#85. Men's Health Beyond the Stereotypes - Associate Professor. Gareth Terry

The episode explores men's mental, sexual, and reproductive health, challenging stereotypes and examining how masculinity influences health behaviors and decisions. Guest Associate Professor Gareth Terry, shares insights from his research on mens identities and how they intersect with things like reproductive health, disabilities, and the social construction of masculinity. We discuss the nuances of the child-free movement, societal perceptions of masculinity, and innovative research ideas in disability and neurodivergence. With the help of questions from our followers, Gareth Terry explores societal pressures, gender dynamics, and future research directions, offering insights into social constructs and personal identities.

https://www.massey.ac.nz/massey/expertise/profile.cfm?stref=775822

Transcript

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Hello, hello, and welcome back to the Smooth Brain Society. uh When we talk about men's mental health, the conversation often stops at the gym or the doctor's office or things like the manosphere. But what about the stuff we don't talk about? The complex psychology behind reproductive choices, the reality of sexual health, and how masculine identities actually change the way men experience illness and mental health. Today on the podcast, we are joined by someone who has spent his career exploring these exact intersections. Gareth Terry is an associate professor in health psychology at Massey University. His research doesn't just look at health as a set of symptoms, he looks at how men's lives, their bodies, and their identities overlap. From his work on the psychology of vasectomies and reproductive responsibility, to his recent insights on how men navigate disability and experiences of rehabilitation. He is here to help us peel back the layers on men's mental, sexual and reproductive health. Gareth, welcome to the Smooth Brain Society. Thanks for having me. And uh just a little forewarning, none of my co-hosts are available today. So Beth is submitting a PhD thesis, Farrell's at a conference. So it's just going to be myself and Gareth. And we put out an Instagram story a couple days ago asking you all for your questions for Gareth. uh that's you all are going to be my co-hosts today. So that will be great and exciting. And we haven't done this in a while. Garrett has kindly accepted to be a volunteer to receive audience questions about men's mental and reproductive health. So let's go. All right. So Garrett, first things first, we always start off with a little bit of a background into our guests and origin story, if you will. So if you could give us all a bit of a idea of and background of like how you got into the field and what you do now. um Yeah, I mean I am I came from working-class family. I'm like the third person in the family to have gone to university. It took me three shots to get in. So I tried and failed and tried and failed. And then the third one landed. And I started up at the University of Auckland. So in my experience of sort of being able to manage what education is and means and all of that sort of stuff, I was kind of primed for that by that stage. It took me a few years to get to there. My dream at that point in time was I wanted to be a police psychologist. So I wanted to work sort of in, not just in the forensic space, but also supporting cops with some of the work that do, but also people that were victims of crime and all of those kinds of things. And so that was definitely the direction that I was heading. And then in my final year, I did a paper with now Professor Jimmy Brown and Professor Tim McCrena, who sort of unpacked some of the ways in which psychology could be understood differently. So it was framed as a critical psychology paper and that paper blew my mind. I kind of was left reeling a little bit so much so that I didn't move into postgraduate for a couple years afterwards, moved to Taiwan, lived there for a couple of years teaching English, came back from there and started my postgraduate work being supervised by Ginny. And so I my honors, my masters and my PhD being supervised by her and my masters and PhD supervised by Nicola Gaby. uh So, you know, that's kind of my trajectory. in terms of the work that I was doing, honors level project exposed me to ah some of the issues and concerns that Jenny had, which were around the ways in which particularly in relational context, what sex looks like after people have been together for a while, so long-term relationships and kind of the shifts and adjustments that people might need to make in terms of how they think about sex, what sex looks like, all those kinds of things. was sort of, because I was the ostensibly straight guy, I was sort of loaded up with that group of people. So I ended up interviewing 15 men, which is a big bonus project. Thanks, Jenny. uh talking to them about their long-term relationships. And so that kind of got me into the kind of space and because of the topic area, I started exploring theory and ideas about men and masculinities to sort of intersect into that to make sense and a lot of that sort of stuff. while I was broadly unpacking sexuality, heterosexualities in particular, men and masculinities became part of that sort of package. So then I was talking to someone uh coming near the end of that, thinking about a new research project for my masters because I was quite keen to continue. I was really excited at that point in time by the kinds of things that have been produced, the kinds of that were possible. This is all qualitative work and I think that's something which I probably need to emphasize pretty early on. Qualitative research has been kind of the core of what I do and how I do. health psychology. So that might not necessarily be the experience of many people that do psychology, but for me was like that's all I was doing for research. Research is being quantitative occasionally, but largely because I'm supporting somebody or I've been engaged in a project where I'm adding something into it. But certainly qualitative research defines all of my work. So talking to this friend, unpacking what I'd already done, and he was like, well, what about men that don't? have sex or choose not to have sex. At that point in time there wasn't a really strong sort of um articulation of things like asexuality, particularly in terms of identity. It was beginning to take shape and certainly the internet at that stage was providing opportunities and community for people to talk about being asexual. And I was kind of interested in more than that. um Anyway, I was kind of interested in why would men who are ostensibly, know, the idea of men is that they're always wanting sex. know, that's out there as a sort of a social idea. What about men that choose not to? And how could that be disruptive or challenge some of the stereotypes and ideas about... and so interviewed a bunch of men that had chosen to be celibate for non-religious reasons for the most part and how they made sense and packaged that together as part of who they were, why it was important to them to make that kind of choice. I think coming into my PhD I I had been married for a period of time at that stage. I've been exposed to literature around ah how reproductive choices are often governed by social forces to some extent. So they might feel like individual choices. They might feel like something that we have inside our bodies. But to a large extent, they can be defined by social expectations and relational expectations, all of that sort of stuff. And uh so my partner and I were talking about the issue of not having had someone that looked like. so as part of that, were thinking about what a vasectomy would look like for me. And around that period of time, I was coming to the end of my masters and I saw a TV show with a comedian who went under the knife on camera kind of thing, had a vasectomy, talked through it. It was largely sort of an investigative journalism kind of thing, but with a light sort of touch, which is often how these sorts of topics are discussed. And I kind of thought that's what I can do. can, you know, not just see an individual sort of experience, but sort of unpack what it means for a bunch of men. uh And including the possibility of talking about men who had chosen to have vasectomies before they had children. So they didn't have children, didn't want children, had a vasectomy, what I call having a pre-vasectomy uh in my research. And so then I put out a call for um participants and that kind of landed uh my PhD in kind of an operating space. uh I didn't expect the response that I got um from my masters. I had like nine people agree to be participants, which is still okay for a qualitative project um when you're talking about people's experiences and stuff. The doctoral staff I had. people showed interest from television news, from radio news. The word spread very quickly and I was quite surprised by how much interest there was. It ended up with over 300 men responding to my cultural research and then had to sort of filter them down. I wasn't expecting to get as many men that had chosen not to have children as I did. So I ended up with 14 participants from just that group alone and then a bunch of participants who were in sort of a typical um group who ah had had kids and wanted and felt like their family was complete and wanted in that particular journey. Yeah, so that kind of took me into that particular space. Finished my PhD, cobbled together jobs for a period of time, um lots of research work, but also teaching kind of gigs, and then moved to the UK for three years to do uh a postdoc kind of experience. So I was at the Open University University for two years and then working out at the University of West of England for a year. Came back to New Zealand off the back of a job at AUT where I was working in the Centre for Person Centres Research and what I was doing became significantly different at that point in time. My qualitative expertise and my knowledge in that particular space became the currency for that job and so I was not doing reproductive health stuff anymore. I shifted into uh talking about people's experiences largely of rehabilitation and how people can live and be well in the context of chronic illness or following injury or anything like that. And so became much more informed by disability theory and um those kinds of sense makings around bodies and what bodies look like. So the shift from sort of reproductive orientations to people's bodies, particularly men's bodies, to focusing on the ways in which know, bodies can change and evolve in relation to all sorts of things. And so that sort of carried me through for a number of years. And then I'm sort of in a new phase. So I've only been at Massey University for a couple of years now, 2 and a bit And sort of coming home to being a health psychologist or a health psychology researcher is probably the better framework because you can't be a psychologist unless you're, you know, registered in all of those places. and hoping seeing some of the intersections between my older work and kind of my current work and looking for new possibilities in that kind of space. So I've been exploring both threads and it'd be kind of nice to see what can be done with some sort of sense of coordination. that's really, really fascinating. um I guess there's so many places where we could start, but I think I'll start off with one of the very broad questions, which I got a couple of different times, which was there were there were all around sort of. Why should we care about men's mental health? Are there different approaches or should we be approaching men's mental health differently to women's mental health? and sort of around. So I'm going to group them all as one and sort of think about on the wider picture when you went into all this work. Are the approaches sort of different? Are the responses sort of different? Are there things which we need to think about, which we don't? And overall, why should we care? I guess. Yeah, and these are great questions, right? think one of the things that often, when often these kind of questions come up, they're set up in a way which frames, you know, it is in an oppositional sort of way, men's mental health versus women's mental health. So there's a couple of things I want to add into the mix here, just to layer it out once early. um The way I understand men and masculinity, masculinities, is that masculinities are multiple, right? The expressions of being masculine manifest in different ways and largely how I understand that and how I frame it with my research is that masculinity is constantly being done. It's not necessarily something that is inherent to us. um And certainly women can be masculine and perform masculinity in various ways. certainly, and again, have to sort of caveat this thinking broadly if we're thinking in terms of cis bodies and the ways in which different identities can be picked up and transformed into lived experience and all that sort of stuff play up differently in different contexts. So that's the first. And the other thing that I would sort of want to layer in pretty early on is that there is more... within group difference than between group difference. So I would argue that the differences between men are greater than the differences between men and women. Different kinds of men have different kinds of experiences. There's all sorts of ways in which men might experience marginalization, uh but also experience privilege in the social context that we're in. And so how that manifests, what it looks like is different. talking about men's health or men's mental health, this is possibly not going to be the most satisfying answer. But it is a tricky thing to be playing with when you're thinking about the ways in which men's mental health might operate in relation to a large number of In saying all of that, I do have, uh there's an evidence of there being sort of a dominant idea of masculinity that sort of sits there and we all orient to men and women and others. And so that's something that Raymond Connell calls hegemonic masculinity. And that's the of the winning style of masculinity that operates. And that can be the winning style at the local level, regional level, national level, and global. So there are different kinds of dominant masculinities that are out there. And we're sort of all answerable uh to that, even if we've got a quite a different kind of masculine expression, um we're answerable to that kind of dominant masculinity to some extent. um That's kind of key, think, to understanding some of the mental health stuff. If someone doesn't feel like they can relate to that dominant idea of masculinity, or someone doesn't feel like they uh live up to that dominant idea of masculinity, that can shape some ideas around ourselves and how we live that out and how that impacts things like health and mental health and all of those kinds of things. So that's kind of just something to start. There are absolutely a multitude of different ways in which men and masculinity has been theorized. Some of it's very individualistic and it focuses on the core experience of sort of what someone... trigger someone's mental health and all that sort of stuff through to, you know, ideas of sort of ideology and how they shape masculinity. And again, in that case, it might be a singular form of masculinity. So we all ascribe to some degree or another to just this one kind of masculinity and we might fit on a scale in relation to it. So it might be more strongly masculine and masculinity sort of very defined in any distance from that creates a degree of strain. And then you have the kind of approach which I, which I sort of think is much more useful in explaining some of the stuff that's out there and that we're all performing uh a form of uh masculine identity as men, whatever that looks like. And that performance sometimes um jars with the expectations within society, jars with other people's expectations of masculinity, and that can cause a crisis for a person. um And that can layer in potential risks to things like mental health. uh So I don't know if that's answering your question. I mean, I mean, the question was a bit loaded, to be fair. um One point which you mentioned was masculinities sort of being different at different levels. And I guess I was just thinking about how sort of. Masculinities or like the stereotype masculinities of certain places aren't the same as others. We often see the joke of. Americans being like, he gay or European online because of like what clothes they wear, how they behave or things like that is what I'm saying. So how do you in all of this sort of diversity coalesce around certain specific ideas of masculinity? I guess the same question comes from femininity as well. But we're talking, speaking about that. Yeah. I think this is one of the things where we build up identities often in relation to others. And so I think that's a really important characteristic. so often it's not necessarily we don't think about what we are like or how masculine we want to be. If you ask someone what's important to you about masculinity or your masculinity, it'd very hard for them to unpack that unless they've done a great deal of thinking about it. someone that has had lived experience of not being masculine at all to being masculine might have unpacked that really, really well. But for um many cis men, that's never something they've thought about in any great depth. And so, you know... often we compare ourselves with others as a consequence of that. And so your example with the European thing, kind of like it sets up the other, right? It sets up someone that we can contrast against and we can slightly disparage, we can make jokes about all of those kinds of things. And that's a big part of how we make identity. And that's kind of fundamental to social psychology, the comparison of in groups, now groups and all of that sort of thing. And I just think that the in groups are smaller than we think they are. uh You know, so what how we construct a masculinity in relation to the people that are immediately around us and how we construct a masculinity in relation to the sort of mixed layers out so, you know advertising media and all of those kinds of things shape experience overall and so those uh There is although I'm not I'm not suggesting it's all up to grabs because I don't think that it is uh I think that we we we find our place and we recognize that it's masculine in relation to people around us. And for men in particular, think other men more than women. uh how we learn to find ourselves in a particular space and understand ourselves as having measured up or being masculine and all that kind of stuff. There's a lot of sort of stereotypes about the way, and these aren't just stereotypes, they're very lived experience for a lot of women, that sometimes women's bodies and women's relationship with women uh are sort of secondary to the approval that uh men get from other men. And so the ways in which that plays out in heterosexual context, particularly for younger men. I was just listening to someone unpacking one of the biographies of Russell Brand, for instance, and just how fundamental to his early development as a teenager was other young men's approval. so, depending on who the men are in our lives and depending on the men that we see and all those kinds of things, they shape who we are and what we can do and the kind of performances that we think we can live up to. I never really was invested in my dad's expression of masculinity. Sorry, my stepfather's probably a better expression. I might have watched things like John Wayne movies and Clint Eastwood and all that sort of stuff. And that shaped kind of a particular version of masculinity. That definitely didn't shape my experience of being a guy growing up. I had different sort of measures. Although my stepfather's expectations of me were probably shaped by some of those sorts of ideas. And so we kind of figure our way through that, these different sort of trajectories of people expecting certain things from us and us performing them in different ways. And memory plays a huge part in sort of keeping that. So being consistent, you know, is an idea that we have being, um you know, unique and whole and sort of centralized around a particular sense of self. That kind of holds us together to some extent. But meanwhile, we're still just know, largely just feeling our way around and making sense of the world around us based on the tools that are available to us. Yeah, I guess I guess the one one more broad question than I promise we'll go into like more specific stuff um is sort of the idea of who creates these sort of ideas of masculinity. I mean, in the sense that I can see it from someone's perspective, they might just go. Men have themselves to blame for this. it comes into like this bigger thing of thinking of, yeah, how do these create? How do these change? And I guess it comes back to the very first question of do you treat men's and women's men, men to and therefore like sexual reproductive health and everything slightly differently in the psychological context? Yeah, absolutely. oh And a lot of what I do is about translating some of the way these kind hidden ideas about how... things are constructed and produced and all that sort of stuff to what we count as individual psychology, right? How does it, how is it located within us and how do we become me? How do I become I? And inflict that with all of those kinds of things. You know, I, just to come to the last part of the question, I think, you know, those same kind of pressures exist for femininity, right? And so it's all about us jarring up against each other or flowing into each other as possibly a better way of doing that in terms of making sense. of that. I've lots of friends over the years that have been women, despite the rhetoric that can't happen. And that's going to inevitably shape uh who I am and what I do and the kinds of things that I think and the kinds of ideas that I'm exposed to. One of the other things that's really important about a lot of those women is that they're really strong, capable, wonderful people who... You know have been willing to challenge me at various points in time and that shaped my experience of being a guy as well I haven't necessarily taken that as something to resist um Whereas many men might particularly if the approval is loaded up towards other men, you know that kind of shape people different and becomes sort something that they need to challenge rather than embrace m Sorry back to you or the first part of your question. Sorry. I may have got tangled up I guess the very first thing I said was like, who started this creation and you can't... yeah. so I mean, without sounding conspiratorial or, you know, or sort of loading it up onto, mean, because the thing is, even these, the people that fully embody hegemony masculinity are answerable to it, right? If, you know, and it's always one of those things where, you know, it can fall apart at the drop of a we look at powerful men in society, for instance, and the fragility of that power and the fragility of that ability to maintain stuff. It was a point in time where Elon Musk, for instance, and for some people still is considered to be an exemplar of kind of ideals in the world of how uh a self-made man can accomplish a great deal of things. uh But someone like Elon, more and more, I think his performance of identity as performance of who he is and all that sort of stuff has become fragile because people are willing to call him out now. And his association with the far right, I think, has played some of that, but also some of the ways in which we're hearing more and more stories about ah the kind of way he made his in and how much of that is hagiography or sort of mythology that he's built up around himself and how much of that is real. And if there is one truism we can take from his life is that he always lies. And those kind of things, I think, highlight the fragility. So back to your question about who produces these things, I think we're all producing these things all of the time. A young person growing up sees all these exemplars of what it can be and they have these relationships with Earth people, but those things are continued and perpetuated through relationships. And those relationships produce them. So I don't think there's any all-powerful group of people out there that are sort of defining these things. Although what I would say is that the ideal form of masculinity is often associated with money and power. And so there's a degree to which that reinforces certain kinds of behavior and certain kinds of characteristics. And that's often what we think about when we're thinking about sort of negative expressions of masculinity, what some people have called sort of toxic masculinity, for instance. And I wouldn't say that the dominant version of masculinity has to be toxic. it is. It wouldn't be able to have the power that it has if it was always perpetually being toxic. So I think those are two quite independent constructs. But what I would suggest is that we're constantly doing stuff that makes sense in the environment we're in. And I think the different kinds of masculinities interact with each other as well, which means that there's always an evolution that's occurring. So back in my parents' generation, this is a broad stereotype because I know that there are massive exceptions. But largely, there was much more involvement of the woman in the heterosexual relationship in terms of child That continues today, but there's much more involvement of men across the board. However, even then, there are exceptions, and those exceptions count. They shape and can shape the next generation to some degree. And we've seen the ways in which there's an expectation that there's going to be a progressive evolution of masculinity. Young men are much more Generation Z, coming into Generation Alpha, much more open to multiplicity. of sexualities, genders, all that sort of stuff. But then equally now we've seen this really sharp sort of turn to, you know, this is the only expression of masculinity that can be, and it's enter a take. You know, those kind of things um play out as well. you know, I don't see it as always a positive evolution. There's always counters and challenges and resistances and complicity. And I think that's what produces different opportunities for masculine expression rather than just a cabal of people that are telling us how it's been me. No, awesome. I'll get to the manosphere part at the end, because don't worry, there are of course questions about that. But I want to talk about sort of you mentioned sort of the roles in child rearing, for example, and then that that kind of comes closer to sort of your masters and honors work. So and you also sort of spoke about like masculinity sort of changing. I guess a slightly broader question and then we'll narrow it down is, do you think those sort of masculine issues are changing fast enough in a world where sort of like women are like more likely to at this at this stage more. There's more women in university than men in most countries. A high we know higher paying jobs and we're associated with that over time. Those roles are changing or balancing out with cost of living and stuff you need two income. There's many factors. But do you think that these ideas of masculinity, one, are changing fast enough, and how do you change them? And then we can go into the reproductive side. I definitely don't think they're changing fast enough. I think that some of the ways in which women's... improvement in sort of the equality sphere has enabled a whole bunch of different possibilities uh has created some change. But there's always backlash to those kind of changes as well. And even if the backlash isn't significant, you know, it's still, you know, can be micro backlash as well. And so, you know, it's not uncommon to hear stories about when there is a decision about who stays home with the kids when a baby's born, for instance, that it's just assumes that that's the woman and largely because of you know that's framed in terms of things like biological function but also framed in terms of ideas of care and what care looks like and who can care properly and those kind of things are still strongly infused into dominant ideas of oh masculinity and femininity. So to answer your question I don't think that things have moved fast enough and I think that part of that is that sort of changing and adjusting and then building up of sort of resistance to some degree, know, given why different pockets of men might be much more invested and involved in care. You know, I have friends, for instance, the guy is the primary caregiver and that has changed the dynamics significantly. But on a day-to-day basis, the research all still points to inequality in the domestic sphere. um You know, it still points to the fact that even when uh men think they are fully involved and they think they're doing 50-50 kind of stuff, they're not. And some of that relates to some of the work that I did. Sociologists from the 80s, Arlie Hochschild, talked about an economy of gratitude. And she argued that for men in the domestic sphere, uh lower expectations of men mean that in higher levels of gratitude for anything that they do kind of makes men feel like they're doing enough. But if you look at the sort of the day-to-day and how things are managed and kind of the little micro invisible stuff, know, research evidence continues to point to the fact that that's still imbalanced. You know, and I have conversations with my partner about that all the time. You know, we were trained differently. You know, when I was growing up, I was trained to work outside with my hands by, you know, stepfather who kind of believed in separation between inside and outside. And so, uh know, boys did outside stuff, girls did inside stuff. And that kind of shaped my experience of stuff. uh I'm really keen and invested in the whole idea um of equality in my relationship. It's really important. And I do push in that direction, but it's not a natural fit. And even though, you know, I spent decades working on that sort of stuff, it still doesn't pan out. I don't see stuff in the same way that my partner does in terms of tidiness. I don't feel uh the same sense of emotional concern when someone comes to visit and the house isn't necessarily as tidy um as she would like it. I can't feel that to the same degree. So the intrinsic motivation isn't as great. The intrinsic motivation for me is wanting, is it I love my wife? And that often plays out in these kind of dynamics. We do stuff for our partner as opposed to because this is what's necessary. We do stuff to help raise our children. And we do that because we love our children and we love our partner and all those kinds of things as opposed to the dynamics which should be shaking that, which is, no, it's fair, it's equal. All those kinds of things. And I think we'll start to see increases in that sort of stuff, in pockets of that kind of stuff. comes up against all the other masculinities that are out there. So although they might be caring masculinities, although they might be much more invested and even identify as feminist or pro-feminist masculinities that are available to men, those don't necessarily translate into the whole of the population. And we'll come to that a little bit later, think, particularly when get to things like what is the future of reproduction and all that sort of thing. Yeah, no, that's awesome. You gave a lot of like your personal example, but I also wanted to ask you in touch upon your research and sort of the qualitative stuff you do. do you sort of see sort of similar things coming out uh from your participants as well when you talk about these things? for sure. So I borrowed from Arlie Hochschild's work and sort of spoke about the reproductive burden. in the ways in which that plays out and the economy of gratitude that exists there as well. The reproductive burden sits with women largely in heterosexual contexts and although there are technologies that have been available that work, all that sort of stuff to manage the male reproductive body, it's often women's bodies that become the primary center of reproduction in that regard. And that makes sense to some extent and that it's women's bodies that have children. And again, framing this in terms of cis women's bodies. And uh that plays a big part in terms of some of the understandings around, again, an actor, an intrinsic motivation. uh Women can be motivated not to have children, so they're really happy to um take on all the pill or something along those lines. But... Largely when men are participating in reproductive stuff, again that economy of gratitude plays out really strongly. Any involvement by a man is considered to be slightly more than what you would sort of weight it if it was a woman's body that we were talking about. And so those sort of things definitely played out in the research that I did for my PhD in particular uh that sort of men would frame themselves in or against and the masculinities in light of that sort of economy of gratitude. And so they were doing much, much more by having a single operation. uh Men would literally say that having a mastectomy, this is me doing my part. Potentially, a couple of decades of someone being on the pill and having their body go through all of the rigors of having hormonal changes and all that sort of stuff kind of gets cancelled out by a mastectomy. that's, if you put it in those sorts of terms, I'm sure many men would sort of, they're taken aback in all of those kinds of things. So it's not something that they're maliciously or anything like that but it just it just that's how it played out and that's how their language played out. So lots of the language of men, then was sort of framed rather heroically, know, they're saving their partners from the pill, they're doing things which are above and beyond and certainly more than other men, because other men, you know, if we go back to my point about the way we construct ourselves in relation to the other, other men aren't doing as much as me, I'm kind of extraordinary, but equally I'm just an ordinary guy just doing ordinary things. So that kind of nuance there is a little bit complicated, but yeah, lots of uh sort of framing in those kind of terms. No, this sort of leads on nicely to one of the questions which we have, because nowadays I think I've also done some work on this of how that more and more realization is coming around sort of men's impact on fertility during pregnancy and things like that. So do you think this has been widely understood by the public sort of more men's role in that? And do you think men will feel more responsible for their role in conceiving when this was previously mostly seen as the responsibility of women, what do you think needs to happen for men to understand what they need to do to optimize things like care, sperm health, all those sort of things? great question. mean, your research is obviously an area which I think we need to hear more about, you the epigenetic contribution stuff, you know. um I think that kind of work, uh you know, being, uh having impact in terms of the trickle down from sort of Academy to broader culture. You know, I think we're seeing some of that stuff happen already. There's lots of great sort of examples on TV shows and stuff like that of people talking through men's infertility. and the troubling of that. Often it's sort of framed as, he doesn't want to talk about it. the focus becomes on the woman's emotional response to that. But I think we're getting there. I think that they're more and more we're starting to see and have that stuff connect to the fact that it's a shared thing. Certainly things like sperm motility and sperm health are becoming much more part of the common lexicon. But I'm not sure men see how far back that sort of tracks. you know, someone has poor motility or poor sperm count Like, well, it was me. uh You know, I failed as a guy. My virility is not what it could be. You know, that's a masculinity issue rather than, know, what? And this is not to blame the men, but, how has this kind of stuff happened and what's shifting within broader society that means that, you know, we're seeing lower levels of of sperm health and all those kinds of things. What are we doing to ourselves in the world that we're setting up where these kinds of things are happening and uh then it doesn't become an individual thing so much. And I think you're probably better suited to speak to some of this stuff that you have in terms of that kind of thing. But in terms of the response to all of that, I think this stuff's completely intertwined with what masculinity means to the particular man and how they're producing it, how they're living that out, ah and then how much of a threat the idea of the decision to look after their sperm health or whatever it becomes, or a genetic... know, fluke means that they haven't got good motility or all those kinds of things. You know, and what does that mean? know, being tested becomes a threat, right? That men have to sort of account for. And the same is true of women to a greater or less degree, particularly in the ways that the maternity is sort of equated with, you know, the pure expression of femininity at the ultimate end of it. So there's definitely things that play out there, you know, resistance is among men to get tested or to understand their that helping them, know, between them differences are greater than, you know, sorry, within group differences is greater than between group differences. So, you know, lots of variation in amongst that, but I think there's lots of that sort of stuff going on as well. I think the point you made about seeing it more is quite true. I mean, don't know how much people are into politics, but I do remember that around the US elections, uh the vice president candidate uh for the Democrats, Tim Waltz spoke about IVF and Republicans sort of limiting it, and it became a big thing. um And men's mental health became a conversation, men's reproductive health became a conversation around that at the time. um But I guess. wasn't a winning argument. in a of respects, right? So lots of those kind of things going on. But then the Trump campaign won, and JD Vance's expression of of vice presidential masculinity played out more. And so I think that that has some implications as well. So again, that talks to that sort of competing stuff there, just multiple expressions of how we do this sort of thing out there. But yeah, the more and more we see those kind of things, the more and more we hear those kind of things. the more and more they're not resisted or challenged, the greater capacity I think we have to start opening up the picture again. And that can happen at an individual level. If you're in a good social circle where you can talk about this sort of stuff, where you can think about health beyond just your lifestyle choices and more about all the things that have shaped you, then yeah. I guess that point also comes to the backlash idea and then the question around the question around that that if if sort of men's responsibilities sort of increase or knowledge around this increases in terms of their role in reproductive health, fertility, all these things. Does that also mean that you could get sort of a backlash that as responsibility increases, do you think there will be a greater push for men to have more rights and decisions about unborn children? I know it's different per country and things, but it's generally up to the mother. Yeah, great question. And again, a tricky question. um I mean I think fundamentally ah the notion of men's involvement in reproduction can be loaded up in those kinds of contexts with poor old men, well those men, don't have the same rights, don't have the same levels of equality and all those kinds of things. But largely, ah men's bodies, while they have been involved in some of the things, don't go through the rigours. Again, it's similar to the context. It's similar to the ways in which women's bodies have been defined by things like... taking the pill or being aware of the hormonal cycle and all that stuff in a way that uh shapes their experience, their bodies and shapes their experience of reproduction and the risks of reproduction uh or the risk of reproducing them they don't want to reproduce, all of those kinds of things. The weighting always is going to sit uh with women. Until men can start having babies uh and some can, I think it's going be one of those things which is always going to sit in the background as uh if men are claiming equal rights then they need to have equal responsibility and equal equal consequence to some extent as well. And that doesn't exist. And so when we're thinking about kind of the nuance around men's equal rights in that space, um it's largely because there's been a discourse and a rhetoric set up around women's equal rights and there's sort of the assumption that well the same thing needs to apply to men to the same degree, but uh qualitatively, quantitatively different experiences of what reproduction means. And until that, you know, unless that weighting changes, I don't know that uh that argument holds fire, but it will because uh it's, as you have highlighted and made the connection there, it's a backlash argument to some extent, right? It is pushing in a particular direction because there's this claim that women have got too many rights already and too much control over that decision-making law. those things. You know, so for me the bigger question around reproduction there is, you know, where does the man, I almost said where does the man get off? You know, thinking in those terms, but you know, I think there's something in that to some extent, you where do men feel like the child is fundamentally a consequence of things they have done and who they are. and how that is connected or disconnected from a sense of ownership over that child. And so that's where I think it becomes trickier because there's been a long, long, long history of men having ownership over their partners, ownership of children, ownership of property, all of those kinds of things. And until we can untangle some of those ideas and also think about the unfair reproductive burden. where it sort of falls in terms of women's bodies, it's going to be very hard to say men should just have equal rights straight away. Because how is it or how is it not tied to that sense of ownership over the child or ownership over the fetus? And certainly while it's not developed and things like abortion rights and all those kind of things become entangled in all of that sort thing there, decisions around when to abort and not to abort and all that sort of stuff should lie with who is most impacted. by this and although there might be a sense of emotional connection to the possibility of having child or a future child and all those kinds of things, that needs to be situated within a broader historical understanding of these things. And I know and I absolutely feel for the ways in which that plays out in someone's individual psychology. So if someone feels connected to the idea of having a child and for them it's not about ownership and all that sort of stuff, it's going to be potentially heart-reaching. and it's going to be emotionally traumatizing when they find out their partner doesn't want to have the care they need and is thinking about having an abortion with all those kinds of things. That plays out at the individual level, potentially is quite traumatic. But equally, I think the working through that and understanding the decision in light of not your own selfish desire to have a child, but how is this going to impact on your partner, whether that partner is long-term or very short-term and all those kinds of things. that need to play out and I don't think they're often done in that way. Those aren't part of the conversation and the problem is that these things become soundbites, right? You know, so it's very easy to sort of talk about men's rights and quickly sort of unpack that and we have those kind of soundbites and challenging them often takes nuance, challenging them often takes conversation, challenging often involves a longer game but you know and that longer game doesn't always work, you know, we We express this stuff, we talk about this stuff, we talk about the ways in which evidence plays out, which social research has played out and shapes all of these kind of decisions and the ways in which they manifest in their lives. But it's unusual for us to be convinced. uh at least initially, by a longer argument, when we've got a short run sitting right in front of us. We make those heuristic jumps as quickly as we can often. And so a sound bite might convince us in the short term that it's harder to pull away from that to unpack that. No, I, yeah. Take a breath. That was very well put. um Yeah, I, there's a question about nuance around men's mental health as well, which we'll get into later. But because we've been talking about reproductive rights, um I and fertility and decision making, I wanted to ask you about the child free movement. could you get into first explaining what it is so that we. I'm just gonna add a bit more and then you can ask questions around it. Yeah, I mean the fact that it's a movement in all is kind of wild. know, human variation being what it is, you know, we should have the choice to not have kids if we don't want to have kids. I think obviously things like, you know, reproductive control and the technologies that we have around that have made a massive difference to the kinds of choices that people can make. But largely these are still social choices, right? We live in a world where, you know, having children, if you're in a heterosexual relationship and even a non-heterosexual relationship, the notion of having children is kind of played out as inevitable. by that I mean that the pressures on, or the expectations on a heterosexual couple, particularly if they're in a longer term relationship, including getting married. those kinds of things um can also play out in the experience of oh a gay couple that's been together for a long time. And also the individual scenes of wanting children and having all of those kinds of things. I don't think as many people want children as have children. We know that there's a lot of evidence that points to, uh you know, like 50 % uh of pregnancies are unwanted, instance, or unplanned for is probably a better way of describing it. But there are lots of people that have kids, even though they are ambivalent to idea of having children. There are lots of people that have kids outright resisting the idea of having children. I know people like this, that have never wanted kids, but because of the relationship that they're in, or because of social expectations, sometimes cultural expectations, having children becomes fundamental to, you know, as an ultimate expression of the relationship. You why be in a long-term relationship? Why be married um if you're not going to have children? And those kind of ideas play out in relation to what's called pronatalism, the idea that having children is a good, and then that gets framed often in a biological term. So this is the biological imperative. You know, we all should be reproducing because that's what we do. You know, anything biological reproduces, so therefore humans should do the same. But there are lots of examples of that not occurring. um And so I think the child-free movement exists and developed in response to all of these kind of pressures and people saying, I'm not interested in having children, often framed as a selfish or an individualistic kind of thing. This has much to do with the fact that people don't want to have kids because of a whole bunch of different reasons. And then there's all the people that can't have children, which is another side of the coin as well. can't have children and feel the burden of that intensely because of some of this sort pronatural pressure. And they might feel that in their very bones, that, you I've always wanted children and how desperately unfair it is that I can't. And that's societal pressure playing a big part in it. There may be a biological element in that. I'm not going to deny that that's a possibility, but I don't think it's as powerful and all encompassing as what we think it is. And so the child-free movement is relatively new on that. regard. I think it's growing in various ways. I think it's grown in some helpful ways. There is lots of sort of, you know, communities that are built around disparaging people that have children, for instance. There's some really great examples of that not occurring, where it's much more about, you know, having not having kids as a choice. And it's something which we think is relevant and important and needs to be out there. Certainly, media makes a big deal about uh child-free people. There's lots and lots of examples of various newspapers picking up a story and sometimes they'll do a whole thread of stories. Over course of a year or two you'll have all these different things, what it's like to be child-free, experiences of being child-free, um largely in that sort of carnivalesque sort of look at this child-free person and what they've done with their life. But often that's sort of framed in terms of what you win. ah So the free time, the sleeping in. all of those kinds of things, as opposed to just recognizing that it's a choice that is framed by social forces and it's situated within the social, but it's still a choice that people can and should make. And I go back to my original sort of comment. I don't think that lots of people, if they were given... full free choice around their decision making. Not that that's possible, but if they were given the option of doing whatever they want, I think there'd be a lot less kids in the world um than what there are. um I could be wrong, but it's against. And I think it represents something of diversity in humankind. Those kind of expressions, manifestations of how we be human, should include as much variation as possible. from what I'm getting, it's not necessarily something which is like the the child free movement is not necessarily led by men or led by women. It's kind of like just a thing which is happening. Or is there like sort of? I mean, I think you'll find that there are more women doing the labour and the emotional labour in the context. think men often, with lot of these kind of things, participate to some extent. um But certainly all the examples I've seen of uh people who run forums and people who are influencers in this space tend to be women. A really great example in the New Zealand context, Annie Duncan, she um has developed a community both nationally and internationally of child-free people that sort of get together, know, go on holidays together and, you know, eat out at restaurants together and all of those kinds of things. And it's about sort of finding people that are in the same space as you and making sense of similar experiences together. Because I think one of the things about child freedom is because it is a, well, being child-free is because it is an isolated experience. and it's not as prevalent as it might be. uh People are separated from one another. We have no immediate child-free friends. instance, most of our friends, all of our friends have kids or may have talked about being child-free at various points in time. I have colleagues that are child-free who I count as friends, so that's kind of some examples of where that sort of unravels a bit. But the people that I've known the longest amount of time, the people that I've had relationships with, generally all have kids. long term. So I think ah the movement is largely more about connecting to people, making sense of your shared experience in light of its rarity within, particularly within heterosexual environment. So I think that's the kind of impetus for it. And I think because of that, and because of the ways in which women are much more likely to the targets of sort of vitriol around this kind of thing, that they've failed as women or feel like their failed as women and all of those kinds of things, more likely to be at front edge of that sort of... movement shaping kind of thing. But yeah, I think it's like the women's health movement as well. There's no equivalent men's health movement except sort of very rights based approach or articulation of men's needing equality in that space. But very little of the sort of orientation towards continual work and continual effort to produce something that's meaningful and coherent. so I think that's generally the case. And I know that there will be exceptions. will be men that are running forums. There will be men that are set up social media. your accounts and all those kinds of things. think fundamentally the visible ones are women. And again, that might be about algorithms, right? So, yes. I mean, so this ties nicely to something which you said in your introduction, where you said you've interviewed men who generally have gotten vasectomies before having kids because they come very well into this child free sort of idea. Are their perceptions or their reasonings different in that regard in terms of how women look at the child free movement? I've done research. with men, with women. So I was lucky enough to participate in a research project when I was in the UK where we interviewed a bunch of women about their experiences of being child-free uh in quite different accounts. So first thing I think that I need to probably emphasize is that men that have had vasectomies are the leading edge of what I would count as almost super child-free. There's no flex in their system at all to some extent. So when I came to interview a lot of these men, um and sort of set myself up as I'm child free, my partner and I are not interested in having kids. I hadn't had a vasectomy So from their perspective, I wasn't as committed to the causes as they were. So I wasn't truly child free in their perspective. In saying that, I think a lot of the expressions of their decisions were very individual. uh It was built around their decision not to children. They didn't want children. That's the end kind of thing. It didn't matter relationally what happened in terms of partners and all that sort of stuff. Their partners would just have to cope. And that's a broad generalization. There was nuance and variation in that. But broadly, it was an individual kind of thing. And that's not what I see in terms of the child free movement. So I see those kind of that core group as reflecting sort of a core of men right an edge of sort of expression. um And then, you know, the interviews with women were quite different. uh women often spoke about precariousness of their child-free identity, that it would shift based on a whole bunch of things, that they felt constant pressure around uh having children, and that could change because a partner changed their mind, for instance. So might be an agreement early on, we don't want kids, we don't want kids, we don't want kids, but generally often it was the uh male partner or another partner that sort of made sense of the fact that they wanted kids at some point in time, and they sort of backed shifted. so women in that interview group, weren't sterilized. They were not all of them sterilized. But there was that sense in which uh it became uh much more sort of up for grabs than some other guys. And so I think their reflections of uh child-free identity, but I don't think that they speak to the whole movement. I the movement's kind of... evolves in different ways. So a forum, for instance, might be built around sort of a whole bunch of negativity. Like I've seen some child free forums where they refer to women who have children as moocows, for instance, because they're just breeding and they're just milking, those kind of things. And so that disparaging kind of language, hugely problematic. But that's just a small pocket, and that's just evolved in the context of sort of internetness, I think, as well. But that doesn't reflect the whole community. think, I refer to it as a community, it's probably, you know, as I said, sort of pockets and not a movement that sort of has leadership or direction or anything like that. I can name some people that, you know, have worked in this area or, you know, influences or whatever, but I don't think there's anything I can add to it. Yeah, I mean, the first thing when you think of is like the whole dink experience, right? Double income, no kids kind of lifestyle. oh when you generally when you think of sort of child free, or at least for someone like me who doesn't work in the space and it's sort of all the benefits of it. And then the reasons for not having are like, have you seen the economy, how expensive it is? know Zahran Mamdani's entire thing in New York was we need to keep families here. And we need to make it affordable for people to have kids and how prevalent are those reasons in terms of like the quote unquote movement? Are they a big part of that? Is that are they sort of like adjacent sort of things? Just like you said, the. I think there's a lot of post-hoc justification that occurs. So people make sense of their resistance and life in a bunch of things. So most of the men and most of the women that I interviewed, for instance, had an environmental sort of consciousness. So, you know, we're not wanting to add to the burden uh of what's occurring already in the world, things like overpopulation, whatever that means. It's generally overpopulation is understood differently by different people and in un-nowanced ways. And I think, you know, so those kind of things play out, but they're very middle-class answers. And it felt like it looked like in the data that they were kind of like after the fact. You know, there's just a gut feeling they don't want children. Something's happened in their early life. You know, it might be that they were an older sibling amongst a bunch of other younger siblings and they had to do all of the care because their parents were working two jobs or something along those lines. And so that kind of thing evolved to the point where they didn't want it. That might cause someone to want kids, but it also created a creative resistance there. And so I think, you know, whenever I hear those kind of explanations, economic choices, all that sort of stuff, environmental, I think that they do play a part, but I don't think there is profoundly uh driving forces as people might think they are. I think that that has increased the number of people who feel that they can align with sort of child-free stuff because they've become aware of both things at similar times and then that becomes a package that can wrap up and then build an identity around that. But I think these things don't necessarily start with economic concern or start with environmental consciousness or anything like that. Could be wrong, but that's kind of what i found in the people i interviewed I guess a very quick question before I ask the next thing is, is this movement sort of growing or is this been a historical thing for a sort of section? And then we can talk about implications of it. hard to know when the history of this sort of thing would have started because I think there's always going to be a pocket, you know, there's going to be the internal thing of what you feel like in relation to having children versus what you can do. It's a reproductive technology plays a massive part in that. So I would say that the evolution of this has developed in relation to what's available and increasing, you know, the woman's ability to make independent incomes, know, being able to get a credit card without having their dad husband sign off on it, all of those kinds of things would have changed that. So I would say that what we know about the movement, if we want to call it that, is probably 1990s on ones. I would say that there's a growing recognition of this as an opportunity to not necessarily express yourself in a particular way, you know, by having children. And I'd say that will continue to increase. In terms of numbers of people that are doing it, it's really hard to pick because someone might identify as child-free at some point in their life but then things might change. New partner, their partner might change their mind, all of those kinds of things. So putting a pocket on someone and saying this is in their 20s or even their 30s that I'm child-free but then you find out later that they've had kids. That's been one of the great griefs of my life watching people heading in the direction where it's like maybe it's my new child-free friend and then having a kid. And that's not on them, that's about a decision that they've made, right? But I think one of the things that's often underappreciated uh by people with children is that there is grief that goes on for child-free people. There is an experience of losing friends for periods of time. Like, you know, they go away, they have their kids, and you don't have the same sort of relationship that you had. Sometimes you might lose them altogether because the relationships they had with people at the school gate, for instance, become greater than. uh the relationship they have with you. So there is a grieving process that goes on. There's also all the what ifs, and I don't want to deny the what ifs that happen. What would be different if I had children? And those kind of things I think play out. think saying that there's sort of growth is hard to know. think that awareness of child free identity, being child free, and the choice has increased, and that's measurable. But I'm not sure whether the measurability of growth of people choosing not to have children is matching. on to that the same degree. And I think that as I kind of spoke to the carnivalist sort of way in which they're presented in the media, sort ah of speaks to sort of the ongoing rarity. Will we live in a world where there's a, you know, an even mix of child free to, you know, child having people? I don't think so. um So, but yeah. Yeah, I mean, guess the question which I had here oh was sort of follows on from that as when as the shift to child free movement sort of maybe becomes like 50 50 or as it's growing. Technically, typically children are the ones who become caretakers or at least assist older generations. So what sort of implications are there once this generation begins to age? Or I mean, we see it in different countries with aging populations and the population pyramids. reversing. So I guess what it's tricky, right, because I think that there are economic things that sort of play into that in terms of like a Western perspective because I know that it's much more complicated uh in non-Western contexts uh but certainly in terms of Western context I don't and this is a lot of the stuff that the people in my research were referring to there's not a lot of really great examples of kids coming uh to support their parents and older age there's lots of experiences of kids you know spreading to the four winds and living in other countries and all of that kind of stuff maybe coming back coming back to your funeral. know, those kind of things happen but not necessarily the kind of support in terms of the population pyramid and the ways in which uh that plays out. And the notion of an aging society, I think a huge amount of sort of... uh emphasis placed on the ways in which our society is aging therefore, you know, we need kids in order to support that. I'm not convinced that those are things that are as real as they're often presented. uh I think that there's got to be a lot of unpacking of those things. We certainly know that population in general is growing, that there are lots of young people, but it's kind of like, well, where are our borders? and who's welcoming to our countries, all of those kinds of things. And when we're saying things like, we don't want immigrants in our country, for instance, and yet also we've got to worry about who's paying the taxes that support our older generations, then those things are incompatible. So if people are having less children, that's kind of a choice that they make. But most couples will reproduce at a level that matches onto... uh the people involved in the relationship. you know, generally parents will have two kids if they can. You know, I've got people in my lives that had three and even four kids and lots of people that have a lot more than that. you know, those kind of things are happening at the same time. And I think we over egg our expectations around what society is going to look like, what an aging population is going to look like. We're assuming that, you know, health is going to continue to be perfect for a lot of these people because they're privileged and all of those kinds of things, you know a war happens and population changes in response to that, a pandemic happens and a population changes in response to that. We've been lucky for the most part in terms of things like the pandemics in our life course. uh COVID wiped out millions of people but it didn't wipe out the whole population. So I think, you know, so by the by, but you know, so I think there's things here where we're sort of, the emphasis is is potentially placed in the wrong. areas right it's sort of an expectation that we sort of need to need to reproduce in order to make sure that the base is safe but that's about our choices, that's about our economic choices. think you know if we, I'm just going to show my left wing credentials here, we tax billionaires at the level they need to be taxed and even high-level millionaires then things like having an economic base that's produced by younger people to support older people wouldn't be as necessary as we think it is. So it's about our political choices and I think think those kind of things are not emphasized when we hear demographic information and talk about things like aging populations and aging society and all those kinds of things. It's not up to us to reproduce in order to improve the economy or make the economy work. There's a dozen different ways to make an economy work and that might include taxing other people that haven't been taxed to extent that they have been so far. So I think blaming that on people that don't have children is a massive overstep and it's building on on knowledges which aren't necessarily contributing to a better society it's just othering people for no good reason. I was not expecting the answer to go as political as it did for a reason. I mean, I mean, mean, mean, to be to be fair, I mean, the question is quite like, how are we as a society going to take care of which is a political decision, isn't it? So, I mean, fair enough. um Let's let's move because I feel I I would be a mistake to not ask about your current research, which is around identities, particularly with disabilities. I know in interest of time, we can't go on for long about it, because it's a whole topic in itself. But Could you like speak to it a little bit, like what you're doing in this space, sort of some of the key things around it and yeah, I'll let you take the floor. Yeah, so um I'm broadly doing research which sort of draws together some of those understandings of men and masculinities and uh disability, critical disability theory in particular, sort of the unpacking of the ways in which disability is not just related to an impairment, so what the body does, more the way it's sort of situated within the society that we lived in. And at a really broad level, the lived environment shapes people's experiences of their bodies. So any variation in bodies and minds, if we're going broader than that in terms of disability theory. Built environment, you know, impacts someone's ability to get around and to live well and to be well and all of those kinds of things. Social environment does the same thing, you know, and so if we take those things really seriously, then someone's experience of being disabled isn't necessarily related to the difference in their body or their mind, it's related to what's happening out there in society and the ways in which they're, you know, enveloped or embraced or sort of set aside and discouraged from engaging. uh And so, you know, I see, you know, disability and masculinity as really interesting concepts to work together. And I had a theoretical goal. Obviously, I'm thinking about the people that have had a chronic illness or an injury or, you know, have uh a congenital condition which has produced a disability in their lives. You know, I absolutely feel for them at the individual level. And all of my work is about sort of supporting and making as much as possible a better environment for them to be in. But as constructs, those things jar really heavily against each other. And I think in the past, researchers focused on the ways in which masculinity shapes people's experiences of disability, or disability shapes the ways that masculinities are constituted. So different kind of expressions of men in men being men in the context of disability. uh I think I see those things as mutually constituted. So they construct different responses in relation to them. So multiple expressions of masculinity are available that can help us point to doing masculinity differently. And I think that's the stuff that I'm really interested in. What can the experience of being a disabled man in an ableistic world tell us and teach us about different kinds of expressions of being men You know, when you can't physically do some of the things or you can't cognitively do some the things that are expected from dominant expressions of masculinity. What does that tell us about the society we live in? What does it tell us about things that should change and how could they change? And what does that tell us also about the kind of things about masculinity that are problematic that we can unpack and challenge because not all of us can express stuff in particular ways. Not all of us can live up to the expectations of those around us because of something that wasn't necessarily our fault. So I think that's kind of the thing that I'm interested in. unpacking that a lot more. It's very little, although it's growing, research in relation to men and disability. uh is a small pocket within men's health literature. But I think there's a lot that can be said about those kinds of things. And so men's experiences of making sense of themselves in relation to both being men and also being disabled could make a difference. Yeah, because I also guess it depends on the type of disability as well to a large extent, right? Of like what youre capable of And I mean, just to take it a step further or sideways, how does this also link in to sort of like mental health conditions or sort of things like ADHD, autism and so on? Do you work with that as well or is it more? I don't have colleagues that do. again, within the kind of theorizing that I frame, that I don't frame those conditions as themselves, as the disability, so much as the people that are neurodivergent are disabled by living in a neurotypical world. And so, again, of the layers of that kind of impact and the marginalization that sort of has or creates on people's lives is the stuff that I'm interested in talking there. And so how can we make our world less neurotypical? How can we embrace and enjoy all the diversity that's available instead of shutting it down? But we can't do that. We still live in a world where left-handedness has become normative, and yet we still live in a world largely defined by right-handedness. So if you're left-handed, you still have to buy a special pair of scissors in order to be able to have a good experience of chopping something up with scissors. And that's just at a really minor level. um We don't design our scoots or our cafes for people that are pushing around, just to come back to the child-free thing, pushing around wheelchairs, sorry, wheelchairs or uh push chairs, so pushing around the child. uh Our spaces aren't embracing all of the variety despite the expectations around having children or all of those kinds of things. So I think these things do need to be challenged and I think it should encompass things like difference more generally. And so I've got colleagues that are doing really great work in relation to ADHD, autism. know, often it's tied to lived experience, both themselves and people around them or whatever. And again, they're trying to make the world a better place for people that are experiencing that kind of stuff. And they're trying to reduce the jar between the world that we've set up and the variety that exists within that world despite that. I guess this links very well into one of the one of the questions we ask everybody. that's sort of if I guess if ethics have gone on holiday, oh you have all the money in the world. Sort of what's your what's your dream research project, which you do. And I guess then smalling it down, what it links it to what you want to do going forward. It's an interesting question to ask, given the last few years, right? We saw one of the greatest natural experiments in anyone's lifetime play out. What happens when a pandemic arises in the world? We've got all these multiple contexts doing entirely different things to try and manage and reduce death and all those kinds of things. And I think we're still seeing the ramifications of the research that's been produced from that environment. oh is kind of like, you you don't want to create a pandemic and see what happens. But as a health psychologist, some of the stuff that sort of arose there, stuff that was outside the bounds in terms of what many people thought was possible. People didn't believe, for instance, that New Zealand could maintain the level of social cohesion that they did for as long as they did. The modeling around that show dropping off of stuff really, really quickly. um So any research that I'd want to do that I had sort of no limits on would be about sort of testing the boundaries of what's possible in relation to things like disability difference. um What are we capable of doing that we don't think that they're capable of doing? Or how far can we push someone to accept stuff? Could we build a society, or pockets of society, around neurodivergence, for instance, and then see how neurotypicals respond to that kind of stuff? So could we create an environment where the majority of people are neurodivergent, and then inject a sample of people into that, and then interview them about their experiences? That sort of stuff's never going to play out in the research context. Ethics would never deal with it. The same would be true of sort of, you know, if we lived in a child-free world, interviewing, you so we sterilized the vast majority of the world. That's not being child-free, that is coming out. Yeah, I was about to say. If there was a way to trigger that impetus not to have children and then interviewing people on the other side, think that sort of stuff would tell us quite a lot as well. Our willingness to marginalize or not marginalize, irrespective of what the category is, the point of difference is, and how that would manifest. I think going into the kind of, to answer the core of the question, what am I interested in? I'm interested in of jarring up against some of those norms that we take for granted. So anything that I'm interested in research is going to be sort of pushing the boundaries around that sort of stuff. But given unfettered stuff, know, changing a context so that people experience what it's like to have their shoe on the other foot, you know, an entire world defined by, you know, left-handed door handles, for instance, seeing what would happen in that environment to right-handedness and how quickly they would start complaining. You know, and I think to some degree, That explains some of what's happened with men in backlash. Men often feel like the world's changed around them in so many different ways, that they feel like they don't have the same place anymore, which is nonsense. Things have just opened up. But the feeling of the jar is increasing for them because they were told that they would have a certain amount of this, that, or the other thing in their lives. They were given expectations around the kinds of work that they would have, the kinds of lives they would have. And that is starting to jar because more and more people are becoming uh part of society in a way which kind of shapes the dynamic and changes the dynamic. so that kind of stuff relates to some of that. So hopefully that added up. I'm not sure if the connection was as clear as I thought it was in my mind. No, no, no, it. No, no, it all it and it adds up quite well. I. And I was just thinking of I guess you could do like those things on like micro scales right? Like you could ask like the child free examples, you could probably ask the one the first couple in sort of like the group of friends who had kids and like their experience at that particular time. The neurodivergence 1 sounds very, very interesting. I think it'll be a lot of fun. I mean, I don't identify as neurodivergent, but I have some tendencies that will suggest that I am kind of somewhere, even at a microscopic level on the ADHD spectrum, as you can probably tell by some of the directions I've gone and how I've spoken. But being... oh like that and you know if I was for instance put in a purely you know neurodivisioned environment with everyone has ADHD and all that sort of stuff I probably wouldn't feel like I've got any ADHD at all. You know so I think those kind of things are things that you know as an experiment and kind of I don't do experiments but you know it's something where you could you could tweak variables in that kind of way. I think it would be interesting to see how people would cope. And we kind of do that in society with reality That is the ultimate example of non-ethical, um ideal research conditions where you just watch people put in an environment that isn't built for them. Survivors are really good example. They're kind of built around people that do that kind of stuff, but it's still hard going and they're not built for that environment ideally. Yeah, so I think we have sort of micro examples out there, but I don't know how that would play out and I wouldn't know how to design that in a way that would be manageable. fair enough. All right. guess the next question which I have for you is the one is one about a hot take. So if you're ready, then I can ask you, Garrett, what is your research hot take? I don't think that we're going to have male hormonal contraceptives without super boners in our lifetime. there's been a long history of talk about a male hormonal contraceptive that has never amounted to anything. And often that's framed in terms of acceptability, acceptability of side effects, the acceptability of men tolerating certain changes to their bodies, hormonal changes to their bodies. And one of the ways in which it's framed is the minimum level of side effects that men would tolerate in order to be justifiable. And on the flip side of that, there's also the kind of ways in which women may not trust men that say they're on the pill or they've taken the pill and all that kind of stuff. Because again, the reproductive burden is on them, right? So for the most part, um it's women having babies. And so I don't think, unless we attach chemically or some effect is sort of uh layered into a male homo-contraceptive that is intrinsically beneficial for the men themselves in a way that... isn't sort of thinking about things like protecting their partner from being pregnant and all of those kinds of things, but actually benefits them directly. So what I mean by super boners is there's a sort of a, well not constant, because that's ridiculous and you'll end up in pain and end up in hospital, but your ability to maintain erections for as long as you want or having multiple orgasms would be another thing without tantric sex uh or having all the positive effects of TRT. as men get um older, they're just as virile and just as muscular and just as capable and all those kinds of things. I'm not convinced we'll see a male contraceptive pill produced unless we cross the, turn the dial, not from minimum level of acceptability and tolerance to something that directly benefits men as a consequence. And that's my hot take. ah You know, I don't, I can't necessarily justify that in all the ways you might want me to, but that's what a hot take's about. that's brilliant. That's what hot takes are about. I quite like it because I was thinking the other way. was thinking that surely if it means I don't need to wear a condom, just use whatever like gel they have. But I feel like my bar is, I guess, different to majority in the way you're conceptualizing it. And then it needs to be a benefit, not just there's no side effect that. Yeah, yeah, And so just to throw some stuff into the mix, right? So vasectomy and condoms are largely the two primary things that men can do in terms of the reproductive burden. But there have been technologies, like men, there have been hormonal injections, for instance, that have worked for men in terms of reducing their ability to reproduce, but they come with side effects. There was also a pill that was developed that stopped men ejaculating. So they could still have orgasms, and it meant they could potentially have multiple orgasms but they couldn't ejaculate and that was considered intolerable for most men that took the pill. couldn't, they, you how do I feel like I've completed? You know, so despite having orgasms and all that stuff. Yeah, you're right. So it ends up being this kind of thing where it's really tricky because that wasn't enough benefit. So I agree. If I was offered those kinds of things and it's like, you can't ejaculate, but you're not going to get your partner pregnant, it'd be like, great. But that could never take off because of general population acceptability and the fact that it wasn't going to be financially viable for the pharmaceutical companies to pursue that line. And so I think part of the thing has to be about societal change at a level that enables pharmaceutical companies and other university contexts and all that sort of stuff to invest in research in that way. As we know, evidence based on our sentence and all that sort of stuff doesn't reflect what people are interested in. It reflects things like funding. It reflects things like politics. It reflects all sorts of things. So evidence is constrained by a whole bunch of things that don't count really in relation to what we want to study. So yeah. That would be my... Brilliant. OK, so one final question for me, because we spoke about men's mental health, reproductive health, everything, we went into some of the nuances, not all because of time, ah but we need to touch on the manosphere And I'll only ask one question. And I like the way it was framed and put out. So we'll ask it that way because it does talk speak to that nuance. And it was like usually when we talk about men's mental health, it's always around why should we care or comparing it to the manosphere without any nuance? So what are your thoughts on that in a world where the media thrives on black and white perspectives and therefore lots of people have adopted these absolutes? Yeah, great question. And I think so understanding men's mental health and understanding men's health for me is important. uh I think that there's a lot to be said for the fact that our systems aren't necessarily designed for the ways in which many men, not all men, but many men might sort of want to be engaged with around health and mental health and all of those kinds of things. ah So I think the tendency is to dip into, you know, again, that sort of difference between society has changed, men have not adapted kind of thing, and that's creating mental health issues. But I don't think that's necessarily going to explain all of the things that go on there. So, And why should we care? I think we should care about men's mental health because mental health is important to care about. But I don't think that necessarily means we should care more than other... groups of people. again, coming back to that point that I made around sort of between groups and within groups, where are the pockets where mental health is worst? It's not necessarily, it's not only men to use the hashtag. It is particular groups of men that are going to be more impacted by mental health issues than other men. It's going to be younger men who don't have access to economic resources. It's going to be men that have access to economic resources but don't have relational connections and all that sort of stuff. they've marginalized themselves from relationships in order to achieve, you know, and I'm not saying those men deserve more mental health care than other men, but largely some of these things suggest to me that our systems aren't good enough, our mental health systems aren't sophisticated enough to handle all sorts of difference. Our mental health systems aren't able to handle, know, when people don't go to ask for help from a counselor or ask for help from a psychologist, you know, how we're accounting for the people that don't go to those kind of things or can't afford those kind of things. What about the people that work to jobs, uh know, working plus people, for instance, or working for jobs, they don't have time to be thinking about mental health. And I don't think our systems have designed for that. So again, to back to a point that I made earlier on, we're not investing broadly in mental health services. We're not investing as much as we need to in health services in general. And as a consequence, people fall through the cracks um because of that lack of investment. And so they're only really fit for people that are really motivated to go in there and engage with stuff. And sometimes men aren't willing to engage with those kind of things because of the ways in which their life operates. For some men, there may be things like stoicism and they play a part of their identity. But that's assumed too much about all men. It's assumed that that's the kind of thing that drives a lack of connection to good mental health for all men. But that's not necessarily the case. Some men that aren't Stoic, some men that are highly emotional and have good relationships with all the people around them would love to spend more time engaging with a mental health provider or whatever, but they can't because of one reason or another. And that might be because also the way in which the provider responds to them as well. And so there's lots of evidence that clinicians often, as those others in our world, often expect us to behave in masculine ways or expect us to behave in ways that sort of match onto their ideas of masculinity. And that may create a sense of marginalization even if we do approach someone to go and have uh care offered to us. Because men are expected to or aren't supposed to deliver care but also not to receive care to the same degree. we do need care. And I think there is that sort of old stereotype that's becoming a meme at this point in time that men will do anything other than go to therapy. And I'm not convinced that that's a truism in the sense that it plays out in the way it is. I think sometimes there's a lot more going on than what we think there is. And I don't think the answers are found in men's rights movements. I don't think that there's any investment in the manosphere or in men's rights groups in actually changing the social conditions that make mental health better for everybody. They're just interested in complaining. They're just interested in moving the world back to a point where other people are marginalized to the degree that they used to be. And that's my hot take on Manosphere. But I think more generally, if we provide the kind of spaces where everybody is able to be welcomed and encouraged and supported. um no matter how they turn up, who they turn up as, then we're going to provide bit of space for everybody. And so I think it's the walk of investment and the consciousness around. broadest social understanding of what good health is and what good mental health is that we're struggling with more than anything else. men are just one particular canary in the coal mine um because often men don't match on to some of the expectations around what you need to do in those environments. again, no one's in what will men a different, men are diverse, whole bunch of different things, the stereotype exists and that is something that comes to session as well. Awesome. I think I'll end it there. There's obviously each and every one of these topics we spoke about. We could have had an entire podcast on each one, to be fair, but we'll let you go for now and maybe pick up on some of these things later on. Once whenever you're free again, you're always welcome back. So thank you so much, Garrett, for coming on. I hope you enjoyed and thank you, everybody who sent in questions as well. And thanks, everybody, for listening. And until next time, take care.