Meet Danny Pérez, Host of NGM's Oreja Peluda Podcast
Q: All right, Danny, tell me the story of the name you chose for the podcast and the story behind it.
Danny: So the podcast is called Oreja Peluda, which is a Spanish for ‘Hairy Ear.’ It relates to the fact that there is a stereotype, you know, of the macho guy, with the Latin guy in particular.
He is this guy with a lot of strength and a lot of hair. Like, a hairy guy is a very stereotypical part of the macho macho man, you know.
But the hairy part is the part is how it relates to the fact that the podcast is about masculinity, to break stereotypes and to rethink stereotypes from many different perspectives. The podcast is an experience that’s delivered by the sense of hearing—and if you have an ear that’s full of hairs, you’re not going to be able to listen very well.
That’s important too, because listening is something that maybe men have not learned to do very well, or maybe just hearing what we want to hear. So in that sense, the name is also a kind of appeal to men.
Let’s make ourselves uncomfortable with some subjects, let's try to hear beyond what we want to hear.
Q: Can you tell me about how you got started? What was that moment of inspiration or those first steps you took?
D: I used to work in education full-time, and then things took a turn, so my partner and I, we started thinking about many ideas, and she suggested to me, “Why don’t we make a podcast, like the ones we have been listening to for such a long time? We love the medium.” So we said, “Why don’t we do a podcast about masculinity?”
So from there we started talking, like really talking, really like talking from there and I started reaching out to some friends and contacts here in Ecuador. Thanks to one friend, we secured the backing of Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, a German non-profit that does a lot of social and political work here in Ecuador.
And then, in the process of researching and putting the whole project together, I came across NGM Circle. I participated in an event for the first time, and I started talking to Jake and the team, and one thing led to another.
Q: Now you talk about how you’re not just speaking to you know, you’re not just speaking to an Ecuadorian audience. You want to speak to a broader audience than that. Tell me about who it is you want to speak to.
D: So the main audience is Latin American men mostly, but it’s not directed to only men. So the general audience is people from Latin America and the Latin community in North America. So the content is in Spanish. And the stories or the examples and the issues that we talk about are mostly things that are happening in all of the region, countries of Latin America or the Latino community in North America.
Q: I double checked this in the dictionary, but “machismo” and “macho,” these are Spanish words. Can you tell me about what cultural context or experiences that your audience is coming from, that they might share even though they’re tuning in from different parts of the USA, Canada, Ecuador and the Spanish-speaking world?
D: I think the fact that these words are actually Spanish at their root, like you say, and they are the same in other languages like English and German—that says something. It speaks to the whole culture that has been growing and cultivating in the Latin world for many years.
And this idea of I think it’s an idea that comes that has a lot to do with colonization as well. The idea of men dominating other people and how that has evolved in many different ways. To perpetrate and validate domination and domination through proving that you are more worthy or better than another person or another man.
So I think it has a lot to do with history, and the way that, particularly for Latin America, our countries were colonized. It has a lot to do with that history of domination, and that happened mostly with men dominating over other people.
So I think that kind of unifies the whole idea of ‘what does it mean to be ‘macho’ now.’ Especially now that we have started questioning a lot of these issues. It speaks to the fact that it is time to start redefining what that means, redefining what ‘a man’ means.
Q: So you’ve had your first episode. What have you discussed so far?
D: In the first episode we discussed why it is important to to talk about masculinity, and how our perceptions of masculinity and the definitions that we have come to learn and grow up with. Many of them have defined a way of being masculine that, you know, that has come to be very violent or very toxic as the term now is broadly used.
Our guests to discuss this were two experts. One of them is he’s the director of a social organization here in Ecuador, that they do a lot of work on masculinity, and the other person is a professor. She teaches feminism and masculinity and gender in one of the universities here in Quito.
And we discuss with both of them, like these ideas of how we learn to be men and how these concepts that are given to us from very, very small ages define the way that we act as men. And act violently, for many men.
Q: Danny, what’s your message to our readers out there who might be curious about tuning in and listening to your podcast?
D: Well, I would love to invite them all to listen to the podcast and send us any questions, comments, opinions through our socials or through email.
And just, I think it’s important for people who are caught feeling maybe overwhelmed by how the situation is right now, with masculinity and with all the bad things that have come with it. People who are feeling a bit overwhelmed by all of that, and a bit curious about what other people, what other men, are doing about it.
Basically my invitation is just to feed that curiosity and to feel overwhelmed together. Like, let’s explore this, this whole thing together.
I don’t think there is necessarily a single answer to any question we ask—an answer to anything is just more questions. But if we just keep asking more questions collectively, I think that’s a better way to do it than just leaving some people to do it by themselves.
From the Future of Masculinity, a weekly newsletter where our community’s hearts and minds come together each week to do the work, tell the stories, and build the blueprint for a future where men and boys experience less pain and cause less harm.