Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Dome. My guest is Richie Hardcore. He is an educator and public speaker based in New Zealand, and his work explores mental health and wellness, issues around masculinity and domestic and sexual violence, as well as addiction. He also spends a lot of

time working with young people about how to make sense of their own sexuality and the omnipresence

of sex in the culture, particularly pornography. He's also a former professional fighter

competing in kickboxing and in Muay Thai, the combat sport that comes out of

Thailand. I invited Richie onto the podcast because he has a way of talking about all this stuff,

the intersection of mental health, pornography, sexual health, things like shifting cultural

attitudes about sex work and kink. In a way, I have

never heard anyone talk about that stuff. He may be the only guy you're likely to find, at least on

this podcast, who is both well versed in the hardcore music scene. That's where he got his name,

competitive martial arts, and also wrote a master's thesis recently on hegemonic masculinitys. This is a spectacular

conversation and it gets even more so in the overtime portion that is available for paying

substack subscribers.

So go over to Megan Down.substack.com and join us there if you want to hear that portion as well.

Richie also answers some questions there about his favorite hardcore bands that people posed on Twitter right before we recorded.

Not something we cover routinely on this podcast.

In the meantime, enjoy this very wide-ranging,

very deep conversation with Richie Hardcore.

Richie Hardcore, welcome to The Unspeakable.

Thank you for having me.

It's really, really nice to talk with you.

You're someone I've been following for a while.

You have a lot of interesting things to say about the subject of men and masculinity,

...