Carole Hooven, Ph.D.

It's about what's happening with masculinity and

I'm really interested in the cultural narrative.

Here's where I also cry.

And that's how I knew I needed to write a book, because why am I crying about masculinity and men being denigrated, which I get very upset about that.

I wanted to really understand what was happening culturally, why we are in a place where masculinity is denigrated.

not valued, and also to explore the interaction between biology and genes and hormones and what's happening culturally.

Why is it that these cultural changes that we've had are affecting men in ways that are different from how they're

affecting women, like economic changes, men are falling behind in education, for instance, and what's happening in schools and why are schools maybe less hospitable to typical male ways of behaving than typical females.

So I really want to

dive into that intersection and to explore some of the questions that you were asking today about aggression.

And we were talking about men's need to compete and how it's different from women and how that plays out socially.

So I want to explore those issues really with an eye to understanding what's called the masculinity crisis.

And there's a kind of backlash going on right now, which I think is interesting.

in that men and their needs and their right to be masculine, I think, has been under attack.

And now I think some men are feeling freer to be more masculine, I would say, today.

What I want to explore is the denial of sex differences and how that plays out socially.

Because if you believe that men and women are equally interested in engineering, then you don't believe in sex differences.

You don't believe there are

important, meaningful differences between the sexes that play out in society that are not all the result of the patriarchy, say.

Certainly there are social influences and that all matters, but there's this denial of real differences that we need to grapple with socially.