This is the BBC.

Welcome to Late Night Women's Hour. Thank you very much for joining us, Sam Lauren Levern,

here with me to talk life, politics, culture, health, and anything else that crosses their mind are.

Neuroscientist Professor Sophie Scott, welcome to you.

Hi, Sue Black. Hi, Sue. Hello.

And journalist and academic Zoe Strimple. Thanks for joining us, Zoe.

Pleasure. Question that you wanted to put to the panel, Zoe, why is masculinity always in crisis?

That is my question. Masculinity famously is literally always in crisis. And I just think that's kind of interesting when actually the kind of going story is that women are the ones that are

kind of dramatic, emotionally, you know, vulnerable, get hysterical. And yet I can't help but feel

that it's inevitably the men in my life or who I encounter accidentally in public who are in some

form of crisis now in the past and forever.

For example, sitting on a tube, sitting on the tube recently, a cup of coffee didn't have a

cap on it. I was in full motor control of it. A man absolutely lost. He had the biggest go

at me I've experienced in some time because he was sure I'd wiggle my coffee and it would fall

on his suit.

So this kind of hysterical reaction to things like that,

and whenever things like that happen, it's always men.

So my question, yeah, is why are men so, why is there this kind of, on one hand,

this sort of incredibly highly strong, dramatic, crisis-ridden masculinity?

And yet, on the other hand, we're told that men are the calm, rational logical,

quiet ones.

I don't understand how those two things can coexist.

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