Niobe Way: The Critical Need for Deep Connection (Growing Up)
Dr. Niobe Way is an internationally-recognized Professor of Developmental Psychology, the founder of the Project for the Advancement of Our Common Humanity (PACH) at NYU, and the Director of the Science of Human Connection Lab. She is also a Principal Investigator of the Listening Project, funded by the Spencer Foundation, the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative and the Rockefeller Foundation. When she was a student, Niobe studied with Carol Gilligan—if you read my newsletter or listen to this podcast, you know Carol is a hero of mine and will be wrapping up this series as a guest. Niobe has done for boys what Carol has done for girls—and their research intersects and Venn diagrams in fascinating ways. While Carol’s research shows that girls come to not know what they know, Niobe traces how boys disconnect from their caring and often enter a period of irrevocably devastating and dangerous loneliness. Niobe is the author of Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection as well as the just-released, Rebels with a Cause: Reimagining Boys, Ourselves, and Our Culture, which offers fascinating insight into our culture at large. Along with historical context, Niobe offers beautiful case studies from her research—following and interviewing boys as they grow up—along with notes from boys who have gone on to wreak havoc on the culture, in homicidal and suicidal ways. These notes speak to disconnection, extreme loneliness, and feeling like nobody cares. As I talk about my book in living rooms around the country, I often cite Niobe and Carol Gilligan, specifically the insight that at a certain point—around 8 for boys, and 11 for girls—the word “don’t” enters children’s vocabulary. For girls, it’s “I don’t know.” For boys, it’s “I don’t care.” And of course, girls knows. And of course, boys care. We need to repair our culture so it’s safe for them to stay connected. As you can tell, I’m very excited for this conversation, which we’ll turn to now.
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: For context, I wrote a book that came out last year about women and goodness and using the Seven Deadly Sins as like, here's a code actually that feels religious but has actually become quite secular in the way that women are socialized to be good while boys and men are socialized for power.
NIOBE WAY: You know what I'm all about.
ELISE: I know what you're all about.
NIOBE: This is my language.
ELISE: And Carol Gilligan, and I've been like invoking you in every talk, particularly in that moment, I think it's in Why Does Patriarchy Persist? And in A Human Voice and I know you were her student.
NIOBE: Yeah, I just saw yesterday, actually, we've been having breakfast or a meal together or a drink together every week since 2001.
ELISE: Oh my God.
NIOBE: Yeah, we are like BFFs and the greatest thing is we just had this conversation last night, so she just came out with A Human Voice, I'm just coming out with Rebels, how we both have a very distinct voice, but we're both very integrated into each other. So we both feel comfortable saying, which I love saying to my 87 year old mentor... can you believe she's 87?
ELISE: I know. And she was leaving me to go to Pilates. I was like...
NIOBE: yeah, no, it's crazy. But what I love is that, because remember I'm her former student, so it means there would be a little bit of a tendency to not be distinct entirely, but we are totally distinct in some ways. And then in some ways we're on the same path. So we see it as a very nice integration, but adding distinctive perspectives to a larger issue.
ELISE: No, I mean, it dovetails perfectly with our whole conversation today, and your revelation and her revelation of the word don't entering the vocabulary of kids: for girls, I don't know. And for boys, I don't...
NIOBE: care. Yeah.
ELISE: And that has been, I mentioned you two everywhere and you can just feel the breath collectively catch in the room and what I love about your work, too...
NIOBE: you're giving me the goosebumps, by the way, I now have the goosebumps on my skin. Yeah, go ahead.
ELISE: But what I love is and I think that Carol uses the word, I don't know if it's agnosia, but people with my book, like I try not to look at criticism because that's not that fun, but it's like, this is an original. I'm like, yeah, no shit. I'm just showing you what's present and trying to pull all of these women, in particular, these thinkers together, because there are people who focus on women and anger or women and sex or boys. Yeah. And it's like, no, actually we're all having similar conversations, different facets of, to use your words, here's the thin story...
NIOBE: right, exactly.
ELISE: Here's the thicker story.
NIOBE: exactly, exactly.
The
ELISE: more we all are plating it together into a thicker story, I think the more clear it becomes.
NIOBE: Yeah, and that's really in some ways, my main message is we just tell these thin stories and the way they're thin, and for the most part, which I say in the book, but I can't ever say enough, is that we segregate. So we have the people studying boys, and then we have the people studying girls, and then we have the people studying race, and Black people, and then we have the studies of poor people, and then we have people studying republicans, and the reality is that, I'm sorry, we can't do that, we have to understand that our identities are intersectional. Obviously, we're always intersectional and we're moving across these different identities, but we're living in a common culture. And I hope we get a chance to talk about boy culture, because to me, or what I call boy culture because to me, that's at the heart of what brings us together, I don't mean in a good sense is that it's a common culture that's getting in the way. And because we segregate. In our topics, we don't see it. So the way we don't, the reason we don't see the hand in front of our face, I always call it to my students, the hand in front of our faces is because we're looking at the pinkies and then the index finger and then the middle finger, and we're not looking at the whole hand.
And so once you look at hold hand, which is what I'm trying to do in Rebels, whether it's the story from philosophy, from political science, from sociology, from psychology, from study of women and girls and women, the study of boys and men, right, study of Black kids, so I mean, whatever you look at, you're starting to see a common theme going on with this, the hard over the soft, etc, etc. So to me, the essence of the message, which is why I got the goosebumps, is that, in some ways, it's not just exposing boy culture, but it's trying to understand why we have taken so long to see it.
ELISE: I know.
NIOBE: Right. And the reason is because we segregate our topics. We set it as if I could understand you by looking at your arm and I would focus, do a deep dive on your arm and your, your epidermis and you're right. I mean, all sorts of textures of your arm. And I could get away with publishing a paper on your arm without looking at it as it connects to your body. So it's just to me, stunning that I really would like to have the conversation about not only what the boys and young men in my particular book and girls and young women, of course, and all non gender conforming kids as well, reveal about us as humans, but also why has it taken us so long? And the other thing is, I just want to throw this out there, two things I want to throw into the conversation. So one is I just interviewed a group of seven boys, 15 year old boys and I was interviewed about their friendships, about what's getting in the way about their thoughts and feelings. I could have been in 1987, at least I'm not kidding. I could have been that young, 23 year old kid in 1987, hearing the same thing I heard from the boys in the high school I worked with in 1987. I'm telling you, Elise nothing has changed in respect to many of the things we're going to talk about today. That is stunning to me.
ELISE: Yeah.
NIOBE: I literally felt like I was sitting there, it's now almost 40 years later and the boys sound exactly the same. They're saying the exact same things that are in Deep Secrets. Second thing is I was on the today show for Deep Secrets 12 years ago, and they did a little bit where they showed boys talking about friendships and then they interviewed me on it. And again that book came out 12 years ago. Some people have gotten the message a little bit, but they think it's just about boys, and that's the whole point of Rebels. I care about humans. And I care about all people regardless of identity surviving and thriving. So the idea is once you make me into a boy person, and you segregate this about boys friendships, and, et cetera, et cetera, you lose the whole message because then it comes about who's suffering more, right? We do that weird thing about who's suffering more. And even though objectively there are certain groups of suffering more, don't think I'm not thinking that there are people who suffer more, but I'm just saying once we get into that question, then it becomes no, no, I'm suffering more than you think. No, no, I'm suffering. All those kinds of things. I don't want to be put on the bottom, all the stuff I say in the book, I don't want to be put on the bottom. Don't put one on the bottom. Don't flip the hierarchy. I want to make sure we talk about sort of what the boys teach us, etc. But what do we know about why it's taken us so long to see the obvious? To just see the obvious.
ELISE: Well, I think that you point to it, and there are two sort of ways to start. One, You talk about how as gender nonconformity starts to emerge, it's only reifying gender even more. And I think we're seeing that in culture, but that this whole idea of gender as a natural state versus a cultural condition is a thin story. And, we have a completely reduced, non creative, very, very, very sticky idea of what it is to be a boy or a girl or what it is to be a man or a woman, that's attached to ideas that are stories. And you also mentioned, and I see this all the time too, I don't want to take us into a total parking lot, but you mentioned Reeves book, and there are a lot of men working on books about masculinity, and you're like, okay, this is good, is this going to be helpful? And then you're like, actually, no, you're just suggesting that the cure for this is more masculinity, or that femininity is at the root of the problem here, and you're just restating thin stories, which is minimizing of our very complex and complete humanity, where many of us are masculine and feminine, simultaneously, or at various points throughout day to talk about those values.
NIOBE: right, right. I mean, the identity has become I mean, we've forgotten that they're socially constructed, what's incredible to me is that it's very cultural, by the way, it's very American culture, but also, I would say Western culture to take culture and to make it biology. Because we don't see ourselves, the we, I'm now talking about white people, Americans, privileged people, we don't see ourselves as shaped by culture. We think culture is, living in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia or living in China in the rural areas. We think that's culture. We don't think we privileged people have culture. And to me, right, that's the most privileged position you could take that my behavior is must be a reflection of biology, because I don't have culture, culture is other people outside of the center. So to me that we get away with that. And again, I always want to repeat the we, whenever I say we, I'm almost always referring to privileged American people on the top. We get away with it, and then we repeat it as a thin story, and it's very compelling because it sounds like we're not blaming boys and men when we make it biological, because it sounds like we're saying, okay, you're not an asshole because you choose to be an asshole. It's just kind of in your biology that you're aggressive and domineering and an asshole, basically. So it sounds like we're forgiving them.
ELISE: No, not only that, that they are actually abiding by some a biological mandate that they are valiant men who are hunting wild boar and protecting their women in the caves with babies. Yeah, this is the highest value, right?
NIOBE: no, no, absolutely. Absolutely. I don't want to get too academic because I don't want, I don't want to only appeal to the academics in your audience. I just think that whole sense of investigating what do we benefit from including women, by the way, what do we benefit from when we make things biological, because the data doesn't prove that, which is my point in Rebels. You know, the data doesn't back it up. So we're benefiting from this biological story and so to understand how we think we're benefiting and then also, of course, it is at the root of our problems. I mean, you're totally right, that's the main message is that what we made into biology is cultural. And we can unmake it because it's cultural, which I say like seven times in the book. Right. I mean, that's the whole point. But the other thing I want to throw out that you said something earlier that I thought the other thing is the way we hijack, we did it with Carol Gilligan's work too, the way we hijack work. So I would hijack it by making it starts out thick and then we hijack it and make it thin. So Carol Gilligan's work that was really about eight year old girls resisting patriarchal norms of niceness, and being truth tellers, all of a sudden by the mid 90s it became about being a mean girl and about, right, and about basically being a mean girl. The mean girl phenomenon of the 1990s grew out of Carol Gilligan's work, which is bizarre, and Lynn Michael Brown's work, which is totally bizarre because the whole point is that big contribution of that book in 1992, was the resistance of eight year old girls, that they showed that these eight year old girls are truth tellers. And then as they get older, they struggle to hold on to their truth telling tongues. And then it became girls lost their voice, which Carol always says, nobody loses their voice. They just go underground with what they know. And then it became about mean bitches, basically. And all of a sudden Brown and Gilligan's work was about bitchy girls. It just, it's amazing. And so to me, even my work to some extent, has been hijacked in the sense that started off with saying, well, boys are human too, but not in the sense that girls aren't human.
ELISE: Right,
NIOBE: but that boys are human too. And then it became in some ways, in a thin way, that I was sort of a defender of boys, that I was not a feminist. And then I was actually a defender of girl s and then I was trying to make sure that we understood that, in fact, that whole ridiculous argument that it's feminism that has actually hurting boys, that I would align with that crazy argument. I don't promote an identity. That's not what I do. I'm a developmental psychologist interested in what's getting in the way of our capacity to survive. And how can we change it? And what do we learn from people, right?
ELISE: yeah, and the heartbreak that comes for these, boys. I'm the mother of two boys. It's interesting too, with me, people essentially think that I don't care about boys, similarly. I'm like, no, no, no. I'm married to a man. I have a brother, a father, and I have two young boys. I am more concerned in many ways about boys, in part because of their pain, their suicidality, their homicidal tendencies, the chaos that they're wreaking on culture. Like I'm devastated for boys. And I want to commend you too, because one of the things that I thought was so beautiful in Rebels is the lacing together of these ongoing stories, these interviews with these boys as they change and become more "I don't caring" as they move through adolescence, which is heartbreaking and then also the stories which I know we don't like to look at, I don't like to look at, of some of these boys who have become killers.
NIOBE: That was a hard chapter to write by the way.
ELISE: I'm sure it was really hard, but their loneliness, their pain, their separation, the way they feel like nobody cares, which is such an important word. And if we could stop pathologizing, I think that's the other thing about the whole nature thing, I think it gives us some relief to think this is nature and therefore these people are pathologized and it's an expression of their nature. And this is a family issue that needs to be solved by parents. Because actually understanding, oh wow, culture is so much more powerful than any individual person's ability to parent their child is overwhelming, I think. I think we feel like we have more control in this, like, the path of rugged individualism. You can do whatever you want... And it's up to you. Yeah.
NIOBE: Definitely. I think the thing that I always also want to remind your listeners is that remember in this conversation and also in the book, which is so important to me, is it's everything that young people are telling us. So it's not some sort of concoction that I've done as a feminist academic putting a magic potion on my data or cherry picking interviews or whatever it is. It really is the story that they directly tell us directly. So, for example, the seventh grade boy in Rebels that says, I quote them, that says, if you turn something into biology, you think you can't change it.
ELISE: Mm
NIOBE: And a seventh grader said that, cause we said that we get confused on what is cultural and what is biological. And a seventh grader in the back of the room, I remember very, very clearly raised his hand and said, but if you turn it into biology, you think you can't change it. And that's been, what's getting in the way is we think we can't change it. So with all these books and some of the, these books on boys and masculinity, I actually talk about my book and I like, so I'm not dissing the whole sort of field of masculinity at all. A lot of the writers, I think their work is fantastic. But there is a tendency in some of them to make it sound as if this is a real gender biological, it's basically making it sound like a sex difference rather than a gender difference, being that gender is constructed and the other thing just to remember too is that if you just look historically on the meaning of gender through the centuries, and you look outside of American culture, you just see so much variety, especially if you go back in time, about what it means to be a man or a woman, etc. So again, it's that sort of arrogance of Americans. particularly privileged people, to assume that what is true for me must be biological. I mean, Elise, I really want to get that to your readers. There's such a profound arrogance that what is true for me and my children must be biological, right? Rather than the product of my privilege of whatever it is about the culture that surrounds me. And I want to make two points in that book, I mean, I want to make lots of points, but I want to make two important points that I think will be missed that I'm hoping that they won't. One is that a lot of what we say is a kind of arrogance. So turning our culture into biology as American superpower, it's an arrogance. It's an arrogance to turn what we see as gender differences between boys and girls in this culture, especially when they grow up as somehow biological. But the second thing I want to really hone in is why it's linked to also capitalism that we'll talk a lot about the ideological systems patriarchy being one of them, white supremacy also obviously woven into this whole discussion, but capitalism, the driving the money over people. The idea that we're driven by money and toys. So fundamentally the immaturity of our culture and the ways in which we are fundamentally as a culture immature, so that we think what's true of me is true of everybody. And we that the most important thing is to have a lot of fun and not take responsibility. So the idea is that it's, immature and arrogant. And that to me is the essence, what I would say is boy culture that boys teach us about
ELISE: Yes. And that this boy culture is pervasive, girls imbibe it too, and that we are not yet a man culture, or an adult culture.
NIOBE: Yeah. We're not an adult culture. We're just not an adult culture. I mean, we are a boy culture and I really want to talk about boy for a second because I'm going to get pushed back on that, I want to make it clear, I chose boy in quotations explicitly because it's not a real boy. It's boys teaching us about boy culture. So it's not a real boy. It's a caricature of a boy.
ELISE: Social construct.
NIOBE: Yeah, it's a comic character of basically a boy that's out to make a lot of money and have a lot of toys and doesn't give a shit. And that is a comic character, but that is in essence with the hard over the soft privileging everything we've deemed hard over everything we've deemed soft is the the immaturity of it and the arrogance of it is that the essence of boy culture. And the reason I want to make it boy culture is that it's affecting everybody regardless of your identity. So it's affecting black families. It's affecting gay families. I don't care what your identity is. This notion that we value everything we've deemed hard over everything that we've deemed soft and that we privilege money over people, et cetera, et cetera.
ELISE: Can I read to you from your own book?
NIOBE: Okay.
ELISE: This is the thin story. So you, write "the story goes something like this. Boys and men roam the earth with little to no feelings of vulnerability, at least in comparison to girls and women, driven mostly by their desire for sex and money, they don't want or need emotional intimacy or deep connection, especially with other boys or men, at least less so than with girls and women, are less emotionally sensitive or astute than girls and women, and certainly are more rational and intelligent, especially in the areas of math and science, they want independence, autonomy and freedom above everything else. Girls, and women in contrast, roam the earth with few thoughts, except perhaps those related to makeup, fashion, food, boyfriends, husbands, and children. They have little to no sexual desire, at least less than boys and men, want nothing but emotional intimacy, especially with boys and men, compete with other girls and women, are untrustworthy, and most of all want to get married and have children and don't value their intellectual selves as much as boys and men do. If they are intelligent, it is simply in the areas of emotions and relationships. Both considered less impressive than the quote unquote real intelligence evident in the STEM fields." So that is our Thin Story, right there.
NIOBE: Yeah, that's it. That's it. Thank you for reading that, actually. It is a bit of a run on sentence, but it's okay. But the point is, what's so shocking to me, I mean, I use dramatic language because we need to stay passionate about why we're having such a hard time hearing this message. What's amazing to me is that could have been said many decades ago that that was the stereotype and there's even some suggestions in my book and also in the data that we're actually getting worse, that we're going backwards in our gender stereotypes and that we were starting to get better, you know, around our gender stereotypes in the 80s and 90s, when I was growing up, identifying as a tomboy with the idea that girls could be tomboys, meaning they could be girls that do boyish things. And then I'm not saying we were great in the 80s and 90s, we had lots of problems, but the idea is that we started to become a little bit more open, which I think did lead to our gender flexibility, identities that we now are tolerating as a culture. But I just think it's fascinating to me how that, what you just read, as I always say, as a sister from another planet came down and listened to that, they wouldn't think it was 2024, they just wouldn't believe it, that in the era of the Me Too movement, etc, etc, that we would still say that that's what it means to be a girl. And that is what we mean when we say what it means to be a girl.
ELISE: Yeah. Well, I think that it goes to, to this idea that the pervasiveness of quote unquote boy culture as something to aspire to, and I can't find it, but you mentioned sort of in the data how girls aspire to boy culture as well. So again, it doesn't just neatly divide.
NIOBE: No, exactly. I'm going to even push it farther. I think I cite this in the book, so I do studies around the world, including in China. So we get some data from our Chinese young people that girls are actually adhering to masculinity more than some of the boys and men, because girls have gotten the message. I mean, you hear this when I listened to my students at NYU, they've gotten the message. that you align with basically stereotypically boy behavior and you get on top of the hierarchy. So you do the hookup sex thing. You say, I don't want relationships. I just want sex. You do that sort of, I'm not going to be, I mean, I hate to get into this cause very dicey territory, but even that notion that I'm going to reject monogamy because I don't need to be in a monogamous relationship. I'm not saying everybody needs to be monogamous. I'm not doing a moral sort of shitty thing. What I'm saying is that that's sounding like a guy that's sounding like a dude. And so the idea is that I would almost argue, at this moment in time I bet you if we did a nationwide survey, you'd find girls and women at least matching boys and men's desire to man up, if not exceeding.
ELISE: Yes. Yes. That's the call. Be more like a man, be like a boy, run like a boy, play like a boy, all of it. It's so insistent. And then when you flip it, and you say, actually, maybe the cure for our culture is for boys and men to be more like girls and women, which is what their hearts need this relationship caring and intimacy. It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
NIOBE: I mean, I know exactly. I always do this thing in talks where I'll say, I'm not joking, but people will laugh when I say this, I'll say the solution is for boys and men to act more like stereotypically girls and gay guys. Like being girly and gay is actually the solution in part, right, to help boys and men. Straight men, of course, and straight boys, I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding that it's basically saying, valuing the soft sides of our the soft sides of our humanity. And, it's funny, it's just amazing to me how we talk about re imagining masculinity, we talk in a good way, actually, many times. We talk about expanding more opportunities for men to be real people, humans, but we never actually name it, which is re masculinity by openly embracing the so called feminine sides of ourselves, call it what it is, right?
ELISE: My older brother is gay and I loved the The Joel Middleman research that you reveal too, which is amazing, so Joel Middleman finds that while 36 percent of adults in the United States have a bachelor's degrees, 52 percent of gay men do. If America's gay men formed their own country, it would be the world's most highly educated by far. And that gay boys describe being a boy as being academically successful. And yet, still, it's wild in your research and in your conversations with these boys who are so loving, sweet and their pre adolescence, like, all they want is friendship, deep friendship, and then that coding that's so pernicious that's like, oh, it's gay, I'm not gay, I'm not gay, it's not homo, I'm not a girl.
NIOBE: I know I'm repeating myself from the beginning of the interview, but I just interviewed, I'm talking about last week, seven boys, 15 year old boys at a local middle school and they said the exact same thing.
ELISE: Not homo, I'm not gay. I'm not gay.
NIOBE: They don't use the new phrase, no homo anymore, because that's considered a little passé, but they have other terms, which I'm not going to repeat because I don't like to repeat homophobic language. But it's other kind of phrases that basically say in a homophobic world, that would be a gay thing to say. And I would never say it because my friends would think I was gay. And they just say the exact same thing. I get this pushback sometimes from people on the left, actually, they'll say, no, you'll be, come on.
It's really changed. I mean we really do allow, we tolerate or whatever. We're more inclusive of gay boys and men. That's debatable whether that's true with girls and women, but but the point is that we're more inclusive now. We may be more inclusive, we may be more inclusive, and there's lots of evidence that we are more inclusive. And we have gay marriage, obviously, so that's obviously more inclusive. But the point is still that fear, I say that in the book, that my brother may be gay, my uncle may be gay, but I'm not gay.
ELISE: It seems dangerous for children to be perceived as gay still, whereas I think that there's safety significantly more safety... you know, my brother, this was like Matthew Shepard times, and we grew up in Montana, so it's like different vibe. I don't think he has any anxiety about being gay now, but it's still dangerous though. I think.
NIOBE: It is still dangerous. And I don't want to, and I also don't want to do that. It's this or it's that. I mean, I do think that something interesting about societal change is as we progress, there's always this backlash. So we've definitely progressed with women, people of color, gay people. I mean, it would be stupid not to say we haven't progressed. We definitely progressed. You wouldn't have had the Black Lives Matter, the Me Too movement, et cetera. We, you wouldn't have gay marriage. If we hadn't progressed but the reality is very fascinating to me when we progress, when we get a Barack Obama, we then get Trump. So, we have this backlash that happens with this kind of honestly, I would call it, I'm going to get pushback on this, at least, but sort of white male anxiety, right. White, straight male anxiety that pushes back and panics, panics that basically that they're going to be put on the bottom of the hierarchy, and that's the mass shooters, Elise. That's the mass shooter. They feel like they're being put on the bottom, and I'm not saying it to be sympathetic, I'm saying it's just a fact. They see themselves as being put on the bottom, and nobody wants to be put on the bottom.
ELISE: Nobody wants to be put on the bottom, but it's also I mean there is such a deep anxiety, too I mean I use Goodreads which is so rife and unfortunately with trolls at this point, but I use it to track my reading and I put your book in and I have an early copy of Galley. Very few people have read this book, right? And there was, there were three reviews. I flagged this one. Hopefully they take it down, but it was obviously a man who'd never read your book. It's exactly what you were saying. Like, you're an idiot. How dare you? Like, this is the same feminizing, whatever, whatever, whatever it's so deep. And you have to look at that as like a symptom of a deep cultural pathology. That's like this is so painful. We can't even acknowledge it. And it's easier to say these boys are just weirdos with video games and access to guns and parents who are terrible. And meanwhile, it's like, no, actually, like, look at what they're saying.
NIOBE: I know. I know.
ELISE: Not to condone their actions, but like...
NIOBE: yeah.
ELISE: Is deep pain. That's bigger than their family.
NIOBE: And the thing that I do say in the book, in case you get listeners like the person who posted on your thing is but yeah, in case you do, I really do make a point is that you can't flip the hierarchy. So I am not calling for the soft to be on top of the hard or for women to be more valuable than men or for white guys to be less valuable than men of color, what I'm saying is you can't flip the hierarchy for anybody. So Trump supporters, and I'll say it very loudly and clearly, Trump supporters are as human as everybody else. And so some ways I would say the reason why there's so much support for Trump, it's not a mystery to me whatsoever, is that if you have someone saying, Hey, you're too human to your needs matter too, which is what Trump's saying to all his supporters, they're going to vote for him regardless if he commits crimes. So I feel like in some ways, to be honest with you, Elise, I'd like my book to be read by Trump supporters, because I'm really making the case that as long as we on the left and liberals think that Trump supporters aren't as human as we are, we will perpetuate the violence that we commit and that they commit. And so I just think I really would like people who would, who will plan to vote for Trump. I really would like them to read my book because I care about them. I mean, I care about all humans. And to be honest with you, I'm going to say something kind of outrageous, but I would say, especially for poor and working class people across race, across identities I would say, fundamentally in this culture of ours, the money over people, we hate poor people, regardless of your race, the most. As a rich American privileged country and as a white rich American woman, I can say pretty confidently that we hate poor people the most.
ELISE: I agree.
NIOBE: Right? In a country that hates poor people, I want my book to be read by those who identify or are poor to see that this book is for them. This book is to say, we have to care about everybody. It can't just be the people who agree with us.
ELISE: Yeah. And what's interesting too is that, I agree, I don't understand, I mean, I guess I do understand, but why we're so allergic to talking about class because To me, it seems like the most significant pernicious diagram to then other identities against. And yet we've managed to skirt it. But so much of this, as you said, is a contempt for class, a contempt for people who aren't as educated, who don't have these hard rational values. And you look at the care economy is primarily women of color. I mean, it's all it lines up perfectly. And yet, for some reason, we don't see it. And I'm with you. I think that the contempt of people on the left for people on the right, and they, of course, would say the same thing, that the right is contemptuous of liberal values. But it's like, this is not who we are.
NIOBE: I'm going to be a little controversial again because I just want to name it. This is my first interview around the book, which is really nice that it's with you. Is that even the fact that among white privileged people we have the so called it's demeaning, but we use it, we even had a TV show around it called. I even hate to say it because it's so horrible, but we have that phrase white trash that we even made shows about and the fact that among white people, privileged people, we have a term called white trash is exactly why we have so many people supporting Trump. If we actually have that phrase, to call humans, to call any human trash, as a joke, because it's made as a joke is so dehumanizing and for us not to recognize that. Now, do we have racist language around people of color, around gay people, around transphobia we have all over the place. So I'm not saying they're the only ones that suffer. Everybody's suffering from dehumanizing language and dehumanizing actions. But I just feel like among white people, that's a missing conversation.
ELISE: Yeah, and looking at the political landscape, which is often breaks down as rural versus urban, you take an urban view and you transplant it on a rural culture. And I'm from Montana, where I'm one of not that many Jewish people. There's a 10 percent indigenous population, but it is largely white and not a huge amount of socioeconomic variety, mostly middle class and lower. But if I take the bias test, my bias was I am terrified of white men who I perceive to be poor that is where my bias and my stereotype comes just like raging in. And yet so you get these two different views too, and then people are like, I don't know what you're talking about.
NIOBE: Yeah.
ELISE: Right? Stop calling me racist. I only know white people.
NIOBE: Yeah. Just to add to that, I mean, I always think even as a woman and as a person definitely identified as a feminist, I'm always very clear that if you're struggling in the middle of the country to put food on the table and You're struggling to keep your job or your husband or wife has lost their job or whatever it is and someone's yapping on to you about the Me Too movement and how we need to support the Me Too movement. I just get it. I get why you would say why the hell should I care about the Me Too movement even as a woman when I can't put food on the table and I can't pay my health and you don't care about farmers and my farm is disappearing. I mean, I get it.
ELISE: Get it. Or I'm a hunter. And so stop. And this is how I feed my family. Like, this is a reality for a lot of Americans.
NIOBE: Exactly, exactly. I mean, thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk about, but I do really hope that as people read the book that they hear the message of what young people are saying which is that it's not natural to create this hierarchy of humanness. It's not natural to just want to flip it because nobody wants to be on the bottom. It's not natural to spend our whole lives wanting to get on top because once we're on top, we're almost never happy because we diminished all our stuff on the bottom, which is all our soft sides. And you can't be happy, you're only half human. So we got to understand this is not natural to create this hierarchy. It's not natural. And even though social psychologists try to convince you it is, it's not. The way we know it's not as you listen to young people, they don't have those hierarchies when they're young, they don't have them. My son said, which I love that he said this, his cousin is black. My aunt and uncle and their child, Kevin that he said when my son was six and he identifies as white, and Kevin was 10 at the time, he said, mommy, when I turned 10, will I turn black? Cause he in his mind, right in his mind, Kevin's his cousin. And he just assumed that when he turned 10, right, he would just become black because Kevin was black and Kevin was part of his family. So I'm just saying that's proving that this hierarchy of white and black in that case is not biological that we do that.
ELISE: Oh, I want you to come back and so that we can talk about the whole back section of the book and listening because I think this is powerful. Because we don't have enough time to do it today, the other thing that I thought was really brilliant and helpful was the way that you, because this is sort of, At the root of your work and Carol Gilligan's work is this idea of individuation and growth balanced by relationship and integration. And that culturally we're sort of stuck in this overdrive towards growth and individuation, which we call masculine or think of as a male quality. And we're like failing on the relationship care and integration part of it, or we deem it as lower. And you talk about attachment theory and ultimately can you talk a bit about like how you bring that into you
NIOBE: work?
Yeah, totally, so, one of the goals of the book very much is it's a data driven book. So, this is not a book about my opinions of stuff and I'm not spouting off as an influencer or something like that. I'm talking from the data and I'm also talking from knowing I'm a developmental psychology professor. I've been teaching developmental psychology for decades. I've been in NYU for almost three decades. And so I know 20th century developmental psychology like the back of my hand. I know everything we've done as a field basically since 1930s. And even I know some stuff of the studies that were done in the 20th century. I know the research and I know my own research. And what we know from the research over a century, over a century, I just want to repeat that, we know this over a century, that we as humans, starting from when we're children, starting when we're babies, we come out both essentially, first of all, having remarkable relational skills, we tune in to people's emotions. We match their emotions. We get upset when they don't match our emotions. We want people to be attuned with us and we're tuning to their emotion. When babies hear other babies cry, they'd start crying. We come into the world remarkably relationally intelligent from the very beginning of life. We know that. That's a fact. That's not an opinion. That's a fact that we see in the data. The second fact that we know from attachment studies, and from all studies linked to attachments, that started in about the 1940s, 1950s with Mary Ainsworth and John Bowlby, is that actually children need both autonomy and connectedness. And this is the kicker. That's important for all educators and parents to hear this, more connected we are, the more we can be autonomous. This is very Bowlby Ainsworth idea, but we see it in the data. The more we feel safe with a person who will take care of our needs, and will attune to our emotions, and now we know it doesn't just have to be a parent, it could be a friend, it could be a partner, etc., teacher, the more we're able to have the confidence to explore our environment. So it's not just that we value autonomy and connectedness, they're intimately linked together. That with more connectedness, the more feelings of belongingness, the more feelings of people care about me and value me, the more we can take risks, the more we can explore, the more we can try to answer the hard question that nobody else can answer, but you're going to give it a good shot. The more we can actually go out in the world and be independent. And we don't get that. So when we only tell the story of our independence, as Carol's made throughout her whole career about the male bias in developmental psychology, only emphasizing independence is we actually don't produce independent children. Because ultimately you can't be independent if you're not deeply connected. So what happens to a child that's not deeply connected? What actually happens? Guess what happens? They don't feel the confidence to be able to take risks. They don't feel the confidence to go out and be self sufficient. They don't feel the confidence in doing it. So we're actually backbiting, right? We're kicking ourselves in the asses when we just focus on independence. Because we need to give them the skills to be able to be independent, which are relational skills, which is knowing that when I need help, I can turn to you and you will help me and I will help you when you need it. So then you can go off and take a risk or go and live in a new city or go have your own apartment and know that you can lean on me when you need to. And so to me, the attachment story that comes out, at this point, almost a century of research on attachment is a gorgeous, gorgeous story, right? Because it's about children, young babies, young people, and their relationships to other adults and how much we need that independence and that connectedness. And to me, I would argue, that's our foundational story of who we are as humans, how we function, how we thrive, is through that integration of autonomy and connectedness. And then the boys and the girls and the research that Carol talks about that Lynn Michael Brown talks about that I talk about and Judy Chu and many, many ,others just affirms those early findings, right? We're just doing those early findings. We're not discovering it. It's not new. It's just, we're affirming what they found with little, with babies and children.
ELISE: And that the distortion comes when girls and women are taught that that connectedness is the only thing that matters and that to individuate puts that at peril and is dangerous and therefore they need to just stay connected at any cost to themselves and that boys are taught you don't need connectedness. In fact, for you to have connectedness makes you weak and you just need to go and be independent.
NIOBE: Since you know Gilligan and Brown's work, I want you to, I want to say this because it's it's always gets my students: what both Brown and Lynne Michael Brown and Carol Gilligan in their research with girls and young women, and what I find with boys and young men, and Judy Chu finds with her young boys as well, and adolescents, is that they experience a crisis of connection as they get older. And that crisis of connection looks different, but it's fundamentally the same thing, but it looks different for boys and girls. The crisis of connection is, and I'll articulate it very clearly, as heard from Brown and Gilligan's research in the book Meeting at the Crossroads, it's if I say what I know, nobody will want to be with me. If I don't say what I know, I won't want to be with myself. Okay. For boys, listen, because it's very, very fascinating because it's exactly what I hear in the boys and Judy hears this too. I say what I feel, nobody will want to be with me. And if I don't say what I feel, I won't want to be with myself. And so the idea is that they end up choosing themselves, right, over the other, and girls end up choosing because of the patriarchal structure others over the self. So they end up sacrificing what they know for the sake of relationship that is not a real relationship because they're not in it. And boys and young men and men end up focusing on their feelings, sacrificing the other person's feelings for the sake of their relationship to themselves. You get what I'm saying? So the idea is that it's the crisis of connection and for both, but what ends up getting sacrificed is different because of what you just said.
ELISE: And then but with boys and men and this idea of feel their own feelings being primary it To me, watching our culture play out that they actually, and maybe it's the disavowal of other people's feelings that's driving this, but that there's this extreme dissociation because they've like lost their tethering, it's too painful, maybe, to feel what they feel in terms of that loneliness and disconnection.
NIOBE: This is a tricky argument because this has changed a little bit, so I would say 20 years ago, they weren't even aware that they feel themselves. So, this sort of stereotypic 1950s guy, but that continued for a long time, that there was a sense that vulnerable feelings was just a girly and gay thing. What's changed a little bit in the last 10, 15 years, and definitely changed since COVID by the way, is that I think men are starting to recognize that they have vulnerable feelings, but this is what you're seeing in the data that they're starting to recognize it, but they're not necessarily sharing it with others, but also that they're wanting everybody to pay attention to their feelings because they've now discovered that they feel, so the idea is oftentimes at the expense of their partner or their female sister or whatever it is. And the reason is because, whose feelings matter. Right now in the divorce rate, I'm pretty positive the numbers are, 70 percent of divorces are led by women divorcing men, and most of them, a very high percentage, over half, are saying because they were tired of the relationship, the emotional support going only one way, from the woman to the man. That's what I'm saying about the findings, that they're sort of recognizing that they have feelings, which is good, but then it's the idea that their feelings are the ones that matter.
ELISE: Yeah.
NIOBE: Right? And the woman oftentimes, unfortunately, colludes with that to make it so that the man's feelings matter most of all. They become absent from the relationship, which is exactly what Brown and Gilligan are talking about, is girls sacrificing what they know and feel, right? For the sake of the other. And boys sacrificing the other for the sake of themselves. Which is, in this case, in the modern version of that, that's saying my feelings matter more. In the old fashioned version, that's just being a man up with no feelings. But I do think men are becoming more comfortable expressing that they have vulnerable feelings as you see in a lot of the articles written about men's friendships and all that stuff that's coming out now in the media.
ELISE: Yeah. Although, as you mentioned, this isn't about sort of a reversal of hierarchy. This is about balance and functioning relationships that are give and take, where someone's having a bad day and the other person is capable of deep listening, and then the next day maybe it's switched. But that there's some equity.
NIOBE: You can't flip the hierarchy. And this is a little bit related to sometimes how my work is hijacked. It's not about now putting men's feelings above women's feelings. It's not also about putting what women think over what men think, it's not about flipping the hierarchy and I have such a hard time teaching that, Elise, because my students and my colleagues and my friends, and even I, even me have a hard time not doing that flip. I see this with my daughter at times too, and her friends, if I'm in the relationship, then it becomes all about me, what I need, I'm a feminist. So you need to pay attention to my feelings. It's all about me. It becomes all about the me, and that's actually just masculinity. Yeah.
ELISE: I hear alot like, either bring back a matriarchy and I'm like, it didn't really exist. There are matrilineal cultures, but there was no matriarchy. And that women should rule the world. And it's like, well, okay, one, I don't want a matriarchy, I don't want an oppressive dominance based. system with women on the top, what does that solve? And I think historically, we were far more affiliative, which is what I want. And second, yes, we need women, but we need women, also living the feminine values. And we need men living those values. Again, I'm using the word feminine, because that's how we code it. But men need to care. And women need to know. And I personally, in my own life, yes, at times, I want to just be home with my kids in a puddle on the couch. And I also want to be out in the world. I think that's normal, a balance, you know?
NIOBE: Yeah. And Carol Gilligan has a great quote, which we can end on, I think it's in the end of Patriarchy, that book she says "the opposite of patriarchy is democracy." Right. And that really is a nice ending quote because it's about bringing all voices to the table.
ELISE: All voices. I hope you'll come back because the section about how to listen and transformative interviewing is a helpful skill. So I'm going to ping you and you're going to come back and talk to us.
What a fire-starter. I have 18 pages of notes for context and the book Rebels with a Cause is so beautiful and as she mentioned, she also wrote Crises of Connection, which came out over a decade ago. At the end, she talked about transformative interviewing, which is the way that these psychologists in the field engage with their subjects, and for her, it’s interviewing these groups of boys at various stages in their life and getting them talking about what matters to them. And just to make a point on it, as a mother to two boys, it’s keeping them connected to their feelings, those deeper relationships that they fundamentally, deeply desire, which should surprise no one. But, as you read her book and read these ongoing conversations with these boys as they grow up, some of it’s because of betrayal—boys are incredibly vulnerable to this idea of not being powerful or strong, which weakness is often associated with femininity or gayness, as he mentioned—but you hear these boys talk about betrayal of trust or being bullied or picked on or feeling like their best friends have weaponized their vulnerability against them at moments. It’s a very beautiful book, and for anyone who wants to understand boy culture, which to her point is what we are swimming in—we are not swimming in adult culture, not man culture, it’s actually boy culture, girls too—I think it’s a really essential read, not just for parents, its a culture book, although I think parents will benefit from reading it as well. Thanks, as always for being here with us. I will see you next time.
