Episode 81 - Man

[transcript automatically generated - cleanup in progress]

[Music] we were talking about masculinity outside and i asked you if you knew what masculinity was and i said no i didn't know what it was okay do you want to know what it is okay so masculinity and femininity are two stories that people get told and have you ever heard the story like blue is a boy color and pink is a girl color and what do you think about that i think that it's wrong because um colors they people don't own colors yeah everyone can like different colors even if a boy likes pink color and a girl likes blue yeah and then there are some other ones like boys don't cry or girls can't be strong there's another one that only boys can do soccer oh and what do you think about that i don't think it's good because it doesn't matter what your gender is it um it matters if you like it or not so masculinity is really just a big word for a story that boys are often told that they have to act out in their lives it's like being given a script for a play and being told you have to act out this script but instead of it being for a play it's for their whole lives and do you think if we think about the other side about femininity that's the script that girls are often given what is the script that girls are often given what have you heard about girls that girls they could not use to be not able to vote and they like they were expected to stay home and sew and girls are supposed to like pink and purple and stuff and and what do you think about that it's not fair because just because we're girls doesn't mean we have different rights as boys yeah i think you're right and if you think about boys too what would happen if a boy liked pink but he was told he wasn't allowed to like pink that would make him sad because um he liked it and he would get blamed for liking that color and you could think maybe even more important than a color would be if he was able to to feel things in life like so what if i'm like not crying yeah and if he didn't like sports and didn't want to do it and they still made him that would make him sad because even just because he's a boy doesn't mean he has to do a boy stuff what do you think happens when we tell little boys that they shouldn't cry is that good is that bad is that it's bad because um because it's showing that they can let their feelings out and show other people that they feel comfortable yeah that's right what would you think if a boy if you saw a boy cry i would help him feel better yeah yeah you just want him to feel better i know okay so if you were gonna go tell your class tomorrow what masculinity is what would you tell them i would tell them that it is um something that peop people tell stories about what girls and boys have to do and what girls can't do and what boys can't do yeah but remember what you said outside when i said it's a story that we tell people remember what you said to me i said it's a lie because um it's not fair and it's a lie that people have to act like that yeah thanks emily in 2011 there was an article in the new york times titled vicious assault shakes texas town [Applause] [Music] is an article about an 11 year old girl being raped gang raped by 18 males and this article is just written terribly honestly one of the worst written articles i've ever seen about a subject like this because somehow the reporter with all of his patriarchal training from our society writes this story in a way that almost blames the victim and subtly assumes such a low and harmful view of masculinity so after briefly describing in the article the um cursory details of the allegations the reporter writes quote the case has rocked this east texas community to its core and left many residents in the working class neighborhood where the attack took place with unanswered questions among them is if the allegations are proved how could their young man be drawn into such an act so did you hear how he put that remember an 11 year old girl has been brutally gang raped by 18 men and the first concern that appears in the article is how could these young men have been drawn into such an act drawn in is a weird way of talking about 18 people raping an 11 year old especially when you see where the article goes again i quote residents in the neighborhood where the abandoned trailer stands known as the quarters said the victim had been visiting various friends there for months they said she dressed older than her age wearing makeup and fashions more appropriate to a woman in her twenties she would hang out with teenage boys at a playground some said where was her mother what was her mother thinking said miss harrison one of a handful of neighbors who would speak on the record how can you have an 11 year old child missing down in the quarters can you hear what's wrong with that 18 men rape an 11 year old girl and suddenly somehow the conversation shifts in this article to what the girl was wearing how this 11 year old must have been such a salacious little girl that wears makeup and hangs out in the wrong part of town what was her mother thinking what was her mother thinking what is the writer of this article thinking what is our society thinking that we so often blame rape victims we wouldn't do that for say mass shooting victims we wouldn't say to the kid that got shot in his classroom well what was he doing there just being a sitting duck in the classroom what was his mother thinking when it comes to gender and sexuality in our society we have these views and these stories that are so harmful where men are seen as these brainless brutes who are going to rape and so it's up to women to watch out and be careful and not be in the wrong part of town and make sure your daughter is not wearing makeup and no how about instead of blaming the girl or her mother or anything other than the 18 people who raped a little girl we start asking ourselves what the hell is going on with masculinity in this country and in this species why of all the mass shootings since 1982 have all of the shooters but two been male and most of them white why are 89 percent of murder-suicides committed by men 86 percent of domestic violence documented in court cases why are they men why in the u.s are one in three women victims of sexual assault at some point in their lifetime and why are 63 percent of them not even reported to the police if you're a man you might wonder why somebody wouldn't report it if you're a woman you probably know why because we live in a society that claims that all men are created equal but apparently that means certain kinds of men [Music] the way things are have left a backlog of four hundred thousand untested rape kits it's left rapists who impregnate their victims with parental rights in 31 states i know a young woman who was gang-raped herself a few years ago she's a black woman and the rapists were respected men and athletes at her school in fact one of the rapists went on to be a professional athlete and is still one to this day my friend reported the incident to the police but nothing was done no arrests were made all of this comes from somewhere what is it why is there so much violence in the heart of man today on the leaders podcast we're talking about man it's the follow-up to our woman episode and you know 75 of the hosts on this podcast are men we're not man haters but we do think that there are some fundamentally bad stories that infect the way that we think and live as men in the world and we want to look at that consider how could we reimagine what it is to be a man on planet earth welcome to the liturgist podcast everybody [Music] when i was in grade nine i sat next to a boy in my science class who i liked we've been in the same class since grade six and i couldn't seem to get his attention why did i need his attention i think it feels good to be liked by someone you like i also know that i was really insecure and had been told all my life that being liked by a boy maybe even this kind of boy would mean i was really special was i actually going to be more special well no not really but growing up in a context where i was told something didn't actually make it true but it made other people treat me in such a way that impacted my life so we'd sit together in science class and i'd start to notice something whenever i asked him a question he would warm to me there was a kind of pride in him being able to help me with something and i felt myself slowly over time start to play dumb more and more knowing that in actuality i was actually going to be able to answer those questions but it felt so good to be liked by him that i felt myself play dumb play small to make him feel better about himself and the better he felt about himself the more he liked me i noticed this connection show up maybe for the first time ever that there was something about him being able to feel stronger than me that made it safe for him to like me that's rough i didn't know what to clap or [Laughter] no thank you for sharing that story but it's that's a rough glimpse in the mirror at our culture yeah the hidden scripts that we all operate in and make our jokes about and form our crushes with and so tell me the men at the table when did you first start learning about the masculine script and masculinity do you might have early memories of being told things like boys don't cry or men do this or hearing be a man i actually think it starts earlier than that like i think it starts in the gender roles like it starts with your boy so therefore you know like when you're a little boy it's like oh he has a crush on this girl you know like oh this you know like you're kind of like sexualized very early like all of us are and if you're a boy that means you like girls and that means it has to look like this and that means you do these things because boys do this boys play with trucks and girls play with dolls and boys like blue and girls like pink boys like to play sports and girls like to play with the easy makeup you know i think that starts really early like as a general script oh yeah and do you have a memory of when you first consciously heard those things and took them in yeah sure i mean i think i have tons of those one one in particular i think sports was a big male unifier and also a way to like connect with the men in the family and so like if i want to spend time like with my grandfathers like i had to like sit and watch sports with them you know if i wanted to like spend time outside of like you know outings with like the parents it was okay my family loved basketball but it was funny because i never did but it was like i had to like learn that passion which i never really did but it definitely felt pretty pretty forced of like you're gonna learn to play basketball and we're gonna like we actually bought a basketball hoop and it's like this is what we're gonna do and you're gonna do this because you're a boy but not really feeling into that i used to love to wear high-heeled shoes and not because they in some way i was far too young to sexualize them or associate them with just some kind of fetish i just like the click clack sound they made on the floor i just thought was the best way to walk around if you're going to walk around this incredible click-clack sound is the way to do it and my grandmother and my grandfather kept high-heeled shoes for me to wear and run around in to the horror of other people in my family i couldn't understand why high heel shoes were just for girls and they were it wasn't that i wanted to wear high-heeled shoes all the time they seemed awfully impractical to run around in the grass with it's literally in the context of hardwood or linoleum floors there was just an aesthetic delight to them and as i became school-aged there was such an obvious and pervasive pressure growing up in the south to identify with and participate in team sports which i found hard it's hot in florida you're supposed to stay outside for a long time be physically active start sweating and in order to succeed someone else has to be defeated i found that just revolting it was more than i lacked the hand-eye coordination and natural athleticism to perform sports well the idea of succeeding at the expense of someone else was anathema to my personality and i was really emotionally vulnerable as a kid i couldn't hold my feelings inside and i found that made not only other male children uncomfortable but adult men as well there were constant social cues that to cry when you were sad made people very uncomfortable some people would literally say something like be a man but i think that was less difficult for me than people whose body language signaled distress the only people i could kind of relate to as a child were the girls in school they i didn't have friends but girls didn't actively antagonize me and what i found pretty consistently is when a tear rolled down my cheek one of the popular girls would come to my defense in fact as an adult years later after becoming a pretty successful executive i walked up to a girl i hadn't seen since grade school and thanked her for saving my life wow and it's interesting to me how often my sexuality was questioned as i went into puberty and adolescence and persisted in a state of emotional openness and utter antipathy towards sports and athletics it was like the fact that i didn't find my identity in the case of florida literal tribal identities like florida state football with the seminoles um that i couldn't be a man but i preferred uh walking outside i preferred sitting under a tree and watching birds i preferred cataloging how many species of spider were within a hundred steps of my home and i didn't understand why those activities were any less manly or masculine than any others and i was so often afraid of men i didn't understand why being manly was desirable in the first place um so i've always had this very strange experience of being pretty comfortably straight my sexuality's not something i really struggled with but so many people so many friends and family genuinely did and the criteria by which they questioned me seemed so arbitrary and confusing to me kind of at the time and to this day it's so strange that the three men here on this podcast none of us seem to really have been comfortable with traditional scripts we were handed with masculinity as far as like are you even a sports guy william i don't think any of us are really i'll go to live games because the energy is fun mm-hmm and like but uh but i can't watch on tv really and i don't really yeah i don't follow teams so no i don't know it's interesting because i mean guys i'm like yeah i feel i'm really lucky that i had really strong women in my life but you know i remember walking around in my mom's high heels and and her laughing and i'm sure she would put makeup on me if whatever i mean she was i didn't get that directly from parenting that i needed to necessarily i wasn't supposed to cry or that i didn't get any of that stuff thankfully but i speak english and i watch television i read books and i know the phrase be a man and at some point i heard that i don't know when that doesn't stick out to me as necessarily when but you can't help but as a man in the society get crafted and what does it mean be a man that has meaning unspoken meaning and it is spoken sometimes but there is like this just general like fuck up be strong be a man hold it inside take care of your stuff so that you can someday take care of your woman you know i mean all these like unspoken stories i bought into that one big time yeah and i did too i did too and not necessarily because i thought a woman couldn't take care of herself i was taught that's what a woman wanted and if i want to be the kind of person that can have a wife and have a family i need to make sure that i'm the kind of person that can take care of that family because that's what a woman's going to look for and so all those scripts i think were were handed to me but i never felt like i'm like a manly man you know i never i never groups of guys that would want to get together and do the typical manly things i'm like i was going to stay home and practice guitar that was my experience i don't know this immediately leads me to think about men's emotional health and well-being and how much gets disconnected from the person when scripts like be a man come in come onto the scene so to back this up and give you a little bit of a developmental psychology perspective there was a woman named carol gilligan who started doing research with girls about what is moral development how do we make moral decisions because so much of the research particularly what was done by kohlberg and his theory of moral development said that people make moral decisions in a certain way and there's a hierarchy that you are more moral if you make decisions that reflect the top tier of decision making and whenever women were put through this grid they would always come up short as being morally inferior because they didn't make decisions in the way that it was represented on this grid so carol gilligan started doing this research with young girls and her work is documented in a really famous psychology book called in a different voice but what she found is that around puberty when girls were starting to be sexualized and their bodies were becoming something different it was changing the way that other people spoke to them and they were realizing something about themselves and what it meant to have a voice and so this the phenomenon of self-silencing started to show up around puberty that girls who could retain a sense of justice and a voice early on and say things like that's not right that's not fair around puberty would start to say things like well you know right or ah but you know what do i know after they would say something with some strength then there would be this kind of cutting down of voice so whenever i talk about that research people are really outraged and they think oh my goodness but the fascinating thing about gilligan's work and she talks about this in a book called the birth of pleasure at that shift of the self-silencing of i want to say the thing i want to say but i can't happens for boys around five [Music] that it's happening so young for boys that they're learning the script of be a man and shut down and don't share your feelings and if you're crying it means that you're weak and you're like a little girl as if that's something bad that shift and that i know something inside my body i have a sense of knowing about what feels right about what feels good about connection about what i need that that switch gets turned off sometimes earlier than five but predominantly around five and so when we talk about the injustice for women about the scripts of femininity one of the things that i often talk about is i think that the patriarchal construction of masculinity hurts boys and men too but there's so many men that i see in therapy who talk about feeling like they are alone in life because they've always been told that they can't connect with other men except if they're angry about sports games or if there's a sense of violence or aggression and that they can sometimes connect with women but it's threatening for their wives or their partners if they're connecting with too many other women emotionally and so there's this isolation it's like these walls get built up to protect the narrative of masculinity but then inside there's a there's a person who just wants to be human like everybody else but has been so cut off from all of these dimensions of the fullness and the richness of an emotional life from sensing from being connected to the body and feeling and vulnerability that there is aloneness on the inside being a man right now in this world is kind of weird and confusing sometimes it's just generally kind of scary because i don't know what it is to be a man anymore and i'm afraid that i'm doing it all wrong and that i like things that aren't masculine i've always been really deep feelings so i used to cry a lot as a child and i learned to not cry to not show those emotions as much and when they show them and when i show them i i'm just generally embarrassed to me being a man used to be something that made me proud and superior now i see it as a source of violence privilege and oppression being a man today means acknowledging the spoiled life we have and speaking up and empowering those that do not have the same privilege so for me being a man has meant a constant confrontation with standards of masculinity i grew up in a culture where the term biblical manhood was often used and so i looked at jesus as the ultimate example of masculinity like my christian community told me and i was fine with that because i was a sensitive kid and jesus seemed like really sensitive and caring guy but eventually i noticed that the men who followed this ideal of biblical manhood they would often attribute these qualities to jesus that i never would have expected for example physical strength because jesus was a carpenter i guess so the more i moved toward this ideal of masculinity the more i felt uncomfortable in my own skin and eventually i noticed that no man in my life seemed like he was comfortable with who he was so at this point i've decided that there is no way to achieve masculinity and the boy who eventually becomes a man in his own mind inevitably feels weak at some point and is pulled along toward more and more toxic forms of masculinity so my hope now is that men of the younger generations will learn from movements like feminism and see the freedom that can be found in throwing away useless gender norms [Music] it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through better help you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better help that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com slash liturgists yeah i i can't be like you guys and name the study right now off the top of my head and i think it's peer-reviewed so i'm doing good so warning there uh for you skeptics um but it talked about how the difference between boys and girls in the language centers early on and how uh girls you know by age six have a broader language center than boys to express all types of like range of emotions and how boys don't but early on boys are tend to be more emotional than girls but they said that right around six or seven that starts to change the study talked about how girls understand relationships better and they can identify who their best friends are very clearly and know who that is where by the time boys get into preteen teenage years they often don't have a best friend and if they do have a best friend when when this study would talk to that other boy that other boy would not identify that one as his best friend and kind of where the study led ultimately was male loneliness and talking about how by the time men get married they oftentimes the women as woman is the uh social center for their relationships um and so then if they get divorced which will have over half of marriages do get divorced um men are often dying of loneliness because they didn't develop the skills early on like like even watching older men to older women in terms of like older women are very good at having like i was talking to ruth science mike's mom you know she's like i got my girls my tallahassee girls and we talk and we do this and we go here together and you you don't see that the same type of camaraderie as much with older men as you do with women and even when they did the studies they said it was often worse for uh lgbt men but not lgbt women which showed it was very like much a strong like a gender thing that there's something happening with boys at a young age and and one of the things they marked was fear being gay being a motivator for men shutting down their emotions and their feelings with other men and not developing strong intimate relationships with other men i i don't know what that is like there's something in our culture that puts this pressure on us to not be vulnerable and intimate with other men like there's this yeah silence there and it's like like you said it's only through like sports or it's through like certain type of pre-approved exercises or activities that we can express that emotion i'm going to find the studies and then the study is sex differences in neural processing of language among children by berman booth and bitten published in neuropsychologia march 2008. yes burma booth and bitchin [Laughter] from the university of haifa which is a lovely town i had a uber driver last year at some point that was from i think he's from morocco maybe or something but he was talking to me about being a man here in the states and how you can't have friends like you can't he's like back in morocco i think it was morocco the guys we'd hold hands and we'd cuddle up and we'd walk take walks together and do whatever and just be like and like hear you oh that's weird you're gay there are people i think of this guy there's this guy at the gym that i see him interacting he's like one of the trainers there i was like i really want to be friends with that guy i'm imagining that he's gay he's very flamboyant very gregarious looks like a real fun time to me i don't know how i could ever like and sometimes just me being a shy person i guess but i don't know how to like go to a a man hey do you want to get some coffee want to be friends friends and same with a woman like i wouldn't know how to do that as a man it's not just that i'm afraid to do it i'm afraid with all the roles and scripts that we have in our society everybody's probably going to assume that's a sexual thing immediately from a man coming up hey do you want to go grab some coffee you're not like maybe i'm just thinking that but that's the script that's been handed to me i'll come off predatorily in some way or something and that sucks it does like these stories do isolate us because there's a lot of people that i come across i'm like i would love to like get to know you you seem like an amazing person um but i don't even know how to start that happening without seeming like a creep because of what a script of what a man is supposed to do when he meets another man and the only culturally acceptable ways in america of like having close friendships with a man or kind of like you want to watch the game you want to go hunting you want to kill something do you want to watch violence in some way like so that we we can there's enough blood around that we're not gay or we're not a woman have you ever like seen this thing it's funny because when you said it i instantly heard it in my head and i was like i should say that no that's that's dumb but like when you said that and like what do i do when i want to go up to another man i want to be like gay like right like people say that like that's the thing right that you hear all the time or hey bro no homo but you know like you wanna like you know it's like there's always this clarification and there's always this like a check don't be gay yeah you know okay you're gay oh my god you know and like yeah i don't know what that is inside of our psyches that feels like we need to keep each other in line like there's something in the like male script that when someone seems to deviate or like show emotion or do something that's perceived to be homosexual it's instantly like we we do it as little boys uh as well too in our culture and i don't know where that comes from or why that is but it's prevalent i see it in in grown men like they they do that too and it's like the way it won't be on the team like in the in the bath since cni this and we don't do this if you're on the team and guys don't do this and we do this i think it comes from agriculture tell us if you look at hunter-gatherer societies of which there are a few still on this planet modern civilization is quickly driving them to the margins and towards effectively cultural extinction but there are hunter-gatherer cultures left on this planet they tend to be much more egalitarian they also don't have any institution necessarily corresponding to what we would call marriage when we look at the relationship between men and women pre-agriculture things are just different now of course pre-agrarian cultures were not in ancient times or today monolithic there's incredible diversity as you would imagine any grouping of homo sapiens would be but when you see the rise of agriculture where you have to have a plot of land so this is the first time anyone's considering themselves maybe owning land or defending very particular patches of land and you're cultivating crops on it male labor becomes extremely valuable and you need more people you can trust to work your crops and to engage in animal husbandry and when that shift happens anthropologically we see this change in the way men and women relate to where the primary value in women becomes their capacity to make more farm hands and therefore men in the male experience was heavily elevated and you see marriage come into the picture following the rise of agriculture and marriage at first although some would say it is a spiritual institution historically we see it primarily as a means of transferring a piece of property which was a woman oddly enough often in conjunction with a dowry so basically for doing someone the favor of taking a daughter you were paid financially it wasn't that simple though it also represented kind of a a tribal or cultural alliance so marriages were strategic and women were property that were used to make more laborers and that's a really terrible deal for women and so as we advanced culturally that that was the seeds of this institution we now call patriarchy and thankfully over time women have indicated they are not property they don't want to be property that's a ridiculous demeaning conception and we saw these kind of strategic marriages fall out of cultural favor in most of the world and instead they were replaced with a new institution of romantic marriage and romantic love but romantic love through some lenses is another way to keep women in their place it conditions women not to desire men but to desire being desired by men and being in competition with one another for said desire so the funny thing about this this patriarchal construction it not only prevents men from having intimacy with other men it also tries to set up women as adversarial which limits their capacity to collectively work against their oppression so whenever i see commercials for diamonds or flowers i always wanted to see at the bottom this ad brought to you by the patriarch of the picture right because women you are a thing to be wooed so that you can become a man's beloved property and so patriarchy has been a real bag of shit for literally every human being it's been the least shitty for men but as we've discussed in here it has also been shitty for men it has been much more shitty for women it's been even more shitty for people with non binary gender identities or trans people or gay or lesbian people that in the patriarchy those are truly aberrant ideas because it undermines this concept that men's role is to run society and women's role is to make more people and you have to fit into this reproductive framework in order to have value so we've been in this period of upheaval and thank god we have been in a period of upheaval where for the last couple hundred years we've been renegotiating the social contract and it's created new senses of identity for people women's liberation and the feminism movements have offered primarily white women a new identity and a new script to create womanism has crafted an even more inclusive vision of progress for women especially women of color the civil rights movement has offered identity for people of color other than as the property of european americans lgbtq advocacy has created new identity and pride for people on those different spectrums of sexual orientation and gender identity and thank god these are all amazing developments in society that i celebrate and that i relish but something has been missed as we've renegotiated the social contract there's no new script for men men are still working with an ancient script where they're supposed to be in charge and stoic and self-sufficient and and the outcome of that as we've discussed is this loneliness and alienation and desperation that men almost universally feel and feel much more intensely as they age we're finding that men today in america who are in their 50s and 60s often report having no close friendships and feeling unable to be in close relationship even with their spouse is it any wonder that men in that condition are so angry that they so readily vote for demagogues that they pour vitriol onto social media because they don't feel some abstract sense that masculinity is in decline they personally are experiencing a collapsing and deteriorating life i actually think that this phenomenon the inability of men to relate to each other or to women to be in physical contact with each other to only be in physical contact with women when it involves sexual arousal is linked to the male tendency towards mass violence and violence in general yeah so we have this ancient script that says if you're a man here's who you are you're a powerful protector over your family you're the leader in your work and the head of your household that emotionally you are strong and you are silent and you are self-reliant and that masculinity is a member's only enterprise no one without a penis is permitted in this institution and no one who's not attracted to traditional conceptions of women are allowed to be masculine and this is destroying our world this attitude not only makes men miserable it is the single greatest obstacle to creating universal human justice and equality because every step forward for people who are marginalized and oppressed represents the last bone of self-worth that men are receiving in their social script and i've seen like two movements attempting to create a new identity for men one is kind of a a faux progressive classic liberalism represented by men like jordan peterson where men become aware rightfully of the problems in society and try to participate in solutions and because of emotional fragility encounter great guilt and shame when anyone names the role that men especially white men play in societal oppression and if this only script offered to them is that of the repentant oppressor it's not psychologically palatable and so men like jordan peterson offer a view of the world where the problem is not only inequality but the current oppression and backlash against white men and that movement is troubling because of its scale but if you want to see a really virulent response to creating a new script you need to look no further than the internet culture movement called the incel movement or involuntary celibacy i've recently been digging deep into this based on listener questions and feedback and involuntary celibates view themselves as men who are sub-human that they are so unattractive that women are not interested in having sex with them this is a very sex-focused and sexual frustration focused movement but what these men believe is to fight the fact that they self-identify as sub-human or unattractive they think that prior to women's liberation they still would have been able to through the force of social pressure and institution guarantee themselves a bride and so i find it simultaneously heartbreaking that there's a large number and i mean a large number of men who view themselves as genetically non-viable from a psychological perspective that's terrifying but that in response to that amount of self-loathing they project onto women the idea that all women including attractive women are sub-human and not only does this movement engage in all kinds of harassment and active persecution of women online we're starting to see acts of mass violence come out of the in-cell movement and so the stakes are very high here we should rightfully in my opinion focus on the perspectives of women and people of color and lgbtq folks as we talk about liberation because they are the ones being oppressed but if we don't as a society and especially as men and i might even say especially as white men intentionally create new positive identities and social scripts for men this is a war that will continue to our mutual peril yeah as a person of color i'm very troubled by a lot of the movements you've been sharing and talking about i would love to see young white men embrace or at least wrestle with like critical race theories like intersectionality like instead of running to a jordan jordan peterson for some type of relief why don't you study kimberly crenshaw why aren't you reading black feminist lit like bell hooks or britney cooper it's funny because i don't find white men willing to wrestle with that like they'll run to the white scholar who makes them feel safe in their ideology and their perception but won't actually wrestle with someone who has a different life experience that can also speak as an academic person into the lived experiences of like all people and i do think there has been this tendency for white men to see their lived experience as the universal experience but unable to see the universal experience through the lens of marginalized people so what you're saying is so huge because i think what we're asking for is both things to be done like simultaneously we're asking for the new scripts that are being created to be valued and honored and taken seriously while and it's funny because actually i think if white men spent time with black women it would help their identity so much more like i really mean that like it's funny because to me those those two identities are probably the most polarized in our society and i actually think if those are the two that are able to come together and actually if if white men are able to humble themselves like kendrick says like and sit down and actually allow black women to show them something about the world that they might not be able to see it will help reinform their identity and help them get a new script i think if men just listen to women in general or even even white women uh but let alone even somebody even further away from their lived experience i think would help bridge the gaps that they're looking to bridge but often like you said running to the wrong type of ideological teachers to do that and one of the things i do i do think you've forgotten there was uh the prevalence of the alt-right as an ideology and movement that white men are are running to and what's funny is i've i saw a great point i've seen some recent data that shows that since trump's election if anyone is moving closer to that it is white men white men are not moving in mass towards a more progressive view of the future they are moving towards very regressive views out of any other group of people i think it is the cultural frustration you're talking about but also like you said they're running to demagogues and they're running to white supremacy and neo-nazism and well that's not as bad and at least i had we had dignity when we believed that or you know what about our ancestors here you know i don't know how to heal that or fix that outside of kind of what you just said so using that framework how does how do white men embrace a new script what kind of internal work mike have you done in your life to write a new script and can you offer that to white men i think the first thing is is giving yourself some grace so i didn't i'd never heard the word patriarchy until i was in my 30s i grew up in the southeast unless you're on a university campus which i didn't go to college no one says the word patriarchy i understood white supremacy to be the kkk lynching people and burning crosses i was like well thank goodness white supremacy is over and so at some point if you're a person that lives in community or or is curious or engages other perspectives you will find new information that is shocking and frightening and gives you a sense of grief and lament and guilt that is a process that is necessary and psychological what i've noticed is so often white men will say i'm not going to apologize for being a white men to which i would say no one wants you to apologize for being a white man no one would care if you did apologize for being a white man uh even if you did so with a sincere intent it would probably be read as you seeking emotional attention from everyone else no one wants your apology if people want anything from you it's just your participation in making things better and in order to make things better we have to do the psychological work of coming to grips with the actions we've taken in our life without any intent of harming others so if there was no intent to harm others it means i really shouldn't feel guilty if once i become aware i begin to change the way i live no one can ask anything more from you than once you are aware to begin to change and to try to make things better and as you do so the best thing that happened in my life was identifying helpful authors and voices of advocacy online to whom i listened by listening i mean i just read what they wrote i didn't interact with them i didn't ask them to explain more to me if they provoked questions i went on google i searched for answers i went to their websites i looked for reading lists i didn't ask marginalized people to do my work of understanding for me and that seems arduous and it seems like a lot of work and it is but if patriarchy and white supremacy really are insidious institutions that result in the destruction of the quality of human life and of human life itself well surely reading a few books is a sacrifice that we can all make surely listening patiently without pestering the people doing some of this work is valuable and as i've kind of looked through that i've begun to question the fundamental reaction that men have had engineered into them by society right so that's the other thing you've got to be aware a lot of the choices you're making these reflexive feelings they were designed in some cases intentionally in some cases on accident to be conditioned into you to have you play a particular role in society and if you're a middle income or lower white man your psychology has been engineered to benefit more wealthy white men you're the front lines defending a collection and an aggregation of wealth at the top of the income ladder by white men who care nothing about you i i have a a dear friend who has is very poor and lives in the rural south and was very excited when a wealthy man invited him onto his property to hunt my cousin is an excellent hunter and so he would go onto this land and hunt with the guy he carried all of his guns he taught the man to shoot he did all of this labor of value and he was excited because he didn't have to pay to go hunt on these hunting grounds but about the time this very wealthy man learned to shoot well he stopped inviting my friend onto his property and i think that small story so well captures what's really happening to men in the rural south and in the midwest who support political movements that don't actually benefit them at all if we look into this and we start to question the psychology that's been engineered into us by institutions and by systems there's a few things i believe one i believe that love knows no lack that if we're people motivated by love and by faith i would dare say even by christ then the kind of zero-sum economic arguments that we so often resort to don't represent love because love is patient and kind and generous and also what we traditionally think of as courage i would call like a a hollywood cowboy western masculinity shows no courage whatsoever real courage is being vulnerable real courage is admitting your feelings even when it means they hurt real courage is the capacity to weep for yourself as well as with others [Music] real strength is the power to admit weakness and so i propose and this is a conversation i'd love to hear not only from the people in this room but everyone listening but i propose shifting the script in four simple ways the first is to go from being a powerful protector to being a powerful advocate man your voice is needed in culture we need to be advocates for women or people of color or anyone marginalized in society but an advocate stands up for people without standing over them and an important consideration as we move in our identities is to understand our voice is not the most important in the room anymore and it never should have been two is to move from the the self-conception as a leader or head of household to a partner i think starting in our homes and going into the way that we conduct business we've got to drop winner takes all approaches we've got to drop measuring success as how many people report to you and instead partner with people in creating solutions to life's problems including those in the home and in business i think emotionally instead of being strong silent and self-reliant men should be vulnerable empathetic and communal i think we should all look a lot more like fred rogers and finally we need to move from a members only penis-based conception of masculinity to something more inclusive can we all just understand that if a trans man is also a man it does not make me less of a man can we all understand that if a woman speaks her opinion loudly and boldly that in no way makes me less of a man can we understand that when men express traditionally feminine traits that in no way threatens masculinity if anything threatens masculinity it is hyper masculinity because hyper masculinity sets us at odds with the rest of the world and with each other and hyper masculinity is problematic because when all you have is hyper masculinity everything looks like a target to be destroyed to be defeated to be owned and to be occupied and if there's anything we've learned as men is that it's awfully lonely at the top of a hill made of other people's bodies [Music] [Music] i have the greatest father of all time and he is kind and funny and wise and tender and very very strong to this day if my dad is in the room if he's giving me a hug if he's talking to me on the phone i feel the safest he is the safest space of course the older i've gotten the more i've learned that that's not always the way that masculine energy is used i've seen it used as as strength that is more concerned with taking and conquering than it is with loving and protecting and it's really frustrating because i can see that masculinity can be so beautiful if it wasn't so toxic when i hear or think of the word masculinity my heart doesn't even know where to begin processing i'm found trailing through a spectrum of emotions i feel an immediate wall of defense build up around me i am guarded and untrusting because thinking of masculinity directs me to think of oppression and patriarchy big muscles and aggression often confused with power my defensiveness was followed by sadness sadness because i know my husband is expected to have big muscles and aggression i've been taught by my world that masculinity means he isn't allowed to cry he isn't allowed to earn less money than me he isn't allowed to appear soft or physically weak those things aren't masculine after that sadness i choose to push myself towards hope hope that one day when we might have a son that we can change what this word means to him and for him so that he may cry and cry freely pursue dreams for passion's sake not salary's sake and go to the gym as often or as little as he like the term masculine and masculinity has a lot of baggage for me because when i was younger as a female i would be told a lot stop asking acting masculine stop acting like a man stop acting like a boy act more like a woman and if i was behaving masculine then i would be told stop acting like a lesbian you're acting like a lesbian and as an adult now it is really painful to think about how i felt about my own body and my own behaviors for so long because i was told that you know being masculine was wrong and i had to be this like ladylike type of lady that isn't and wasn't at all me one thing that i have learned from my non-binary friends is that not all masculinity is toxic maybe a year ago if i heard the word masculinity it conjured up negative images for the most part because so much of my exposure to masculinity has been toxic however as i construct my own idea of my own gender i don't need to be afraid of masculinity itself only the type of masculinity that our culture glorifies things like violence and narratives of like domination and conquering and things like that don't have anything to do or don't need to have anything to do with masculinity itself i think there is immense beauty in both the feminine and the masculine and i believe that we all have both within us but masculinity in our culture tells our little boys and men that they are not allowed to fear to express sadness to show affection to their male friends and family members because to be soft to be vulnerable is to be weak i look at these sensitive compassionate little boys and wonder at what age will that be robbed from them i wanted to make a link between what you had said william and and why it might be hard for some people to hear what mike was saying and i think you got to that in its essence but most of us know that privilege is invisible to us if we have it we don't we don't know that we have it if we have it and so first of all there there might be some men who've benefited from masculinity and might not even know it but then we're less likely to challenge the things that have benefited us in some way and so when men do become aware of their privilege it feels threatening at times to imagine sharing that with somebody else if especially if it has been of value to them or they've perceived it to be a value to them and like you were saying mike the narrative of masculinity prevents us from going to the place of vulnerability which allows us to consider other people's perspectives so the thing that prevents men from changing is written into the privilege and is written into the thing that then keeps them isolated and it's this this feedback loop the masculinity feedback loop keeps men alone and keeps men feeling like they have to protect even more and more and more their identity because they're feeling like they're gonna have to give something off that that's been a value to them so i like to think about mary parker phillips narrative of power and how in masculinity as power has been constructed power is the ultimate but power is defined as power over i only have power it fits in a hierarchy and you are at the bottom and so it's threatening to feel like there could be a shift in power where the contrast is we could have power with because it feels like to men that that's giving up power that feels like it's giving up the thing that makes them valuable or makes them secure but power with often shows up in in feminist constructions of power that it it calls out the idea or the myth of the lone genius it calls out the myth that you actually are over somebody else if you have power and that that's real power and it says that we can actually be more powerful when we are together but that might feel threatening if it feels to certain men like it means giving up something that they've benefited from i have thought interchange that could be very helpful so you identify as a feminist correct it seems that there is a lot of vitriol in male culture towards feminism and feminist ideology and black feminism and and i don't know if it's from a fundamental misunderstanding of that or if it's just uh it's almost looking like you're born with it you know like you know you're kind of born thinking gloria steinem is a you know as an enemy to your gender right like or women that have represented that in public culture can you maybe break down what feminism is kind of for men because i think for women and for women yeah too because there are there are lots of women who do participate in the patriarchy too especially coming from the christian background i've seen a lot of the ways women as well christian conservative women tend to rally to that same uh understanding so can you maybe break that down thank you for asking for giving giving me space to to name some of those things i think without trying to polarize the feminist community in my response because there are a few different camps and sometimes there can be some some frustration and disagreement between them i think one of the things that we advocate for as feminists would be the equality of women and men but not within a patriarchal system that's actually also harmful to men so i don't want to be equal in a system that's destructive to all people i don't want to be equal where you know because of the sexual objectification of women we think about okay let's just sexually objectify men and then everybody's equal i think i want to dismantle as a feminist the power structures where and the narratives and the institutions which are harmful and erosive to the value of all people where because of how a person is born how they identify that somehow they are not allowed access to things that have been traditionally identified as existing only in a masculine space and i think that i want that for men too i want men to be allowed to experience the freedom from the rigid and isolating and erosive narratives that actually decrease the fullness of their existence and their humanity under patriarchy so i don't just want equality in a system where people still get hurt i want freedom for people it's important for that to coexist with an intersectional feminism and say i don't just want feminism to benefit white women right when we look at the womanist movement and the feminist movement and how women were saying white women were saying i want a job and the black women were saying i've been working for decades so your feminism is a white feminism if it doesn't acknowledge how racism colonization and sexism all work together to keep certain people under power structures that other people get to benefit from so to the women who are listening to this who might think oh this is an episode on masculinity what what do i have to do here how can i actually take anything away from this i want to talk to the women for a second we can actually endorse toxic masculinity and we can do that by asking men to shut their emotions down because it's not convenient for us and it threatens our narrative of femininity we want someone to rescue us to be taller and stronger than us so that they can carry us into the bedroom when we so we can feel petite and fragile in their arms we want to enjoy our silence and self-silencing to be chosen by a man who wants to enjoy a woman who is less threatening than him and in doing that what we're doing is we're propping up a system that also hurts men and reducing their existence to something that protects our fragile femininity and so we need to be aware of how we perpetuate toxic masculinity narratives that actually harm the men that we love renee brown talks about this so famously in one of her books where she says at the end of one of her talks about vulnerability a man came up to her and said like that that's a great idea but for women because if i'm vulnerable i'm gonna get crucified by the women in my life and so vulnerability is something that women are readily eager to accept for women but it feels scary for us because we've bought into a story of masculinity that we're not safe if we don't have a bigger stronger male there to protect us even emotionally to protect us and so we prop men up and keep them isolated because it's scary for us when they show vulnerability in a way that confronts our depictions of the masculine narrative so what happens is i see men come into therapy primarily because their wives have asked them to because their wives don't like their anger but what we see is that that is the cherry on top of a whole developmental narrative and historical narrative that has gotten them there like i was talking about with gilligan's work we see the shutting down of emotions in boys but because of the power over construct and because of power over and the aggression that comes with that the anger that men experience is often the only socially sanctioned emotion that they can have so anger particularly anger or sometimes sadness about sports games but all of the protective defenses that they've used to keep all of the other emotions out and shoved down start to spew out between the cracks in the form of anger and that threatens relationship because it doesn't feel safe and how is it possible that men can then get close to other people including their partners if the only way that they can emotionally connect is actually through anger at somebody else so i often see men come into therapy and they'll talk about having anger and angry outbursts to their kids and feeling like they don't understand why but when i tell them that actually the important part in changing the most difficult part in changing that cycle is learning to connect with all of the core affect that's been underneath there all along that they've shoved down that's the way that we change and we help change the cycle of anger and the emotional regulation it means confronting a narrative of masculinity that either they have benefited from or that they're terrified to confront because it means sacrificing a sense of identity that although doesn't work for them is something that's known i would like to offer like a little word to maybe those who feel overwhelmed or maybe even hopeless in in the face of some of these ideas because maybe so much of your world has been built upon these traditional scripts you don't even know how to start moving towards a less toxic masculinity without feeling like you're you know maybe you hear these stories and you're you're immediately going to like i can't be like the moroccan guy and hold my friends hands i'm not going to become these just or even a mr rogers character that mike is talking about maybe it's just not something you even you might be revolted by the idea of like trying maybe if you're a hunter and you're like in a sports i you just are that kind of manly man i think there's room in this world for all the stuff that we've been saying all the stuff that mike was saying about and hillary about the changing a subtle changing of dynamic of power it doesn't mean you again that you don't have any power it doesn't mean that you have to become the guy that cuddles with your guy friends on the sofa and watches grey's anatomy rather than the football game ain't nothing wrong with grey's anatomy ain't nothing wrong there's nothing wrong with crazy really okay i've watched a lot more grey's anatomy than i've watched football i think that there's room for generals in the army that are still fro that i think there's room for hunters and for sports people and for big strong men and ladies that are like ooh look at his muscles i i don't know that all of that i mean it's not gonna go away but i think we can re-listen to some of this stuff some of that stuff that mike and hillary and william were saying and see it doesn't have to be a thing that you totally change everything about your personality change everything about your desires and ways of enjoying yourself but we can find ways that our quest for power is more exploitative and change that to be more cooperative we can find ways that our desire for sportsmanship and competition actually end up being oppressive in ways that we live rather than adventurous and cooperative and empowering i just i'm i was trying to identify any flags that might pop up for people that feel like i'm not mr rogers does that mean i'm a bad person and i don't think the world needs to be entirely made of mr rogers i mean yes however if you had to have a planet composed of a single person i would propose mr rogers as a reasonable candidate but that's a joke uh in seriousness i totally agree as long as there's room for a woman who's a general who's like absolutely and there's room for a man who says ooh look at her muscles yes and there's room for women who play basketball and men who weave baskets and women who chew tobacco and wear camo and go deer hunting and men who like to make cocktails you know that's what i like i mean ideally wouldn't it be great if someday the the phrase be a man was as silly as saying like be a green eyed person like what do you mean be a be a green eyed person what is that what is the story that you're assuming with that yeah i remember growing up in the church and everybody had a copy of uh wild at heart john eldridge and the companion book captivating about women being beautiful by his wife and i remember taking that in at one point and thinking that that was really helpful because it gave me a way to expect something from men to know what to expect and then if i didn't get that to have something to point them to to challenge that and over time starting to dismantle that as i particularly just started taking classes in in developmental psychology and looking at what was actually harmful for men and for women and what kind of relationships were most healthy and people who had androgynous identities or identified androgynously in terms of gender performance had healthier more satisfying long-lasting relationships and androgyny not being the absence of masculinity and femininity but actually the presence of both and that's from sandra bem's work for anyone who's interested in looking up research about androgyny but the idea is that when we present as having both masculine and feminine characteristics both men and women that we're actually healthier for it there's nothing wrong with having feminine characteristics as a woman or as a man especially if you balance those out with also having masculine characteristics but i remember challenging some of those those things that i heard in john eldredge's work about this prototypical masculine warrior type of man particularly in the church and how that was the most godly form of masculinity and started to have conversations with the man who would eventually become my husband as we talked about masculinity and started to deconstruct this this term be a man and i remember thinking we had this conversation one time it was so pivotal what we were saying what is there anything that you would say that be a man means that you wouldn't also want for a woman and if there are things that you wouldn't want for a woman is that because they're they're not good for a man either or because it's not okay for women to do those things so starting to to pull apart what that phrase means and i remember us having a conversation where we made sort of a pact with each other we said that maybe the appropriate response would be you can do a better job of being human in this moment or let's let's be more adult but again if you're using those phrases not to shame someone out of emotion not to shame someone out of their experience but to say you know you're staying in a place that's harmful for you emotionally and so why don't you come towards me and i'll comfort you and then we'll move towards emotional health as humans again that doesn't roll off the tongue in the same way but i put together better but it's better i put together some some ideas about what to do because i think you're right michael we have to have we have to have some practical takeaways for people who feel like but i i don't want to just swing to the other end of the spectrum because that also doesn't reflect my humanness and my my sense of identity and so to the men who are listening and to the women who are listening i think these apply to all of you because it's about being healthy as a human and i want to say as a feminist i think it's important to say this i love men i love them i have so many men in my life who are incredibly inspiring and transformative in fact in fact i feel like i can love men because i have so many men in my life who are good and loving and kind and powerful in ways that are inspiring to me and so men are not threatening to me men are not dangerous to me but masculinity has been something that has been hurtful to me and other women that i know and love so here are some of my recommendations as a therapist who works with men as a researcher who looks at gender narratives and how they help and hurt relationships and people emotional closeness and vulnerability is an asset to your life practicing closeness with people particularly with men sharing your feelings talking about things that are painful and scary for you can actually be a richer way to exist it helps you feel close to people it helps you feel less alone try practicing power with not power over and so this looks like equality perhaps example of that would be when you're going to speak try asking a question or try thinking about the endeavors that are already existing that are meaningful and building those people in your life up instead of starting your own initiative thinking about how you can partner with people and when you do something successful remember to challenge the narrative of the lone genius to remember all of the people who supported you to get there not that it isn't yours to take pride in but to remember that as people it's very rare for us to do things completely alone especially things that are meaningful and transformative try to move towards your fears not shoving them down so when you have a sense of becoming aware of something that's scary for you perhaps invite that fear out for a beer go think about spending some time with that fear and asking yourself where does that come from how is it helping you how is it hurting you and try going to therapy maybe even to ask someone to help you sift through some of the things that you heard on this podcast you might even try to go to therapy if you feel angry about this podcast you might try to go to therapy if you felt like it brought up sadness for you it sometimes can be easier to start going to therapy with a woman because men are often socialized to connect emotionally with other women more than they are with other men so if it feels scary try going with a woman and if you feel open for it try going to therapy with a man another idea is to join a men's group something where instead of doing just foot fantasy football you're talking about feelings you're practicing sensitivity you're going around and supporting organizations and people and women try doing a fundraiser for a rape relief shelter with some of your men friends and find other ways to bind and bond with people besides putting each other down or covering up your pain with humor if you see someone you know is hurting instead of phrasing an awkwardness and changing the subject try asking them to tell you about it or saying to them i know it might be hard to talk about it but if you ever want to i'll listen and we can push through the awkwardness together try taking phrases out of your vocabulary like being a man or stop crying like a girl by thinking about what a healthy alternative would be try challenging something that terry coopers calls pathological arrhythmicity the way that women have actually gotten comfortable to the idea of cycles in the earth cycles and emotions cycles and relationship and the idea that we can have a rhythm the earth has a rhythm and that we can learn to be in tune with that and benefit from that there are some books that i might recommend reading the work of robert jensen things like getting off a book where he talks about pornography and its relationship to masculinity terry cooper's work revisioning men's lives and carol gilligan's work particularly around the ethics of justice and ethics of care as well as the birth of pleasure there's work by jackson katz and michael kimmel that talks about masculinity and the toxicity of it there's even a great documentary called the mask you live in if that's a good place for you to start [Music] i'm sitting here chatting with brendan kyokovsky a phd student at university of edinburgh he's a canadian teacher and has done research about emotional issues relating to boys in education you can follow him on instagram at reemasculate so why this topic so the short answer is that when i was doing my research i found that 81 of students diagnosed with emotional behavioral disorders were male and i wanted to figure out why why are they at such a high risk of suicide of failing classes being expelled being arrested and the most convincing research i found had to do with society's scripting around masculinity okay is that that's the short answer that's the show what's the long answer the long answer is that from a young age early elementary school i always had this sense that there was a part of me an emotional part of me that i couldn't fully express particularly among my male friends the females around me i felt like that part of themselves could be emotionally expressed and i i think incorrectly assumed but it felt like other males my age did not have that longing for an emotional connection in the same way that i did and so even though i could fit in throughout the majority of my life this research has caused me to reflect and realize that there was a lot of alone feelings feeling like i had to restrict a part of myself yeah so how did you get into starting the research tell me tell me about that process what your research question was i was going to see if that if i could do a year-long program with a bunch of grade 11 boys the typical problematic behavioral issue boys if i could somehow if i could increase their emotional intelligence and increase decrease their maladaptive behaviors okay and the majority of them i had built a relationship with fortunately playing intramural sports with them ahead of time so that helped initially for the buy-in yeah and is sports within this restrictive masculine framework is that an important way of forming connections it's definitely one of the traditional tenets of masculinity that allowed these boys to be blunt allowed them to respect me more because they saw that i could physically perform in a way that they could respect on this on the court huh so it was easy to transfer that into a session yeah which i feel the tension in because it's like you're trying to actually re-author what masculinity means but the reason that you were able to do that is because there was buy-in through these traditional masculine scripts that is the awkward balance and some of the research shows that in order to be emotionally expressive and connected to your emotions often one of the factors is that there is some other masculine tenant that you do adhere to more closely so you're more able to be emotionally expressive if you're also a jock there's almost that freedom to do something if you adhere to one tenant of traditional masculinity wow okay so then you engaged in this year-long program and what kind of stuff happened over that year so the first psycho-educational so there's a number like conflict resolutions we brought in counselors and almost had more group counseling sessions of going through emotions trying to share our emotions get connected to what our emotions and we went through a documentary called the mask you live in which was profound in fact it shows one story is that the first time we watched it these boys gave it a standing ovation at the end of the first half an hour which i've never seen students do anything of the story let alone these boys who are generally not engaged in school wow so that really impacted them then yeah that the fact of watching stories and hearing how gender had been such a constricting experience for these men in these documentaries was so true to their experience wow then the second semester after learning all of this they were mentors for grade seven boys at a local elementary school who also had behavioral problems whoa okay and what was the purpose of that i brought on my teacher partner who's also a counselor can we lead through our emotional vulnerability and mentor these boys and can they in turn take that and mentor younger boys wow and we're those grade seven boys also kids with behavioral emotional challenges yes all the great 11 one boys in my study were diagnosed okay but the boys in grade seven weren't necessarily all diagnosed wow and what kind of changes did you see take place in them over the course of the program i did a mixed method study so i was really keen on the quantitative measurements and the only quantitative change that did occur is that their levels of restrictive emotionality did improve statistically significantly although it was a small sample size wow so it meant that the boys were able to identify and understand their own emotions better by the end of the intervention wow did you get any qualitative data about what that actually means for their lives and how they experienced that yeah quite a bit the most basic understandings was one boy realizing he had emotions wow like it's so powerfully simple and i almost didn't believe it but his reflections his ex interviews i guess i realized i had emotions another boy realized that another participant had emotions because they're all presenting this toughness exterior that they end up fooling each other that that is all that everyone else has as well and so one boy reflecting i didn't realize he had feelings and he cares and thinks about things as much as i do and so understanding their own emotions because generally i would say that their emotions encompassed three types they had anger they knew what happiness was and they knew what meh okay i feel nothing was and that was their amount of emotional diversity i think what was the clearest learning for my research is how basic their understanding of emotions were and if we look at emotional intelligence as something that needs to be practiced and implemented throughout your life in order to develop it more fully their levels although they're 16 years old was at a very immature young level the reason why they have all these defenses is because they didn't know what it was like to share and to how they respond to another man who was being vulnerable wow how can you hold a sacred space for someone sharing something emotionally deep if you aren't connected to your own emotions understand how significant that is their inability to connect with themselves created an inability to connect with other people yes okay exactly and i think that the research on emotional intelligence is knowing and understanding your own emotions and knowing and understanding the emotions of others which is why it programs to help increase people's emotional intelligence like roots of empathy looking at a baby understanding what are their needs yeah they're not at that stage of being able to see other other people's needs so speaking more broadly than just the boys who are in your study but what are some of the things that get in the way of this connection to emotion for men and for boys i think foremost is the lack of positive examples of older from older males and if you look at the three most restrictive masculinity messages in our society that men must be emotionally stoic particularly fear and sadness they must be autonomous and they must be tough those things all impact their abilities to form a relationship with yourself and with others so it's a disconnect it's a stunting that impacts the fullness of your relationships yeah did you feel that any of that got loosened up for you in the process of doing this research in my own emotions yeah oh totally yeah what i i had said that i really cared about the quantitative data but by the end it was their stories and realizing that these are boys that often are marginalized and are overlooked and dismissed and viewed as the black sheep and they just shine at the chance to share and we couldn't stop them from talking by the end of the semester they just wanted to keep on exploring they weren't great at listening to other people but they had a chance to actually communicate and hopefully be seen and heard and i hope they felt that from me but the relationships i formed are still ongoing one boy said that it literally saved his life i found out later that he tried to commit suicide during that semester year and that this boys group was one of the most foundational things feeling a sense of belonging was one of his the greatest lights in his year i stole a relationship with him one of the boys said one of my favorite quotes is he said we just sat around and talked and guys don't do that anymore in this time period and it was like weird but good weird that sounds like such a teenager quote too i know what do you think he was trying to say i think he was trying to say that he's not practiced in the art of emotional vulnerability that it felt uncomfortable because it's so new and it's vulnerable but that there's an aspect that he really appreciated yeah we just have emotions we just have them they're part of our neurobiological development and yet there's this story that's placed on top that dampens them down makes us tuck them away particularly men and it's just harmful just not good and i also teach a psychology class or 12 psychology class and i show the mask you live in which is the boy experience and my class was 27 females two males which is a sad story in and of itself but at the end of it a lot of the females were crying and saying i need to show my boyfriend i need to show my dad or holy crap i have done this to my younger brother i have i have assumed things and promoted a sense of masculinity that is damaging i did not see that now okay on that train of thought what do we need to know as women to protect the emotional lives of boys and men a couple things i would tell females and of course this is generic but one of the things is to make sure that you don't give a dual message to the men in your life that you need to be tough you need to take control and be in charge but then when you're in relationship like maybe a romantic relationship or just even a friendship then you want them to be emotionally sensitive and so if you expect them to not be in 90 of their interactions and then expect them to all of a sudden know what it's like to be emotionally attuned to someone else that's not a realistic expectation to have to recognize the necessity for a wide variety of emotions and from the girls in my class i actually asked them this question and their responses were what can women do well we can stop holding up men who achieve success and are rich and are athletes as better human beings as a set as such so not like any of those things in and of themselves are necessarily bad to be successful or to be athletic but to expect and put pressure on guys to be these things yeah as if there's only one way to be an ideal male yeah wow so from the mouth of one of the participants in my study here was his final reflections on everything that he had learned [Music] for a man to show his feelings i feel it's kind of like for people it's seeing an extinct animal come back to life or something it's weird to see when a man cries when a full-grown man cries it's hard to watch and it's sad because you hardly see it i feel like if people opened up more i feel like this problem with hiding your emotions and people feeling trapped and suicidal and having depression and having all these things that come from hiding their emotions if they let out their emotions and explain how they felt to people and showed people how they felt more than just hiding it under a hat or putting your hood on or something it can change your day it can change your week it can change how you feel for the rest of your life if you don't express those feelings how do you describe how toxic masculinity and patriarchy have impacted your life when it feels like you haven't had a moment in your life where they haven't i can think about how much work i've done in my own life to try and get my voice back after i started to self-silence and i think about how painful and frustrating it is to speak publicly as an expert on something somebody who's educated and because i mentioned the word patriarchy they write off every single thing that i say [Music] to constantly be silenced to feel like i have to walk down the street with my keys in my hand because i don't know if the man who's walking towards me is going to try and sexually assault me to feel like it's easier to play small to play dumb because i don't really feel like having a conflict with somebody in my family about something that i'm actually an expert in to feel like it's scary to know that most of the women that i know have been sexually assaulted and feel like they're at fault for it to be afraid to one day have a daughter because i know just because she's born a daughter that she's more likely to experience victimization sexual objectification to dehumanization it feels like constantly living with fear and it's frustrating to constantly have to explain to other people what that fear is like and then to be told that it doesn't matter or that i'm making it up or that they're actually feeling threatened because of it that they don't want to have to walk on the other side of the street they don't want to have to see a woman cross the street because they've never raped anybody [Music] so we've talked a lot about the script that we've all been given as men and how that makes it hard for us to relate to each other how it makes us hard to find an equal place in society to partner with other people well in creating civilization and we were thinking about like how to take this from a podcast into something more applicable and practical and useful and more socially connected and so we're gonna do i guess kind of an experiment that we're pretty excited about and these words are going to come out of my mouth and i don't believe them as i say them but we're going to do a liturgist men's retreat and i hold on now i hear i literally hear all the trigger and all the trauma coming up through our audience and you're thinking about like sunrise pancake breakfasts and you're thinking about softball leagues killing animals killing animals and and fundamentalism and that's not what we're talking about we're talking about a truly and radically inclusive and welcoming space for men and that would include all orientations sexual orientations men could have that would include all gender identities trans men would be welcome at this event what we're talking about is a space for us to reclaim manliness and masculinity in a way that allows us to really connect with other people that allows us to not be oppressors or or people who exploit others to be open to ourselves and to others with our feelings and our needs and to connect genuinely and deeply with other people just becoming more human basically and doing it in a space with men it's such a rarity as we've been talking about on this podcast for men to have that sort of space of vulnerability and emotional connection embodiment and like mike said i mean we've never never done anything like this a men's retreat in the past that sounds like something i would run away from but hopefully by now if you've been listening to delirious for a while you can trust us that we're not going to make it that we want it to be small we want it to be intimate we're going to keep it to 30 tickets for an event so you're going to want to move quite quickly on this it's going to be in the los angeles area october 12th through 14th and uh again get it quick because we've already had people express interest in this sort of thing in the past and this podcast just happened to bring up a need in a way that we wanted to do this sooner than later and then a small enough group for some real work to be done so you can head over to the liturgist.com slash events and learn more and grab your ticket there and there'll be a waiting list if you don't get there quickly enough we want to do some more of them so jump on that waiting list if the tickets are gone by the time you get there so i'm sure this episode has stirred up many a thought and feeling among you so you can engage with other listeners and us by going to the liturgist.com podcast and looking for the man episode or you can go to at the liturgist on twitter or instagram or facebook.com the liturgists we'd like to thank the patrons for their support of the show and for making what we do possible as liturgists if you're interested in becoming a patron if you enjoyed the music in today's episode this was all actually from the upcoming on earth album so myself and tyler chester uh started this band called on earth it was actually for the liturgist podcast music we just make music that's instrumental and that's what all this music is today is on earth music and it's coming out august 3rd and streaming in stores everywhere so online so you can check that out thanks to greg nordin for some editing the hosts have been william matthews hilary mcbride science mike myself michael gunger thanks for listening everybody [Music] you