Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Are Men Toxic?
Transcript
- 0:03G'day humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
- 0:07Men need to do better.
- 0:13Some men definitely do need to do better.
- 0:15There's been a spate of violence against women and there's also been a national conversation sparked by a scandal involving one of Australia's big Australian rules football clubs, the Sydney Swans.
- 0:27I won't go into great details about it.
- 0:28If you're in Australia, you know it.
- 0:30If you're not in Australia...
- 0:31The general contours are that some players were in a hotel room that was being paid for by the club.
- 0:37They have apologised for breaching the club's standards insofar as they invited exotic dancers, shall we say, topless waitresses, some reports say.
- 0:48to the room.
- 0:49It's worth clarifying for international listeners that, not that this was prostitution, but just to be clear, sex work is not criminal in Australia.
- 0:59It's legal.
- 1:00So if you find yourself wondering, well, hang on, haven't they done something wrong?
- 1:04No, there's nothing wrong necessarily with paying for sex work if any of that had happened.
- 1:09That
- 1:12misbehaving in ways that were demeaning towards women and set a bad example for younger men, and B, the women have now levelled accusations at some of the players that there was some behaviour, some sexual behaviour that was non-consensual.
- 1:28No charges have been laid.
- 1:29I'm certainly not implying that anything like that actually went on.
- 1:33But it's a fast moving thing.
- 1:35We're recording this on Wednesday.
- 1:36By the time it goes to air in 36 hours time, all of this could have changed.
- 1:40The national conversation has erupted yet again in the problem of men, the problem of male role models, the problem of us not wrestling in an honest way with violence and misbehavior that men inflict on women.
- 1:55Ben Vassiliou is the CEO of Australia's foremost charity that helps adolescent males become better men.
- 2:05It's essentially a mental health outfit called The Man Cave, and it runs programs designed to prevent teenagers from turning into the kinds of men that we would not want them to be.
- 2:16And as such, Ben sort of wrestles with ideas of the manosphere and masculinity and what it means to be a good man in the 21st century.
- 2:22He sometimes cops flack from conservatives for supposedly preaching a softer, gentler vision of masculinity than some conservatives might like for the whole program being maybe a little bit too focused on boys being...
- 2:40socialized into being more in touch with their feelings and more scornful of what might be called toxic masculinity.
- 2:48But Ben is very thoughtful and open about the way that he wrestles with those things.
- 2:51He has a new book.
- 2:52It is called Better Man, Reclaiming Masculinity for Good.
- 2:57And he joined me in studio to talk about the challenges that young men face, uh,
- 3:03women's rights activists, how we talk about having this conversation and all else that goes into fostering positive visions of masculinity for young men.
- 3:12I hope you enjoy as much as I did, the one and only Ben Vasilian.
- 3:21I mean, we're in an environment right now where, you know, there's this scandal in Australia about the misbehaviour of men because of this football team, the Sydney Swans, where some of the blokes breached the code and they've apologised for inviting what are variously described as topless waitresses or exotic dancers to a hotel room that was paid for by the club.
- 3:45And so they did that and they've copped to that, but now the women have alleged that there was...
- 3:52some kind of sexual misbehaviour, but nobody's been charged.
- 3:55I think the investigation's still pending, right?
- 3:58Well, I mean, that's what police say when they don't have anything else to say.
- 4:02But, yeah, so we have no idea what the upshot of it will be.
- 4:07But it has sparked this conversation where even the captain of the team came out and said, you know, this holds up a mirror to all men, to all men in society.
- 4:21the Governor-General chimed in and talked about, like, the crisis of toxic masculinity in Australia and entrenched sexism in Australia.
- 4:29One of the legendary AFL writers, you know, wrote a column about how, you know, which was entitled, Guys, It's Us.
- 4:37Like, it's us.
- 4:37This is about men.
- 4:40And I sort of think when you're trying to reduce the incidence of jihadism,
- 4:53You don't blame all Muslims.
- 4:58If you want to do counter-terrorism, if you want to minimize violence and dysfunction in a community, the strategy is well known of what works.
- 5:06You win over the largest number of them as possible and you try to sideline and isolate the bad apples in order to get the maximum amount of buy-in.
- 5:16for your position.
- 5:18Do you not feel called into that action, though?
- 5:20Because there's something interesting in that for me is that I feel a sense of call to action through all of this.
- 5:28I feel like when the allegations hit around the Sydney Swans players at the hotel and I heard the commentary, there was a lot of me checking myself and saying, hold on a second.
- 5:40you know, this immediate instance, not all men, true, not all men will commit violence against women.
- 5:47However, it's all men's responsibility to set the cultural tone that we will weed out the bad apples.
- 5:54So for me, when I look at that, I read that.
- 5:55Are you worried that you're not weeding out the bad apples?
- 5:58I think we are.
- 5:59I think we are.
- 5:59I think we're setting a standard and a tone for what it means to be a man today, and that doesn't include what happened with the Sydney Swans.
- 6:06Like I don't look at that and see anything great about that at all.
- 6:10No.
- 6:11I don't look at that and think.
- 6:12But don't you feel you're already doing the maximum amount that you could reasonably be expected to do?
- 6:17Never.
- 6:18I mean, how else would you exert control over a bunch of young wolf heads who don't?
- 6:23want to get it on in a hotel room?
- 6:25Well, this is where we... What mechanism would you exert that?
- 6:26Well, this is where we go back to the cultural and the structural issues.
- 6:30What culture have we set that it's acceptable for them to go out after a game and get drunk, go back to a hotel room, allegedly there was drugs involved, and have women sex workers or strippers back to their room?
- 6:45Now, a number of those players are partnered or married.
- 6:48So for me, that crosses a boundary.
- 6:49Unless they're in an open relationship, that's up to them.
- 6:52But when we think about a football player, you know in Australia, when you sign up to become an AFL footballer, that that comes with a weight of cultural expectation around the expectations of boys and girls who are looking up to you.
- 7:06If you think that that is reasonable behaviour, whether you're caught or not, at 4am the day after a game, and I don't want to make this about football, but a week out from the AFL grand final, the sense of entitlement that you must carry, that you think that you can do that and get away with it before the biggest finals campaign that you've been through from a footy perspective really shirks me.
- 7:26But do you think you would do that?
- 7:29No.
- 7:29No.
- 7:29No, I don't think I would do it either.
- 7:31No, but I know...
- 7:32I can't even imagine doing it.
- 7:35So...
- 7:37But I have.
- 7:38Calling...
- 7:39I went to the strippers.
- 7:41I have been there.
- 7:41I've been that person.
- 7:43Like, I'm really open and honest about my journey.
- 7:45You hadn't signed an agreement that said that you're not allowed to do that and you weren't...
- 7:47It shouldn't be about the agreement.
- 7:48It should be the expectation of what I set for the people around me.
- 7:51I now don't...
- 7:52I've done things that I don't agree with anymore.
- 7:54I think we can mature and we can evolve.
- 7:56Yes.
- 7:56But when the conversation happened around that, you also have to frame it up.
- 7:59For those not in Australia, we had the week before we had a report from the eSafety Commissioner who in 2025 received 3,000 reports of sextortion, of which 85% were boys and young men.
- 8:12And that's just what was reported, 3,000.
- 8:14They're the ones that, you know, actually reported it.
- 8:16We had a number of incidents coming out of alleged sexual assaults and rapes of young teenage girls, some of them linked to private schools.
- 8:25We had misogyny and sexism cases coming out of some public schools.
- 8:29We had the Sydney Swans debacle, I'll call it, and then it was followed up by the fact that on average since the start of last year we've been losing four women and children to violence every four days.
- 8:40So there's this cultural moment that's happening in Australia where we're saying...
- 8:44We know that the early days that can lead to some of this extremist behaviour is around not calling out your mates when you see bad stuff happening, particularly around sexual harassment or the treatment of women.
- 8:58So there's like all of this is building up.
- 9:00And, yes, predominantly women, but more and more men are saying, this is just not the standard that we want to live by anymore.
- 9:07That trend, I mean, that terrible trend is...
- 9:12suggests to me that whatever we've been doing for the past 20 years is not working very well.
- 9:17Or is it exposing more?
- 9:19It strikes me that what we've been trying for the past 20 years is the men have to stop killing women mantra or men need to do better.
- 9:28Yeah, we've got to go beyond that.
- 9:29We have to go beyond that.
- 9:30I mean, you might feel called in by that.
- 9:33It is very difficult for the average bloke, and I include myself in this, to...
- 9:42to perform the psychological jujitsu that is required to squeeze through the looking glass into the upside-down, topsy-turvy, Mad Hatter's universe in which I feel genuinely, personally, morally responsible for actions I would never do, have never thought about doing, have never done and do not understand, committed by people.
- 10:05And I'm not talking about any specific actions here because we don't know about the particular case.
- 10:08Of course.
- 10:09But as a general, you know, all of the, in totality, the misbehavior of males by people I have nothing in common with apart from my sex.
- 10:19That is not generally how we strategize counter extremism.
- 10:24Yeah.
- 10:24Right.
- 10:25You know, you try to win over the largest number of Muslims and isolate the jihadists.
- 10:29We should be trying to win over the largest number of Muslims.
- 10:32by understanding what is it about particular subcultures where a hyper-masculinized persona is glorified and how do we manage those subcultures.
- 10:47You know, the not all men thing, I know it's irritating to a lot of people when men respond by saying, oh, not all men.
- 10:55Yeah.
- 10:58But it's not an illogical, like I understand that it's politically incorrect to say it,
- 11:04But if a person said, you know, I don't know, Indigenous people commit more crimes per capita than white people, and I said, well, not all Indigenous people, he'd be like, yeah, fair enough.
- 11:19That's true, actually.
- 11:20We treat different groups differently.
- 11:22And men, I think part of the dysfunction of the manosphere is a reaction to,
- 11:28to this sense that we're the only group who gets treated, we're the only group who it's legitimate to collectively blame, we're the only group who it's legitimate to demean in polite society.
- 11:40You can be in an office and a female co-worker can roll her eyes and say, bloody stale, pale males, fucking men.
- 11:47That's fine.
- 11:47That's not an HR reportable incident.
- 11:49Imagine a man saying that about a woman.
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- 12:25Yeah, I think the bit that I can agree with you on is, you know, I might have come a long way in 20 years.
- 12:31My life is very different now and I live a life of privilege, but I still live out in the suburbs with my mates, my brother-in-laws, my cousins, my uncles.
- 12:39I get it.
- 12:40I get it.
- 12:41I actually sit around the dinner table talking about this stuff.
- 12:45with my brother-in-laws, with my mates, and they're not out there being violent men.
- 12:50And they also feel pushback.
- 12:52They feel like, I feel like they're telling us that we're all caught, that all men are bad.
- 12:56And when I dig into that and have the conversation about the fact that they're not being violent or they're not being coercively controlling or they're not doing, but what sense of responsibility do you feel like you have?
- 13:08And what generally comes from them is like, I'm trying to do better in my life and I'm trying to raise good kids.
- 13:13So I get that.
- 13:14I absolutely understand that.
- 13:16And I do understand that grievance is pushing boys and men into the manosphere.
- 13:21Absolutely it is.
- 13:23We have to get better at talking with people.
- 13:26boys and men, as opposed to at them.
- 13:29So I hear you, I see you, I feel you.
- 13:32If I walk into a group of boys or young men and start with all the things that are wrong with them or all the things that people say that are terrible about them, how many walls do you reckon go up?
- 13:41Every single one of them.
- 13:42And the minute I say that, people will come for me.
- 13:44Well, you can't just give in to the comfort of men.
- 13:48We're constantly making men feel safe.
- 13:51We have to push past the discomfort.
- 13:53How the hell do you think we're going to get any significant change or have an open conversation if you don't actually meet boys and men where they're at?
- 14:01I'm not saying justify any terrible behaviours, but people come for me when I say that.
- 14:05Meet boys and men where they're at.
- 14:06Oh, well, you're just enabling men and you're just making them feel comfortable.
- 14:11Now is not the time to make men feel comfortable.
- 14:13Okay, well, sorry, having worked with...
- 14:16hundreds of thousands of teenage boys at the man cave and been on the front line for 20 years, if you walk in on a deficit base, particularly in a prevention style landscape, you will be met with walls and the engagement is so difficult.
- 14:29The barrier to entry to have a strong conversation about what it means to be a man in a really positive way is really, really difficult.
- 14:36So in that sense, I agree with you.
- 14:38I get it.
- 14:38There's so much heat in this topic right now.
- 14:41There's not a bunch of men standing out there saying, we don't want to talk.
- 14:46We're not open to talking.
- 14:47We're not going to talk about this.
- 14:48I mean, there might be, and that would be a problem.
- 14:50But often I guess I just want us to have a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer when it comes to why men might be defensive.
- 14:59Yes, I like that.
- 15:00Often I'll talk to very...
- 15:04I mean, I guess I don't have a good term for this type of activist, so I'll just call her a woman's rights or him a woman's rights activist because there's a lot of virtue signaling from guys on this as well, that will say like men have to have the conversation and they have to stop being defensive and they have to stop putting walls up when we try to talk about male misbehavior against women.
- 15:27And all of that is true, but I suspect that part of what they actually want is for men to have the conversation that they want men to have, not the conversation that is going to be constructive as a real exchange of ideas.
- 15:44What they want the men to say is all men need to do better.
- 15:49What they don't want men to say is how do I do, like, I don't think I can do any better than just be a good person in my family and call out, you know, bad ideas.
- 16:03And I don't, and I frankly resent that.
- 16:06the double standard of the way that you get to talk about men that I would never talk about women in that way, that it's now become okay and, you know, to wear the punching bag.
- 16:19They don't want to hear that.
- 16:20They're like, why are you being so defensive?
- 16:22Well, you need to have the conversation.
- 16:24Well, which conversation?
- 16:25They need to have the conversation that the women's rights activists want them to have.
- 16:28They can't have their own conversation.
- 16:29Which conversation, so this is the bit though, if you ended that part at, okay, so they want us to have the conversation and then stop there and just stop in terms of thinking about what people think you want to have the conversation and have your own conversation.
- 16:44That is the bit that I'm interested in.
- 16:46Why does it have to then be infiltrated by what others think you should be having the conversation about?
- 16:52If people say, I think men need to be having a conversation about whatever the subject is in their worlds.
- 16:59And thank you.
- 16:59I will.
- 17:00I feel called to do that.
- 17:01I don't have a conversation in my life.
- 17:03Absolutely.
- 17:03But the infiltration of other people's expectations of what the conversation should be like.
- 17:08Because what that looks like is, and I've absolutely copped it before, is men need to step in and do the work.
- 17:16Men need to lead this work.
- 17:17Men need to do the work.
- 17:18Yeah.
- 17:18And I step in and I lean and I try and do the thing and I do it based on evidence and collecting practice wisdom from all the experts and all the different bloody gendered studies.
- 17:28And it's not like that.
- 17:29Oh, no, you can't say that.
- 17:31Oh, no, no, you can't do it like that.
- 17:33Okay.
- 17:33Hold on a second.
- 17:33Hold on a second.
- 17:35I'm trying, I'm doing my best, I'm learning, I'm listening, but ultimately you're asking us to do the work.
- 17:41And the more that you tell men not like that, or it's not perfect, or it should be more based like this, the more of us are going to step away.
- 17:48Whether you like that or not, that is the truth.
- 17:50It's not about making men comfortable.
- 17:52It's allowing men the space to have the messy conversations.
- 17:56This is the thing that we do when we work with boys.
- 17:59Not every single conversation we have with boys is completely politically correct.
- 18:03Most of them are messy.
- 18:04And we allow that.
- 18:05We don't immediately course correct.
- 18:07We call our team facilitators for a reason.
- 18:09They're there to facilitate conversation.
- 18:12They're not there to course correct.
- 18:13Yes, we will hold boys accountable if it is wrong.
- 18:16You know, there's very, very clear lines and boundaries on what's wrong or right.
- 18:20But if it's messy and it's a bit shitty and it's not something that you'd expect, let's dig into that and find out why.
- 18:26Like, why does that boy think like that?
- 18:27What's going on for him?
- 18:28Let's understand that.
- 18:29Is there an opportunity for education?
- 18:31Maybe.
- 18:31Is there an opportunity for his other mates to chime in and get a bit of group conversation going?
- 18:36I just think that this constant opposite of thinking what others think that you should do and your ability to receive evidence, your ability to receive practice wisdom, knowledge.
- 18:44Your ability to amplify your own lived experience and use that is being, I suppose, countered by what we should say and what has to be said.
- 18:53Okay.
- 18:53Thank you for your advice.
- 18:54Thank you for your wisdom.
- 18:55And thank you for your evidence.
- 18:57I'm going to choose to do this in the best way that I can.
- 19:00And I think that that is okay.
- 19:02Yeah, yeah.
- 19:03It's a good point.
- 19:03I mean, like why you're – this whole thing about making boys and men feel uncomfortable, it depends on what they're uncomfortable about.
- 19:11I mean, that's the name of the show, Uncomfortable Conversations.
- 19:13I want people to get uncomfortable by being more nuanced, by challenging themselves, by being more empathic towards ideas that they hadn't considered before.
- 19:24Yes.
- 19:24Right.
- 19:25I don't want them to feel uncomfortable because I'm forcing them to recite some orthodoxy that they feel obliged to pretend that they believe in.
- 19:37And I feel like that is often what's being asked.
- 19:41of young men to get uncomfortable.
- 19:45You know, I remember a conversation that I had when this topic was in the news a lot about 18 months ago, I think, when a woman was saying that the way to, that, you know, it's important for men to get uncomfortable with the reality of,
- 20:04that what begins as a sexist joke ends with controlling a girlfriend's finances, putting a tracker on her car, and ultimately raping and killing her.
- 20:17That that is part of the same continuum, and you have to sit with that discomfort.
- 20:22And I thought, maybe...
- 20:26Maybe you have to sit with that discomfort or it's also possible, and there's a lot of research around this, which you might know better than I do, that the ameliorative hypothesis, which is what sociologists call this claim, this claim that a little bit of bigotry is on the same continuum as extreme violence and that the way to address the extreme violence is to make the little bit of bigotry taboo and clamp down on it really hard.
- 20:56That's actually not borne out by the research.
- 20:59That isn't the best way to address violence, to go around like a game of whack-a-mole, trying to erase every sexist joke that people tell in a pub by wagging your finger at them and telling them that that's on the same continuum as murder.
- 21:14That if you're expecting, if you're demanding that a man feel uncomfortable...
- 21:21by agreeing with your claim that those two things are part of the same spectrum, then all you're doing is shoving a belief down his throat and then forcing him to sit with it in discomfort.
- 21:35Maybe.
- 21:35What he should be doing is getting uncomfortable by...
- 21:38I mean, what we ought to want is for a genuine exchange to happen where the guy says, I don't think there is a link between telling a sexist joke and rape.
- 21:47Right.
- 21:48Well, so two things.
- 21:50Hold on, because there is actually, there is evidence that suggests it can be a continuum, but not for everyone.
- 21:57That's the distinction, is just because it can happen from bigotry to sexual violence, it can be a continuum.
- 22:06There's actually research out there.
- 22:07By definition, it's a continuum retroactively in the sense that nobody who is persistently violent towards women is,
- 22:16will have started without prejudice towards women.
- 22:19Right.
- 22:19So it's almost like...
- 22:22But that doesn't mean that there's a causal relationship between having retrograde ideas about women and becoming violent towards women.
- 22:30And even if there were, it certainly doesn't suggest, and the research doesn't suggest...
- 22:36that the cleanest way to target and prevent violence against women is to go all the way back to the beginning and try to improve people's attitudes towards women.
- 22:46It's one of the strategies.
- 22:48So the first thing for me is, I get where you're coming from, but don't we want to live in a world where there just isn't sexist jokes?
- 22:55Like we can joke in other ways.
- 22:57Well, it depends on what the price is, right?
- 22:59If the price is that in that world, I mean, I would like that because I would just choose to associate myself with people who don't think that sexist jokes are funny.
- 23:12That's my choice.
- 23:15Do I want to...
- 23:17live in a world that's sufficiently authoritarian and group thinky.
- 23:21No, I don't want that either.
- 23:21That one person's definition of what a sexist joke is can be imposed on the way that everybody else lets off steam.
- 23:29Yeah.
- 23:30No.
- 23:30So in that sense, I do want a world in which there's sexist jokes.
- 23:33In the same way that I want to live in a world in which people can do Nazi salutes and people can believe all kinds of horrible things.
- 23:41I think that's the price worth paying for...
- 23:44not living in a world where we're constantly looking over our shoulder and worried about whether or not what we're saying is okay with the thought police.
- 23:51There has to be a middle ground.
- 23:53I don't want to live in that world where a Nazi salute is okay.
- 23:57I want to live in a world... Not okay, that it exists.
- 24:00It exists.
- 24:01It's a thing that a person will do.
- 24:02We already live in that world.
- 24:04Yeah.
- 24:04We already know it exists.
- 24:05But I do want to live in a world where we believe, generally as a society, that that's not an okay thing.
- 24:12The threat on the continuum is really...
- 24:13Sorry, just to clarify.
- 24:14Your question was not do I want to live in a world that regards sexist jokes as not okay.
- 24:19Your question was do I want to live in a world with sexist jokes, period.
- 24:21Yes, exists.
- 24:22I'm happy to live in a world where the majority of people agree that sexist jokes are not okay.
- 24:27And I think we already live in that world.
- 24:29Mm-hmm.
- 24:31I'm not crazy about a world in which we've managed to eliminate all jokes.
- 24:36Nor do I think that every man that makes a sexist joke is going to go on to become a rapist or sexually assault someone.
- 24:43That's just not true at all.
- 24:44It isn't.
- 24:45But this is the extremity of the conversation.
- 24:48G'day humans.
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