that is used in the trial to describe how bad they are, like, to describe their bad character. Right. But it's not seen. It's not ever seen in these cases as related to the ideology or the radicalization, to white supremacist extremism, even though these are the same kind of hierarchies and of superiority and inferiority. That kind of supremacism, that thinking that the refusal, that the anger and rage that can be expressed at a woman who refuses to submit to your authority and supremacy, that is a hallmark of domestic violence, is not that dissimilar from the anger and rage that comes out against racial and ethnic minorities who are seen as a threat or an existential threat or not adhering to what's expected in terms of deference or inferiority. And so those same logics of superiority and inferiority intersect. It's something that black feminists have said for ages, right? For decades, but has not been listened to, kind of in my side of the field.
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B
So one thing they talk about is how a lot of. There's a lot of fields that study gender. Tons, Tons of fields. I've studied gender.
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A
You know, lots of people study gender
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B
in all kind, from, you know, the humanities, the social sciences. But what is happening? And other people study violence.
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A
Yeah, right. Well, it's siloed, essentially. So one of the problems we have is the siloing of expertise and the siloing of interventions into really different agencies, organizations, and academic fields that don't always communicate with each other. So things like gender studies, women's studies, LGBTQ issues like those tend to be in the humanities, in colleges of arts and sciences. And then you have kind of people who work on domestic and intimate partner violence, sexual assault, sexual assault prevention. Those tend to be in, like, departments of criminology or schools of social work. Right. In a kind of separate way. And then you have people who work on mass violence, terrorism, targeted violence, and that is in what are now departments of terrorism studies or schools of Homeland Security. It's in the security field. Right. So you, and, and you see that at the national level, where domestic intimate partner violence is a local law enforcement issue that ultimately is under the Department of Justice's sort of command, but mass shooting, mass attacks, you know, targeted violence is under the Department of Homeland Security. And those two things really don't intersect. We have the same problem with hate crimes. Right. Hate crimes is a local issue. White supremacist extremism is a national security issue. But actually they're very related. They're often, you know, it's a local expression of the same kind of logic and of harm that from a prevention perspective, when we're talking about addressing things very upstream, that's where you address it on the local and interpersonal side of things, because that's what comes first. But this later escalation, people don't just become terrorists. They often practice or, you know, express these forms of harm much earlier against animals, against more vulnerable people in their family. Child abuse, domestic partner abuse, hate crimes. Right. Those types of things are escalating actions of harm that then eventually can. Don't always. Right. But can lead to. And in the case of, at the end side of things, when you look back, almost always have been there prior to escalation to a mass attack.
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B
So it seems like the people who have been reported to have had beat their wives or whatever ship should actually be tagged in some way to watch them.
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A
Yeah, well, I think it's like this part is a little, I have some caution about that too because I mean, obviously the problem of domestic intimate partner violence is much bigger than the problem of targeted violence and terrorism. And so, you know, and we, if you, if, if being an abuser puts you on a terrorism watch list in some way, we don't want in any way to reduce the likelihood that someone's going to report a partner, a spouse or a husband, you know, like. So I, I would want to make sure that this is not like an additional disincentive. We already have, you know, a challenge of people being afraid to report not wanting their partner. You know, they still love their partner, they don't want them to have a criminal record or not getting authorities involved. So I think that's important. And also it's not like a one to one, it's not like we can say some percentage of these are going to come. It's more like understanding the logic of violence and particularly violence from men that can come out in so many different ways. And so we have to address, if we're going to address the prevention side of mass violence, we have to understand its roots and how it relates also on these interpersonal violence sides and how the gendered motivations play a role in almost all of this. So even when there's not a personal history of perpetrator violence, we often see that like false crime statistics get about who you know about sexual threats posed to white women from racial and ethnic minorities or immigrants are mobilizing white supremacist extremist actions. Also state violence. In the case of ice, right, where you see that justification coming. So you see a lot of times there's other gendered motivations that are a part of the story on the mass violence side that are not reported as part of the story because the targets of the violence are not women. And so the, the motivations or the prior histories don't factor into the story because it's a synagogue or a, you know, a Walmart targeting Latinos or a black church in Charleston or, or you know, grocery store in Buffalo. In all of those cases, there were gendered motivations in the perpetrators desires to target these minorities. But the they're declared white supremacist extremist crimes, as they should be because they target the racial and ethnic minorities. But maybe a place to intervene is also in thinking about what those gendered motivations are so that people don't escalate to thinking there's an existential threat against women or that they're conspiring with women to create this existential threat.
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B
Well, it's interesting though that how many of the mass violence in America in recent years have been committed by young, young men, okay, these are not many men in their 40s or 50s who've had bad experiences. Women, I mean, we're talking sometimes teenagers. And you're, and you're thinking, okay, how does a 16 year old or 15 year old young man, how is the gender park there? What's going on there?
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A
Yeah, well, that's where, that's why I call it the new misogyny, because I think, you know, misogyny itself obviously is age old and has always been there, sadly and at points of time was codified into law. And I talk a lot about those. You know, I use a lot of anecdotes with my mom basically. And it compared to me like just even just show those two generations, right, like what it was like to have, you know, my mom, many colleges that my mom would have applied to. She was a high school valedictorian. And wanted to go to college, and her dad said he wouldn't pay for college for a girl at that time in the 60s. And, and then she applied to college, but she could only choose ones that would accept women. Right. Like there were a bunch of colle that wouldn't accept women at all. And that's just for my generation, like, that's really hard to imagine. Right. Like, that wasn't a factor at all. It never occurred to me, and it just wasn't a part of the story of my life to think about where I could apply or not based on being a woman. But of course it would have been if I wanted to go to the military. It would have been like there were other ways in which there were barriers that were structural. But for the most part, those structural barriers have transformed into something much more cultural. And the cultural kind of barriers are where you see the new misogyny being expressed in tremendous scale online. And so, you know, we have documented increases in online misogyny starting to surge in 2011, which is right around the time that social media becomes, you know, a dominant way of communicating. And, and soon after that, smartphones, you know, that create a much more accessible way of having that social media in your hands all the time. So when we talk about how young boys or young men might be affected, mobilized to violence, a lot of that has to do with what gets normalized, legitimized, and amplified online in terms of misogyny and hatred of women, including the scapegoating of women as the source of their problems or the, or the person, the group they can blame for their problems.
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B
Yeah, it's interesting because some of these young men probably don't even know the word misogyny.
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A
Right. Of course not. Right. So like, and. And a lot of, you know, a lot of people, I use the word, I should probably define it here. Like, a lot of people use the word colloquially to mean hatred of women. And I use it not that way, but as the philosopher Kate Manne uses it, which is to say it is the law enforcement arm of the patriarchy. So if the patriarchy is a system of power distribution that distributes power and status unequally between men and women, and then it's upheld by two pillars. One is sexism, which is a set of beliefs and attitudes about inequality being baked in. Right. Like men and women are inherently less, you know, have different levels of capability. And so it should be men should get more power and status because they have more capacity. That's what the, you know, that's what sexism would say. And then misogyny, which is the law enforcement arm that polices gendered norms and expectations to keep everybody in their place. And that's where, you know, I like that definition of it because it. It explains why it can happen through women as well as through men. Like, women can be misogynistic, and it can also affect boys as well as girls. So girls and women experience more of it. But that kind of gender policing also comes through in a lot of homophobic bullying that boys and young men describe as kind of a constant of adolescence, of being taught to slice off pieces of themselves in order to fit into an acceptable box in which they're dominant and aggressive and stoic and don't ask for help and all the kinds of things that are hallmarks of masculinity in our culture. And so all of that is reinforced by online environments that are constantly telling young people what it is to be a boy or what it is to be a man and how you can achieve, like, the kind of success that they're supposed to. And a lot of those messages are deeply misogynistic against women as well.
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B
What's interesting to me that I've always had this question. Women, mothers tend to have the vast majority of influence on young boys,
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And
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we reproduce it in some way in young boys. What is it? I guess it's another book. What is it that women are doing? It's not blaming the victim here, but what are we doing in mothering that is producing this misogyny? I mean, because, you know, there's a whole. There's a whole. Maybe it's a myth. You know, there's a whole. You know, men. Men tend to talk about their mothers. I love my mother. My mother's great. It's all about love of mother. You know, mom is great. I mean, you have lots of celebration of these motherhood, but how does that become this anger? And that's. That's. That's the thing.
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A
I think that there are a few different things that are really important to talk about when we talk about the role of women. So one is there are women who are, you know, Phyllis Schlafly, like, you think of women who are, like, complicit, like, completely participating in movements that are trying to reduce women's rights, whether those are reproductive rights or, you know, are arguing in some sort of biblical patriarchy way for men to be head of households. Like, there are women who are just invested in a world in a kind of conservative family, traditional, religious, often view of their role as complementary but different from men. And so they support that approach. So I think there's first of all, whole cohorts of women that are like that and who can deliberately try to promote a view of women as subservient, as part of their God given or natural roles. I think what's much more common than that are women who unreflectively, you know, unreflexively pass on or adhere to traditional gendered roles in ways that might just reinforce the same thing, but without realizing it, they slip into it. I think this is just much more common among progressive women as well, who just because of the way the system works, because of the way that it's difficult to, you know, to have enough childcare coverage that's not outrageously expensive, women may step away from the workforce, they end up in lower paid situations, they end up taking on more of the household tasks. Things become uneven. I mean, this is, you know, there's a lot of common ways that you can model to a son that might present a view that shows women as not having equal roles or authority. So I think that's another way that it can happen. And then the third thing is I think just not talking with kids about what they're seeing online. Because even though moms do have a huge influence over their sons, they can't influence what they're not seeing or hearing or talking about. And I think when we're looking at what I hear from teenagers and young adults in terms of how much content they consume and see that is misogynistic, but also gender policing for boys. And so, you know, content that tells them that they should be taking testosterone or else they won't be attractive to girls, that they have to have this strong jawline, they have to be over 6ft tall. They should be considering shin lengthening surgery or jaw enhancing surgery. I mean like surgical interventions, but also pharmaceutical interventions to make themselves look more like the so called masculine ideal in order to be attractive to, to women. I think those messages are also ubiquitous. I mean, they come to boys within four minutes of being online. And according to the center for Countering Digital Hate, it's, you know, girls get pro anorexia and self harm content and even less time. I mean, so it's not like, you know, it's any better on the part of girls, but it's, but it's constant, ubiquitous. And I don't think that mothers in particular or fathers are doing a good job at all of talking about what kids see online, how violent porn, how ubiquitous violence itself. Constantly seeing things on feeds that are inappropriate or harmful or racist or misogynistic might be shaping in more subtle ways boys and young men's views of themselves and of others and of what a healthy relationship even looks like. For example.
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B
Well, how does this tie into feminism and the rejection of the F word that nobody, nobody, nobody wants to claim it, you know, and feminism is a, is a problem. Not for me, but I'm saying for a lot of people, they can't even say the word.
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A
Yeah, well, you know, a younger, like Gen Z, young women are the most likely of any generation of women to say they are feminist and, or support women's rights. So there is a growing support for feminism among young women. What's happening among young men, though, is the opposite. Gen Z men are now less likely than older generations to say they are feminist or support women's rights. And that in part is because of online narratives that constantly position feminism and women's rights more broadly as having gone too far. That's one phrase like it, you know, it's gone too far. It's, it's taking the rights of boys and young men that it's making it too difficult that it's time to stop promoting girls and women at the expense of boys and men. Like these types of narratives, or worse, in conspiratorial ways that feminists and Jews usually are conspiring to harm white men and to reduce the power of white men. And so that's a conspiratorial claim. And you'll see that in everything from the great replacement conspiracy theory to just more, you know, broadly anti feminist conspiracy theories that basically say there is an orchestrated effort to reduce the power of white men and feminists are part of the puppet masters who are doing it. And so you encounter that kind of stuff too, that has turned boys and men toward more anti feminism.
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B
Well, the, this, this feeds into the whole idea of that there's a crisis of masculinity, you know, that lots of people are talking about. And, and, and also it's interesting that most people, most people, most people in power today, the vast majority of people in power in government across all the industries are men. Yes. There's some women thrown in there, that's some women who got, got through. But the power is.
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A
Yeah, it's not, none of this is backed up by data or evidence. Right. It's like it's, and so it's not data driven, it's not evidence driven. It's all about emotions and feelings. And it's, you know, I Think what we see is that there, there are some real grievances. And this gets into the crisis of masculinity where, you know, the data is very, very high on boys. Disaffection, disillusionment, isolation and loneliness. And you know, men have three quarters of the deaths of despair. They have suicides, overdoses, alcohol fueled deaths are higher among men. There's a greater loss of traditional male labor market employment opportunities, a crisis of affordability that affects some of that for boys and men in a different way, in part because we've socialized them away from growth industries like caregiving and healthcare. You know, not at the doctor side, but like being a healthcare tech or a nurse, right. Which are really growth industries. So, you know, all that to say there are some real grievances. The problem is one, you know, girls are also lonely, right? They're. The loneliness data is just as high among girls and women, but it's boys loneliness that gets weaponized online. It's boys grievances that get channeled into scapegoating by people online who seek to either to kind of manufacture outrage or engineer those grievances into something bigger than they are. So this isn't some, you know, these are politicians, you know, who seek their votes, but also profiteers who seek their money online. And so people who are really profiting from their subscriptions, they're, you know, purchasing of products that are supposedly going to help them on the dating market, like stale gum that's supposed to strengthen your jawline and give you that lantern. I mean, it's ridiculous, but people pay for it. And, you know, courses on manipulating women, courses on getting more success on the dating market or getting wealthy by exploiting women, right? There's so much these sort of dating coaches and the dating academy tactics that are sold and packaged online, all of that positions women as someone to manipulate, someone to dominate, and ultimately someone to exploit. And it positions women as inherently manipulative themselves and transactional. So it says like, women are only going to want to date you if you look like this. And so this is how you get there. And also this is how you get them to be less confident. Like you deliberately undermine Gaslight and manipulate them into being dependent on you. Those kinds of tactics are being sold to them, you know, for like subscription prices. So there is a real crisis, I think of for boys and men. But there's, as I often say, like there's absolutely no reason why a crisis of manhood or masculinity would have become a crisis of misogyny. But that's what happened, you know, the legitimate grievances, instead of saying maybe we should be lobbying for structural responses. The answer, and particularly among conservative mainstream actors, has been to reframe this as, you know, things that we have to do in personal family conservative values like reduce absent fathers or just be a better father, be a better husband, you know, be a better provider, instead of saying, actually, maybe there's, maybe we deserve some apprenticeship programs for alternatives to college or maybe we deserve, you know, there might be structural solutions that create better pathways to adulthood. And those get dismissed. And so I think that's where we see a lot of this manipulation happening.
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B
Tell me about the connection between all this misogyny, which understands a cultural thing with right wing politics.
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A
Yeah, I think there's sort of two parts of that. One is authoritarianism itself, which is, you know, we've seen in, particularly in the far right or right wing authoritarianism like Victor or Bonn, but also Trump himself, you know, where you see attacks on gender and women's studies, gender studies as an, you know, a very instrumental part of early, early action. So the closure of women's studies and gender studies departments in Central European University was an immediate, you know, immediate part of what Orban did, like reducing the idea, the power, the empowerment and the knowledge that comes out of those departments is really important. And we've seen that in, you know, in curricular erasure, you know, across the country, but in universities that close those departments, as well as seeing them as too woke, as leftist, as radical and really disempowering what, you know, what they had originally set out to do. I think, though, you also see this legitimation and normalization. So the Pete Hegseth saying, you know, we're going to return to male standards in the military or, you know, he's not in the political sphere, but Mark Zuckerberg saying what we really need is more masculine energy in the corporate sector or even Trump just saying misogynistic things like quiet piggy to a journal journalist. These are, these are kind of, you know, just complete normalization of misogyny and of sexist ideas about, you know, about who's qualified to be asking a question or who's qualified to be in the military or the corporate sector. And, and I think that that has led to what we hear among young boys, young men and teenagers now that there's the society has become too feminized, it's too soft, it's too weak, it's sissified. Right. Those are kind of common narratives online. And I think that is very much reinforced by far right politicians who basically argue we're going to get back to a strongman era. We're going to get back to an era when men were rightly on top and when we weren't so weighed down by all this political correctness. And I think that's a typical way that this plays out in far right politics.
- [30:23]
B
The thing about when you, when you say that many people are saying that America's too feminized or it's, it's so utterly ridiculous because the problem we have is that it's actually too masculine. There's too much, there's too much masculine energy. Not that there's too much feminine energy.
- [30:42]
A
I know, it's an incredible thing. And the fact that like the quiet part though gets said out loud now is, is really shocking. Like that's the part that I just, you know, people might have thought that in the past, like maybe there were men who thought that, but the idea that they would just say it right out loud like. And that's not a, that's not a disqualifying statement for someone like Mark Zuckerberg to say we need more masculine energy in the corporate sector. I think 10 years ago there would have been a consequence for saying something like that. He would have had to apologize or show that he wasn't discriminating against women. And now it's celebrated as like, he's saying the real thing, right? He's saying it like it is.
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B
So the question would be to them is, so what is wrong with feminine energy?
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A
Yeah, well, according to, you know, what the online contexts say, feminine energy is soft, it's too emotional, it's not rational. And these are the kind of grievances that you hear online that it's not hard headed enough, that it's not going to make the hard decisions, it's not dedicated enough, not going to work too hard, too focused on self care, right. All of these kinds of like narratives that circulate. Um, all. But you also see, we see we're mapping gendered grievance narratives right now in my research lab. So I've just seen a whole list of them. And you know, you also see things like, you know, women are no fun, right? They can't take a joke, they're too serious. That you know, and you know, so there's a lot of that kind of their feminist killjoys, right? If you know that's a title of a book, this kind of argument that, you know, women, racial and ethnic minorities, the progressive left in general are all Just a bunch of triggered snowflakes who can't take a joke. And so what the far right has done is successfully positioned itself, particularly in youth culture, oddly enough, as the counterculture to that boring triggered mainstream. And so it's, you know, they use humor, they use satire, they use irony, they make a lot of fun of people, including women and LGBTQ folks. And that has really successfully persuaded a lot of young men to be a part of those types of scenes. And just everything's a joke. We're not going to take anything seriously, and anyone who does is just uncool.
- [32:55]
B
So I'm going to bring up something that's not too much in your book. I think you mentioned it. Jeffrey Epstein, first with. That is not just the sexual abuse that went on, but the fact that he cultivated all these very powerful men and there's a few women thrown in there. But for the most part, it's a bunch of very powerful men who really didn't need to do what they did. But it's that. I think it's. It shows you, I think, how much the backlash. The backlash is especially. Especially when they're. When there's. When Jeffrey Epstein said that he, a woman under 25, is. He was interested in.
- [33:44]
A
Yeah, no, exactly. I mean, that's. That is very much a part of online discourse in male supremacist spaces that uses the language of sexual market value. They call it smv, to determine a woman's scale on an attractability scale. They also do it for men, but started out around women and, like, 25 is one of the ages. They call, like, hitting the wall, like, you're no longer attractive. It's your. Your sexual market value starts to decline. So there is this almost pedophiliac component to, like, how young. I mean, Andrew Tate says he prefers young women, like 18, because they're more malleable, they're more manipulative. You know, you can have easier control over them.
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B
Right.
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A
So really gross and disgusting kind of reasons for wanting young women is not just. Not just, you know, a beauty standard that is ridiculous, but also a control, a desire for control and dominance over women who maybe don't have as much experience or as much ability to stand up for themselves yet. And so I think you see that you also see with the Jeffrey Epstein case. You know, I mean, I think a lot of what we're seeing right now in the pushback against feminism is a direct backlash to the MeToo movement. I mean, that's been pretty clearly documented. And so, you know, what we're seeing now, I think, is a moment, another wave of. A moment of potential accountability to elite men who have gotten away with horrific crimes, in this case against children for decades. And we are seeing some accountability. I mean, the arrest of, you know, the king of England's brother. Right. Like, you're getting to some pretty high level accountability in international contexts at least. But, but we're still not seeing that in the US and we're not really seeing. It's so much that's been unleashed that I think it's. It's overwhelming at the moment. And so. But it does reinforce some of the ideas of elite abuse that come up in things like QAnon as well.
- [35:59]
B
It's interesting that a lot of times the people around these people or people who are making excuses. Right. Talk about. I'm wondering about evolutionary biology. The idea that this is sort of, you know, wired into men to go for women under 25. You know, it's. It's part of the biological destiny.
- [36:24]
A
Yeah. I mean, this, you hear that a lot. This kind of biology. It's natural. Like that word natural comes up all the time. This idea that, you know, that men are naturally violent, that men are naturally driven to pursue women, that, you know, so there's a lot of justification for bad behavior based on what's supposedly hardwired biologically or is natural.
- [36:50]
B
Yeah. And also that, that. That men must have to have multiple sexual partners, that they have to spread their seed. Anyway, so what I want to ask now is what do we do? I mean, I mean, you present just an incredible amount of evidence about how bad things are, you know, in media, you know, and all it. The media is terrible. The messages that are being given, the way it's gender is being studied, the way violence is being studied. What do we do? I mean, what is it? What are we to do? I mean, how do. It's a knot.
- [37:32]
A
Yeah, there's. I mean, the good news is, I will say, like my book, to my surprise, to some extent, one of the biggest audiences who has received my book is what are known as the Men's Wellness World. Like the, this burgeoning community of men who are trying to forge change for a younger generation in particular. But there's also some younger ones, and there's dozens of these organizations now and podcasts and groups like Next Gen Men or the Good Men Project or A Call to Men. Right. Projects that are really working to either tackle issues of men's violence or of the lack of men's connection, their inability to form intimate friendships or maintain Them. So a guy named Mark Green who now runs a project in New York called Walking Talking Men, which just gets men out walking in Central park and talking to each other on a deeper level, the way that is more common for women to go walking with a neighbor or whatever, but less common for men. And so men get more and more isolated starting in adolescence and continuing on, they kind of slice off their intimate friendships, get more dependent on their partners, typically their wives, for that kind of connection. So, so one is just, you know, continuing to support these organizations that are led by men who are not leaving it up to women to do this, but are led by men to combat misogyny, to combat violence against women and their partners, but also forge different ways of breaking men out of this so called man box of culture that says they have to be dominant and aggressive and stoic and not ask for help. So that's one thing. And there's a big global initiative starting from an organization called Aquamundo in collaboration with Women of the World, which is a major global feminist organization with funding from the Christchurch Call Foundation. That is Jacinda Ardern's project after she stepped down, that I'm a part of it. I'm one of their, you know, 100 change makers who they're bringing together globally in two different places. And then a series of online events over the next two years to forge solutions across seven action tracks, which is includes sort of issues of young men, democracy and violence and political violence, but also includes like young men in education because educational attainment has gone way down for men, particularly at the post secondary level, where in the US there are now only 40% of college graduates. On my campus, it's less than that even. I think we're 57% female at this point. And so you start to see these real gaps. And so I'm heartened by the attention. Like Governor Newsom just, it's like Washington State, California, Maryland, and I think there's a fourth state that's putting forward bills or legislation or executive actions from the governors to tackle like sort of crises around men and boys, both with disaffection, disengagement, labor market, lack of participation. The number of them who are what are called no education, no training, like they're not in anything, they're just not even trying. They're kind of home video gaming, living with their parents. And so, you know, there's an increasing problem on that front. While we still have to center the fact that girls and women are the targets of much of the bad behavior that comes out of it. And so this isn't a zero sum game. We have to kind of address both things at once. So that's one set of things. The other thing is the kind of stuff that my lab does, which is try to do improve digital media literacy to help young people recognize and reject manipulative actions that are not in their interest. And that includes misogynistic influencers, but also other bad actors who algorithmically take advantage of them to, for whatever profit, for their votes or for their money, basically to weaponize what's going on in their lives and, and amplify it in ways that channel their disaffection into really harmful ideas. And so we try to intervene really early. We have a K to 6 program with digital media, media literacy, and then programs for older kids. And the last thing I'll say is I ask this question all the time to kids, middle school, high school, and college students who right now, at least once a week, I'm in a college classroom, not at my own institution, but I'm visiting right now a lot. And we're doing focus groups across the country with 18 to 24 year olds. And then one of the questions I always ask is, what do you think adults should be doing about the, these, you know, the challenges we've just been discussing? I also ask them, you know, to talk about something that they think adults don't know about their online worlds that they wish they did know. Those two things produce tremendous amounts of desire from young people for conversation about their online worlds in structured ways with adults who can help them navigate the violence they see, the harmful content they see. So they're afraid that they're just going to lose their phones to bans, to social media bans, to cell phone bans. And what they really want are places to discuss and process and learn how to reject, you know, even pressure from peers to watch a video that's harmful, which happens all the time in the playground or in the school bus. So those are some of the things that we advocate for that I think are not such heavy lifts.
- [42:58]
B
Right. So it, it's basically about teaching critical thinking skills when they're looking at media, you know, people ask, ask questions, why is this happening? Why are they doing this? You know, who's being, who's being, who's up, who's down?
- [43:12]
A
Yeah, I would say teaching critical thinking skills and also opening up dialogue about what they are seeing online and giving them space and places to process it because they're seeing it no matter what. And, you know, and realizing that you know, they're learning about sex education from watching porn that is three times as violent as it was 10 years ago, where the majority of online porn now focuses features things like choking and slapping and spitting and hair pulling. And so boys are learning, you know, boys are watching it more than girls, and they're learning about sex and sexual relations from harmful things that don't reflect what the majority of healthy relationships look like and don't necessarily reflect what their partner wants. And so then when they start having sex, they have. They do that, and girls don't want that. And so we're seeing that, you know, that girls will say. Women will say things like they feel like they have to participate in that because otherwise they're too vanilla and. But that it isn't what they wanted. And so. And then boys and young men are saying, well, they thought that's what they were supposed to do, for example. And so some of those disconnects are just like, who's going to tell them, right? Like, if it's not parents having those conversations, we should be having those conversations in health classes. We should be having those conversations in digital media literacy classes. Just about what, what is real and what isn't, what is a healthy relationship, not just what consent looks like, but also what, you know, rejection looks like, what pleasure looks like. These are things that kids are learning from harmful online content that I think we have an educational responsibility to engage with.
- [44:48]
B
Well, Cynthia, boy, you have done a lot of work.
- [44:52]
A
Thank you.
- [44:53]
B
Appreciate the conversation. So I'm going to let you go. Thank you so much.
- [44:58]
A
Great. Thanks for having me.
- [44:59]
B
Bye. Thank you. Cynthia Miller, address and thank you to our listeners for tuning in to another episode. From New Books Network, this is your host, Lillian Barger.
- [45:09]
A
Sam.