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Michael Collina: Hi listeners. I'm Audible editor Michael Collina. Today, I'm speaking with activist, writer, and queer icon Jacob Tobia. Jacob is the author of bestselling 2019 memoir, Sissy, and now they've written a new audiobook, Before They Were Men: Essays on Manhood, Compassion, and What Went Wrong. Welcome, Jacob.

Jacob Tobia: Thanks for having me. It's so good to chat.

MC: Thanks so much for joining us. I am so thrilled to have you here with us.

JT: I figure that we'll just talk about all the fun stuff. We'll just talk about how young men are broken and how our feminist discourse isn't accounting for that. And it's just fun, light, kind of casual fare. We're just at a very light moment in human history I feel. It's like so springy and lush [laughs]. There's a lot of work to do, and so let's get right to it.

MC: Yeah, there is a lot of work to do, a lot of hard topics, but you also add a lot of positivity in throughout the book, which I really appreciated.

JT: Yeah, I mean, I feel in this day and age, one of the biggest problems we have on sort of the left side of the political spectrum is there's a real lacking in people having fun and kind of finding some joy in the whole thing, you know? I feel like there's too much kind of a self-serious tone of voice for my taste. If you aren't finding ways to giggle and aren't finding ways to throw in a joke or two, I'm like, "Can you really create liberation without a laugh?" Like, I don't know. And I don't think so.

MC: And you have such a knack for incorporating those jokes and that humor without taking away from the really serious, at times, heavy and traumatic topics. So even though this new collection of essays incorporates personal anecdotes and experiences from your own life, it's also not quite another memoir. Instead, it's this really incredible piece of critical theory that is, again, imbued with that humor and that wit and those hot takes that I feel like you are definitely known for these days.

And though I would love to talk through each essay and every line in this book with you, I know we don't quite have the time to do that today. So, if you had to boil Before They Were Men down, and there’s one thing that listeners should take away, what would it be?

JT: If I had to boil it down into one thing, it's that men and boys need us right now. They need us to show up for them, and they need us to take the skills that we've learned as a feminist movement and apply it to their very real, very under-theorized, very under-discussed gender-based suffering.

MC: So true. It is so painfully true. And like your memoir, Sissy, you also give voice to the audiobook version of Before They Were Men. And like we said, with your humor, you have such a wonderful way of incorporating that into all of your work, but you're also always such an incredible and engaging narrator. What does it mean to you to narrate your own work?

"if you want a world in which you get to feel free, you have to learn to have empathy for someone who's hurt you."

JT: Honest to God, I write like I'm writing a one-person show pretty much at all times. So yeah, my conversational writing style can often irk copy editors and can be frustrating, I think, grammatically for people. But honestly, like I don't give a f**k. If it sounds right, it's right.

I grew up as a performer. I'm an actor by training. And my theatrical training oozes into every minute of the audiobook, right? I am not just reading for you, like I am giving you a performance. It is an endurance piece. It is a, what, eight-, nine-hour monologue that I think you're going to be riveted throughout the entirety of if I do my job right.

And it's fun, too, because there's really fun performance challenges where you get to kind of be like, "Oh my gosh, I'm doing this." The hardest one, there's a section where, in the chapter “Incelopathy”—which is my chapter about incels, because, had to do it to 'em—and one of the things that I talk about is the social construction of desire, right? Because an uncomfortable truth I feel when it comes to incels is that there is some truth in young men feeling ugly, right? And young men feeling like they live in a world where they are dysmorphic as heck about their bodies. Like, that is true.

But one of the things we're really bad at as a feminist movement in this day and age is sourcing where that comes from and helping young men think through how beauty and, in this case, handsomeness is socially constructed. And so I talk about how much media shapes what we find to be beautiful, what we find to be attractive, what we find to be sexy, what we find to be hunky, right? I talk about how much our sense of desire is controlled by the world around us.

And I think some people would be skeptical of that analysis. So I turned to the pros and I pulled from the iconic cerulean monologue from Devil Wears Prada. And I quote the entire thing word-for-word in the actual text of the book, but then we got to it in the audio booth, and I was like, "Oh, shit. I have to figure out how to perform this." And that is so scary for a queer person to have to figure out how to deliver that entire monologue. What I decided on was that I wasn't going to try and do a perfect Meryl Streep because I think that's a fool's errand. I settled on doing sort of like a half-version of it, where I'm not trying to do a perfect imitation, but I'm still really giving it to you.

So yeah, I'm really glad that you pick up on that. Like, I think for me, the audio version of my books is when the book comes to its final form for me. When I get to read it to my wonderful readers, my wonderful listeners. And we just get to sit together for a few hours.

MC: I love that so much. And I do just want to say, you nailed that monologue.

JT: Thank you. And all in one take!

MC: That's impressive. That is honestly really, really impressive.

JT: Yeah. Tell my agent [laughs]. My acting agent.

MC: Your style really does translate so beautifully to audio. It really does feel like you are just right there with us performing your heart out, having a conversation with us. It really makes the audio version of all of your books just so, so special. So, thank you. Thank you for giving us these incredible performances and these incredible audiobooks.

JT: Can I tell you something really fun about this specific audiobook?

MC: Please do.

JT: So, I recorded this audiobook in Raleigh—because I'm living part-time in North Carolina right now. My audio engineer, it was this amazing moment for both of us, because my audio engineer was this, like, I think, cis, hetero, white dude named Kyle, who's like sort of a rocker type. He's a band guy. He does some audiobooks, but he does mostly bands and music and stuff. And he's also a dad. He has an 18-month-old son at the moment, right?

So, it was this amazing moment for me where I've always wondered: How is this book going to resonate with straight men. How is this going to resonate with straight white guys, right? Like, how are they going to feel about this? And then I walk into the booth, and I realize, much to my joy, that I get to read him the entire book out loud and then get his take.

And we had so much fun recording together because he would just be like, "Whoa. Yeah." And would give me thumbs up and, like, rock-on symbols from the booth when I got to a particularly zesty part. And I gotta say, honestly, the lunches we had between recording sessions were every bit as fun as recording the book because it was just like, “Oh, shit, this really does translate.” Like, this work gets through to, at least, to cool dudes, in exactly the way I hoped it would. It was one of the most reifying experiences of the process of creating this. It was really special. Shout out to you, Kyle. You're amazing.

MC: I love that so, so much. That just brings so much joy to my little gay heart.

And right from the beginning of this audiobook, you do share how difficult the writing process has been. It does sound like the output of it is so worth it and is going to affect so many men's lives and just so many people's lives. So, you write about and read a lot of really difficult subjects. But you're also revisiting some really painful and traumatic personal experiences too. So what did that writing process look like for you?

JT: Well, a lot of my writing process is just learning to luxuriate and crying in public at coffee shops poetically. I just had to sort of really get into that and be like, “You know, okay, I'm writing something pretty. Or I'm reading something pretty. Or something is really moving within me. And I just have to accept that, like, I'm eating this scone and I'm sipping this coffee and there's a bunch of people around, and I'm going to kind of poetically and very quietly just have some tears running down my face in this very public venue.” Because I'm not a “from home writer.” I have to get out of my house to write. I need to be out in the world. So, yeah, I just had to get really cozy with the idea of crying in public.

And then, on a kind of more serious note, the blessing of this book, of it being my second, is that I already know firsthand that with the process of memoir, healing and resilience are a guarantee. It may not heal it completely, but it‘s guaranteed, 100 percent—I promise everyone listening to this—that when you take the time to memoir an experience, it loses its power over you. Or at least it loses its negative power over you. And you get to regain a sense of narrative control within your own life. And you get to feel like you are more of an agent within the story of what has happened to you.

I write some about my father's death in this book. It's my first time publishing a book while my dad's dead. So that's sad. I write a good bit about my father's passing and also just about him in general. And a lot of different things I learned from him. It just added a few more little sutures into my heart, you know? It just stitched some things right up.

And in that way, I'm very grateful for my readers and very grateful for you, my listeners, because it's like, y'all give me the chance to do that. Like, we get to do that together. And I'm really grateful to you not just for buying a book that I wrote. I mean: Oh my God! In today's day and age? Purchasing a book someone wrote? Wow! But also for the opportunity to heal hopefully together, right? That we get to heal some of it together. It's been a really powerful process creating this.

MC: First of all, thank you for doing all of that really hard, difficult work because it is so clear in this audiobook. It is so clear that you put in the time, you put in the energy, you put in the research, and you really put your entire heart and soul into that.

You open up with a statement that feels obvious at first, but also clearly needs to be said and that's that: Men are not okay. Men are suffering under patriarchy and under gender binaries, and many men lack the language, community, and tools to deal with that suffering in a healthy and productive way.

JT: There is so much work to do. You know, one piece of this that I hope people don't take the wrong way, is that I'm not saying: "Oh, we need to have empathy for men and boys and their suffering, because that's what we owe them and that's what it means to be a good person. And you need to be a good person and be super kind and do the emotional labor for them." Like, that is not the way that I come at this work.

I am coming at it from a much deeper, much more grounded, much more radical place, which is, if you want a world in which you get to feel free, you have to learn to have empathy for someone who's hurt you. You cannot find freedom for anybody until you empathize with the people who have hurt you. It doesn't mean letting them off the hook, it doesn't mean not asking for accountability. But spiritually and emotionally speaking, the only way to move forward, and in, in full freedom and in the full strength and power of your own damn heart and whatever is to empathize for the people who have hurt you, and to see the ways in which the people who have hurt you are hurting.

Also, I just think it's so much more powerful, rather than focus our energy on the violence that some men are doing, to focus on the vast violence that is being done to almost all men. It makes so much more sense to help men come together and say, "Yes, the world has treated us abominably, too. And being made into agents of a patriarchal world hurt us and was itself abuse." Right?

"It doesn't have to be everyone's job within the feminist coalition to do this work, but ... we must support and glorify and celebrate the people who are trying to do that work rather than tell them that they're selling out."

I didn't put this line quite in there, but it's something I do say pretty often. Like the moment that you are asking who has it worse—the child soldier or the person they shot—you have gone very, very wrong with your analysis. That is not a question you ever need to ask. You don't need to ask: “Who has it worse?” The answer is both people are spiritually in pieces on the floor. And we haven't, I think, spent the time to really think through what the violent upbringing of young men in America does to them and the dehumanizing enormity of that.

And it's interesting because the people who I think see that most clearly, but also feel the most anxiety about knowing how to talk about it, are queer people—like you and I—who were raised as men, right? We came up under those strictures; we came up within that club. We were recruited into that army. Um, conscripted is probably a better word than recruited. We weren't “recruited,” we were “conscripted”: We didn't really have a choice. And they tried to train us, and they tried to make us into them. And I think we, most of us, not all, but most of us, found some sort of way to defect, found some way to find freedom from it. But when you defect, you're scared to turn around and speak to other people who are still kind of serving within that institution.

And I, at a certain point, had to acknowledge that the most powerful thing I can do as a nonbinary person, the most powerful thing I can do as someone who's transfeminine—like basically just the laziest trans girl you'll ever know—the most powerful thing I can do is turn back to the men that I left behind and say, "Hey, I can help you get out, too." And that doesn't mean necessarily not identifying as a man, right? Like identifying as a man and serving the institution of manhood and patriarchy are two fundamentally different things. Being masculine and serving the institution of manhood and patriarchy are two fundamentally different things. I love masculine people; I love masculinity; I love men. And I would ask the men and the masculine people in my life that I love to try to find ways to sever their manhood and their masculinity from the imperative to serve patriarchal institutions and to serve the institution of manhood.

MC: Absolutely. And I know one of the other things you kept bringing up throughout this book—which I absolutely latched onto—was just the fact that we lack so much nuance in current conversations about men and masculine-presenting folks, and masculinity in general. Like, it's always such a binary conversation.

It's always: There's good; there's bad; there's right; there's wrong. Zero nuance in between. Which, I mean, we all know that's not how life works. That's not how life is. And why do you think that is? Why do you think we are so latched on to this lack of nuance in our thinking about masculinity and our approach to it?

JT: I think it was just easier to vilify masculinity wholesale. I think the idea of figuring out where the baby is within all that bath water was just too scary and felt too hard and felt too difficult.

Also, I think that it came from a desire to be tough, right? When you have been f**ked over by somebody for a large part of your life, you don't want to go back to that person. Your gut instinct isn't going to be to go back to that person softly and with nuance. Your gut instinct is to come back in guns blazing. And I'm not even going to condemn that gut reaction, right? Like it's a fair way to feel. And given the scale of violence that men have done to others, it is entirely legitimate to say, "I can't do the work of helping men heal. I can't help the people who have hurt me to find healing."

And I am not saying that anyone must do that work. I'm saying, I want to do that work. If you would like to join me, please join me. And if you don't want to do that work, please support me as I do, right? And help me do that work and help us do that work. It does not have to be everyone's job within the feminist coalition to do this work, but it must be some of our jobs. And we must support and rally around and glorify and celebrate the people who are trying to do that work rather than tell them that they're selling out, rather than sort of imply that they aren't radical enough, right?

So, any discourse that just condemns masculinity wholesale is discourse that is going to push young men who desperately need us and need our wisdom, and need our love, and need our intelligence, and need our care, right? Like it's going to push young men away from us and directly into the arms of any idiot right-wing manosphere loser who's going to exploit them, right? Like one of my favorite lines in the book is something like: "Young men are either going to process their trauma with us or they're going to process it with Andrew Tate. That is our choice to make."

I think positive reinforcement and identifying what is good gives people a roadmap to be better people. Whereas telling somebody: "Masculinity is bad and you need to not be masculine," I mean, that's just, it is a recipe to guarantee, uh, our spiral into fascism never lifts, you know?

MC: Absolutely. And I'm so glad you brought up that positive reinforcement and that positive spin, because I really did love how each of your essays ended with just a list of thought starters and conversational ideas on how to reframe our current thinking and our current discussions and our current approach to a lot of these issues to focus more on the positive, to focus on the things that we are doing properly. Because I feel like we're not doing that. We're not thinking as critically about the positives as we are the negatives. And that really is such a shame. So thank you for really emphasizing that radical positivity and that radical positive outlook for our futures.

JT: Yeah. You have to give people something to aspire to. And young men deserve an idea of manhood they can aspire to. And young men who want it deserve a masculinity that is loved and celebrated and cherished. You know, it's funny because my nonbinary ass just kind of is like, "Well, the irony here is that everything I love about masculinity is not inherently masculine. And everything I love about femininity is not inherently feminine either."

But part of being an activist—part of caring about the world—is figuring out where the rubber meets the road. And it's stupid for me to approach a young man who is really lost spiritually speaking, right, who is really suffering and try to say to him, "Yeah, well, strength isn't inherently masculine." Right? That is something to say later maybe. That's not where you meet somebody where they're at, right? It's just to say something like, "Masculinity can be gentle too." Right? Like, but more importantly: "What about masculinity feels good to you? Because if it feels good to you, it's probably good for others in some way, shape, or form."

I include in that, things like competition, competitiveness, aggression, right? Like aggression can be good for everybody if you know how to channel it right, dammit. You can put a lot of aggression into chopping some wood for the fire. You know? Like you can put a lot of into tending a garden and pulling weeds, right? You can put a lot of aggression into biking really far and really fast because someone needed help, right? There are ways to harness everything that men love about themselves for good. I want to be more a part of those conversations.

And I want to enter the manosphere and try to fix what, ultimately to me, has become this vast awful game of telephone where the dignity of all men and boys is on the line. I say this in the book: The message degraded and, by the time it reached them, it was something entirely different than what we intended. And so I'm like, "Well, I got to write this book, and I got to be part of this conversation, and I have to enter the manosphere. And I have to figure out how to talk to Jordan Peterson so that, like, we can start fixing some of this miscommunication." It's not all miscommunication, but like, I really do think that 75 percent of it must be.

MC: And on that topic, speaking of the manosphere and Jordan Peterson, as you were researching this book, you do mention that you spent a lot of time exploring the manosphere and incel culture, and all of those areas of the internet. You also mentioned that you actually had a large number of surprises throughout that process. I know you do cover this in the book, but is there one surprise in particular that really stood out in your mind that you still can't stop thinking about?

"I was really surprised by how much I could relate to [incels]. Not in the violent misogyny, but in what it means to feel profoundly romantically isolated. To feel that you will never find love."

JT: What surprised me most was when I read Reddit posts from incels. I mean, the ones where people were going off the deep end with violent misogyny—that didn't do much for me. Presumptively, young men got online and posted, had the courage to post something like, "I don't think anyone will ever love me, and I'm tired of people telling me that that's not true." Or, "I feel so ugly, I haven't looked at myself in a mirror for five years." Right?

Like, there were these vulnerable confessions that felt indiscernible from diary entries of my own, that felt indiscernible from things I had felt deep in my bones as a gender freak who like only was kind of able to be understood as cute, culturally speaking, within the last five years. I was really surprised by how much I could relate to them. Not in the violent misogyny, but in what it means to feel profoundly romantically isolated. To feel that you will never find love. To feel that touch is maybe not something you're going to experience in your life. My heart just ached and ached and ached until it bloomed. And that just kept happening over and over and over again.

Another part—that I think it's the best essay in the book—is the “Child Soldiers” essay, where I write about military violence, and the Pentagon, and the American military infrastructure. How it preys upon the gender identity of boys and men, and how it creates a type of gender-based violence that we don't even refer to as gender-based violence, right? Like war is often gender-based violence. Military violence is often gender-based violence.

There's this documentary that I watched that I end up taking my reader on a journey through with me. And at the end of this video, you are with a veteran who joined the armed forces to serve alongside his older brother. He lost his older brother, not to war, but to suicide, when he returned. And you're with him while he's taking his older brother's motorcycle to the biker bar where they used to go to together. And he just breaks on camera and then, and then tries to hide it in the way that men do, right?

It was interesting because I could do the parts about my dad's death. I could do that part in the audiobook fine, I could get through it, right? Like I could do the parts about when I wanted to die, right? Like I could do the parts about my spiraling and my own sort of experiences with depression. I could get through those parts fine. It took everything I had, and I had to do a lot of retakes, to get through the part talking about that guy, because I just kept bursting into tears. I just can't... Every time I watch that video, I cry. Every time I think about him, I get verklempt, which you can't be verklempt and record an audiobook. You can do it on video, but on audio, it's terrible.

It's just when you actually sit with the violence that is done to men and boys, it breaks you. And that is in fact a beautiful thing because, as it breaks you, it breaks what you've been told about what men and boys are, and it breaks what you've been told about how you should relate to them.

"We have to learn to honor the anger of young men, but help them direct it well."

MC: Absolutely. And let's close this out on a more positive note if we can. Because there is so much positivity in this.

JT: Yes. There's lots of fun in there.

MC: There is lots of fun, there's lots of positive solutions. So how do you think we can make all of this that we've just spoken about, all of these things more accessible to men so that they do have healthier, safer, and more targeted outlets for all of this aggression and all of this disappointment and all of this anger?

JT: Hmm. Well, there's a lot of public health interventions that I think we need. One thing that I would love to see is just, I feel like gyms are our most underutilized resource in this fight. We need to work with every gym in America to have a men's group at that gym where men can talk about what they're going through. It would be so good if every gym also put up flyers in the bathroom about muscle dysmorphia and then had a support group that everyone could go to when they're working out too much. And by too much, I mean, like, literally to unhealthy levels, right? Like where it's actually a disorder. I think that there's so much we could do tapping into those kinds of spaces.

More generally: just meeting men where they are. Men are gathering in places, and it behooves us to go to them and to say, "Hey, we want to talk, and we want to participate with you." Right? And we have skills that might help you.

The other thing that I think is just imperative for us in this moment is: We can't shame young men being angry. It doesn't make any sense. We have to learn to honor the anger of young men, but help them direct it well. Like, are you angry that you don't feel like you have a professional future? Yeah, that's accurate to feel right now. Yeah, absolutely. You should feel that way. The economy is totally rigged against you. You want to know who's working on that? The Democratic Socialists of America. Have you considered going to a meeting? You can yell all you want, right? And then get boots on the ground and do the work, right?

Oh, do you feel lonely and like you don't have enough friends, and there are no places for you to gather? Cool. Let's start at... Have you heard of Dungeons & Dragons, right? Like, have you considered joining a D&D group somewhere near you? Have you thought about like joining a running club, right?

There are so many solutions that we can bring to the table, but the only way we find them is by figuring out what young men are angry about and hurting about and saying, "Yes, your pain and your anger are real. Let's find something to do with it." Because the cool thing about when you do that is that rather than the anger of young men being a problem, it actually becomes fuel for a better world. And it's powerful fuel. And if we can harness it, like, girl, this world is going to be good real fast!

I feel so much hope, and it's really a light, airy, fluffy kind of hope. Are you a young man in America, and you're pissed off about how the world is? A: Thank God you're rationally perceiving the world you're in. And B: I have so many ideas about how we can get to work and what you can do with that." And like, "Y'all are funny and fun and a good time, and we're going to have a blast organizing together."

MC: And again, thank you so much for doing all of that work and coming up with all of those solutions, and just really being such a leader in this space. Because you really are doing great, important, impactful work. And I am so hopeful that it just continues to grow and continue to get out there and continues to make an impact.

But before we break, is there anything else we haven't covered that you'd like to share with listeners about Before They Were Men?

JT: I mean: Listen to the book; you're not going to regret it.

MC: Thank you so much for writing this audiobook and taking the time to chat today, Jacob. It's such important work that I think a lot of people will really benefit from.

JT: Thanks for having me, Michael. This has been a treat.

MC: Thank you so much, Jacob. And listeners, Before They Were Men—written and performed by Jacob Tobia—is available on Audible now.