Richard Reeves

And so breaking down the gender stereotypes around occupations has now become a bit of an existential thing for the employment prospects of men and no longer just a sort of seminar nice to have.

I think one of the really most unfortunate turns recently has somehow to feel that to pay attention to men, to have some empathy for the position that men are in, to actually allow men to, quote, be men in ways that are positive, not negative, but without expecting them to somehow become androgynous, right?

Somehow the reaction to that has been to lean back into a more hyper-masculinity, as you say.

It's just this sort of almost cartoonish...

adolescent view of masculinity.

You know what I mean?

I sometimes think about, like, wow, what's all of this reminding me of, right?

And actually what it's reminding me of is not my 26-year-old son, to pick one of them, but my 16-year-old son.

And so I actually don't find the toxic, as I said, toxic masculinity is a very unhelpful term, but I do think there's something to the idea of maturity.

What does it mean to be a grown-up, to be mature?

And I think for men that is much more of a...

Social construction in some ways.

So what does it mean to be grown up rather than adolescent?

And so there's a bit of a glorying sometimes in the transgressiveness and boorishness that is much more associated with a young man, an immature man, a man in his puberty.

Like I was not as boring as...

when I was 14 as I am and I'm 56 because guess what?

I grew up and growing up is hard to do.

And again, I think that's a reaction to what was previously seen as a sort of squeezing out of any discussion of masculinity and sometimes a pathologization of any trait that seemed to be masculine.

And you did have a generation of young men who were probably a bit over it.

So my view is that what happened here politically and culturally is that a lot of young men were just