“Women Recoil in Disgust When Men Get Vulnerable” | Jon Ronson

Link to full episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SW6vtFmxEg

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Every TED talk aimed at a struggling man gives the same instruction. Drop the mask, let people see the real you, and women will love you for it. Jon Ronson went and tested that advice, and what he found was ugly. He tried being vulnerable with female friends and watched them pull away from him. When he took it to Brené Brown, the woman who started the whole vulnerability craze, she told him the same thing happens to most men: they open up, and women recoil in disgust. Ronson’s reading is that a man who moves too far from the old protector role loses the women who were asking him to change, including the ones who begged him to be more vulnerable in the first place.

Ronson has spent thirty years reporting from inside subcultures, and for his new project he skipped the manosphere entirely and went looking at ordinary men. One number kept pulling him back: 6.7 million American men who are not merely unemployed but have stopped looking for work altogether. They have bowed out. He asks what that does to a man’s inner life, and he answers it from his own, because a couple of days without a story idea leaves him sitting on a bench feeling like his self-worth is draining out of him.

The rest of the clip is the pile-up of contradictory instructions men are living under. Be vulnerable, say the TED speakers. Be stoic, say the podcasts. Then the television tells them that men drive off cliffs, leave babies on restaurant conveyor belts, miss flights because they cannot navigate an airport, and sob when their wives take away the Doritos. Danny argues that the men projecting the hardest are the least secure, and that the jiu-jitsu black belts who could genuinely hurt someone are the gentlest people in any room. Ronson closes with a UFC fighter who bragged about a one-sided open marriage right up until his wife ended it, which he takes as a sign the pendulum is finally swinging back.

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Written by Danny Jones Clips