Jamie Paris: Why 'Toxic Masculinity' Isn't Helping Anyone (And What Will)

We sit down with Jamie Paris, a University of Manitoba literature scholar whose research bridges Shakespearean drama with contemporary issues of race, gender and masculinity. Jamie brings a unique perspective to conversations about what it means to be a better man in 2025.

As an educator first and foremost, Jamie's work focuses on helping foster the next generation through meaningful classroom discussions about identity, dignity, and human connection. His personal journey - growing up as an orphan, becoming a young father at 17, and finding his path through academia - shapes his approach to understanding masculinity not as something to tear down, but as something to rebuild with joy, care, and moral courage.

We're talking:

• Why many young men today feel ashamed of their gender and how to move beyond "toxic masculinity" conversations

• Defining healthy masculinity: the desire to protect, care, and extend joy to others

• How Shakespeare's tragedies teach us about pride, community, and making better choices

• Why preventing gender-based violence starts with teaching consent and bodily autonomy from a young age

Jamie challenges us to move past the question of "who's right and who's wrong" and instead focus on rebuilding trust - between individuals, communities, and across difference. His work reminds us that masculinity, when rooted in love and care for others, can be a source of strength and joy rather than harm.

Whether you're a parent trying to raise thoughtful children, an educator working with young adults, or someone interested in how literature connects to contemporary social issues, this conversation offers practical insights into creating more meaningful connections in our communities.

Episode Transcript:

Stuart Murray  00:00

This podcast was recorded on the ancestral lands, on treaty one territory, the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe Cree, Oji Cree, Dakota and the Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Metis nation.

Amanda Logan (Voiceover)  00:20

This is humans on rights, a podcast advocating for the education of human rights. Here's your host, Stuart Murray,

Stuart Murray  00:30

rethinking masculinity, teaching men how to love and be loved. I was made aware of that when I saw the conversation article that was written by my guest, Jamie Paris. Jamie is a dynamic early modern and Canadian literature scholar whose research bridges Shakespearean drama with contemporary issues of race, gender and masculinity. That piece that was written in February 2024 rethinking masculinity, teaching men how to love and be loved is something that I want to explore in this conversation with my guest, Jamie Paris. Jamie, welcome to humans on rights. Thank you for having me so, Jamie, maybe from a more in depth perspective, can you introduce yourself and explain what you

Jamie Paris  01:18

do? Yeah, so, I mean, I always say I'm an educator first. I think some people are scholars first, and they happen to educate. I kind of go the other way. For me, the classroom is everything, especially from a human rights perspective, we're helping to foster, build, develop the next generation, and the values we model and instill in the classroom are going to be the model values that, for better or worse, shape our culture. We've got to be very It's a sacred responsibility educating. We've got to be careful with it. A lot of my work is thinking about race in the early modern period right now. So I'm currently finishing up a book Thinking about whiteness as a kind of performative identity. So the argument is, in the early modern period, there weren't actually black actors on the stage to play black roles. So you would have people dressing up in what we would now call black face to play those roles, sometimes quite elaborate, like costuming, like pantyhose on the arms, black gloves, black face paint, wigs for hair. And one of the things this does is it actually makes the performance of whiteness visible. So not only do you have white men who are playing White women and had to, like, you know, get that kind of cosmetic advice from local women, but you also had white guys who were just playing a role. Wouldn't have thought of that role as racialized. But as soon as you put a actor on the stage, you've now sort of created this us, them, dynamic. And I'm really interested in that, because it means that Shakespeare is kind of teaching his white audience how to be white. And this is happening during, you know, the origins of the transatlantic slave trade. This is happening during the Age of Discovery. This is happening at a time where London is becoming a little bit more of a commercial hub. So these questions of what does it mean to shift from an English identity to a white identity are percolated in the period they're not as formulated as they're going to be in the 17th and 18th century? But we see the antecedents of a lot of contemporary anxieties about race and racism, anxieties about class. Is everyone who is white, white, or only the aristocracy white, that sort of thing. The other thing I'm working a lot on right now is thinking about, what does it mean to be a better man? A lot of my work is on questions of listening. What does it mean to actually listen to another person? How might masculinity get in the way of that and these questions of love, what does it mean to love and be loved by other people? And how do we develop the moral courage to think about love as not, you know, Martin Luther King said, like, not sentimental, Bosh, but that that idea of like love is seeing the value in ourselves and others and caring about that value. And how do we promote that

Stuart Murray  04:19

so? So Jamie, how did you find yourself interested in this very important topic that we're going to discuss? What got you interested? I mean, first and foremost, when I when I read a little bit about your background, and knowing full well that we were going to get into a talk about masculinity, and what does that mean? And that's, you know, very topical today, but how you sort of bridge from Shakespeare to today? I mean, you alluded to a little bit in your intro, but how did you decide, like when you were looking at this, did you, did you decide to go back earlier than Shakespeare? But there's nothing, really in terms of writing from a research perspective that you could draw out or. How is it that you started with Shakespeare and then bridged it up to where we are today?

Jamie Paris  05:04

Yeah, I mean, to answer that question, well, I think I have to just take a step back in terms of my biography. So I'm I'm an orphan, and I grew up without a dad. My dad actually died just before I was born. My mother struggled with addiction. She was never part of my life, and like a lot of young men in the 90s, I ended up having a son very, very early, and I found myself in the unique position of kind of never being loved. I had people who cared for me. I had people who, you know, made sure I was fed. But it's different when you're an orphan, it's different. When you're a foster kid, it's not the same relationship always. And all of a sudden, I had a child, and I had to love that child, and I wanted to love that child, and I wanted to end those cycles, right? You don't end up in the situation I was in at 16 or 17 because one family member made a mistake, right? This is generations of problems that have led to this, histories of racism, histories of poverty in our country, I had to make changes. So when I went to university, I went as a mature student. I also went with this acknowledgement of like I wanted to be the right kind of man for my son, and I had no idea what that meant, so I gravitated towards a lot of people in gender studies. I gravitated towards a lot of people in literature who were starting to talk about masculinity, but I really gravitated towards a lot of people in theology as well who wanted to talk about these questions of, how ought we live our lives and Shakespeare, Shakespeare brought me there, because so much of Shakespeare in my dissertation, we're talking about, I'm talking about the tragedies. And so many times what happens in the tragedies is pride, right? Someone makes a mistake. You know, Macbeth makes a mistake. He knows he should listen to the Weird Sisters, but he's just too invested. He's doubled and tripled down. And you get this like, almost like an early modern version of YOLO. I might as well just go forward if I'm going forward. And they're so frustrating to read when you start reading them over and over again, because you see these great men making these horrific mistakes. And then you start looking at your own world and going, Well, okay, this is art and artifice. And there's a little bit of, you know, forcing a plot into a to make sense for the reader. But I'm also watching the men in my world make these mistakes over and over again, and I just want them to stop. And then you read the comedies and you see it again, right? You see these men who make horrible mistakes, but the difference there is often they have a community, and that community steps in and sort of says, hey, just hold up before the worst of the mistake, right? And that really got me thinking a lot about, how do we develop these communitarian ethics so much of criticism of masculinity, it's individualistic. It's about me and my masculinity. It's about stoicism, and what can I do to be a better man individually? But it's less about this broader sense of community. How do I enact my gender in a way that helps other people?

Stuart Murray  08:25

And I appreciate that. And thanks for the openness and letting us know a little bit more about who you are in your background. Jamie, thank you for that when you, when you sort of looked at, sort of getting into these studies, I mean the fact that you became a young father. How old were you when you became a father? 1717, okay, so you became a father. You're 17. You're a mature student. You're at university. You're studying these, these areas of Shakespeare. And then you get into this issue of masculinity. Let me just sort of start with with a question about, How do you define masculinity?

Jamie Paris  09:01

Yeah, yeah, that's a great question to me. Masculinity, at its best, is about the desire to protect and care, the desire to protect and care for ourselves, certainly, but it's also that extension to others, right? Like when I feel most like a man, it's when I'm taking care of my students. It's when I'm taking care of my wife, it's when I'm taking care of my dog, my son, right? It's those extensions that really matter. I think the other way I would define masculinity is joy, right? I think of, you know, being out with the guys having a beer, laughing at a joke. I think of, you know, the gentle ribbing and playing that I think are all parts of you know, the beauty of masculinity. I think of playing sports and the joy of moving one's body in harmony with others, and that joy matters, right? And I. Think that joy is not unique to men. Certainly, I certainly hope all my female colleagues and friends have lives filled with joy, but I think sometimes we understate it, because we confuse joy with fun and they're kind of different things, right? Like Joy is about when I'm taking all of myself and putting it into a moment, an emotion I'm gaining something by the experience fun is more momentary, right? It's more of a body, embodied response. And to me, I think great masculinities are joyful.

Stuart Murray  10:42

Yeah, I'd say that's a great way to kind of frame the conversation. Jamie, thanks for that. And I mean, when you you know, we sort of look at this as a from a human rights perspective, and when you look at masculine and human dignity, you know, understanding your framing of masculinity. You know, when you talk about rethinking masculinity, from your book teaching or your piece, I should say, teaching men how to love and be loved. How does rethinking that masculinity relate to, say, fundamental human rights, especially to dignity. You know, for both men and for those around them.

Jamie Paris  11:21

You know, one of my North Stars is Martin Luther King, Jr, and his writing on love, and he talks about agape, and this, this general sense of to love another person just to see what he would call the image of God and the other. Now, I'm not as religious as Martin Luther King. I don't think many of us are, but I do take from him this idea of seeing the other and recognizing that there is at least as much dignity in that person as there is in me and anyone I care about. King also makes this really nice distinction between loving and liking right? So the Christian commandment is you must love your neighbor and kings like if the commandment was like your neighbor, it's almost impossible. There are a lot of people who do things I dislike. There are people who are racist, there are people who are homophobic and sexist. I dislike these things strongly, but I still love them. I still see their dignity and potential for dignity, and I think this, again, goes back to teaching, right? There are times where you work with a student and they are frustrated, they are fighting you, they are not living up to their potential. They can be unlikable, but I still love them. I still see their dignity, and I still want to help them develop and grow. So when I imagine rethinking masculinity, it begins one from I actually think a lot of men don't see themselves as people with dignity. I think a lot of men see themselves in terms of lack, in terms of what they don't have. So reframing the self in terms of dignity is really important, and then reframing the community not as taking away dignity. So sometimes men will prove they are men by harming others, by transgressing against others, but starting to get people to see that actually it takes courage and strength to respect the dignity of other people. And if we start focusing on that as enacting your manhood as opposed to like getting in a fight or saying something sexist, what we start to see is this kind of virtuous circle. And to me, that's the reframe, yeah, so.

Stuart Murray  13:37

So when you are having these conversations with your students, what is one of the biggest challenges they've come in terms of questioning what it is that you're you're talking or teaching them, or you would like them to learn. What's Have you felt that there's been sort of a conversation with a few students who go, you know, in terms of reframing? Has it changed your thinking in any way.

Jamie Paris  14:02

I think there's two that jump out right, and the first one is the term toxic masculinity. I think toxic masculinity, if you look at its original scholarly development, you think about prisons, and you think about what it was actually trying to describe, right, a kind of masculinity that was harmful to the self and to others. It's an incredibly valuable tool. Analytically, unfortunately, we've started applying this to pretty much everything with young men, so that a lot of young men are coming into my classes, almost ashamed to be men, and a lot of women who are, you know, female identified who are attracted to men, almost come in with an apology that they're attracted almost come in with an apology for their love of other men around them, because there's so much negativity around masculine. Personality. So part of this is framing for people like when we're talking about toxic masculinity, we're talking about an almost pathological condition. It's valuable, but we want to distinguish between toxicity and people making mistakes. And that someone makes a mistake does not mean they're toxic. It doesn't mean they need to be canceled, but does mean, in a caring community, they need to be redirected. They need to be told, sort of how to be part of that community in an ethical way. The other thing I'm seeing a lot of is gender shifting. Gender is just shifting. So when I come to university talking about masculinity, talking about sex and gender as cultural construction, that was new and that was radical, and you could feel teachers just like being a little cautious in the room. Now I'm coming into rooms and half of my students are they them. They're very openly queer. I believe it's 20% of the millennials now identify as somewhere on the queer spectrum. They've got a knowledge of gender. In some ways that is just night and day above what I had coming into university, and in other ways, they're 1718, 1920, year olds, and they've got misconceptions, and challenging those misconceptions can be scary, especially when it's a big part of your life. So that conversation is new. That conversation is new like when someone will come into a room and tell me I had a student tell me they were a gendered cool I don't know what that means. I still don't I talked with the student multiple times. I respect that. That's what they are, but I'm also like, we need to talk that through, and we need to be willing to interrogate that. If the students like, not that student needs to talk in front of a room, but like as a culture, right? We need to talk some of these new identities through and ask ourselves, what are they doing to masculinity,

Stuart Murray  17:05

right? Yeah, yeah, no. I mean, it's always think it's a great you know, being in the university, you you have so many different, you know, races, culture, backgrounds, biases, that are people sometimes don't realize they have them, and so you have these conversations, and as you say to a gender again, I'm with you. I'm this is kind of a, still a learning experience for me in terms of the use of pronouns, Jamie, sometimes it's you know, kind of sort of navigate that in a very respectful, dignified way, not only for the person who's asking, but for the person like me who is engaged in the conversation. So, you know, you mentioned a little bit about, you know, kind of race, masculinity, systemic injustice. Let me just kind of explore your thoughts on, you know, sort of the intersectionality. So, you know, how do racism and colonialism intersect with masculinity and from a human rights implication, what are those human rights implications, specifically for something I know you're studying, which are black and Indigenous men?

Jamie Paris  18:19

Yeah, well, first off, thank you for that question. It's a book. It's a very hard question to answer quickly. Not that you're asking me to answer it quickly, but it's difficult. So when we're talking about intersectionality, we're talking about a theory of gender that's coming out of black feminist thoughts. It's old. In black feminist thought, you could go all the way back to Sojourner Truth. You can go back, you know, a die a woman. We're starting to see those kind of intersections, but it's typically credited to Kimberly Crenshaw, a legal scholar from America who talks about de marginalizing the intersection of sex and race. It's this idea that black women were often forced to choose, are you black, or are you a woman? Are you a feminist, or are you anti racist? And the answer is, well, you're both right. You can't take one hat off and put one hat on. So if I'm working with an indigenous community and I'm working, say, with a men's group, it's not like, well, we're men in this circle, and that's it, right? Like the indigeneity doesn't go away. This is really important, by the way, in Canada, if you think about one of the legacies of residential schools, it wasn't just teaching Christianity, it wasn't just the teaching of language. It was also a radical reconception of gender, gender ideals, responsibilities to the community. And a lot of indigenous communities are still fighting their way back to traditional ways of being male, and it is causing a lot of real problems. You know, you think about over incarceration. I. Some of that is because of racism, but some of that is because of just systems within community that aren't healthy and are going to take, you know, Murray Sinclair says, seven generations to heal. We've got a lot of time to go before we're going to fix some of that stuff. Now, that's not an excuse. There's a lot that the Canadian state can do in terms of resources, in terms of making sure schools are good, healthy places, especially on reserve, but we've got to deal with that legacy. So when I'm thinking about these intersections, part of what I'm trying to get people to think about is you don't stop being disabled, black, poor, wealthy, when we get into a conversation about gender like there's no position from nowhere through which to interact or engage in these conversations. So it's really about bringing ourselves our whole self to that conversation and then thinking about how that self changes over time. So one of the things I am noticing is, you know, I'm not old, but I'm getting older. And as I'm getting older and working with my students, the culture has shifted enough that we don't share a common culture anymore. My youth culture is not their youth culture, which means if I make a Simpsons reference in class, they look at me like they have no idea what I'm talking about, which is great, but it also means that I've gotta accept that I take on a different role for these students as someone a little bit older than them now than I did say 10 years ago, who We are intersectionally also shifts and changes is our understanding of our bodies, ourselves, our racial identity, our gender changes over time, right? So rather than thinking about intersectionality as a fixed thing where I give you a list, I like to think of it as a collection of fluid states where some things matter more to us at particular moments in our life and they're foregrounded. Maybe you're young, you've just come out of the closet. Sexuality is huge to you. Maybe 30 years later, you might still identify as gay, but now you're much more worried about disability politics, and that's actually a really good thing, that these things shift and change over time.

Stuart Murray  22:20

You know, you look at the the where we are in today's society, and I've had podcasts with with teachers, with librarians, who are under some pressure to eliminate, or, you know, take away books that certain people are looking at and saying that they shouldn't be in the library, maybe they're to deal with trans issues or the LGBTQ two plus spirited, two spirited community. You know, Jamie, those this is 2025, and a lot of times people look at and say, Man, we're really throwing this clock back to the 50s. How do you, from your perspective, feel we can create a more open conversation about allowing people who have these challenges, these intersectionalities that are very, very normal, but they get to be stigified, because so many people are trying to put a label on people.

Jamie Paris  23:16

So I mean, I want to begin by thinking about the book question, because I am, at the end of the day, an English scholar, right? And one of the things I do is critical race theory. As a critical race scholar, I wouldn't say I'm in support of banning books. That would be way too far, but I do think there are times where we do want to actually have some real safety mechanisms on what we put forward. The classic example is Mein Kampf, obviously, you know, in Germany, it's now in the public domain, but for many, many years it was not, and it just was not available. Now, if it's available, it's gotta be in a scholarly edition. I think that's a good cultural compromise. I think there are lots of racist texts that, quite frankly, I don't want in public schools. And if they're going to be there, I want them, I want them to have some semblance of framing device so that we're explaining to students. For example, I did my Masters on Rudyard Kipling. Actually really love Rudyard Kipling's children's literature, but I don't think that young students should be reading a white man's burden. And I definitely don't think we should be teaching that in classes, or if we are, we should be teaching it in an incredible amount of context, right? Why do I say all of this? Because I think right now, one of the things I'm hearing is a book like, gender queer is pornography, and it's just not. It's just not. I mean, we can get into a whole debate about what pornography is, where the line is. But like, are there a couple panels? I don't. Love, yeah, sure, but no, this is not pornography. This is someone exploring their gender and sexuality in a visual form that's accessible. And this matters, because for so long, these conversations were so specialized and technical and the preserve academics that you could kind of, you know, let people write Judith Butler, read Judith Butler, and it was, it wasn't a threat to anybody. But now we're in the third, fourth generation of this, and we've got people who can express these ideas in very accessible ways. So that's, to me, a big part of what's going on with this book banning. I do think if someone wanted to put something legitimately pornographic in an elementary school. Yeah, we should stop that. But I also think we gotta hold on to the actual meaning of words. A society built on mendacity will not survive and pretending that things are more objectionable than they are, I don't think that really helps if you don't want a book in your public school library. I think people should make the argument from a good faith perspective of why this particular book is hurtful, but pretending it's something else. I don't like that. I think that's that's really harmful.

Stuart Murray  26:18

I look at it, you know, from the basis of saying, particularly when I listen to some of these librarians from rural Manitoba who are specifically getting pressured with books around trans children, what it's like to be somebody who's exploring what does that mean, trying to sort of self identify, getting a sense of who they they are, or what they're trying to be. And you know that having those books, I mean, I've had librarians say, you know, what we can do is we could try to be very clear that in the library, to be very explicit about what sorts of books are in this section, without saying that we have to remove them completely from the library. And so, you know, part of that conversation is, as you say, you know, how do you academically and thoughtfully? And there's not, not from a legal perspective, but from a kind of, almost a sense of a human rights perspective, ensure that those books have people that are interested in getting access to those books still have the ability to do so. And I

Jamie Paris  27:28

think you know, when I was young, we had one friend who would now identify as non binary, but that was not termed that were available when I was in high school. And that was terrifying. They were terrified. They were terrified of how they would be perceived. I mean, the first film I had that introduced me to trans issues was The Crying Game, you know, like there, there was this constant drum beat of to be trans, to be gender varied in some meaningful way, was to live a life of tragedy. And I think what's really important about these books that are getting banned is they're suggesting the opposite. They're actually suggesting joy. They're suggesting that here are people who have a different way of expressing themselves, and they're living good, healthy lives and sometimes have supportive families. And I think we have to have a conversation about why that's threatening to some people. Why is it threatening to imagine trans joy? Why is it threatening to imagine trans love? And I think part of it is this belief that I have a queer theory colleague who says the fundamental fear of heterosexual men is that gay sex is awesome. And, I mean, I think there is this fear that, like, oh, well, that sounds like fun, you know? And, yeah, sure, it does. It's not what I want to do with my life. But I get why someone does it, yeah? So, like, I don't like the idea of a part of the library becoming, like the, you know, back in the day they had, like, video stores, they have that, like, black curtain for the naughty videos, right? Again, I don't think that's healthy or productive, right? I think what we want to do, if you want to change the conversation, go write accessible books about why your lifestyle is beautiful. I would challenge many of the people coming out of rural communities to seriously just sit down and tell me why you love marriage. Tell me why being heterosexual is awesome for you, right? Enter into the world of ideas, and let's talk about it, right? But shutting people down, I don't think it helps anyone, and I think it makes the books more popular, right? Quite frankly, if you tell me I can't go read a comic book, I. That's

Stuart Murray  30:00

all I want to do, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, to some extent, Jamie, you know, it's a little bit of the Jordan Peterson phenomena, you know. I mean, there he is. I mean, the best thing that can happen to him is people protest him, and people don't want him to speak and they don't want to do this. I mean, a lot of times people would say, I didn't even know he was in town until somebody told me there was a protest, and you know, you're gonna go to the protest. So, you know, it's a it's an interesting observation you make. And I've always sort of thought that, you know, the biggest thing is, when people have issues with what's on television, or a Jordan Peterson, like character speaker, turn it off. Don't go. I mean, do your own thing. It's all good. You've got lots of other things that, to your point, will bring you joy. Go seek that, find that.

Jamie Paris  30:47

And there I would again, going back to this distinction like Jordan Peterson, I disagree with a lot of what he says. He does not hurt me. He said hurtful things, right? Andrew Tate, right, that's a different thing. Yeah, right, I'm fine with putting blockers up and making it harder for 12 year old boys who are impressionable to have access to that context. Yeah? Jordan Peterson, Well, honestly, I think 90% of what he says is just weird, you know, like, I'm not worried about that, but there is some stuff he said that is hurtful for sure, right? But again, having that conversation and not pretending that all these things are equal. Yeah,

Stuart Murray  31:28

couple of things that I'd love to explore with you, Jamie is, you know, when you talk about rethinking masculinity, let's maybe just if I could pose my question this way, you know, how does, or how can reshaping masculinity help prevent gender based violence or promote maybe a culture of consent and equity?

Jamie Paris  31:55

Yeah, you know, that's, that's one of the big places I come into this conversation from sometimes our desire to prevent sexual assault comes from a beautiful place, and it can lead to an almost puritanical kind of culture. And what I mean by that, specifically, is people start getting scared and paranoid of sexuality. Sex is a beautiful part of life. We should be able to talk about it in university classrooms. We should be able to talk about how it ebbs and flows, and we should be able to talk about what it means to have joyful, consensual experiences in real and honest terms. There's a huge literature on human sexuality. It is one of the most written about things we do, and having those kind of conversations about joy is really important to have while we're having conversations about what goes wrong, right? So, yes, we need to have sort of these huge conversations about what is happening in terms of the crisis of sexual assaults on campus. It's real. It needs to be dealt with. We need more resources for women's centers. We also need men to step up as much as possible and say like, you know, Rape is rape. We need to not call it something cute that doesn't make it any better. We need men to start saying, you know, like, part of being a real man is making sure you have consent. Part of being a real man is making sure that the experience is joyful for both parties, or however many parties are involved in that particular experience. When I think about reframing, I think about reframing cultures of consent with most of the things we do right, I think about one of the studies that just broke my heart was finding out how many men have workplace incidences like just, you know, they break a knee, a hip, throw their back because they're trying to work so hard they want to provide for their families. They want to, you know, be perceived as hard workers, and they're pushing their bodies past a breaking point, and it's got to end. It's got to end, and it won't end unless we start talking about it. And to talk about it, we've got to sort of get at there's something selfish about doing that. It may not feel selfish while you're doing it right, but there's something about pushing your body to the point where you can't play with your kids to provide for them. That's not good. But it also means we want to talk about rethinking masculinity. We've got to rethink our our model economically as well. We shouldn't be in a place where someone is working a good, honest job and 40 out. Hours a week doesn't give them enough money to provide for their family. You know, like this is a problem, and these economic inequalities are starting to impact the way men live their lives, and it takes us away from having the kind of meaningful family, community existence we want to have. So it's hard, right? Because when you start talking about reframing masculinity, you're always coming back to these intersections, and you got to start thinking about all the other things that get in the way of living a life filled with joy.

Stuart Murray  35:36

So on that point, Jamie, what about preventing you know, from a masculinity standpoint, helping to prevent gender based violence.

Jamie Paris  35:45

First off, you know, we just had the case with the junior hockey players. And I want to be clear here, I'm not giving a legal opinion on the junior hockey players, but I am saying these cases send messages, and when a Justice says the woman is lying, when women who come forward are treated poorly by the media, are treated poorly in courtrooms, when major newspapers talk about how this is the end of me too, or a referendum on the I think the National Post had a headline the excesses of me too. This is not good, right? Not everything needs to be a culture war issue. Not everything has to be us and them. I wasn't in that room. I don't know 100% what happened. I've read the evidence. I tend to believe the victims in this case. I am aware that, you know, I think believe all women, every single time, is actually a little infantilizing. I think women are just as capable of lying as men. And there's a long tragic history of women lying in cases with black men, in cases with Indigenous men. And these are things, sorry,

Stuart Murray  36:58

just to interrupt there, Jamie, who, when you say cases of lying, who is referring to? There cases of lying?

Jamie Paris  37:03

I'm referring specifically to a so, like, one version of this is, there's a long history in the American South of women getting into affairs with black men, getting caught and then saying that they were sexually assaulted.

Stuart Murray  37:18

So white woman, white women, told him, okay, yeah, thanks, yeah.

Jamie Paris  37:21

Like these things, these things do happen and but in this case, it really does sound like something occurred. And when we have this kind of they're innocent, everything's fine. The women are the problem. We're sending a message to our young men. We're sending a message to our young men that they should push limits. We're sending a message to our young men, especially young white men who are privileged, that they will not face consequences for their actions. That's a dangerous message to send, and it hurts young men, especially because not all young men get away with these things, especially because I think actually committing acts of violence scars the soul, scars the self in some really important ways that we don't talk about enough in our culture. And I think that it's really, really bad for young women, and I think we need to have serious conversations as men about these things. But I'll make one other point here, because this is something that has been bothering me culturally for years. I hear a lot from the victims of sexual assault and rape, and I love that. I love hearing from them. I want to hear more from the men who do these things. I want to hear more about the consequences, the psychic cost. I want to hear men coming forward and talking about encounters they had that were dicey, and what that feels like when they're a little older, maybe something feels great when you're 18 and you're pushing a boundary and someone's drunk, and you think, haha, I'm going to get away with it. And then you reflect on that 10 years later, and you're like, oh my god, that was a horrible thing I did. I think having people talk about these conversations, these sort of like honest, ethical conversations matters. Because when young men are making these decisions, they're often thinking, Can I get away with it? Not ought I get away with it? I want them in the space of the odds. Yeah,

Stuart Murray  39:37

you know, I think you know that issue with the five World Junior Hockey athletes. A lot of people have a hard time with the legalities of it. And as you said, Neither of you or I are legal scholars or lawyers in any way, shape or form. We simply listen to an issue where you know five and maybe more men were in a room with the young. Woman. And so when you look at some of these issues, I know somebody said, you know, we have to look at promoting this culture of consent and equity and and, and so where, where does that? Where does, where does that start? Because I, you know, part of it is a lot of people who wondered whether the judge would find these five young men innocent or guilty, the fact that they were found innocent, that kind of, in a way, gives an opportunity for somebody like minded to sort of say, Okay, well, to your point, we can do this and get away with it. And where do we start the conversation? Jamie, where does it start with the notion of what you talk about, teaching men how to love and be loved? I think it's fair to say that that none of those five in that room, if they had the idea of how to love and be loved, would have been or allowed whatever took place in that room, you and I weren't there. But you know that notion about, how do you then put your moral compass on and suggest that that something in this room isn't right? Somebody's going to take you talk about being a leader. Somebody could take a leadership role and say, You know what? I got to tell you, this thing is shut down right now. We're stopping this,

Jamie Paris  41:22

which is hard to do, by the way, that's so hard to do but, but it is where it happens. It is sometimes I think about my own life, I've gotten out of many situations because I or somebody else had the moral courage to say we're done now. And sometimes you do need someone else to step in? In terms of, where do we start this conversation? I honestly think we go back to where do we start to learn how to love? And it's very young. It's very young. And I'm not saying, you know, if you don't learn how to love by five, you're not gonna be able to have a loving relationship as an adult. That's not true. But what we want to do is, here's a really simple example hugging. I do not like being hugged. I do not like that feeling of it. Some people do, and that's great. It's not for me. And I remember family events, community events, where I had to hug everybody. I'm all factory sensitive, like smells or something that really hold on to me. So if I don't know you and you smell a little funny, the idea of being like, right in your personal space was actually a little uncomfortable for me, I bet. Yeah. But what are we teaching people when we tell them, actually, if you don't hug this person, you're being rude, right? Actually, if you don't consent to sort of give up control your body for a little bit, you're being unfair. You know, you think about clothing the you know, go try that on. You must wear this. Put this shirt on for grandma. Again, you know, sometimes that's really fun. Sometimes that's teaching people from a really young age that they don't have control over their bodies. I played football. I played basketball. And, I mean, we got to talk about athletics culture if we really want to get into how this works. Because, like, I was told to push. I was told to hit and go through that man when you hit him. I was told that all that matters is getting the football out of the player's hands and getting it for your team and put everything else to the side. I was told in so many ways that my athletics was more important than my academics more important than my moral development. For all the movies we have about like the great coach who comes in and talks about the moral formation of young men. If we actually look at our sports culture, especially, I think in Canadian hockey right now, what you're going to find is a lot of people do not care about the moral formation of young men. They care deeply though about those potential NHL contracts. They care deeply about the potential fame that comes with the with these kind of rewards, I think that we've got to refocus morality right at the grassroots level of athletics, at the family and In school, we really do have to have conversations about consent. And I don't think it's as simple as saying we have to have sex ed. I actually think, like right from the hop, we gotta have conversations in school about bodily autonomy. We have to have conversations where, if a kid says, No, I don't want to do this, we don't force them to do it. We start saying, Okay, why don't you want to do it? What can you do instead? Can you demonstrate your knowledge in a different way? Can we give you another option until you're ready to do this work? It's not about coddling people. Sometimes I get that as pushback when I say this, like, oh, I want people to be. Snowflakes, it's actually quite the opposite. I think you become morally tough when you start understanding the difference between I'm uncomfortable and I really don't want to do this, and I worry that the young men in that room did not know the difference. I'm sure every one of them had the thought of like, Is this really what I'm supposed to be doing with my life right now? Right? The other thing I will say about this is I feel so bad for these young people's parents. As a father, I can't imagine what it would feel like to watch my kid go through this, and even if he was acquitted, I don't think I'd ever feel good about it, right? And I'd have to really go back and think about what did I do to enable this? And I'm not hearing that conversation, right? You know? Like I'd really love to be hearing coaches, teachers, parents, coming forward and talking about, where do we screw up? And here, I think the whiteness matters, right? Think about how frequently, if it's an Islamic kid, if it's a black kid, indigenous kid, we want to talk about the systems that created the criminal right, but that drops off the map when it's good looking white kids, for sure, that's a problem, yeah, and a problem for them too, not just for us, right? Like, I don't think it's good for anyone to not have moral expectation of oneself and one's community, right?

Stuart Murray  46:37

Jamie, do you think those conversations are they? Are they most comfortable or most open, potentially, in a school setting, in a community center setting, obviously, in a family setting, I appreciate that. But for many, many families, these are hard conversations. And so you know, for if those families that are having hard conversations, where else is the opportunity to explore that? Well,

Jamie Paris  47:09

again, I think, you know, as an educator, I tell students, we read literature to learn how to die. We read literature because there's going to be a point in your life, where life is too big, life is too complicated, you can understand everything. And then those skills of interpretation start to really matter. That skill of slowing down, like you do with a poem, starts to really help you figure out what's going on. What do I care about? It's a way of seeing the world. My hope is that if we teach students to think this way about their world, they're going to be more comfortable having these awkward conversations with their own kids. But no, it can't just be one source, right? And we've got to realize that while I'm talking about moral formation, there is a 24/7 stream of propaganda that is telling young men the problem is feminism. The problem is some other thing. When we look at the reality of the media landscape, young people are growing up in between Tiktok, between YouTube, all the social media. But also, you know, look at popular culture. You know Barney Swinson and How I Met Your Mother, this kind of like pickup artist thing has become mainstreamed. We constantly reinforce to young men that women are trophies, that sexual events are conquests, that the good life is the life of randomly hooking up. We have apps that turn love into algorithms in ways that I find really morally degrading, that push against human dignity in some ways that scare me. We got to have these conversations at multiple levels, right? We got to have them in schools. We've got to have them in the home. But we also have to have community leaders. We have to have community leaders stepping up. You know, we have to have community leaders stepping up and talking in real, meaningful terms. I didn't agree with Joe Biden about everything he said, politically and culturally, but the one thing that guy could do is he could talk about his world and his life and his family like a person. And when he talked with people who are suffering, when he talked with victims, it brought a tear to my eyes sometimes, like you could just hear. There was nothing performative about it. Yeah, it was real, yeah. And that's the thing I think we have to have. You don't have to be perfect. When you have these conversations with young men, you gotta be real, right? And if you're real, they'll listen to you, yeah. And I think sometimes people are so scared they're gonna get a pronoun wrong. They're so scared they're gonna. To say something that gets taken out of context. Just accept you're going to make mistakes right, push through it and have the conversation. Yeah, yeah, no, it's a

Stuart Murray  50:12

that's that's a great way, I think, Jamie, for for us to look at Winding up our conversation. You know, I enjoyed reading your piece on in conversation on rethinking masculinity, teaching men how to love and be loved. It was, it was really well done. And I appreciate your time on this podcast and this conversation, as you see, it's some of the questions I you know sort of pose, as you say, could be a book. We could still be talking about it. It's fair enough. But you know, Jamie, when I asked you to sit on this podcast or to be a guest on this podcast, as we sort of wrap up, is there a question that you were hoping I might ask you that I didn't ask you?

Jamie Paris  50:56

I love that question. I often use that on exams. I'll ask students, like, is there something that wasn't on the exam that you wish was? It's always interesting to see what students reply back, sometimes with things that become questions for the next iteration of the exam. I wish I would have gotten a question about course I just taught. But, you know, you wouldn't know what I'm teaching necessarily. But we just taught, and I say we because it was Dr Jocelyn Thorpe and I, of course, at the University of Manitoba. It was cross listed with women and gender studies and English, and it was called Love, joy and masculinity. And it had about 40 students. We read mostly bipoc texts, we read poetry, we watched some films, we read some novels, but most importantly, we talked about what it means to become a man, and what it means to become a man who loves and I gotta tell you, the thing that really stuck out to me when I was reading the course evaluations was how many of the people were like? I never thought that masculinity could be a joyful, beautiful, ethical thing. And I thought one how sad you have been in your lives. We all do. And then I thought, How wonderful, because it's a reminder that it actually doesn't take a lot, it doesn't take a lot, but it does take some institutional push behind and I would encourage people at other institutions to start putting together courses where we're talking about men, and we're not just talking about everything that's wrong with them. There's so much wrong with contemporary masculinity. We need to have those conversations. But if we only have those conversations, we can, unfortunately, it's a little like the racism trap. You know, if you keep talking about racism, you start to give people the impression that there's an indigenous problem, as opposed to there are problems in the indigenous community that need to be solved. And you know, is there a masculinity problem? No men like there's nothing wrong with being male, but there's a cultural shift right now going on with what it means to be male, and we need to talk about it, and we need to nudge an influence, and we need this happening all over, and that's something I hope we start seeing more of, more of a focus on thinking about, how do we help co create young men who view loving as central to their identity, and there, I really want to distinguish between love and care, right? I think a lot of young men view care as essential to their ability, their identity. They want someone to take care of them, you know, do their laundry, make their food, talk to them about their emotions. That's not love. That's an element of love. Love involves so much more. It involves trust. It involves open communication. It involves a willingness to put the needs of the other ahead of yourself. Bell Hooks talks about this beautifully in her book, all about love. And I think that the more we get young men thinking about what does love mean to me, the happy happier we're going to be as a culture. It's not going to fix everything, but it's part of fixing everything,

Stuart Murray  54:31

right? Jamie Paris just really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for finding the time to do this. Thank you for sharing what you're working on. We'll make sure that that in the Episode Notes, people can reference some of your work, because I think that's important. But you know, I'll just close out by saying, I always enjoy all my podcasts. I learn a lot, as I did in this particular one with you. Mm. So thank you for taking the time to share and I continued success on on your journey of getting and rethinking masculinity, I think it's a very important topic.

Jamie Paris  55:11

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate this time.

Matt Cundill  55:15

Thanks for listening to humans on rights. A transcript of this episode is available by clicking the link in the show notes of this episode, humans on rights is recorded and hosted by Stuart Murray, social media marketing by Buffy Davey, music by Doug Edmond. For more, go to humanrightshub.ca produced and distributed by the sound off media company