Protecting Boys From Toxic Social Media with Peggy Orenstein

The hashtag #RomanEmpire currently has over 893 million views, and the videos have been racking up hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of views across these creators’ pages as women ask men how often they think about the Roman Empire. The answer, is apparently, all the time.

What does this say about men? And our culture? And the Roman Empire….

To figure this out I called up the author, journalist and cultural critic Peggy Orenstein who writes and thinks a lot about the politics of every day life and gender. She is author of many, many books including Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Girls & Sex and Boys & Sex.

We started out dissecting this Roman Empire thing….does it have to do with the gladiators, the brutality, a desperation for a different kind of time. But then Peggy and I got into SO MUCH more. We started chatting about the kinds of rigid masculinity that boys might encounter on social media. The stuff being shown is extreme and misogynistic.

As the mother of a son this conversation terrified me but it also brought me hope because knowledge is power and if we know what is out there then we know how to help our kids work through it.