Things You Can Do
Take a thoughtful yet slightly goofy dive into ethics with your professor, Peter Owens, to discover some... things you can do.
Things You Can Do
Ethics and Masculinity, or, Being Hatched or Going Bad
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Content Warning: In this episode I’m going to be talking about the recent investigative report by CNN into the traffic and activity on a website called Motherless.com. While the episode’s focus is not sexual assault itself, there still will be frank conversation about it, and about the harm done by men who prey on others for their own gratification. If that’s not something you’re looking to hear about in a podcast, I totally understand. You can just skip it, or come back to it when you feel ready. If you or someone you know and love are the victims of domestic or sexual violence, in the United States you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or chat online at thehotline.org. All calls are free and confidential. You matter, and you don’t have to endure abuse, coercion, or manipulation to deserve love. There are people who care about you and support you. There is hope.
What do we do when we experience the worst that masculinity has to offer? Is there a way for men who use their masculinity as a weapon to become better? Is there a way for any of us to become better, and if so, how? We'll discuss this along with what makes something philosophical, how we can learn from those who "fence the Torah," and just what the heck we mean when we talk about "toxic masculinity."
1:55 | “Exposing a global ‘rape academy’” A CNN As Equals Investigation
7:35 | “Making Fences Around the Torah,” Rabbi David E Ostrich
15:20 | Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, pg. 2
25:20 | Todd May, Deleuze, pg. 19
27:18 | Lectures on Liberation : Angela Davis : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
40:28 | Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Hackett Publishing, pp. 63-64
42:05 | Ibid., pg. 65.
45:12 | Selection from Speaking Freely: Bell Hooks. newseuminstitute.org
51:50 | Plato, Republic, 392b
58:08 | CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, pp. 198-199
Hi, Peter here for a quick cold open. In this episode, I'm going to be talking about the recent investigative report by CNN into the traffic and activity on a website called motherless.com. While the episode's focus is not sexual assault itself, there still will be frank conversation about it and about the harm done by men who prey on others for their own gratification. If that's not something you're looking to hear about on a podcast, I totally understand. I've got other episodes besides this one that you can check out, or you can just skip it or come back to it when you feel ready. If you or someone you know and love are the victims of domestic or sexual violence in the United States, you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233. Or you can chat online at thehotline.org. All calls are free and confidential. You matter, and you don't have to endure abuse, coercion, or manipulation to deserve love. There are people who care about you and support you. There is hope. Okay, thank you for listening. Let's move on to the episode. In March of 2026, a CNN as equals investigative report detailed the online activities of individuals posting to the website for pornographic videos, motherless.com, a quote, morals-free file host where anything legal is hosted forever. The report suggested that, no, much of its content did not seem to be legal at first blush, especially a popular category of videos known as sleep videos, in which users film themselves or others committing sexual violence upon and raping their unconscious partners. Here is how the report describes it.
SPEAKER_01In these videos, men film themselves lifting the closed eyelids of women to show they are sleeping or sedated. With some eye check videos surpassing 50,000 views. Inside the motherless sleep community, first reported on by German investigative journalists Isabel Beer and Isabel Stroh, members trade advice on how to drug their partners.
SPEAKER_04The report goes on to describe how the reporters maintained contact with individuals who were and are members of group chats and message boards devoted to these predations. They learned that men trade secrets, talk about what kinds of drugs to use to incapacitate their partners, the right doses, the best circumstances to try it. One of the hardest things for people who have no experience with this kind of thing, either as a perpetrator or a victim, is to understand how it is that someone could ever get in the headspace where they would find these actions not only permissible, but the kind of thing that you would collaborate in community to try and optimize. I play video games, so I'm no stranger to reading message boards and even commenting from time to time about the best ways to equip your party to take on an optional super boss in Final Fantasy V. But I would say that the amount of time I've spent on this particular endeavor pales in comparison to the amount of time and effort these men have put into literally committing crimes against people they claim to love, not to mention the risks they take exposing themselves to others on the internet and potentially to their victims. At some point, a guy doing this has to just turn off something in their brain or their conscience that says, hey, this isn't a good idea. This is wrong. How does a person get to this point? And is there anything society can do to fix it? Or is someone who commits an act of this heinous just morally bankrupt forever? Hi, I'm Peter. I'm a professor of ethics and your host for this episode of Things You Can Do, an ethics podcast of approximate regularity, where I take your ethics questions and transmography them into meaningful answers so that you can know some things you can do. And before we were married, I would often refer to her in my YouTube videos as girlfriend of the show Meg. Similar to how I would refer to a friend of the show. But when we got married, wife of the show Meg just sounded weird. And also it lent itself to too many bull rat type moments. So Meg and I decided that we would give her a promotion and start referring to her as producer of the show. So today's question comes from producer of the show, Meg. She asks, Do you think it's possible to rehabilitate someone who has the urge to knowingly commit sexual assault and film it and share it? Does someone with the intent to do this thing to another person have the self-awareness to prevent themselves from causing harm? And who should be centered in the conversation about the systemic problem of men committing sexual violence against women? This is a big, heavy question. And I want to start by putting some borders around it. There's all kinds of questions that we could get into, but some of them would require us to move this question from a matter of ethics into one that feels more detached. For example, sometimes talking about consent requires talking about it in terms that feel very abstract. The danger of this is that it can lead us to forget that we talk about consent because it matters to human actions, and those actions have effects on real people, people who we love and care about. In rabbinic Judaism, there's an idea called fencing the Torah. So we can take a very quick moment of Hebrew. Fencing the Torah comes from the phrase Asus Siagla Torah, a phrase found in the first chapter of an important text in Judaism called Pirke Avot. The name of this text literally means something like chapters of the forefathers, but perhaps a translation more faithful to the idea of the phrase would be something like the Book of Foundational Principles. And in the very first bit, we read that a foundational principle of rabbinic Judaism is this idea of putting a fence around the Torah. What this means is that rabbis and teachers will recommend certain actions that aren't necessarily commands, but that are prudent precautions to take against accidentally transgressing the commands of Hashem. According to Rabbi David E.
SPEAKER_03Ostridge of the Congregation Barit Shalom, just as a fence around a yard or house protects it, many of the rabbinic innovations were designed to protect the commandments in the Torah. These developments were not seen as additions or subtractions, prohibited by the Torah in Deuteronomy 4.2 and 13.1, but rather as aids in maintaining the integrity of the mitzvot. I like to think of it with an image from my childhood. Many long driveways were lined with oak trees, and often the oak trees had tiny picket fences around them. A careless driver would break the fence, and not the oak tree.
SPEAKER_04The goal here is, as Rabbi Ostrich says, if you mess something up, you end up breaking the fence, something that can be fixed, and not killing the tree, which is a lot more precious and harder to replace. So I don't want to get caught up in any discussion that might descend into a casual casuistry when it comes to talking about sexual and intimate partner violence. It could be easy to talk too casually or flippantly about the harm caused by this form of violence, even when you're trying to be careful, even when you're trying to explore the idea with the express purpose of making the world better. Casuistry is a method of taking particular cases or events and applying broader concepts and ideas to them, often concepts that are based in paradigmatic or precedential cases themselves. So in United States jurisprudence, when we talk about the right to an attorney, we often talk about the 1963 Supreme Court case Gideon v. Wainwright, in which the Supreme Court unanimously decided that states must provide legal counsel to defendants that couldn't afford it. That concept, you have a right to an attorney, is then applied to other cases with different specifics. It's sort of like a theorem in geometry or a save point in a video game. You don't have to redo anything before that point, but instead you can point to this established principle in building a case based on it. But when we talk about casuistry, we often mean something like that person used a clever and disingenuous argument to deflect criticism or judgment. It takes advantage of the idea that to make a claim that all X is wrong, all one would have to do to cast doubt on that or disprove it, would be to find one single case in which it wasn't wrong. So for example, if someone were to say, all relationships between people who are more than 20 years apart in age are bad, to disprove that, someone could just say, well, look at this one case. They seem quite happy and healthy, so it seems that you're wrong. What the first person was probably saying was something like: in general, people 20 years apart in age might not have a lot in common, and there's the potential for unhealthy relationship dynamics that might not exist in relationships where the ages are closer. But the casuistry here is in making that all age gap relationships are bad claim seem weaker by pointing to an exception and then quietly reinforcing the opposite claim, age gap relationships are fine. Now, don't think that that represents my ethical breakdown of the case for or against age gap relationships. I'm just using it as a useful example that people likely have strong yet divided opinions on. So obviously, case law, precedent, and exceptions in law and morality are usually a lot more complicated than all X is Y. And there's a lot of value in digging down deep into the details of these kinds of things and finding all the nooks and crannies of meanings and definitions. But I don't care to do that when it comes to something as serious and as morally unambiguous as sexual assault. So to bring this back around to fencing in, I won't be entertaining any ideas that the kind of behavior described and depicted on these websites is acceptable. Yes, I think there are exceptions or situations where an actual consent could underlie the appearance of a lack of consent. But I'm not interested in those cases right now because they are statistically and logically the tiniest minority of those cases. Filming the sexual assault of your partner and sharing it online for the pleasure of others is wrong and evil. Full stop. Now that we've established that, we can also establish that the question here isn't really about sexual assault, it's about the people who do it and the people who have these impulses, intentions, or fantasies. Sometimes it can seem like even though a topic is ethical, remember, ethical just means choicey, it can be weird to think of it as philosophical. I've spent a lot of energy in this podcast on trying to explain what I think makes something ethical, but not really on what makes something philosophical. So first, I'm going to explain what I think makes something philosophical by way of talking about why thinking about character formation and virtue is a philosophical thing. Then, I want to use that conversation to carry us into a discussion of what it is that makes someone might want to do something like commit sexual crimes or victimize others in a way that's coercive or manipulative or violent. Why does it seem like there's this weird social exception to treating others poorly when it comes to sexual or romantic relationships? What is it about the idea of masculinity or sexuality or relationships that makes otherwise reasonable people think that it's okay to treat someone like an object? I'll be drawing on the work of Bell Hooks and our old friend Immanuel Kant to try to find some answers here. Finally, I want to conclude with a little bit about how it is that people who are conditioned to think that sexual violence isn't that big a deal. Well, how do we make them into people who understand that the way they've been conditioned to think and have given their assent to thinking is wrong? What does it take to change a way of thinking when that way of thinking is socially pervasive? We'll see what Plato has to say about teaching virtue at the level of society in his great work, The Republic, and how Foucault's idea of discipline and practices can help us take practical embodied steps toward this virtue. Here's a moment of Greek that I can't believe we haven't had yet. Philosophy is our English word for the Greek word philosophia, a combination of the Greek word philain, to love, and Sophia, wisdom. If you know that Philadelphia is the city of brotherly love, you've heard this phil root before. We also might have heard of a bibliophile, a lover of books, or even a philanderer, a man who has many irresponsible romantic dalliances. So the idea of loving is built right into philosophy. Loving wisdom is an action, and philosophy is never just a thing, but always kind of an action, a mode of activity. While there are many different definitions of what that activity is and means, there are probably three primary ideas that have affected my personal view of what it means to do philosophy. First, in their short 1992 book, What is Philosophy, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Gottari say that, quote, philosophy is the art of forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts, close quote. They tease out this idea of the lover of wisdom, saying that the philosopher is the concept's friend. What does that mean, to be the friend or lover of a concept? Well, first I think we need to know what a concept is, right? So here's my moment des Deutsch. The word concept in English comes from the Latin concipere, literally to take something in. But I think the best word picture is brought to us by the Germans, those masters of the philosophical vocabulary. Concept in German is begriff. It comes from the verb greifen, which means to grab or grasp. The prefix b, be is sort of like ed in English. It signifies a past participle. So a begriff is the thing which has been grasped, i.e., metaphorically, my mind grasps the idea of a thing. I'm able, to use an idiom of English, to wrap my mind around the idea of a thing by grasping it. For Delaws and Gottari, then, if doing philosophy means forming and fabricating concepts, I think that says a lot about what philosophy can do. We need to find out ways to understand the world, and sometimes the language and ideas that were given by the world just don't quite fit. Instead, we work with ideas, uh, twisting them, bending them, making new connections, making them work in different ways. Think about how new technologies sometimes use the words and ideas of older technologies to describe them. When we turn on a computer, we call it booting up. This is a reference to an older phrase, to pull up by the bootstraps. We still have this phrase in English. It generally means to rely on oneself to do a difficult task, but bootstrapping became a term for getting a computer system to run a program by having a smaller program whose job it was to run programs. We call this a boot drive, and a computer has what we call a BIOS, basic input-output system. One of its primary jobs is to tell the operating system to start up. So we use this old language that is largely obsolete. Most folks don't use bootstraps to pull their shoes on anymore unless they wear a specific kind of boot, but we use it in a creative way to describe a newly developed process. There are so many examples of this. The save icon on our computers still looks like a floppy diskette, even though we don't really use those anymore. You drive a car instead of operate it, because driving was what you did with the car's predecessor, a team of horses. When you call someone, you get them on the line, because phones used to literally operate using lines of cables. The person in charge of steering the airplane is a pilot because, well, a plane is like a skyboat, and the person in charge of steering the water boat is a pilot. In order for these ideas to work for us, that is, for them to make these phenomena intelligible and functional for our everyday lives, they had to be malleable enough to be adapted into new situations. So when the first computer programmers were building operating systems, they were doing something philosophical when they tried to describe that activity with old language. I especially love this definition because I describe critical thinking, a phrase often associated with philosophy, as the act of being really good at relating concepts to particulars. And that's why thinking critically about ideas and problems requires being a friend to concepts. You've got to get them to also be friends with these things that happen out there in the world so that the concept can be used to understand that particular. I have a future episode where I talk more about this, and we're a bit in the weed, so I don't want to belabor the point. But suffice to say that part of understanding what it means to do philosophy has a lot to do with how we apply our ideas to the things that happen in the world. Another way of thinking about philosophy comes from early 20th century German philosopher Edmund Husserl. Husserl was an important figure in what is called phenomenology, which is a branch of philosophy that deals with what it means to have an experience of consciousness. We understand that things happen out there in the world, and that we also have thoughts that happen in here or in our minds. Matthias and I discussed how this is part of the mind-body problem in our Gollum episode, and part of what phenomenology seeks to do is tease out the boundaries of what kinds of things happen on the side of our minds, or the subject, hence subjective, and how those experiences reflect what we think happens out there in the world. A way of thinking that is quite crucial to Husserl's later thought is what he calls the epoch. This is a Greek word literally meaning cessation, but it has the connotation somewhat of discontinuing a participation in or consent to something. An easier way to remember this is to call it bracketing or sometimes a phenomenological reduction. What Husserl means is that sometimes we think about things in a way that takes those things for granted. I get in the car and I turn the key, the car starts. I put the laundry in the dryer and it comes out hot and dry. I give my dog some food and she snarfs it down. But other times we think about them in a different way. Sometimes this is because they don't do what we expect them to do. The car doesn't start, the laundry doesn't get dry, my dog spits out the food and leaves it in a wet blob on the floor. So in order to think about that problem, we bracket the sort of everydayness of the idea, and we start to think about it as itself. Now, the mere act of problem solving a difficulty isn't necessarily bracketing like this. After all, solving the everyday roadblocks we bump into is kind of a part of everydayness. But taking that moment to go, hey, you know what? This is a thing, this is an experience in itself. This is its own little self-contained something that has a whole history behind the way I understand it, the way I talk about it, the way I imagine it. That way of thinking, what Husserl elsewhere calls the critical attitude, is what it's like to do philosophy as an activity. As an introduction to my third idea, I want to take a moment to talk about this phrase, the critical attitude. I've said this before, but this point bears repeating quite often. Critical thinking, or a critical attitude, doesn't mean criticism. That is, to tell someone that what they're doing is wrong or to be rude and negative about something. Critique, as a word and idea, goes all the way back to the Greek word krinain, which means to make a judgment or a decision about something. When we do critical thinking, we are thinking in a way that allows us to make a decision about the usefulness of an idea. For example, I have a friend who used to work for the News Literacy Project, an initiative that seeks to help students be thoughtful about the information they see in news and social media. To think critically about a particular news story or an anecdote of dubious veracity on social media, a student will have to make a judgment about this information using various concepts like: are multiple news outlets reporting on this story? Is there empirically verifiable information backing up this claim? Is there a bias that isn't being acknowledged or an agenda being pursued? Is this story attempting to come to conclusions that the evidence doesn't support? This is what we mean when we talk about being critical, using all of the available information to come to the best conclusion. In order for us to think about whether something works as an idea, we have to be able to think about if it were different than the way that it is right now. That seems a little counterintuitive, but if we interrogate this a bit, I think we can see the way this works. In order to even ask the question, is this the right conclusion? We have to have an idea, even the faintest, vaguest wisp of a notion that what there is right now could maybe be different than that. Think about it. What is the most taken-for-granted, unchangeable thing in your life? Maybe it's breathing oxygen or using your eyes to see things or gravity holding you down on the ground. You almost never think about that being different because, well, those things hardly ever change. And trying to imagine breathing ammonia or sensing light through your fingertips or floating in zero G is almost too difficult to describe. This is why I think the idea of the otherwise is really important in describing what it means to do philosophy. If nothing needed to change, or everything already worked in a way that didn't cause any problems, we wouldn't need to think very hard about those things, right? Gravity isn't a problem until you have to push a heavy rock up a hill. Ah man, I wish this rock wasn't so heavy and stuck to the ground. What if it had magical wings from the gods that could make it levitate? What if it were taken away on a huge gust of wind like a feather? What if it could float in the air like an apple in a barrel of water? This what if, this otherwise, is part of the activity of philosophy. Todd May, in his excellent book about G. Deleuze, says this about Deleuze and Gatari's definition of philosophy that we talked about before.
SPEAKER_03It is a way of articulating the hidden virtual reality out of which the actually experienced reality emerges. In Deleuze's hands, philosophy does not seek to offer a coherent framework from within which we can see ourselves and our world whole. It does not put everything in its place. It does not tell us who we are or what we ought to do. Philosophy does not settle things, it disturbs them. Philosophy disturbs by moving beneath the stable world of identities to a world of difference that at once produces those identities and shows them to be little more than the froth of what there is. And it does this by creating concepts. Concepts reach beneath the identities our world presents to us in order to touch upon the world of difference that both constitutes and disrupts those identities.
SPEAKER_04What Mei means here is that philosophy is the act of making concepts that can describe what it would be like if reality wasn't actually like that? What if it wasn't like that but something else? Well, to describe something else, I probably need a new concept. One that will describe a possible situation that doesn't actually exist right now. What would it be like for a computer to tell itself to do computering? Well, let me think, we could have it pull itself up by its own bootstraps. We could make it boot up. This is why I present Angela Davis's definition of philosophy as a third and maybe most practically crucial offering for us to consider.
SPEAKER_07My idea of philosophy is that if it is not relevant to human problems, and if it does not tell us how we can go about eradicating some of the misery in this world, then it is not worth the name of philosophy. I think Socrates made a profound statement when he asserted that the reason for being a philosopher is to teach us proper living. In this day and age, proper living means liberation from the urgent problems of poverty, economic necessity, indoctrination, and mental oppression.
SPEAKER_04When we think about how reality could be different than what it is, sometimes we're doing it because it's fun, it's creative, it's enjoyable. But often we're doing it because we find reality unfair, intolerable, unworkable, unjust. And I believe that to think philosophically, to do philosophy as an activity, is to think about how what there is now could be otherwise in a way that makes the world a better place to live, that solves human problems, that creates more and better situations for human flourishing. Because if we're going to heed Socrates' admonishment that we care for the self, that we cultivate the goodness of people, we have to think about how things could be different. We'll talk about how we can apply these ways of doing philosophy to the problem of sexual and gender violence after a quick trip to the agora.
SPEAKER_06Do you ever have a thought you maybe shouldn't say out loud and then immediately find yourself talking about it for an hour? We're Katie and Katie, and that's exactly how we operate. On I Suspect, a podcast for the curious and the chatty, we bring that dynamic to weekly conversations on topics ranging from the serious to the very unserious.
SPEAKER_05We're two friends navigating life a decade apart with chemistry that would impress your high school science teacher.
SPEAKER_06But for everything we agree on, there's just as much that we don't. We are not afraid to disagree and challenge one another's perspective, and you might find yourself picking sides.
SPEAKER_05But one thing is true: we always leave the conversation with a fresh perspective and more to think about. And we hope you do too. Join us on Mondays for new episodes of I Suspect.
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SPEAKER_02Or maybe you've read the books, but it's been a while and you've got some questions about the deeper lore of Middle-earth. Questions like, where do orcs come from? Why do dwarves and elves hate each other? And just who the heck is Tom Bombadil? Well, if so, I'm here to help. Hi, I'm Matthias Austin, and each week on the Lord of the Rings AMA podcast, I answer listener questions about Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit, and the Greater Legendarium of J.R.R. Tolkien, giving as in-depth an answer as I can, while trying to stick to a manageable 30-minute episode. If you've got questions about hobbits, elves, dwarves, or wizards, I've got answers. Check out the Lord of the Rings AMA podcast. Available wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_04There's a buzzword that's been going around for the last 10 years or so that attempts to describe the behaviors and attitudes of men who take advantage of their maleness to gratify themselves at the expense of others. Toxic masculinity. Well, I suppose that's two words. So, buzz phrase? Is that a thing? You know what I mean though. It's one of those sayings that starts out maybe as helpful, and then it gets sort of twisted and used up until it can kind of mean anything anyone wants it to mean. I don't know when I started using this phrase, and I wasn't really sure about its origins, even though I know that the ideas I associate with it have a firmly established history in the last hundred years of sociology, philosophy, and psychology. It turns out that the term toxic masculinity likely didn't begin as a term in feminist conversations, but was actually an idea meant to be a response to feminism. Let's talk about it in a new little segment I'm calling Minute History.
SPEAKER_03One man's quest to tell the story of a thing in 60 seconds or less.
SPEAKER_04Sometimes I have a habit of really belaboring a point to extinction, or doing such a deep dive into an idea that I risk losing the plot. That's why I'm challenging myself to explain this little nugget in just one minute. So here goes. Toxic masculinity was a phrase used in the mythopoetic men's movement as a response to what these men saw as unintended consequences of second-wave feminism. Men were being challenged to change their toxic behaviors without a proper understanding of what their non-toxic behaviors should be. Enlisting the ideas of psychologist Carl Jung, poet Robert Bly, and analyst Robert A. Johnson, they create practices that helped them recover a deep masculinity. These practices, such as reconnection with father figures and spaces for all-male collaboration rather than competition, aided men in grappling with the effects of a world that was changing the meaning of what being a man meant. Robert Bly, in his 1990 bestseller Iron John, a book about men, says, quote, The grief in men has been increasing steadily since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and the grief has reached a depth now that cannot be ignored. This grief is due in part to a difficulty in understanding the changing form of masculinity and how previous ways of understanding how to become a man have become hurtful, damaging, or toxic. Alright, that was Minute History. Let me know what you think. Did I explain it well enough? Did I leave too many questions unanswered? Is there a single noun in that paragraph that I didn't read a Wikipedia article for? Sound off in the comments or open the nearest window and shout your answer into the void. Using the term toxic masculinity in as good faith and constructive a way as possible probably looks something like this. Children learn what it means to be a man by watching the behaviors and attitudes of the adults in their lives. And sometimes those behaviors and attitudes cause them or others harm. Harm for which those adults don't really seem to need or want to apologize for. Often these behaviors are excused as boys just being boys, or this is just how guys are. Many times they're explained as usual or necessary components of what it means to love. Why does that boy keep picking on me? Well, because he likes you and he just doesn't know how to show it. Why does dad come home and sit on the couch and watch TV instead of helping with chores or playing outside? Well, honey, he's worked all day to provide for this family, and he's tired, so we should just leave him alone. I want to be really clear that I don't think toxic masculinity should be a way to browbeat men or make them feel guilty about being men. It's not a stick for hitting, it's a tool for demonstrating. Think about what we mean when we say that something, or more often some amount of something, is toxic. Certraline, the generic name for what many people know as Zoloft, is a drug that helps people overcome the symptoms of clinical depression by keeping their chemical serotonin in their system longer. It's known as a select serotonin reuptake inhibitor, or SSRI. When it's used under the direction of a physician, it's incredibly effective, and it's earned its reputation as being one of the most successful pharmaceutical developments of the 20th and 21st centuries. But like many substances, sertraline can be toxic if you take too much, or if you start on too high a dose, or if it interacts with your body in an unhelpful or unexpected way. On its own, it doesn't make sense to say that sertiline is toxic. It becomes toxic when it is in the wrong kinds of circumstances, when it's employed incorrectly or recklessly, when it isn't right for the person trying to use it. Here's another mini moment of reading. The Greek word pharmacon is where we get the modern English word pharmacy, a place to get our medicine. But just like the word drug, pharmacon meant both medicine and poison. Hey, this thing can help you get better, and also it can kill you graveyard dead. Even as far back as ancient Greek times, doctors understood that the same thing that can make you better can, under the wrong circumstances, be terrible for you. So I think it's prudent to take this approach to thinking about masculinity. Now, I'm taking for granted that masculinity is not an inherently bad thing. Which, to be fair, some people don't do this. There are folks who have reasonable arguments to say, well, these forms of gender presentation are oppressive and just sort of permanently messed up, and we need something different. I think that's a thing you can think. But it's not my personal position. Instead, I think that because what it means to be a man looks different in lots of different contexts, what it means to be masculine can also look different. But that there are ways to do it that, for lack of a better word, work well. But it seems pretty clear that there are habits associated with masculinity that do not work well. When a little boy gets hurt and starts to cry, maybe someone says to him, Oh, don't be such a baby, or big boys don't cry, or man up. The explicit message here is don't cry. The implicit message is if you cry about this pain, you aren't being a man in the right way. You're jeopardizing your chance to become a real man. So don't feel that feeling and ball it up and put it away, because real men don't show that. It's 2026, and I think we've seen enough examples of good, strong, manly men showing their emotions to feel comfortable saying that the men don't cry trope is just wrong and silly. But there are lots of men who grew up with these ideas implicit in the media we consumed. The adults we watched make decisions, the way that our actions were praised, ignored, or punished. Cast your mind back to our episode about teeth, and you'll remember that we don't learn things deep inside us simply by someone saying to us over and over, You must learn this. We get it from our environment, from interacting with countless little moments of affirmation and denial that build up over the course of many years, an idea that can't simply be worn down by telling ourselves the opposite. Let's bring this back specifically to the issue of men who abuse their partners, or take advantage of them, or sexually assault them. At some point in their lives, these men, I think, learned one or both of two things. I deserve to be in control, or I am an exception. Let me explain what I mean. One thing that the CNN report makes clear about the men that were observed participating in these online communities that celebrate rape and abuse, is that they enjoy it. They're titillated by it. They're excited and gratified by sharing it with others, in one-upping each other, in helping each other achieve the same results. The conversations revolve around encouraging each other to more effectively subjugate their partners against their will. What should horrify us is that many of these men, probably most of them, believe in some way that they love their partners, are good family people, or at the very least, are doing the kinds of things in their everyday life that entitles them to do these things privately, or at least in secret. I think this speaks to a sense that they are an exception to some rule. Hey, don't treat your partner badly, but also, every once in a while you can do things that you probably wouldn't tell your friends about, because you work really hard and deserve to have some fun every now and then, right? Yes, this is horrendous, and I want to be clear that I'm not using this line of reasoning to justify their conduct. To borrow a phrase from one of my favorite officiating analysts, here I'm trying to explain, not excuse. But what do we think of this idea, I am an exception, or there's a rule, but sometimes I get to break it if I did the right things to earn it. That seems to be the attitude that these men have, right? Let's take a look at this idea of making an exception of oneself in a slightly less high-stakes example. In 1799, Kant published an article in Berlinische Blotter called On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns. Kant took exception. I get it. It's just a little philosophy button there for you. Kant took exception to another thinker, Benjamin Constant, who said that sometimes it's okay to lie if there are major overriding philosophical concerns.
SPEAKER_03The moral principle stating that it is a duty to tell the truth would make any society impossible if that principle were taken singly and unconditionally. We have proof of this and the very direct consequences which a German philosopher, he's talking about Kant here, has drawn from this principle. This philosopher goes so far as to assert that it would be a cramp to tell a lie to a murderer who asks whether our friend who is being pursued by the murderer had taken refuge in our house. It is a duty to tell the truth. But the concept of duty is inseparable from the concept of right. To tell the truth is a duty, but it is a duty only with regard to one who has a right to the truth. But no one has a right to a truth that harms others.
SPEAKER_04What Constant is saying here is pretty common sense, right? Hey, don't tell an axe murderer where his next victim is hiding. If the Nazis come to your door looking for Jews in your basement, you have no obligation to tell them the truth. So it seems weird that Kant wants to die on this hill, right? But remember what we've said about Kant in the past. Kant wants to make ethics a science. So he wants to find a way to make sure that we can get the morally upright response to a difficult situation, not just in the moment, in a specific context, but all the time and for all time. So Kant's response here is something like, hey, we don't tell the truth because it usually turns out well. We tell the truth because it is the foundational principle that all duties are based in. Kant says in response to Constant.
SPEAKER_03And the laws of such duties would be rendered uncertain and useless if even the slightest exception to them were admitted.
SPEAKER_04So we don't need to agree with Kant about whether there are exceptions to the rule, don't lie. To understand what he's saying about exceptions here, and what he says about them in other places, especially in his more fleshed-out ethical works like The Critique of Practical Reason. Practical reason is Kant's way of saying ethics, because it's the use of our rational faculties not for pure things, that is, things that are not about experience, but for practical things, that is, stuff that does have to do with experience. Kant repeatedly doubles down on the idea that when someone does something against the moral law, what they're tacitly saying to themselves is, this is probably a good rule, but I am an exception in this circumstance. I think what we can take from this is that we should be really careful about doing things as an exception. I mean, things that are exceptions are, by definition, rarer than the things that usually happen. And if you can find a whole internet forum of guys helping each other literally commit crimes of sexual violence against other people, and if that internet forum is on a website that brags that it's the place for all this clandestine activity, well, I don't think you can really admit you're doing something that's merely a matter of course, right? What these men are doing when they commit these acts of violence in secret is asserting that they believe that they are the exception, but that they really want that exception to be the rule. And they do it in the open if there weren't so many darned consequences to it. Constantly asserting yourself as the exception betrays that you think the exception should be a rule. And I think this is what Kant is afraid of in allowing exceptions to moral rules. I also said that these men are expressing that they think they should be in control. I think that's pretty clear from the fact that they aren't obtaining proper consent from their partners and are bragging about it. But also from the fact that they're using substances to literally drug their partners, substances that damage or remove the agency of their victims. You don't take away someone else's agency when you think that they would do what you want in the first place. These men want and feel entitled to their partners' bodies in ways that they most likely feel like their partner would not consent to. But since they're the exception and they deserve to be in control, well, they just need a little help from a date rape drug to make sure that they get what they deserve, right? I don't think this point needs belaboring, but I do want to draw a principle out here that reflects some of the work of feminist scholar Belle Hooks, and that I think is important for us all to learn as we navigate all kinds of relationships: romantic, platonic, relationships between parents and children, between friends, between mentors and learners. Any relationship that is founded and guided by a sense of love and care, Hooks says, must be based in justice. And there can be no justice where there is abuse.
SPEAKER_00But in fact, so many of us have been wounded in some way in our childhoods that we really need to cling to the idea that if someone hurts you, they can also be loving you. And I tried to make a big distinction in that book between care and love. That like saying that my parents cared for me deeply, and care is important. A lot of children don't receive any care, but it's it's only one ingredient of love.
SPEAKER_04Hooks here is talking about the relationship between parents and children, but she is clear that this also is the case in relationships between equals. In her book All About Love, she recollects how once at a gathering, the subject of corporal punishment for children was raised. One woman said, She doesn't hit her kids, but when they do something she doesn't want, she clamps her fingers down onto their arm until they stop doing whatever it was they weren't supposed to be doing. Imagine, Hooks asks us, if a man said that he didn't hit his wife, but he did clamp his fingernails down onto the skin of her arm until she did what he wanted. We would be justifiably outraged at that. Hooks' point is that coercion and abuse are the same between parents and children and between intimate partners. They are a sign of an absence of justice. And where there is no justice, there can be no love. If men claim that they love their partners, but they coerce, abuse, or secretly violate their bodies and agency, there is no love there. The last part of producer of the show Meg's question was about who we should center when we're having conversations about how to fix the problem of men who prey on women. Briefly, what we mean when we say centering someone in a conversation is all about whose interests become the primary focus of our words and actions. For example, if a tree in my yard gets struck by lightning and falls on my neighbor's house, making it impossible to live in, I would seem pretty callous or at least out of touch if I presented that as a story of how I can never seem to have nice landscaping and how it always gets ruined by the weather. Sure, my interests were affected because maybe I love that tree and maybe it'll cost a lot of money to get it cleaned up and all the branches and debris out of my yard. But like someone's house got wrecked. And we reasonably tend to think that that interest in general carries more weight. Trees are nice to have. A safe place to live is a necessity. So in this conversation about violence against women, we do have to think about whose interests weigh more heavily here. In the 2015 case against Brock Turner, a man convicted of felony sexual assault, the judge in that case considered Turner's lack of criminal record and apparent remorse as sufficient reason for deviating from minimum sentencing guidelines and only giving him a six-month prison sentence, of which he served half. I'm not going to debate the merits of that choice from a jurisprudential perspective here, but I do think that giving Turner a sort of benefit of the doubt on whether or not he would offend again feels really off. It feels like we didn't take the right lesson away from this situation, which was a man took sexual advantage of a woman who was incapacitated and incapable of consenting. Instead, it seems we reinforced a lesson like, sexual assault is a peccadillo, and we don't want to upturn anyone's life too badly if we catch them doing it. Despite this, I think that the conversation about sexual violence cannot just be about victims. I think this for two reasons. One, to do this, I think, makes victim into a really flat category and makes it harder for us to remember that all kinds of folks are victims of sexual violence. Men, women, children, non-binary and trans folks, black and white, gay and straight. Failing to understand the dynamic between abuser and victim creates a conversation where we are always on the defensive, always trying to fix things after the fact. This kind of violence is preventable. And if we only focus on victimhood, I think we tacitly accept that, well, it's gonna happen, so we can only react to it. So my second reason is related to this first. If sexual violence is preventable, one of the ways that we can prevent it is by focusing on the perpetrators or potential perpetrators, and by focusing on the situations, behaviors, and knowledges of those people. We can think about how to create situations where it would be harder for sexual violence to occur. I remember having a conversation with the dean of students at my university, Dr. Jesse Brown. I genuinely don't remember what we were talking about, but I remember him using this word picture that was so vivid to me. He said something like, if someone is throwing babies into a river, yes, we need to rescue those babies, but we also need to go upstream and figure out who the heck is throwing babies into the river. I think about that word picture all the time when I try to imagine how to solve problems of any kind, not just big life-threatening issues like the river baby bandit. What are the effects that need to be mitigated in the short term? And what are the underlying causes that need to be addressed to prevent long-term effects? And so I want to wrap up here by invoking an ancient philosopher and a contemporary philosopher, who both seem to be on the same page about this. In The Republic, Plato talks about the way to ensure that there is what he calls a calypolis, or a good city. He thinks that in order to have a just society, its citizens have to conduct themselves a certain way, and the government of that city has to function a certain way. Using Socrates as his mouthpiece, as he does in many of his dialogues, Plato begins with questions like, is a righteous life better than an unrighteous one? And what's the use in being good? It's Socrates' and Plato's contention that it is better for a soul and a city to be good than to merely be lucky, advantageous, or dominant. This honestly sounds like an analogous situation to one we see in modern Western culture, where the question about various forms of masculinity could be posed something like: Is it better to be a man who feels powerful or a man who is good? We should be careful not to use Plato's Republic as a perfect roadmap. For instance, he would ban certain forms of art and advocated state-mandated open marriages, policies that would not be popular today. But one thing I think we should be thoughtful about is what he says about education and the kinds of stories and examples we use to teach people.
SPEAKER_03Because I think we'll say that what poets and prose writers tell us about the most important matters concerning human beings is bad. They say that many unjust people are happy, and many just ones wretched, that injustice is profitable if it escapes detection, and that justice is another's good but one's own loss. I think we'll prohibit these stories and order the poets to compose the opposite kind of poetry and tell the opposite kind of tales. Don't you think so?
SPEAKER_04So, to be clear, I think Socrates and Plato here are advocating for a certain kind of censorship in education. And I don't think we can take his advice one-to-one and just apply it to our world. But it should make us think about the kinds of stories and images we use to teach things, especially to teach the kind of socialization it takes to grow up in the world as a male. What images are we using to describe what male looks like? What stories communicate most effectively what manly is and means? What are young men and women absorbing, consciously and unconsciously, that tell them this is how to be a man, or this is the conduct to expect and accept from a man? I have this weird habit of getting kind of emotional when I watch a show or movie where two men have a meaningful, vulnerable, emotional interaction without relying on tropes or humor to carry them through. What I mean is, oftentimes the most visible examples of men sharing vulnerability come in the context of punchlines or bits. But sometimes they're just two men talking and sharing and showing that they can trust each other. This can just feel really special and comforting to me. For example, I've been watching Downton Abbey for the first time with producer of the show Meg, and I really like the head of the family, Lord Grantham. There's a scene where he gets upset with one of his servants for resigning his position on short notice. As the viewer, we have the information to know that the servant, Mr. Bates, is doing so in order to protect Lord Grantham and the family, but his lordship doesn't know this. Later, when the two men come back together, Lord Grantham apologizes and he bears his heart to him. He says, Come back, help me, I was wrong. I want your friendship and support.
SPEAKER_08What's the news? But now the thought of Matthew gone and the future once again destroyed. More than all that, I loved him like a son. No, I love him present, Mr. McCann. Will you come back with me and help me through the fade of shadow? I expected my if you want me to. I misjudged you, Pate, and I abused you when we parted. I'm sorry.
SPEAKER_04I want to use this to take us to the second piece of what I want to say about what we do about men who behave badly, especially ones who commit violence against others. As nice as this would be, we don't live in a world where just knowing something makes us good at doing it. There are plenty of men who acknowledge, and maybe even want to imitate, an image of what a safe, good, masculine man looks like, but they keep doing it wrong. But becoming a certain kind of person requires us to engage in practices that build us up over time into that new person. In Michel Foucault's 1982 lectures at the Collage de France, later published as Hermeneutics of the Subject, he talks about how the Delphic maxim in ancient philosophy, it's the exhortation to know thyself, this is always paired with a second command, take care of thyself. Now, here, care means more like health care or caretaking than take care. That is, the care here is a sort of self-cultivation, a set of practices that build up the self into what we wanted to be, in the same way that we have healthcare practices that build us up into a healthy body. How do we do this? We have what he calls practices or techniques that are aimed toward that goal. We engage in learning that takes us closer. We obtain mentorship and guidance from those who are farther ahead on the path than we are. We're aware of and track our temperaments and attitudes. These are the techniques we use to obtain our goal. And if we want to be the kind of person who is a safe man, for example, there are things we can do. We can make into practices and habits. These things will get us closer to that goal. I like this interaction between Grantham and Bates because it shows a good example of modes of practice that can get you closer to being a masculine man that is also safe, emotionally vulnerable, and just. Even just those phrases, I was wrong, I apologize, I need help. Those are phrases that the mere utterance of can be really difficult for many people. Practicing saying them in the right context with the right attitude, it takes work. You won't get it right the first time, but it can help to see it modeled for you, so that when you aren't sure if you can get it right, you can rely a little bit on that social script you've seen to help you act in a way that will turn you into the person you're becoming. This is a very small piece of what it means to understand and address male violence against others, especially against women. I have only scratched the surface with these ideas, but my hope is that when we approach this issue, we see reason for hope. The history of gender relations in Western civilization is suboptimal, but it is better than it was, and it can keep getting better. Especially if there are more and more folks every day who tell themselves that they will put effort into changing themselves, or put effort into not accepting bad behavior from the men in their lives. The hardest part might be that it can never happen in one big, epiphanous moment of clarity. That just isn't how people are made. It takes a long time to become a person, and you have to navigate the person that you already are while you're on the way there. But I want us maybe to consider the words of C.S. Lewis.
SPEAKER_03It may be harder for an egg to turn into a bird. It would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. For we are like eggs at present, and you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
SPEAKER_04I think a lot of people, but especially men, fear changing themselves because they don't know if it's gonna be worth it. They don't know if it's gonna be worth becoming someone better, especially if it means they won't get the kinds of social privileges or advantages that they know they get now. I also think a lot of men fear changing because they feel like they already can't measure up, so why would you put even more pressure on yourself to change and probably fail at that too? But honestly, I kind of see it this way. It's more likely that you'll be forgiven for messing up at trying to be a better version of yourself than it is that you'll be forgiven for being found out to be no better than the men we find overtly monstrous. For those of us men who are embarrassed and outraged by the behavior of those who would use their masculinity as a weapon, we must either be hatched or go bad. Developing habits that support our knowledge and goals about what it means to be the best versions of ourselves is the slow and steady work of picking away the shell of our former selves little bits at a time. But it will be worth it to one day spread our wings and become someone better. Thanks for listening. See you next time when we'll talk about some more things you can do. For references and citations, you can see the show notes. The Things You Can Do intro theme is written by Brantgum. The outro theme, and Around the Sun Again We Go, was written by me. Other music includes Right of Spring by Igor Stravinsky, performed by Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Igor Markovich, Sight of Summer 89 by Colors of Illusion, and Cascade and True Bayou Detective by Patrick Harding. The minute history theme was Titans by Dreamcave. Thanks to Nikki Adkinson for her voice talents on this episode as Angela Davis. If you've got a smooth groove you'd love to have featured on the podcast, or you're interested in being a reader for a future episode, email me at thingsyoucando pod at gmail.com.