Partnered with a Survivor: David Mandel and Ruth Reymundo Mandel

Season 6 Episode 7: Every Man: A Candid Conversation on Male Violence and Social Change with Jackson Katz

• Ruth Reymundo Mandel & David Mandel • Season 6 • Episode 7

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What if ending violence against women isn't just about asking men to stop bad behavior, but inviting them to embrace a more meaningful definition of strength and leadership? This question forms the heart of our powerful conversation with Jackson Katz, Ph.D., one of the world's foremost male voices in the movement to prevent gender-based violence.

Katz joins us to discuss his groundbreaking new book "Every Man: Why Violence Against Women is a Men's Issue"—the first book published by a major publisher addressing men's violence with men as a primary target audience. With decades of experience pioneering bystander intervention training and educating on these issues, Katz offers profound insights into why this particular moment demands men's full engagement with ending violence against women.

Together, we explore how masculinity is "policed" through social mechanisms that keep thoughtful men silent. The modern lexicon of shame—terms like "simp," "cuck," and "beta male"—serves to isolate men who might otherwise speak out against misogyny or violence. Yet Katz argues persuasively that true strength isn't demonstrated through domination but through moral courage, resilience, and standing against injustice.

We delve into how traditional mental health approaches often fail to address violence, how some of the most prominent voices speaking to men today actively undermine healthy masculinity, and why institutional accountability must accompany individual leadership. Particularly riveting is Katz's argument that prevention work must be framed as a leadership expectation, not merely an optional hope.

This conversation doesn't shy away from uncomfortable truths—including how patriarchal systems harm men themselves through what Katz calls "the triad of men's violence": violence against women, violence against other men, and violence against themselves. Yet it ends with an affirming vision of how men and women, with their fundamentally similar emotional makeups, can find connection instead of conflict.

Whether you're a survivor, a male ally, or someone seeking to understand these issues more deeply, this episode offers invaluable perspectives on creating a world where all people can live without violence or threat.

Read more about Jackson's work here: https://www.jacksonkatz.com/

Now available! Mapping the Perpetrator’s Pattern: A Practitioner’s Tool for Improving Assessment, Intervention, and Outcomes The web-based Perpetrator Pattern Mapping Tool is a virtual practice tool for improving assessment, intervention, and outcomes through a perpetrator pattern-based approach. The tool allows practitioners to apply the Model’s critical concepts and principles to their current case load in real

Check out David Mandel's new book "Stop Blaming Mothers and Ignoring Fathers: How to transform the way we keep children safe from domestic violence."

Visit the Safe & Together Institute website

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Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

and we're back hey hey, how there how are?

David Mandel:

you good, we're always're always fired, it's almost like we're surprised.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Yeah, we are, well, we're doing this again. How did we get here? Yeah, so what is this? Oh, we are partnered with a survivor.

David Mandel:

Yes, you're the survivor.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Oh, and you were the person working in the field.

David Mandel:

That's right. And who are you?

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

My name is Ruth Ramundo Mandel and I am the co-owner of the Safe and Together Institute and the business development officer.

David Mandel:

And who are you? I'm the CEO and founder of the Safe and Together Institute, and we are on.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Partnered with the Survivor. Partnered with.

David Mandel:

Survivor. But we're sitting on what land?

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Oh, we're doing our land acknowledgement.

David Mandel:

Yeah.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

So we are sitting on Tunxis Masako land in the beautiful Farmington Valley and the leaves are just really starting to come out for spring. We hear the peepers at night now and a beautiful red-tailed fox that keeps whooping for its mate, and we are so grateful to be here. The Farmington River, which brings a lot of life to this valley, is sparkling in the spring light and we are honoring the elders, past, present and emerging.

David Mandel:

Great Thank you.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

So I'm super excited. I say that a lot, but I am really super excited, by the way, super excited for all of the Americans. Listening is a very Americanism which I think every time we say it probably our Australian listeners are tickled.

David Mandel:

I'm super excited about our guest today and the theme and we've got I'll be introducing in a moment Jackson Katz, author, educator, academic activist, who's been working in a space around male violence against women and girls for decades and you know it's we've run parallel careers and I'm really excited because it's there's. There's not enough of us and there needs to be more.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

More men speaking?

David Mandel:

Yeah, that's right Particularly now, and so I think it's this is extremely timely kind of topic and we're going to dive deep into it and I'm really excited about it. So I'm going to do the intro. So I want to introduce to our audience Jackson Katz, phd. He's a leading educator, author, scholar, activist in the global movement of men working to prevent gender-based violence and promote gender equity. He co-founded Mentors in Violence Prevention MVP, one of the most influential and longstanding prevention programs, pioneering bystander training across sports, culture and the US military.

David Mandel:

A prolific author and journalist this is real. He's writing and writing and writing for a long time. His books include the seminal the Macho Paradox and man Enough. He's also a filmmaker. He created the influential Tough Guys documentaries in the film the man Card and co-founded the Young Men Research Project. His TEDx talk has over 5.5 million views and is translated into 27 languages.

David Mandel:

He's a regular contributor to Ms Magazine and has spoken globally, delivering thousands of trainings and lectures across six continents, and so, for those of you kind of want to get a quick hit, some of his recent Ms Magazine article titles include Feminist Future or Return of the Strongman, the Young Men's Vote and the Fate of the Nation.

David Mandel:

The Men Need a New Narrative. The Future of US Democracy Depends on it, and Against the Normalization of Trump's Misogyny. And so you can get a feel for sort of how he's speaking to the political and social moment of the time. And and what we're gonna we're gonna start with is his new book every man why violence against women is a men's issue is uh was published in the uk in february. It's coming out in australia in may 20th. So for all you who are listening from australia, just you know this is something that you can get in australia, australia at the end of May 2025. And, with the American version, which you said was just updated to include current events, including the recent presidential election, is coming out in September. So, with that long introduction, because you have so many things you've done, jackson, in your career, welcome to Partner with Survivor you've done, jackson, your career.

Jackson Katz:

Welcome to partner with survivor. Oh, thank you so much. Uh, david and and ruth, it's really great to be in in conversation with you and it's great to connect with you after all these years, both of you yeah, I'm looking forward to it and and I think you're what you're doing is really really great and really important, and in getting your dialogues and interviews and ideas out to broader audiences all over the world, I think it's fantastic. So I'm very happy to be with you today.

David Mandel:

That's great, Thank you. So we're going to start with your newest book, and I know it's going to take us in all the directions we want to go, because the newest book is your most recent, along with your articles in Ms Magazine. Feel like it's your most recent manifestation of your thinking, even to being updated to the moment. And so it's every man why violence against women is a men's issue. So I'm going to ask you the question that I'm sure you've been asked why this book and why now?

Jackson Katz:

Sure, I mean honestly, men's violence against women obviously has been a huge problem for thousands of years. It's not a new problem. And even our work you know many of us men doing work in trying to prevent men's violence against women. We've been doing this work for the last half century, since the 70s, but very few people know this, which is amazing and it's shocking and it's kind of, you know, it's, it's frustrating. I mean, for me and for many of us, it's frustrating that some people don't even know that we exist, in other words, that men who are committed to working against men's violence against women even exist in any sort of organized fashion. And like, for example, my TEDx talk, which you just referenced in the introduction, which has gotten, you know, five and a half million views talk, which you just referenced in the introduction, which has gotten, you know, five and a half million views.

Jackson Katz:

I still hear on a regular basis, especially from women, but sometimes men. Oh my God, I've never heard a man say these things. I get, you know, I get emails, or I get social media contacts. Oh my God, I didn't know that there were men who cared. Oh my God, why have I? I've been waiting my whole life to hear men talk about this subject in this way and I think to myself. On one level, I appreciate being appreciated, but I also feel like, oh my God, we've been doing this work for decades. The problem is we haven't had a big enough microphone, we haven't had a big enough audience. We haven't, in other words, and part of the reason why my book well, I think it's. You know, I'm excited about my book for this reason. It's the first time a major publisher because this is Penguin, random House, uk published a book by a man about men's violence against women, with men as being an important part of the target audience. It's never happened before.

Jackson Katz:

And I'm, you know, I'm surrounded by books. We read books right, no-transcript, in various ways. As a result, we're in this really isolated subculture where people know a lot about issues relating to men's violence and survivors and everything else. People know a lot within those insulated, sub insular subcultures, but the broader public doesn't know it practically anything. And my goal was has always been, from the beginning of my activist work, which is a long time ago, when I was a college student back in the early eighties, my goal has always been how do we reach broader audiences and how do we make the big change that has to happen, rather than keep it in the small subculture of people doing the work professionally. And so that's why the name of the book is Everyman. By the way, it's not some men who are abusive, it's every man, all men.

Jackson Katz:

And my goal in writing the book and also in the title of the book was was to reach a broader audience, which is why it's a short book, it's only 200 pages. I mean, there are notes and there's an index, and I was I was intentional on making sure that we had, you know, those sort of credibility markers, especially for people who are academics and journalists that had to have you know sourcing and stuff, but at the same time it's easy to easily digestible. And I'm had to have you know sourcing and stuff, but at the same time it's easy, easily digestible. And I'm trying to do in 200 pages, give a summary to people who aren't particularly knowledgeable about the history of all this work or the ins and outs of it. And you know, you sacrifice things when you make something shorter because you want to say a lot more but you can't. But the flip side is you reach a broader audience.

Jackson Katz:

And, last thing, I'm convinced and I've been doing this as an educator, right. I'm a person who runs educational programs and writes and gives talks and everything else. I'm convinced that there's an awful lot of men who can hear and take in what I've been saying just now and also what I say in my book and what you all talk about. I'm convinced of it, but I think they need to hear it and they need to hear it articulated by both women and men, and they haven't really heard that. And I think the publication of my book gives me at least the opportunity to tell this story and to introduce people to this whole world out there of men in a racially and ethnically and globally diverse sort of group, you know, like men who have been engaging with this subject, engaging with women and carrying the, you know, carrying the sort of human consciousness forward over the past half century, and I'm trying to do all that in every man.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

I'm really happy that you're making it accessible, jackson, and that you're speaking to every man, and men need to absolutely step up and speak to men. And you know one of the things that the feelings. Sometimes, again, everybody has feelings, right, I try to observe the feelings coming up in me as a survivor when we talk about men engaging men around their violence and developmentally impacted and formed and their relationships are stunted and formed by so many of these behaviors that they learn in childhood, reflected through their fathers, their uncles, the authority figures in their lives, and they are being handed this template which is so traumatic and so disconnected from themselves and from relationships with others. That grief, really, I feel it very deeply.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

But I also feel a little frustration because women have been experiencing men's violence for millennia and we've been saying my dudes, this is not going to work out well for you, you are not going to be happy or feel fulfilled by behaving this way. But it seems like in the construct that we have, men need men to speak authoritatively, because men have been taught that women's perspectives arise out of emotional places and men's perspectives are logical, even when men are punching in doors and kicking walls and breaking things and acting like emotional beings. That's considered logical. So there's a little bit of frustration in there that, although I really want really good men out there to be deeply connected to themselves and reflect back how male violence is harming them as well as women, sometimes it's a vital and absolutely necessary to be accessible to hear these criticisms of male behavior.

David Mandel:

Yeah, it's a I love the every man part. You know, when I, um, I came out with a book last year and I had some choices to make in the titling and we had to do workshops and I was focusing on domestic abuse particularly, um, and you know, went through a number of titles but ended up with stop blaming mothers and ignoring fathers, because the underlying issues for me, one of the kind of thematic issues across my career, is watching how, across all these systems who develop to respond to domestic violence, domestic abuse that we can't shake, that we have much higher expectations of women as parents and much lower expectations of men as parents, and that has so many repercussions and I wanted to speak to the broader issue. So you know, I just appreciate the you really kind of saying here's something for everyone, every man. So can you tell us a little more about what's in the book and what you're really hoping a man who picks it up may get from?

Jackson Katz:

it Absolutely. And, by the way, the book is for everyone and we knew we knew writing what. You know me writing it, you know the publisher and the editors working on it. We knew that a lot of the people who would initially buy the book would be women, and it would be. But it would often be women who are partnered with men. You know, and you know husbands, boyfriends, you know fathers, sons, you know friends and male colleagues. It's like the kind of book that a woman who really wants men to talk about this subject matter, think about it, engage with it, hand them the book and say I want you to read this or take a chapter and you should read this chapter and let's have a conversation about it.

David Mandel:

I had somebody tell me the story that they were given by their female partner my book for Valentine's Day. So that's sort of an example of what you're talking about Exactly.

Jackson Katz:

Exactly. And, by the way, can I just also say on a related point, that's great. On a related point, the conventional wisdom in mainstream publishing has been forever that the reason why they would never publish a book on this subject and that's why it's been such an uphill fight for me to get this book published by a mainstream publisher. I've been working on this for 30 years, you know, trying to get into mainstream publishing is that the presumption is that men don't buy books in general and they don't buy books about gender at all, except if it's like a Civil War history about some great general or something that they buy for dad on Father's Day. So the presumption is that men don't buy books. They don't buy books about gender. Women do buy books and women do buy books about gender. But the presumption by the publishing industry was why would a woman buy a book by a man about the subject of men's violence against women when all these brilliant books have been written by women about this subject? And that was the conventional wisdom that there was no market for it for those reasons. And so what we're trying to do is confound that, because I honestly believe that a lot of men are interested in this subject and having a dialogue about it, but they don't have entry points and I think there's lots of police. One of the things I talk about throughout the course of my book Everyman is all these policing mechanisms within male peer cultures at all levels. I'm not talking about the 16-year-old boys or 21-year-old college students or university students. I'm talking about adult men. There's all kinds of policing mechanisms within male peer cultures that keep men silent or that keep men who have the points of view that I have, or that you have David, from speaking out about it, and some of them are so crude and so like they're embarrassing how simple minded they are, but they're effective, which is it's soft and weak for a man to talk about this subject matter. It's, you know, like introspection is somehow non-masculine. In other words, thinking about your own attitudes or beliefs is like navel gazing in a negative way. It's being, you know, it's being too therapy conscious, which is very feminine, and a real man would never do these things.

Jackson Katz:

In addition, you have these prominent men now in the, you know, in the manosphere, but not just the insular manosphere. The manosphere has gone mainstream, and you have these men like Jordan Peterson, who mock men like me, who not by name, but but but mock the idea that there are men who stand with women, who, who, who identify with feminist ideas and activism. They mock us as being somehow soft or weak. And the language that younger men use is soy boys, cucks, virtue signalers, simps and beta males. And what happens is, by that kind of policing, bullying language, men and thoughtful men and young men often keep it quiet. If they have these affinities or these interests, intellectually or politically or socially, they don't feel comfortable sharing it.

Jackson Katz:

And a lot of adult men, including men, who are good men, what they end up doing and I talk about all this in my book but what they end up doing is they think okay, my role in all of this is to be quietly supportive of women and girls in my personal life and maybe in my professional life, but I'm not going to be on a soapbox, I'm not going to go out and speak about this, I'm not going to be like publicly talking about this, but I'll privately write a check to a domestic violence program or a sexual assault program which is, by the way, I'm good, I'm glad they're doing this, but I'm not going to really have a public voice on this, and I think part of the reason why they don't want to have a public voice is that they're worried and they're fearful about the pushback they're going to get from other men, perhaps from feminist women.

Jackson Katz:

And I address all of this because I think that this is the heart of some of the reason why there's been such a collective silence among men is not because they agree with the status quo or that they think that it's that the status quo of men's violence against women is OK. It's that there's all these other mechanisms that are going on, both in their psyche and in their interpersonal and political networks, that are actively conspiring against them, speaking I have so many thoughts rolling around in my head.

David Mandel:

You should go first. Okay, let me go first. Okay, let's try to keep it going.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Okay. So one of the things is that in experiencing my own life and I may be of a different generation, and that is that even violent men who are extremely ideological in this new generation have availed themselves to therapy like books. The problem is is that a lot of those therapy like books don't actually speak about male violence. They speak about men's trauma. Some of them are extremely misogynistic in saying that men just think a different way and behave a different way because of testosterone, which is a fallacy and is dangerous.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And some feminist theories also center that, when indeed men are just humans like women. We both have the same hemispheres of the brain and we still have that mid-ranging hemisphere that locks it all together. We all have the same emotional behavioral traits, but a lot of men, even in those circles where there's an ideology, religion locking them in to an entitlement that they get to tell women what reality is, to behave in ways which control women so that women do what men are asking them to do, do actually engage. Now, I think, in these emotional therapeutic traditions, some of which have historically been very male-centered and have not centered behavioral realities of men themselves. So my experience is that therapy was used as an excuse by men in my life for them to behave in ways which were violent and coercive and say I'm so sorry. I'm just a man, I can't change it.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

I can't change it. This is how men are, this is how we behave, this is how we're wired and you, as a woman, expecting me to be different is fundamentally illogical and unreasonable.

David Mandel:

Let me see if I can connect the dots and then sort of hand it off to Jackson to respond. So what you're saying is that for years I'm going to stereotype this Women have been saying we want men to talk about their feelings, we want men to go to therapy. And you're saying men doing that doesn't guarantee change in this area of violence.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And sometimes it actually supports it.

David Mandel:

Okay, so now I'm going to throw that over to you, jackson, to hear what you think about that. Okay, so now I'm going to throw that over to you, jackson, to hear what you think about that. How's that? I was just like okay, tina P Jackson. So I mean, we can just talk back and forth, but I just think it can give you, give you a chance to like, because it is.

David Mandel:

I think it's really there's a pernicious nature here. I'll just kind of expand on it for a second. You know, there's a perniciousness to this and an insidiousness to this, which is these things keep changing form and they can start looking better, and they may be getting better or they may not be getting better, they may just be changing form, you know. So I think that's part of what I'm thinking about here, which is going to therapy, and I would agree with this from the point of view of my professional work that a lot of therapists aren't trained to deal with violence or perpetration of violence to deal with. So the traditional mental health field has done poorly in terms of both survivors but also people using violence, you know so. So anyway, so that's kind of just a couple of thoughts.

Jackson Katz:

Well, I mean, I again I appreciate both, both Ruth's comments and and sort of perspective, but what I'm seeing and David's, what I'm seeing and hearing, which is, I'll kind of state, the obvious, is people use the lens that they're most comfortable with or familiar with. I'm not a therapist. I don't talk about interpersonal I mean, I think I do talk about interpersonal violence in the context of my writing, but it's much more sociological. These are bigger systems that are at work, that impact how individuals play out their lives. So, for example, racism is not about individual shortcomings of a person, like a white person in a white majority country that has a history of racism, like many of the white majority countries that are in the sound of our voices. Racism is not an individual psychopathology. It is a systemic reality that has manifestations at the institutional level, at the political level and at the interpersonal and psychic level. And so the changes that have to happen in our societies have to happen at all these different levels. And so and I would say again, I say this in my talks all the time as well While there's therapy I think is a really important intervention in people's lives Therapy is not solving the underlying social conditions that produce the pathologies. If we're going to actually do the prevention work, that has to happen over time. This is a long-term work. None of us are going to do this successfully in our lifetime. This is like long-term, multi-generational, hundreds of years of work. If we're going to actually be effective, it's by changing institutional practices at a fundamental level economic, political, social, cultural and I mean the Feminist Project.

Jackson Katz:

In the past 50 years just 50 years or 60 years it's incredible how much has changed in Western societies, for example I know in other societies as well, but I certainly can speak more thoughtfully about Western societies the changes have been unbelievable and radical over the last 60 years. If you take the 2000s or thousands of years of history that led up to this moment and I think a lot of women, for example, that I talked to, will often say you know, oh my God, things haven't changed and why do we have to still fight this battle? And I think to myself, I appreciate on one level that that's the frustrate. Frustrating that that you know that women like, oh my God, we've been saying these things for years, et cetera. But if you take like a 30,000 foot view or a long historical view, you'll realize things have changed dramatically over the past 60 years.

Jackson Katz:

It's radical what things have, how much things have changed and, in part, the reason why we have such a backlash, why right wing populism and Trumpism in the United States and, in part, and right wing populism throughout Europe and other parts of the world. One of the reasons for the virulence of the backlash is because of how much things have changed, how fast things have changed, especially around feminist change and the LGBTQ revolution's challenge to heteronormative and heterosexual centrality. I know that's an academic-s language, but let's be honest. We are living in a time where especially men's power and control, both in the family and the society, has been under challenge. And it should be, because if you believe in democracy, if you believe in human rights, if you believe in justice and fairness, it's, you know, male dominance is not, it's not fair, it's just unfair.

Jackson Katz:

And, by the way, I think that one of the arguments that I use with men and you know, male dominance is not, it's not fair, it's just unfair. And, by the way, I think that one of the arguments that I use with men and you've, ruthie, you've used this a couple of times and I and David, when I I appreciate it, I think it's logical everything that I'm saying. I think that you can be emotionally connected to feminist ideas and logically and I consider myself very logical thinker I'm a. I was a philosophy major in college. I'm very, very logical thinker. I was a philosophy major in college.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

I'm very, very invested in critical thinking and logical argumentation I was a philosophy major.

Jackson Katz:

Oh, right on, that's solidarity.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Philosophy in English. So all you people who say philosophy in English majors can't find a job.

David Mandel:

You're not right. So I want to make some connections here, if I can, you know, and go back a little bit to go forward to our conversation. You threw out all those words cocks, simp, beta, right, this is the language I was introduced to this through and it's the first time I heard the word simp was through my kids, it wasn't through some blog or you know, and I was like what's that word? And I was like and I said that's awful, and they're. They're like no, it's not a big deal, you know, it's just part of the lexicon.

David Mandel:

Now, just the way the, the, the word and I'll use it bitch is transformed in some ways it's become mainstream and and so I have a question for you about when you and I were younger and the constraints then and now and how they're different and similar. Right, so you threw out all those words and what I would say is again I apologize for the offensive language, because it is that the worry was you're going to be called when I was growing up, you're going to be called a pussy or a fag. Those were the two big and and. Again, you get the, the. You know, and everybody who's listening would you, would you get the.

David Mandel:

You get the hierarchy, you get the pecking order, you get the. You know what's lower than being a man, being gay or being a woman. It's sort of it's right there in the language, right? So, jackson, what you think about your experience or socially looking in your research of media and culture is is are we just looking at with cock and simp in this current time, just a continuation or resurgence of the same, or is it different?

Jackson Katz:

I love that question. I think it's the same, qualitative, when we were young, and young people today are being policed into conformity with certain kinds of patriarchal norms. The power of the anti-gay kind of language has been somewhat diminished by the success of the LGBT revolution in large parts of the world, so it's not as powerful today to use those anti-gay slurs to police men, although it's still powerful, but not as powerful as when we were young. That's progress, by the way, but it has morphed into these other terms. Some of it comes from pornography. The word cuck comes from pornography. I mean, it comes from cuckholding which has older.

Jackson Katz:

English, old English, yes, yeah, but in porn it's a subgenre of porn and so there's a sexualized aspect to the word cuck, which people who are literate in porn which is a lot of young men and you know are literate in the narratives and language of porn. So cucking somebody, you know a man is emasculated by being cucked, if you will.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

I'm pretty sure it was Chaucer and the Wife of Bath that that first came up, so that's my English reference.

David Mandel:

You just threw it down, didn't you? I?

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

just threw it down right there. But you know what? It's interesting because I have to orient us in the traditions and the reality of where these things came into the world, because we're talking in a way as if this has been a linear progression of male dominance and male violence, and the reality is, as a Latin, hispanic, latin American and white woman, that there's a lot of traditions and First Nations that were absolutely not this and this came out of a particular context. This type of male dominance came out of a very particular context and there's a lot of realignment with those more collective, natural. We must take care of our whole ecosystem. We all exist together. We depend upon each other. Your actions impact me, my actions impact you.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

That type of returning to reality that's what I call reality is really important for us to ground ourselves in non-shame-based relating, and that is that we have inherited men as well, and women have inherited this way of thinking that came into the world in a very specific way, in a very specific time and place, and then was spread all over the world via violence, when you look at the ways, for example, that indigenous First Nation and people who had other beliefs, where women were equal to men and sometimes these were matriarchies.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

We did not all have the same experience of history. So it's really important, I think, to acknowledge that, because I can feel the disconnect in my body when we're only talking about that one, that one tradition that really sort of propelled itself into the world with violence, and being able to see and distinguish between the fact that that came into the world. But there were other things here. People were living in different ways, they had other language for relationship, they had other types of relationships, they had other family constructs, they had men and women who were working together and that was seen as a holistic value, because we all live in this world together. So for me, bringing it back to the fact of difference, the fact that there are other perspectives and they have historically been there but they haven't been centered, they've been dominated by this one perspective is important to me because it feels affirming and acknowledging that for a long time there was in places around the world men and women working together for our common good and that we can get there again. We can do it.

Jackson Katz:

Yeah, well said, very well said. And again we're talking about the long sort of march of human history and as a species we've been around for a long time, but the sort of the patriarchal present and the domination of the world really in many ways by patriarchal sort of thinking and cultures and politics and and European colonial domination, that that, that sort of spread its, you know, tentacles all over the world, has been really the dominant force in the world for the last, at least the last few thousand years. And and one of the, I guess one of the powers that again I'll come back from this because I know it's too academic, but one of the powers of ideology or belief systems is what they often have. One constituent part of a belief system is the idea that it's common sense. What people believe in a given culture at a given moment is just common sense and they don't even understand that it's ideological. There's historical roots, that there's reasons for it, that there are reasons based in history and we're all products of that history. We're all products of those processes.

Jackson Katz:

But that's why being educated is threatening to establish systems of hierarchical power, because the more people are educated, for example, the more women are educated. Look at the Taliban is an example of a radical like it. Look at the Taliban is an example of a radical like. It's obvious because the Taliban is so radically against women's education. But even in the United States you have the right is attacking like women in college and women in university, and women's studies programs and gender studies programs are one of the first things they criticize. When they talk about the wasted taxpayers' money on these frivolous educations, one of the first things they invoke is basically educating women about patriarchy and about their subjugated status, because they know the smart ones on the right know that educated women are a threat to their power. In other words, understanding all this, for example, the indigenous roots of some of these small d democratic ideas and the gender equality in some pre-patriarchal societies all that stuff is really important and interesting but it's threatening because people who are trying to maintain the status quo in the present don't want people to think that there's other ways of doing it. They want to think that the way we're doing it now is just inevitable and natural and normal.

Jackson Katz:

I mean Jordan Peterson, again, arguably the most prominent public intellectual in the whole world and certainly around gender stuff and around masculinity stuff, jordan Peterson is without parallel at the moment, which I think is really really harmful because I think he's really really like been his ideas are really problematic but even though, by the way, I appreciate he's, he's a very impressive as a person who's taken even though I don't agree with most of his ideas. He's taken his ideas to a different level and I and I appreciate that. But I was going to say he talks about hierarchy. A big part of his teaching is that hierarchies aren't based in things like gender. He doesn't even accept that there's such a thing as a patriarchy. He thinks that multiculturalism is all BS, is that the sovereign individual is the unit of measurement, not the group, not systems, and so he talks about hierarchy where feminists would talk about.

Jackson Katz:

Hierarchy in patriarchal culture is based on illegitimate male privilege. Jordan Peterson says hierarchy is based on competence, and so he has this argument that it's all about hierarchies sort out themselves through various competencies and Then the implication there is that men are more competent at doing things in the public space. Women are more relational. Men are more abstract in their thinking. Like you were saying earlier, ruth, these are cliches of old ways of thinking that reinforce and reproduce the current problems.

Jackson Katz:

And yet we have millions of people, including millions of men and young men, who are listening to this on a daily basis. They're listening to Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan or these other and even more extreme versions, andrew Tate's, of the world, or they see Donald Trump at the highest levels of power and being reaffirmed by 77 million people, and it just continues to reinforce the idea that what they're saying makes sense, when what they're saying is what's one of the reasons why we have so many problems, why we have so much men's violence against women, why we have so much men's violence against other men, why we have so many mental health challenges among men, because the system itself is producing those problems. But these are people who are defending the system, and you you too, in your program and your work, and me and my work and a whole bunch of other people are doing work that actually threatens those systems that they're defending.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Well, it's very easy to claim that everybody else is incompetent when you yourself have defined yourself as the measure of what is competent. So if men have defined themselves as the measure of what is competent, it means everybody else is incompetent. It's so simple. So Jordan Peterson can say these are the measures of competency. Well, guess, guess what, jordan? You're not the only person in the room and you don't get to define competency singularly you know.

Jackson Katz:

So it's just it's it's, it's so it's such a.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And then you know the natural law argument, the testosterone argument. It all falls into place and where it lands is men just can't help themselves. Excuse my language, they can't help themselves. That's the only the second time I've ever laid down the f word on this. The first time was the first episode. So this marks a time in history, I think, and for me that was cranky survivor that, but I think it's I think you're, you know you.

David Mandel:

For me, the the warning bell goes has gone off, goes off anytime. Anybody from any position says well, it's just natural, it's just the way things are. Whether they say it's the way god ordained it, right, it's just because the natural is, is the argument ender.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

We don't, there's nothing to talk about there's nothing no other legitimate perspectives I get to define it as natural. It's just the way it is it's the natural order.

David Mandel:

And so, going back to eugenics, going back to, you know, reading about sort of uh, um, you know, going back to victorian time and how this has been carried forward, those ideas are now carried forward in the technologists and elon musk's, you know, we're, we're who are saying empathy. I mean to me, I'll just kind of give this the pinnacle of this in some ways, to me, recently, the statement that from elon musk that empathy is the fatal flaw, I don't know the exact term, but the fatal weakness in Western civilization. I mean, I really if, if you don't, if you don't pay attention to anything, pay attention to that coming out of the mouth of the richest man in the world. You know who has these visions for the human race, man in the world, you know who has these visions for the human race and he's saying empathy is a, is a fatal flaw, right and then, and then link them to his buddies who say that he wants his workers to be terrified every single day.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Right and and, and then we really, we really get down to brass tacks well, so this is, this is the meeting of masculinity.

Jackson Katz:

Culture, economics, right, all that stuff in one place yeah, I mean, this is a hundred percent and I, by the way, david, I totally agree. When he made that comment, I was thinking on one level. I was like so embarrassed for this guy to say such a stupid thing and such an ignorant thing. Empathy is the problem of western civilization. It's like the opposite. It's like, literally, and he's supposed to be the logical thinker, it's like. But he's given us a gift, and some of these Trumpers are giving us gifts of, like teachable moments to show people how far we have yet to come, that people actually buy into some of this ignorance and the whole.

Jackson Katz:

Boys will be boys. The White House spokesperson just said a couple, a few days ago ago, in response to a conflict between two main main members of Trump's cabinet. She said boys will be boys. Can I, can I just for your, for your listeners? I want to. I've, I've been saying this and I write about it in my book Every man as Well, boys Will Be Boys to defend bad behavior by boys and men. It's said in a way that's seemingly defending men, like they can't help themselves, right, like Ruth was just saying. Like that's just, you know, that's just how it is. The testosterone flowing through their veins is, you know, somehow you know, causing them to act these ways, so you can't really blame them. So it's said in defense of bad behavior by boys and men, but it's actually anti-male. It's anti-male because the suggestion is that boys and men are not ethical beings who have higher abilities as humans to reason and to use our higher faculties to make ethical choices. It's just, we're just beasts who are overcome by urges that we can't control.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

So boys will be. Boys is anti-male.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

It's extremely anti-male, but? But I'd love to break it down behaviorally, because, because essentially, what they're saying is that women need to accept men's violence, even if it destroys connection, destroys trust, even if it causes trauma, even if it causes injury to the body, to the relationship, to the connection. That we just need to accept that men are completely incapable of that relationship. Right, and guess what? We don't. If you all want to live in a world where men are incapable in relationship, go live in that world by yourself. We don't want anything to do with it. And then that's where the male loneliness epidemic comes in and men are like oh, women are rejecting us. Well, if you behave in ways which destroy your connections, which cause distrust, which mean that women don't trust you in relationship, where you're abusing your family, where you're using violence, where you're demeaning us, where you're threatening us, taking our liberties, we do not need to be in relationship with you. You can go be in relationship with each other and fight it out, and I think this is the intersection of economics and education, right?

David Mandel:

Because those things have given women and you'll hear women say, and the studies will show this more freedom. You know, if I'm doing okay, I don't need a man as a provider.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

But that's why they're targeting women's ability to be economically independent, absolutely.

David Mandel:

So I want to kind of move this kind of-.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

I don't know, I like this rage fest.

David Mandel:

No, I like it too and I think it's totally appropriate. I want to see if we can mine it for more, even, and I'm thinking about because what we're discussing here is sort of is really actually a battle over defining masculinity, and it's not framed that way, but it is as well, because I think we can. You know, just like you know, one of the best things I ever heard about racism was it's not a Black person's problem, it's a white person's problem. Black people are the targets. You know, um, you know, one of the best things I ever heard about racism was it's not a black person's problem, it's a white person's problem. Black people the targets. You know, brown people the targets, other people the target. But it's really a problem of construction of, of of whiteness and the definition of whiteness and acted out through people who are seen as white and similarly, this whole the, the woman problem that is what was defined at some point is the way it was explained is actually not a problem about women. Women aren't broken. There's nothing wrong with them.

David Mandel:

We're discussing in this context how we define masculinity, what we expect from them, how we shape men, how we grow men, and so what I'm really interested in kind of exploring for a few moments is this there are people who are saying, hey, there's economic dislocation, there's changes in gender roles, and those things are causing stress in men. I'm just going to use a generic. I'm not saying I agree with these things, but this is the way it's framed and it's a genuine dislocation that men are experiencing because of these things, genuine change. And certain people on the right are weaponizing that politically in the ways we've been talking about it and activating and transforming men. Who's their discontent or their confusion or their feelings of what do I do now? How do I have a relationship? How do I have a relationship? How do I grow a family? And they're saying the enemy isn't traditional masculinity, the enemy is women, the enemy is feminism, and they're saying so let's really pay attention to boys and men.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

I actually think what they're saying is we're uncomfortable, we're upset and we don't know how to do this. To be honest with you, that's at the bottom of this.

David Mandel:

I think that I'm saying what people are saying about boys and men.

David Mandel:

I'm not saying what boys and men are saying, but on the left, in the center, what you're getting people are saying let's look at men's depression. Let's look at men's suicide rate. Let's look at men's economic issues, let's look at this 15-point swing in academic achievement, and those folks that I'm talking about will nod to well, women are still behind in the employment space and politically, and they'll acknowledge that anything we do with boys and men shouldn't come at the expense of women and girls. So I want to kind of frame this in a fullest way and my experience is that those folks will not, don't seem to be willing and are able to make the connection to the violence discussion we're having, and I see them as part. They need to be woven together and, jackson, you and I were talking about this before we started recording.

David Mandel:

I'm, you know, wondering what your take on why those things are staying so separate from those folks who are trying to address men from a more maybe progressive not not right-wing perspective. But they can't bring in that. These boys who are growing up traumatized and then getting drug addicted or struggling in life. They're growing up in many households because their dads or stepdads or somebody else in their family was abusive or violent. They will not name it. In my experience, in the family was abusive or violent.

Jackson Katz:

They don't. They will not name it in my experience I really well said, I appreciate that One way to I mean I could. This is like a hugely important talk, you know sort of topic, as as I have all the topics that we've been talking about. But one way to think about this I think is and again I write about this in my, in my book, I try to, I try to fit everything in the book that I think is really important, even though I can't do it full justice.

Jackson Katz:

But this has been this tension for the last several decades, in quote unquote men's work between people who would say what we need to do is attend to men's wound W-O-U-N-D. Their wounds first, and then we can talk about men's political responsibilities to work against misogyny and sexism and men's violence against women. But if you don't address men's hurt and men's you know the longings and the lacks in their lives and their father, hunger and all the kind of narrative you'll hear from some people in that sort of world unless you attend to that first, you're not going to successfully address the political questions of men's responsibility around sexism and misogyny. And my argument from the beginning has been I don't accept that at all. I think it's both at the same time and I think that we have a response. It's like saying white people are harmed by racism too. It's not exactly similar, but there are some analogies like white people are harmed by racism too and their humanity is diminished by playing a role as perpetuating racism. But imagine how absurd that would sound to the, to people thinking about racism, that the first thing that white people need to do is attend to their own feelings of hurt from racism, as opposed to how racism lands on people of color. And then, yes, you can talk about how men, how white people have been diminished, but you can't center that. But I would say one of the reasons why this is connected to other really important things that men and women and others in this work have been doing and writing about and thinking about, is that feminist critiques and feminist analysis speaks to men's pain and speaks to the wounds in men's lives better than any other system that's ever been devised.

Jackson Katz:

And so part of my I often say part of what drove me into these ideas early on, when I was a young guy, like a 19 years old, you know, when I was in university was it was? I often say it wasn't altruistic concern about women that came. I mean, it wasn't like I'm going to go help women. It was more like I was unhappy in my own life. I was trying to reconcile certain things in my own psyche and my own public versus private self, because I was a big star athlete as a young guy especially American football and I had also private challenges in my family. I had all kinds of issues I didn't know.

Jackson Katz:

I didn't have a language to talk about it, but I was smart enough, I think, as a young guy, to enroll in some courses that had gender in the topic description or the title, like man and woman in literature or things like that. I was like I want an opportunity to talk through some of this stuff, and what ended up happening is I got exposed to feminist ideas. This is back in the late 70s, early 80s, by professors Some of them were white men who were assigning black women's literature and stuff like that. I was reading about people's experiences, especially women's experiences, in a way that gave me so much insight both into women's lives but also into my own life and men's lives, and I saw as did some of us in our generation early on in these feminist ideas that they had enormous implications for men's lives as well as for women's lives, and it was incredibly inspirational, but intellectually and personally and politically.

Jackson Katz:

And one other thing, but I just want to make sure I say this I think it's really important that people know about this concept that Michael Kaufman, one of the leaders of the anti-sexist men's world, who's one of the founders, the co-founders of the White Ribbon Campaign, and he's been, you know, he's been a prominent figure in our field for a long time he wrote an essay in 1987 called the Triad of Men's Violence, and the triad of men's violence is men's violence against women is connected to men's violence against other men, which is connected to men's violence against themselves, because suicide is violence turned inward.

Jackson Katz:

And so those of us in the field, including myself, have, from the earliest days, been making the connection between men's violence against women and all these other forms of violence, and one of the reasons why this is so important is that so many men will talk about what about men's violence? I mean men's experience of violence. What about all the men who have been victims of violence? Most men who are victims of violence are victims of other men's violence, and so the same system that produces men who abuse women produces men who abuse other men, and feminists are have been at the forefront of thinking about that and talking about that.

David Mandel:

It's interesting. Again, I have a few things to say about this, and one is you know, you know, one of the things I I've been mulling over is I'm, you know, I come out of the violence against women field. That is my home base. That has been my kind of what's nurtured me, what's kind of driven my work and sort of you know, think about alignment with violence, the idea of violence, ending violence against women and girls, and I wonder so I'm just gonna say this as a wonderment the ways we're not serving ourselves when we don't talk about men's violence against women, girls, boys and other men. And really, if you just even leave the other men stuff out, which I don't want to, you know, we're talking a lot about kids, we talk a lot about not working with kids and I think there's sort of a question about how we square the circle or circle the square or whatever, which is sort of how do we really not leave out that there's a gender nature to this and that boys are being abused at horrible rates by adult men sexually, physically, emotionally. They're being shaped for their entire lives, and that every conversation I'm reading about boys, men in the US, in depression, suicidality, they almost always come back to upbringings that are unstable, create fragility, create trauma and then make them vulnerable to these other things later in life, create trauma and then make them vulnerable to these other things later in life. But we have to name. We lose ground if we don't name that.

David Mandel:

It's often violence by other men as parents, as caregivers, betraying that trust that is creating is a primary driver, not the only driver. Women can be abusive, women can be controlling. We always say that, but it is such a critical driver and I read these articles and go why are you leaving this off the table if you're so committed to fixing this problem? So that's just. I'll leave space, jackson, for you to respond. I have a couple more things I'd like to connect the dots to, but I don't know if you want to say something.

Jackson Katz:

Right on. I'd be totally terrific, and I would say, if we're politically sophisticated in building more support among men for the changes that have to happen, the positive changes, the feminist changes, the increasing gender equality, increasing men's commitment to gender equality at every level. These are really important arguments because what you're doing is you're finding points that men will then resonate with right. I haven't thought about this, like, for example, I don't buy for one millisecond that anything that I do is anti-men, is anti-male. I think it's in the best interest of men and I think I, I think we need to say that and we need to say it loudly, especially in the current moment when there's so many of these voices among men, in the in the manosphere, in the political sphere, who are saying the opposite that feminists hate men and that men like Jackson Katz or David Mandel are, you know, sort of self-hating men. This is BS.

David Mandel:

We need to say it loudly and proudly Right.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

You know for people to because, even though I'm a philosophy major and I love philosophy you know for people to actually live in the reality of impact, behavioral impact what is the actual outcome of their behaviors and their relationships? What is the impact on their connection to themselves, to their connection with their partners, to their connection with their children? Now, men who are violent, and even women who are violent, will say well, it's illogical that you're responding in a way that says you are experiencing pain from what I'm doing. I have a right to do this. This is the right thing for me to do, and X, y and Z tells me it is.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And in living in that space where we can disconnect ourselves from our impact on each other interpersonally because we ascribe to processes and theories and academic theories I don't care what they are, I don't care the name of them If we're capable of disconnecting ourselves from our impact and saying I'm behaving totally reasonably, even though you are saying it's hurting you, this is where things get really muddy. And I want to stay very behavioral as a woman, because I've experienced men who talk about feminism who were not able to engage in interpersonal relationships. They were still very process related, they were still very much like. This is logical. Therefore, I get to do this as if we don't exist, dependent upon each other and reacting to each other's behaviors. So you know, I just want to bring that back in the room because we can get really heady, which is good, but thinking about heady.

David Mandel:

I'm thinking about Martin Buber and I and thou when you're doing that. But I think about just practical things and then I think we may need to, unfortunately, wind up this.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Sorry, Jackson, this could be like a two hour interview, but I think about that for me the application of this.

David Mandel:

In some ways, I would feel valuable to say this has been a through line, trying to thread this needle, as we're talking, through my entire career, and so when I did started out very beginning of my work with men who were violent, I started working with men who were arrested for domestic violence. That was the beginning of my career, professional career, and built a program and an approach, and so one of the pillars was there's no excuse for being violent. That was a firm thing. That was just. You know, like she cheated on you, I don't care, that's not a reason or justification.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

For instance, being violent doesn't increase fidelity.

David Mandel:

Right, exactly, it doesn't help. But within that, we made space for men's experience of feeling afraid or helpless, powerless, as an experience that was not dangerous by itself, totally legitimate. Even the fear of somebody cheating on you, even when they're not, is something I can hear. If you tell me you're afraid she's cheating on you, that's not a problem. The problem comes in when you create a story and then use it to justify actions of violence. Right, that's the problem. And so we very much created a very conscious space in that, and I always thought that for me, I was always looking out for that guy's highest interest.

David Mandel:

This is, you're creating your own suffering when you're entitled, when you think you're entitled, to control somebody and you can't actually control another human being. You know that they're separate entities, living, breathing, thinking on their own, that there's a, there's almost a self-reinforcing desperation and escalation that can happen, which is I I'm supposed to, and if I've been handed a set of messages by culture and society or my parents that I'm supposed to be in charge and you're not going according to the script, then my helplessness escalates and then my justification, and so I always saw that for some men there was this ladder they climbed very quickly, so often very unconsciously. But it was this mixture of entitlement and fear that they didn't want to own as theirs and made it somebody else's problem. Fast forward to my work today. You know the way it manifests and I think some of this is sort of this sort of is instead of saying fathers are important there are a lot about fathers, as the audience knows instead of saying fathers are important or fathers have rights, the simple statement is fathers' choices and behaviors matter to their kids and their functioning to their partner and their functioning to the function of their family. That's as simple. That's the rocket science. They matter, good or bad, and we have to talk about all of it.

David Mandel:

So if you're acting poorly, guess what You're responsible. You've made impact, like Ruth's saying, that's the tie into what you just said. You've had impact, you can deal with it. You can admit you're wrong. That's not writing you off and making you a monster. It's like okay, here's the pathway forward. Be brave, be courageous, with support, say you made a mistake. I mean and I'll use the phrase very consciously man up, man up, man up and say I made a mistake. But people won't. They will, they will retreat into and we're seeing this played out, and I know this will resonate with you on the national international stage. But I'm the victim here. I'm tired of naming them. Who who publicly say that their ethos is never apologize, never admit defeat, never say you're wrong. You know and, and you see that played out and you see the harm it's doing.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

And we should consider those people to be poor leaders.

Jackson Katz:

But they want to present themselves and be seen as strong Right, which is absolutely absurd, because it's totally the opposite. If you can't acknowledge that you've made a mistake or that your behavior landed harmfully on another person because you're so insecure that you can't acknowledge reality, then how am I supposed to be impressed with you as a leader, as a strong person?

David Mandel:

And I'll just say one more thing and then we can come to wrap up, which is just this the simple, the talk about feeling crazy, the most fundamental thing most parents would agree. I would bet 98.9% of parents would say that they want to teach their kids right from wrong and they'd like to have kids who admit when they make mistake and take responsibility for that. And that's so fundamental to most people's parenting. Creation of nurturance of little humans into big humans. Is this idea that a good person acknowledges, admits when they're wrong, and it's not weakness, but somewhere along the way that is not acceptable for quote-unquote strong men and and can I thank you and yeah what?

Jackson Katz:

just building on that and I have a couple more minutes- yeah, okay I want to extend this for a few, you know, but it's um to me and I write. I write about this in a lot of different places and and I talk about it in my talks I'm almost always towards the end of my talks I say we need to redefine strength. This really gets down to how do you define strength, especially in this case, strength in men? Because what you hear is people who are opposed to feminism and, you know, right wing sort of, whether it's politically or even interpersonally. What they'll often say is what are you trying to do? Make men weak and soft. The world is a cruel place and we need men to be tough. We need men to be strong. I say I want men to be strong. I think I'm a strong man. If you will, I aspire to being strong. I have a son and I you know I and my wife, you know want our son to be and know he is a strong young man.

Jackson Katz:

This isn't about not wanting men to be strong. It's about how we define strength, and so are we defining strength by your ability to impose your will on another person? Is that dominate another person? Is that cartoonishly simplistic definition of strength in the 21st century, something that those of us who are thinking for ourselves are supposed to take seriously. It's like I'm sorry. Strength includes moral courage, which means you know doing something that even might might land negatively on you. It means social courage, which is challenging somebody who's just made a sexist or racist comment and saying I'm not cool with that. Somebody who's just made a sexist or racist comment and saying I'm not cool with that. It's resilience in the face of adversity. There's a whole range of things that embody strength, that do not embody in any way dominating another person. But the reason why I think this is so important is that you're saying it positively and aspirationally. Instead of finger wagging at young men or men and saying stop being bad, we're saying we need more men and young men who have the courage and the strength to step into this moment to stand up against men's violence against women, to stand with women as their partners and allies in the struggle, the long-term historical struggle against these forms of oppression and abuse. And if you say it positively and aspirationally to men and young men, some of them can hear it in a way that they're not going to hear it if all they're hearing is stop doing bad things.

Jackson Katz:

Um, in in the sports culture, in the military and all kinds of other traditional organizations, but also in my book, um, every man is that this is fundamentally a leadership issue, and a leadership issue for all people, all people, but especially in this case I'll just center here men, and this is what I think is the global game changer, and I think it's important that I say this the global game changer, if there is such a thing and that's an ambitious way to frame it in the prevention of domestic and sexual violence, is defining it as a leadership expectation and not a hope. And what that means is that anybody in a position of leadership institutionally, politically, culturally or even in families by definition needs to have basic competencies around supporting victims and survivors, around challenging and interrupting abusers and holding them accountable, whatever that means, not just legal accountability, other forms of accountability. And third, the person who's in the leadership position again, I'm talking about formal leadership has a responsibility to set a tone within the organization, within the community, within the peer culture, whereby abusive behavior misogynist abuse in this case is seen as completely socially unacceptable and contrary to the group's values. The leader is the person most responsible for setting that tone, and the argument that I'm making is that if we define it as a leadership expectation and not a hope, we hope that more men will sign up for these courses. We'll hope that more men join this Take Back the Night rally. We'll hope that more men get involved.

Jackson Katz:

I'm done with that. I was done with that decades ago as a transformative model for change. But if we define it as a leadership issue, what will happen is that men and young men who in a million years wouldn't have signed up voluntarily to take courses in domestic and sexual violence, will sign up because they have to, because it's a requirement of leadership, and they might walk through the door with their arms folded and say, oh my God, we have to sit through another one of these feminist man bashing sessions. It doesn't matter how they walk through the door, because they will walk through the door, and what will happen once they walk through the door is that they'll learn all this stuff that you've been teaching, that I've been teaching, that many women and men have been saying and writing about for decades, and they'll be like oh my God, I never thought about it that way, or I've never heard about making people make those connections.

Jackson Katz:

I didn't know that men's health was a product. The men's health movement is a product of the feminist-led women's health movement. All the stuff that's been happening in men's health mental, emotional health, physical health, sexual health this is all really good stuff. It's all a product of the feminist-led women's health movement. How many people even know this?

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Right, I'm going to take your leadership chip and I'm going to raise you an institutional chip, and that is is that the institutions that have been made the leadership positions and the way that the mechanics of institutions work is fundamentally in opposition to a lot of equity, because there's a liability factor where institutions are protecting themselves and their male leadership. And the thought was is that if we create these equity measures and we say women need to fulfill this amount of leadership, that that means the whole culture will shift. Unfortunately, what that meant was that women were in those leadership positions and they were still being sexually assaulted, they were still being sexually harassed, they were still being denied raises or equitable pay, because the basic structure still exists in many of these institutions and in our governments. So it's not just leadership that needs to change. It's actually the way we respond as institutions, as governments, as societies, to men who are being violent and to that lack of equity in decision-making and in leadership, because women are getting abused pretty severely in these environments and the lack of accountability is allowing it to continue. And it's extremely costly to our governments because there's a lot of backside payouts for those behaviors A lot of CEOs in high power situations that have been accused of serial sexual abuse have multimillion dollar settlements by their organizations to pay off survivors, to keep them silent and keep those men in positions, because those men are seen as investments.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

They're seen as making the money. They're seen as making the money, you know. So what we, what we really need to do, is double down on saying this is unacceptable. We have to have it accountable in all areas of society institutional, and that's that's a that's something that needs to happen.

David Mandel:

So this is where we're ending. I think we're we're ending on aspirational expectations for leaders to to step up and institutions institutional accountability when they don't and they make mistakes. So I I this has been tremendous.

David Mandel:

I I'm sad to end, it's been I know it's been a passionate you know ride for the last hour, jackson, with you and ruth and wow guys, this was a fun podcast, so so again remind us everybody we'll post this in the show notes that Every man why Violence Against Women is a Men's Issue is available right now in the UK, which is this is the beginning of May 2025. It will be available in Australia Again, a lot of our audience in Australia later this month, may 20th, I believe Jackson correct Is that right? And that it's coming out in the US an updated version, even in September of this year, and so really we encourage people to get that book and we will include information about Jackson's other programs.

Ruth Reymundo Mandel:

Other information and I just want to do a little reality check-in here. I do this sometimes on the podcast, especially when we've been spinning around. I know, david, we have to go, but I just want to affirm for our listeners that men and women are coexistent beings and that we have compatible and we have similar skills, that we're made of the same emotional, physical makeup, that we all are striving for connection, for meaning, for liberty, for the ability to self-determine and discover who we are as humans as we go through our lives, and that we all deserve to do that without threat, without violence and without removal of our liberties and our human rights. And that men as beings are valuable, that women as beings are valuable, that we belong to this earth, that we belong here, we are part of this ecosystem, and that we can live together and we can work together in ways that nurture and protect our relationships and our connections. We can do it. I actually really believe that. So let's just leave on that point.

David Mandel:

And that's lovely. So this is Partner with Survivor. We've had a wonderful guest, Jackson Katz. Thank you, jackson for being with us.

Jackson Katz:

Thank you so much. It's been great to be in dialogue with you and we'll continue. I hope, yes, please.

David Mandel:

And if you want to learn more about the Safety of the Institute, go to safetyoftheinstitutecom. If you want to check out our virtual academy, it's academysafetyoftheinstitutecom. Yeah, and if you like this podcast and the other ones, please listen to other ones. We have 60 or 70 of them out and share them with other people. Like it on your favorite platform and we're out. Thank you.