This man wants women to have more ‘feminine energy’. Be careful what you wish for

If you’ve been lucky enough to miss the latest instalment of moronic hot takes offered up by conventionally attractive people with large online followings, I envy and salute you, but buckle up.

Last week, Australian podcaster Chris Griffin, who describes himself as a “deep thinker” and has an audience of over 1 million followers, told listeners he doesn’t want his partner to work unless she wants to because he’s in the enviable position of being able to financially support them both. On the surface, that seems like a nice premise, except it quickly became apparent that his generosity is very much conditional, and very much rooted in gendered gripes.

Host of The Pocket podcast, Chris Griffin.Credit: Instagram

In the podcast episode, Griffin said, “If you feel the need to go and work to make money, and then you come home, and you’re complaining about your day when we don’t need you to make money because we’re sorted; if we’ve got four hours to spend in the afternoon and I ask you ‘how was your day today, babe?’ I want your eyes to light up with excitement.”

He added that men need to come home after a long day of work and be greeted by what he and other manosphere-adjacent influencers have dubbed “feminine energy”. This, according to Griffin, “is the calm, it’s the harmony, it’s the peace and love that a man that’s got a busy life, that’s chasing his dreams, needs when he’s trying to wind down.”

But how do women have their emotional needs met, you may wonder? Enter “hot girl walks”, which are identical to regular women walking and talking, but hotter and with more expensive activewear. “I would love my partner to go on a hot girl walk with her friends every day,” Griffin said. “She gets this feminine energy, they get to talk their shit, and then they get to have a bit of excitement about their day.”

An increasingly popular concept among influencers like Griffin is that personality traits aren’t informed by genetics, environment or society, but by gender. According to this world order, men are predisposed to be driven leaders and providers who offer safety to women thanks to the Y chromosome. These traits are, they say, “traditional masculine values” and men who lean into these assets are “high value”.

By contrast, women are biologically more likely to be calm, peaceful, harmonious nurturers on account of our “feminine energy”.

As Griffin explained in the podcast, “A man’s born, and we know, OK, we need to make something of ourselves … It’s quite an easy process for men. Women on the other hand, it’s a lot tougher … they need to go on this journey and end up in a spot where they’re the purest, most innocent version of themself. And that is their peak.”

Professor Luke Smillie, an expert in personality psychology from the University of Melbourne, says Griffin and co are “painting a starker difference between genders than we have evidence for”, and that there is little to support the premise that men and women differ categorically on traits like ambition or innocence.

“There is very little basis for arguing that personality traits are inherently gendered. Hundreds of studies have found that most gender differences are fairly small. In practice, this means that for any given psychological characteristic, women and men overlap considerably,” Smillie says.

And here’s the root of the problem with Griffin’s thesis. In conflating financial care with emotional care, he’s not just screwing over women. By telling men that it’s fine for them to not show up for their partners in that way, or even bother trying to learn how to because men aren’t biologically designed for care, he’s leaving them totally unequipped to emotionally support anyone, including themselves. Considering 43 per cent of Australian men will experience anxiety or depression in their lifetime, and that 77 per cent of suicides each year are men, this rhetoric sets men up to fail, too. What good are chiselled abs or motivational quotes if you don’t have basic emotional tools?

If Griffin and his bros want to pay someone to listen to them and provide emotional care without offering the same service back they don’t need girlfriends, they need a therapist.

Katy Hall is deputy opinion editor.

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