About a month ago there was a popular thread on Reddit: 'Straight guys ... what's the most intimate moment you had with another guy?'

The question attracted over 12,000 comments, and the the answers ranged from stories of looking after a drunk flatmate by feeding him crackers in the bath, to lying in bed with a dying friend and saying you love them.

When self-described "angry feminist" and "notorious boner killer" Clementine Ford found this thread, she was both moved and saddened, she told Hack.

"One of the things I thought was very sad about it was ... some men are so held back by this idea of how men are supposed to behave with each other it takes a friend dying for them to lay in bed hold them and tell them how much they love them," she said.

Those are things women can do all the time because we're not subject to the same vigorous sort of policing of our heterosexual masculinity.

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'The world I want to raise my son in'

Toxic masculinity is the subject of Clementine's latest book: Boys Will Be Boys: Power, patriarchy and the toxic bonds of mateship. It's her second, and comes two years after Fight Like A Girl - a mixture of memoir and opinion that called on women to stand up for their rights, and preceded the #MeToo movement.

If her last book was about how a patriarchal society is harmful for women, Boys Will Be Boys is about how patriarchy can be harmful to individual men.

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It comes partly from reflecting on her experience of raising her young son.

"It's made me look at the world I want to raise my son in and the negative impact patriarchy has on men," Clementine told Hack.

"The whole trope of men not being able to share their emotions and not being able to express sensitivity is not just a stereotype, it's something that leads to the high levels of mental health issues we have in men, the high level of male suicide."

"My role as mother with a young son is not only to raise him with respect for other people so he causes no harm to anyone else but also to protect him from the systems that will try and fit him into a box that he may not want to fit into."

'Men are capable of a higher standard of behaviour'

Fight Like A Girl was published around the time of the first sexual assault charges made against Bill Cosby. Three years later, on Wednesday this week, he was sentenced to three to 10 years in prison for assaulting Andrea Constand 14 years ago.

Also this week, President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, has denied allegations of sexual misconduct.

The defence offered by some supporters of Kavanaugh, both men and women, has been that any sexual misconduct was just a boyish college fun.

"There are still people who will line up to protect not only powerful men but to protect men having to account for their behaviour from decades ago," Clementine says about the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.

"It's feminists who actually say that men are not only capable of but [should] display a higher standard of behaviour than that, and it's people who assume a base level of behaviour in men - i.e. mainstream society that uses phrases like boys will be boys - that assumes that actually they can't be better than that, and nor should we demand better from them."

[They say] not only should we not demand better from them but also still smooth their transition into positions of leadership because this is just what boys do.

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Whatsapp Bill Cosby departs from a sentencing hearing on Monday.

Clementine says it remains to be seen whether #MeToo will result in convictions for powerful men accused of sexual misconduct.

"There are so many women around the world refusing to sit down and take what we've always been told we have to take when it comes to sexual violence," she said.

"It will be tricky to not [convict] Harvey Weinstein but for the rest, who knows?"

'Not all masculinity is toxic'

Whether or not it does lead to convictions, Clementine says the revelations of #MeToo have already helped reveal the way the patriarchy can distort men.

It has forced men to consider the effects of toxic masculinity on themselves.

"One of the things that people make the mistake of when they hear a phrase like toxic masculinity is thinking that all masculinity is toxic, which isn't true," she said.

"What they're saying is it's certain aspects of prescribed masculinity and the excuses made for masculinity that become toxic.

"The idea that boys can't help themselves when they're presented with a drunk woman is an excuse that's made to mitigate sexual assault. That's a form of toxic masculinity - taking aspects of masculinity and applying toxic ideals to it.

"I think it's toxic the idea that somehow men should reserve their platonic intimacy from each other in this country.

"I think removing toxic ideas around that and enabling men to actually connect with each other in really intimate platonic ways is a huge step forward."