(gentle music) - We hear it everywhere.

Boys are hurting, men are in crisis.

Today on Common Ground, how to help boys and men?

Our first guest, we welcome Christine Emba.

You are a gender studies expert, and you wrote a piece that really jump started the national conversation, which was, "Men are lost.

Here's a map out of the wilderness."

Now it sounds to me like we're talking about a giant identity crisis.

Is it that simple?

- I mean, that is exactly what we're talking about.

First of all, thank you so much for having me to have this conversation.

It is a really important one.

I wrote that piece because I was seeing in my peers and men around me that, yes, men seemed lost.

They seemed unsure of how to be in the modern world, what it meant to be a man.

And that loss of identity was happening, and it's still happening I think, because of how quickly society has changed over the past several decades.

Women are luckily very happy about this moving forward, moving to the forefront in careers, in education, and earning.

And many men feel like suddenly their place in society is less certain.

- There are a lot of triggers that have brought this to the fore.

Which do you think are the most consequential?

- In terms of the most material triggers, I think it has been a change in our labor markets, in the types of work that are most common in the United States, the things that we produce and no longer produce.

You know, for a long time in the 20th century, there was sort of a mid-class strata of manufacturing jobs, jobs that relied in some ways on physical strength and presence.

And those were jobs which were often filled by men.

- Right.

- That helped give men stable identities in their communities as earners, as providers, gave them enough money that they could sustain and earn a family.

But as our society has kind of shifted away from that sort of manufacturing into very much sort of social and soft skills-based jobs, first, men have lost their place in some of that work, and they've also seen women come up from, you know, behind after the feminist movement in women's rights era to take major jobs, to outpace them in earning college degrees and post-college, post-graduate degrees, to earn more money than them.

And suddenly some of these men I think are feeling like they have been replaced.

- You wrote that piece a couple years ago.

And in the interim, this has exploded.

This whole issue has exploded.

Now what's the differential?

- I think one of the things that people, that sort of woke people up to this conversation too was the 2024 election, where Donald Trump really spent a lot of time sort of chasing and capturing the votes of young men in America.

There was kind of a major shift in voting patterns where young men were suddenly beginning to lean conservative, while younger women were leaning very strongly in the opposite direction, voting for Democrats.

And I think part of the reason why this happened is that, you know, these simmering concerns that young men were feeling in society, about being sort of lost and forgotten, not knowing who to look to, were catered to very strongly by the Republican Party and by Donald Trump.

He spent a lot of time also in what's known as the manosphere, going on sort of male-focused podcasts, being in sort of male, young men centric spaces and talking directly to young male voters.

And that helped result in his win.

- Right.

At this point, we are honored to bring in the man who's widely considered to be the founding father, grandfather, the founding father of the healthy masculinity movement, psychologist Dr.

Ronald Levant.

And I want to start by asking you how much of what we're seeing has to do with the fact men are trying to conform to role models like Beaver Cleaver, John Wayne, how much of that is the problem?

- Jane, I think you put your finger on it.

And hello, Christine, it's good to be on a show with you.

No, I think we have to kind of take the long view and go back to the era of John Wayne to the 1950s.

And I'm old enough to remember that.

And, you know, in the 1950s, women had fewer rights than they do today.

A woman could not get a credit card.

Very few women were in the workforce.

Mothers of small children, their percentage participation in the labor market was in the single digits by 1955.

By 1985, over 50% of mothers of small children were in the workforce.

Just an amazing change in 30 years.

And the next thing that happened was the divorce revolution.

So you think about it, women gain financial independence and then they start leaving bad marriages in droves.

And during this long period, many, you know, mothers and aunts were having conversations with daughters and nieces about the changes underway and how to navigate the world in a world of changing gender relations.

Meanwhile, boys were still being told to double down on the John Wayne masculinity, and that's all you need to know.

And that went on for decades.

So we need to kind of get to a point where boys can be treated as who they are rather than as a role.

The lack of that leaves men without essential skills to advance to higher stages of labor market participation, particularly, you know, the emotional skills of empathy and compassion and emotional self-awareness, emotional intelligence, things of that nature.

- You at one point were head of the American Psychological Association, which back in 2018, identified a lot of this real men stuff as harmful to men's health, wellbeing, mental health.

Talk about specifically what that means.

- Well, I think you're referring, Jane, to the American Psychological Association's Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men.

The APA consists about 150,000 psychologists, and the two largest groups are scientists and practitioners.

And the scientists do research on different kinds of treatment modalities and so forth, and then they tend to write guidelines.

And so guidelines had been written for girls and women, Psychological Practice with Girls and Women, for older adults, LGBTQI folks and so on, but they hadn't been written for men.

So when I was president in 2005, I set up a task force to do this.

And to give you an idea of how slow things move in APA, it took from 2005 to 2018, - Right.

- to get these guidelines approved.

The multiple layers of review.

And you're right, they tagged a lot of boys and men's problems on conformity to outmoded traditional masculine norms that basically left men without valuable skills that enable them to participate in a 21st century marketplace.

- But talk about, I mean, men in terms of toughing it out and what that does to mental health, what it does to physical health?

- Men have poorer health than women.

Men have more diseases in every category of disease.

And while a small part of that can be traced to biological factors, specifically female hormones, estrogen and progesterone confer a protective factor, the vast majority of the health problems in men have to do with men's poor health habits, which really are rooted in traditional masculine norms.

Just to give you a few examples, men wear seat belts less often than women when driving.

They use more tobacco products.

They use more alcohol.

They use more illicit drugs.

They visit their physicians less often.

They don't take medications that are prescribed.

They have poorer diets and they don't exercise.

And that's just the start.

So, you know, men's poor health really kind of, you know, again, comes back to this adherence to outmoded masculine norms.

You know, it's really a shame to see that even today, that boys are made to feel ashamed of themselves for such things as crying.

We all have tear ducts and crying relieves sadness because it releases endorphins and oxytocin.

It makes you feel better.

And if that doesn't convince you, do you know what the shortest sentence of the Bible is?

- No.

- Jesus wept.

- Christine knew.

- So, I- Huh?

- Christine knew.

- Yeah.

I mean, so why are we forbidding boys from crying?

You know, that's just one example of things that we force boys to go against their very human natures.

- Right.

You've been very open about your personal history.

You grew up, had a tough childhood, your father was physically abusive, mentally abusive, you were bullied because you were Jewish.

Yet you went on to have this mission to help other people.

Where did that come from?

- Well, in psychology, we say all research is me search, which means we psychologists often select our subjects from our personal lives.

And, you know, I got involved in this.

I became a psychologist, I was licensed in 1975, so quite a while ago.

And I started working on fathering.

That's really where it started for me.

And the me search part was at that time I was a divorced semi-custodial father.

My daughter would live with me for the entire summer because her mother wanted to travel.

And then I would visit her on the weekends in New York.

I was living in Boston.

And things didn't go well.

I mean, you know, I really, not having a great role model, I was a pretty, you know, I'd give myself maybe a D plus as a father.

And based on that, I started something called the Boston University Fatherhood Project, which was designed to essentially provide fathers with parent education, you know, in terms of, you know, learning how to listen to children, how to communicate with children, how to set limits appropriately, and how to deal with sibling rivalry, all these kinds of things.

And in the context of that, I discovered some real limitations in some of the men I was working with.

But that led me deep into the psychology of men, - Right.

- some of the problems.

- Right.

We always like to know where this comes from, me search.

At this point, we want to welcome two more guests, including Gary Barker.

Your organization, the global organization Equimundo, does work around the world on masculinity and violence, studying those issues.

And Kristin Du Mez, you're a gender studies professor, you also wrote the bestselling book, "Jesus and John Wayne."

Give the full title, Kristin.

What's the full title?

- "Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation."

- Thank you.

Okay, Gary, I am going to go back to you because you did a really interesting poll pre-COVID with 13 to 19-year-old boys, young men.

What happened?

- What did we see?

You know, I think we started to see the beginning of this storm that Kristin and Ron had been writing about, which is this uncertainty.

One was the wave of me too, young men feeling very called out and not necessarily feeling called into something new.

We're now finding kind of 2/3 of young men think their reputation can be destroyed with a single comment.

I just interviewed some young men in Kansas who had attempted suicide because of feeling their reputation had be been destroyed because of what felt like probably not true allegations of sexual misconduct.

You know, so I think we have to think about what that means.

It's a necessary change that young men and adult men are worried about being called out.

But I think we've not said, what is it that we want to call young men into?

The other thing we've seen is, you know, this kind of perfect storm of the manosphere.

There's now a whole industry, not only, you know, the political side of it, but there's folks making a lot of money on the algorithms that kind of give young men a sense of self.

We will fill in where you feel uncertain.

We've heard, you know, we saw some of the economic uncertainty issues as well.

80 to 90% of young men say that my main identity is to be a future provider.

And if we offer you an economy that says you don't have that, we've not really filled in with what comes.

Right after that, so we did that first study at COVID, right after that, we had the biggest wave of young men going online than we've ever seen.

Half of young men now tell us that their online lives are more interesting than their offline lives.

And in fact, that even that distinction of online and offline no longer makes sense.

So one thing we're very concerned about is what kind of socialization, what kind of identity, what kind of social spaces are you making for yourself online?

And how do we bring you off?

So that we can build, you know, meaningful relationships, help you connect with others, and really find your better self than you may be finding online.

- But if you ask a, a 10-year-old, a 13-year-old, what does a good man look like?

What do the younger kids think a good man looks like?

- Yeah, I mean, if, you know, if we put the good man label there, you know, if you ask it what's a good man or what does a man or what do you want to be, most of the time if we put the word good there, the word cloud will fill up with all kinds of positive stuff.

Young men are not, you know, going out there.

They're not clicking online to say, tell me how to be a better misogynist?

Or how to, you know.

You know, Andrew Tate finds them, it's not usually their finding Andrew Tate, if you want to use that.

- Explain who Andrew Tate is - Yeah.

- for the person- - He is, you know, he's come up as sort of one of the most followed voices.

He's a former kickboxer.

He's made a living out of kind of promoting misogyny, but the main thing he draws young men into is his Hustlers University where he says, you can be like me and you can make a very healthy living by producing stuff online.

So it's, you know, it's basically a big Ponzi scheme that feeds into young men's sense of uncertainty.

But I think, you know what, I think what we step into, and Ron is certainly saying this and Christine as well, that it's distorting young men's humanity.

It's not that they're looking for those kinds of voices.

They are being drawn into them in this moment of confusion and loneliness and really an uncertainty of what is the framing we've offered.

So much of what we hear from boys is, you won't let me be the good man.

You are calling me out at every turn.

So I think we've got to figure out what is the positive space that we call men into to be their better caring selves which are already there.

- We're going to figure that out by the end of the broadcast and Kristin is going to help us, because you have been tracking militant masculinity.

And you really feel this has been a big influence on how our families are shaped, how the country's been shaped, how men are being shaped.

Explain.

- Yeah, so I'm a religious historian, and also with a focus on gender and sexuality.

And I teach at a Christian university in Michigan.

And it was more than 15 years ago actually that my own students brought to my attention this immensely popular Christian book on what it is to be a man called "Wild at Heart."

This was in the early 2000s.

It sold more than four million copies.

Every guy I knew in churches and small groups and dorms was reading this book.

And it offered a very militant conception of Christian manhood.

God is a warrior God, men are made in his image, every man has a battle to fight.

And they told me I really needed to read the book.

And I took their advice, I went down to the Christian Book store, bought a copy, and I saw immediately what they were talking about.

And I also saw, what struck me is that for a Christian book, for a book on how to be a Christian man, there actually weren't very many Bible verses in the book.

Instead they looked to kind of secular and mythical warriors and cowboys and soldiers, and figures like Mel Gibson's William Wallace from the movie "Braveheart," and John Wayne.

And this just became mainstreamed inside many white Christian spaces and particularly conservative Christian spaces.

And over time shaped conceptions of not only what it was to be a man which was aggressive, militant, sometimes even ruthless, committing acts of violence to protect what was righteous and good in their eyes, but it also ultimately reshaped their understanding of Christianity itself as a very militant faith.

- Let's talk about the values represented by those characteristics, because those are really key to what we're talking about.

Go ahead.

- Exactly, so kind of fundamental to this ideology was a very rigid concept of gender difference.

Men and women are completely different.

And therefore, there's also this kind of separation of virtue.

And if you look at the Christian scriptures, you can find lists of virtues, the fruit of the spirit, things like love, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control, all of these historically Christian virtues get put into the feminine camp.

And so what does that leave for men?

Courage and kind of aggression and audacity and being unrestrained.

And what happens then is you really separate out these virtues.

And when you do that, it's very easy for virtues to become vices.

- You have actually challenged, there's been sort of this whole narrative that's evolved out of this with people like Senator Josh Hawley from Missouri, that progressive people, the left, whoever, are damaging this real manhood kind of concept.

What do you say to that?

- Yes, you know, as a historian, the first thing I would bring to the table is complexity.

And that doesn't play well - Right.

- in social media space.

And it also doesn't work very well, if you're trying to really rile up supporters, right?

We live in a very polarized moment, and complexity isn't a way to really, you know, increase your followers.

But as a historian, it's very clear that there have always been multiple conceptions of masculinity.

What does it mean to be a man?

This changes dramatically over time and place.

It changes according to social class, right?

And this is something in any given moment that complexity tends to be erased.

And so what you'll have is proponents of a kind of today a reactionary vision of masculinity that's presented not as one option but as the only option.

So any critics that come along and want to, you know, take apart maybe some of the more harmful elements or replace it with something more positive, very quickly these folks can be dismissed as they hate men.

They're enemies of masculinity.

You know, they're woke.

And you know, all of these things.

And so, it's a difficult time right now I think to offer the positive visions of masculinity when a lot of people make a lot of money and amass a whole lot of power, selling something much more simplistic, but something that ultimately is performative and not real.

Something that works really well on a podcast or, you know, with a streamer, doesn't work very well if you are actually situated in society.

- Right.

- If you have a spouse, if you, you know, want to have a girlfriend, it doesn't necessarily play well in real life.

- Okay.

But keeping in mind the word complexity, in defense of those who say that real men are in trouble, they're looking at the marriage rate dropping, the dating rate, men are lonelier, they're having fewer children, they're living at home, they think their internet life is better than their real life.

So, you know, maybe they think that's the problem, complexity.

- Yes.

I think that, you know, and I think all of us here today can probably agree on the problems.

And even to a large degree, in diagnosing some of these problems.

It's when we start getting to solutions I think that ways tend to part.

So it's the solution to some of these problems, which as we've already seen are multifaceted.

There are material conditions here.

There have been dramatic changes in the labor market.

We're also looking at an increasingly diverse society, racially, ethnically diverse society.

How does that factor in?

Which men are really losing ground here?

And is there a one size fits all or do we have to look at different strategies?

And then we also have the social media landscape.

Like there is a lot that is in flux right now.

- Right.

And from Gary, I do want to ask, 'cause you do have the global perspective on this.

What is the vision?

Is it real manhood?

Do you have to achieve that?

What's the standard?

'Cause you work with the UN, you work with countries, you work with governments, what's the standard?

- Yeah, I mean, one, there is no one size fits all.

But I think it is entering with a, you know, where do we see some positive change?

That's where we're hanging on, right?

Where do we see men changing?

Men's friendships, young men's friendships mean a huge amount to them.

How do we build on those?

Those men who have children or are at home, we're seeing that men are doing more hands-on care work, they're finding more identity in being caregivers.

And that seems to go across, you know, political lines in the US and some other places.

How do we build on that?

How do we start that earlier?

We will sometimes give the expression of we need men to work more on their care muscles to basically, you know, practice and use the empathy that we already know how to do.

Online lives are happening everywhere for young men, but I think we also have to step into that place called the manosphere and say about 70% of the stuff we see happening in English online for young men, which travels around the world, is actually either positive or kind of innocuous.

So there's a lot to do about those online spaces.

Let's build on the positive voices that are there.

The other is I think we got to step into where young men are.

We're working with a couple of game producers to build some video games into existing platforms where guys have to win by playing together.

They've got to do something together, show their concern for a fellow player.

So I think, you know, there's got to be a little bit of, if we're going to bring some guys offline, we've got to step into the spaces where they're already hanging out.

And then onto the health point that we've brought before, you know, health sectors in more countries, has been slower in this country.

But we helped Brazil create a men's health program that tries to look across primary healthcare services to promote mental health, primary healthcare services for men, break down that barrier of men seeking services.

And mental health, I think we've got to talk a lot more about.

Ron talked about that before, but one of the huge barriers is breaking down, and this is global, breaking down the resistance of young men believing they need help.

And I think there's, you know, there's models for celebrities, sports guys, online figures, actors and others that guys look up to say, show their vulnerability, show them seeking help, show them seeking professional help or show them going to their friends when they're not doing well.

And then I'd add to that the stories.

We've got to tell better stories to boys.

You know, with the stories that boys grow up with.

They need to be able to see stories that show full hearted humans, not just, you know, tough guys who can break down everything out there.

This starts with young boys and I think a lot of the conversations have to start there.

- So Christine, I want to ask you about women's reaction to what this upheaval, this sort of Sturm und Drang that they're seeing.

What kind of reaction are you seeing?

- Well, you know, it's interesting.

There are, first of all, I think a lot of women who have begun to notice and are talking about how something seems to be off with the men around them.

But then when you have figures who come to the board talking about, you know, there's an issue with men, like men need our help, often the sort of first reaction by women is like, what, men need help?

Men have been on top forever.

Is it our fault that men can no longer keep up?

And that I think is an understandable reaction.

You know, women have fought hard, the feminist movement has done a lot of work to bring attention to women and women's issues and promote the idea of women's equality.

And I think there's some fear that by turning the focus to helping men, that women will be left to fall behind again.

That said, however, it doesn't have to be a zero-sum game in that way.

Helping men doesn't necessarily mean helping women less.

In fact, because men and women are, you know, together in our society, are so intertwined, helping men be better helps the women around them, women who care about them.

- Yeah, and you can't blame women for the hard-won gains.

I mean, do people make the correlation that women are rising while men seem to be falling?

- Well, they absolutely do.

And so this is, you know, where we talk about how the right wing, as Kristin and others have said, has kind of weaponized this distinction and wants to or attempts to shore up the past definition of masculinity by denigrating femininity or denigrating femaleness by suggesting to men that the reason why men are falling behind or the reason why you feel so lost is because women have taken your job.

So women are taking your place in the home.

You know, single, childless cat ladies, as our our vice president, you know, claimed were ruining society.

But, you know, that's not necessarily the case.

I mean, I think society has just developed and the role that men play needs to, you know, developed and catch up, and men have to be responsible for that.

- Kristin, among the students, 'cause you're dealing clearly with the younger demographic, what kinds of reactions are you seeing?

- Yeah, you know, when I have asked students in the past about, you know, where do your ideas of masculinity come from?

What's striking is the vast majority of students will name their father still, right?

They look at the people closest to them.

And frankly, you know, their own fathers may not come up, you know, looking as masculine or as macho as some of these kind of performative heroes that they're being fed through streaming.

And so it, I think it's, we're very much in a time of luck.

And I think that the younger generation really is navigating uncharted territory.

- You know, one of the things that I have noticed in talking to young people and interviewing men for the essay I wrote in for other pieces is that there's a lack of role models.

When you ask young men, you know, what does a good man look like?

Who is an ideal masculine figure?

Often they are not really sure who to point to.

- Yeah.

- And many men and young men especially have told me, you know, part of the reason why they feel sort of confused about what a good man looks like or what good masculinity is because they don't have those physical role models in their lives.

They're distanced from their fathers or fathers aren't in the home.

They don't have, you know, older male teachers or mentors who they can look up to to see, you know, sort of a real man in action and what that would look like in the real world.

So they default to what seems available to them, which is these, you know, overblown figures online.

- We've asked that as well.

That, you know, middle-class white guys would often name Marvel characters, so not real life humans, who don't really show many three dimensions.

A lot of African American young men we talk to will name sports figures, rappers, who they kind of feel like have gotten out.

And interestingly, other immigrant groups we talked to name somebody in their family, somebody real who they saw.

- Right.

- You know, not somebody close to them who kind of made it through.

But I think we have to ask that question more and help young men find role models that feel real and attainable and that are around them, right?

That there's a relationship with them and they're helping you through.

They're not just in some distant space on a screen doing things that no human can do that doesn't seem particularly useful.

- All right, Dr.

Levant, finally we're going to get to things that are holding men back.

And one of them starts early on.

Talk about alexithymia.

- Well, it's composed of a series of Greco Roman roots that literally mean without words for emotions.

And it was, you know, kind of coined in the 1970s, maybe late '60s, among psychiatrists and psychologists who were working with psychosomatic disorders.

But in my work at the Boston University Fatherhood Project, I discovered a particular kind of difficulty that men had to be able to put their emotions into words and began studying that.

And what I did is I went back to the research literature in developmental psychology on a process called emotion socialization, which is how children are socialized to express emotions.

And what I found is that, you know, boys are more emotionally expressive than girls as neonates, hours after birth.

The same difference between girls and boys was found in a study at six months of age and one at 12 months of age.

And so I found then at two years of age, girls outstripped boys in their verbal expression of emotions, which meant they had, knew more emotion words.

And then between four and six, an ingenious study showed that boys lose their facial expressivity.

This particular study had others bring a child between four and six into the lab, girl or boy, and the child was shown emotionally stimulating slides.

And while the mother was in an adjacent room watching her child's face in a TV monitor.

And the question was, could she tell the slide shown to her child?

At four years of age, the mothers were equally accurate with sons and daughters.

But as the children age, the mothers grew progressively less accurate with their sons suggesting that boys were losing their facial expressivity.

And so what's happening in boys' lives between four and six, they're in preschool and elementary school and their behavior is being policed by their peers.

And when they're showing emotional expressiveness, they're being called out or worse.

So, you know, it's this emotion socialization process that led me to kind of theorize that boys who are reared to conform to this is one of the masculine norms, restrictive emotionality, that they have an elevated risk of growing up to be men who cannot put their emotions into words.

And I did several studies to show that there is a good measure of alexithymia, that males meet criteria for alexithymia more frequently than women.

A prevalence study done in Finland showed that 17% of men and 7% of women met criteria for alexithymia.

So it's clearly more prevalent among men.

But you might say, so what?

- No, I'd say, how do we fix it?

- Well, how do we fix it is, I developed during the '90s, a psychoeducational program that can be used in therapy or it can be used outside of therapy that, you know, first involves helping men develop a vocabulary of emotion words.

And second, I think it's easier to get somebody to recognize emotions in another person rather than in themselves.

So I teach them about nonverbal expression of emotions, facial expressions, tone of voice.

And I ask them to watch people during the week.

And ask themselves the questions, what are they feeling as they're saying this?

And then I ask them to keep an emotional response log where if they're feeling an emotion or a bodily sensation, write it down and then ask yourself who is doing what to whom and how does it affect me?

And then go through your vocabulary list and figure out the word or words that matter.

And I'll give you a quick example.

Butterflies in my stomach situation, I was expected to give feedback on a report from my supervisor at noon, and it's one o'clock.

Go through the words, apprehensive, anxious.

So you can see that this is almost like a kindergarten approach to emotion.

But when you realize that boys' ability to identify and express their emotions occurs very early, a kindergarten approach is not a bad idea.

- Kristin, you're working with, again, young men and young women, is this something that you see, the inadequacy or the inability to express?

And how do you handle that?

- My vantage point is as a professor in the classroom, and so in college level courses, women tend to be much more eager to study things like gender.

To study things like, you know, what does this mean?

What does it mean to be a woman?

How have things changed over time?

And so, you know, I think it would be a very good thing to have more gender balance in courses that influenced gender.

I think for a long time gender was seen as a women's issue, and that masculinity was not even seen as a thing in itself.

It was the default.

And so, you know, it was not viewed as something with curiosity.

And so I think that that approach has not served us well.

- Christine, would you acknowledge there's greater awareness even in terms of the emotional component that we're looking at now sort of in this culture that people are more sensitized to it?

- Yeah, no, I think that's actually absolutely true.

And that's something that, you know, has potential to be really helpful.

I think as a society, both sexes, both genders are open more to the idea of therapy, of talking about mental health, of talking about emotional wellness.

But it is still something that is more acceptable for women to do than men in many cases.

There are still those sort of traditional masculine ideals of kind of stoicism and emotional regulation that are in place.

And to be clear, I think there's something to be said that I think can be convincing to men about learning how to use emotional regulation for good.

If emotional management and sort of self-mastery is a tenet of manhood, like that can be a good thing.

How do you valorize some of these traditional visions of masculinity to make them form social and actually workable and useful in a new and modern environment.

- Gary, we have a final question for each of you.

I was intrigued because you have also been very open about the fact that the path you chose was influenced by two things that happened when you were young.

You saw someone shot and killed in a cafeteria, and then you knew of a rape of a woman in college.

And the through line to those two episodes, as you say was men.

What do we take away from everything we've been talking about today?

- Yeah, there's a lot I could say about those two incidents.

It was a lot about manhood and the layers of silence that we build around it.

In both of those settings, we knew that we were supposed to stay quiet.

That was not a space that said, talk about how you feel, talk about the loss, talk about your role here, talk about your relationships with others.

So this through line of letting men be connected humans, letting us have that expressions, and of all the emotions that I'm trying to get men to express is that I'm connected to you and you're connected to me.

That relational aspect of our humanity that I think we literally beat out of or repress out of or squish out of boys and men on the way to adult manhood.

- And now, going to go to Kristin.

Because you're bestseller "Jesus and John Wayne" touched a nerve, resonated with people, so I'm going to ask you because you are an historian, going forward, where do you think this culture is headed in terms of redefinition, making masculinity healthier?

Where do you think we're going?

- Unfortunately, so I wrote the book almost five years ago now, and so where it has gone since I wrote the book is not really in a healthy direction, right?

I think we've seen the strengthening of more reactionary ideologies of unhealthy visions of masculinity.

All of these problems that we've been addressing really have only gotten worse in the last five years.

So in the short term, you know, it's not looking great.

I'd like to cast a more hopeful vision for a longer term future.

I think what it is going to take is people to bravely step into this space, to know that, you know, there there's a lot of interest in certain spaces to silence voices who are trying to bring nuance, who are trying to bring a more positive vision of masculinity.

You're not going to please everybody, but we really need people from various places on the political, religious, ideological spectrum to work together and help boys, help men.

And as we know, as you said, this is not a zero-sum game.

In doing that, it really helps women, it helps society to function in a healthier way, which when it is, it saps the appeal of extremism and authoritarianism.

- Okay.

Christine, I think one of the most memorable lines in your piece, you say we have to retire the old script, that we have to write a new script that's compatible with gender equality for men.

What does that look like?

- Yeah, I mean, I think it looks a lot like many of the things that we were talking about.

There is sort of this old kind of traditional vision of strong silent John Wayne-esque masculinity that is based on, you know, working in a certain way, providing in a certain way, protecting in a certain way, using strength in certain ways.

And in this moment, you know, some of those old practices are no longer relevant and men who rely on old definitions will feel like they are not relevant in today's world.

And so we have to be looking for these new role models.

Role models who can still, you know, valorize certain ideals of masculinity, who are men that men want to look up to that have some sort of particularity to their masculinity that is actually makes them stand out and that men can relate to.

But that's workable in today's world.

It doesn't necessarily rely on putting women down to prop men up.

That doesn't necessarily rely on say, using physical strength to harm people as a way to show that you're strong.

But might, you know, involve using your strength and protective instinct to help heal people.

You know, there's a push to see more men enter HEAL occupations.

So health and education, administration, and literacy.

It can be, you know, using provider and protector instincts to help society and help others rather than to help one's self.

But we need those new models.

We need to not just sort of denigrate toxic masculinity or negative old forms of masculinity, but really provide a positive vision and provide modern role models.

And also provide kind of modern mentorship from man to man, from, you know, older men to these younger men who don't have mentors or role models in their lives to see what a man can look like in this moment and how that can be an additive thing.

- Thank you.

You don't want to be in the same sentence with the word toxic.

Dr.

Levant, I'm going to leave it to you to wrap this up today.

It's been an extraordinary conversation with four guests who have just been insightful and perceptive and we're so grateful to all of you.

But I want to ask you going out.

I keep going back to your hardscrabble childhood because there are a lot of lost boys and men who are still stuck in that.

How do you counsel them with next steps to try and just make some sort of gain where they can feel somewhat more confident?

- Well, I would actually go right to the boys.

I've been working on trying to get a module in middle schools for boys in the, it used to be called health ed, now it's called emotional and social learning in some schools, but a module on masculinity.

And one of my colleagues has written a workbook for teens that enables them, because in middle school, boys, well first of all, they're going through puberty, the heterosexual boys are getting interested in girls and they're getting enormous pressure to conform to masculine norms.

So a workbook that gives them a space to kind of look at the pressure they're getting to consider what their values are, what their family's values are, how their mother and father relate, and to think about what kind of guy they want to be.

You know, if we can get something like that started now, you know, we won't be having this conversation in 20 years.

And I would say if we don't, we might still be having this conversation in 20.

- No, we will have have another conversation in 20 years.

I want to thank again our extraordinary guests for joining us today.

Thank you.

When I read the New York Times op-ed by our final guest, I felt like I'd been punched in the gut.

I had a visceral reaction.

And I knew that its author, Naomi Beinart, had to be part of this show today.

And we're grateful that she is.

Welcome, Naomi.

- Thank you, Jane.

- Delighted to have you with us.

Finally, you wrote a piece with a haunting narrative about what happened the day after the presidential election in November, an election that meant a lot, more than usual, to women and girls.

What happened?

- It was a day like I'd never experienced in terms of community.

I think I wrote in the piece that I've never felt more like a woman.

It felt as if the entire female population at my school was going through mourning.

Female teachers were crying in the stairwell.

My friends and I, we were crying.

Outside of classes, middle schoolers were on the stairs, you know, embracing each other as I walked in.

And then on the flip side of that, my male peers, you know boys my age, younger, older, they were in a parallel kind of universe, talking, chatting, walking around like normal.

And it was quite disturbing because of the drastic difference.

- And how did you figure out what was causing the difference?

- One of my friends helped me figure it out.

We went for coffee together that day.

And point-blank in line, he asked me, why are all the girls crying?

And he didn't mean it in a malicious way, he simply did not know why all of the girls in our grade were crying.

And for me that was really eye-opening in terms of my answer to this question of why is the gap between teenage girls and teenage boys so large in the Trump era.

And I had to explain to him that Trump winning the presidential election was so, it felt so personal and is so personal to each and every woman.

And it was that, not ignorance but cluelessness of I don't understand why you could be so upset about something political.

And that to me was kind of where I got my answer.

- We should point out, you go to a high school that's pretty, pretty conscious shall we say of cultural, political things that are happening in society that impact their students' lives.

So I find this a little surprising that the boys would be that clueless.

- Yeah, it definitely was.

I know a lot of these boys' parents.

They are liberal, they vote, they vote blue.

These guys that I'm referencing, they are not right-wing extremists, they are not Trump supporters.

They would, a lot of them, and I've spoken to them about this, would consider themselves liberal.

So that's another reason why I was quite, it was jarring when it felt like they didn't care.

- You went out on the street at some point I guess after school, and you wrote in the piece that you locked eyes with other women, total strangers on the subway, in a shop.

And you locked eyes with them and you could see that they felt like you felt.

Which meant that you had more in common on an emotional level with strangers than you did with your own classmates.

What is the message there?

- I think the message is womanhood.

I think we are all in this together.

The Trump administration is targeting women, it's targeting people of color, it's targeting immigrants, it's targeting every minority out there.

And we are now all in this together.

And what was so depressing for me is that I felt like the we no longer included my male peers.

My female friends and I, we are now part of the larger struggle of women, of adults.

And I hope that the boys that I go to school with before they age to a certain degree, I hope that now they can recognize what that means to us and how they can help.

- Does that mean, Naomi, that you're helping to bring them along to that point?

I mean, you know, they can't do it in a vacuum.

They're not psychic, they can't read your mind.

So I'm not putting it on you, but that's part of this issue is letting them know what they need to know.

- Yeah, I hope I am part of the conduit.

I hope I am there as someone that they don't feel like is going to judge them to, you know, ask questions, ask what they can do.

These boys have sisters, they have mothers, they have cousins and grandmothers.

But if anything, I hope that I am on their mind when they make political decisions, that their mothers and their sisters and their grandmothers are on their minds.

And if I can be an aid to them in helping them realize that Donald Trump will affect us, me, my friends and I, and them too, that's the goal of mine is to kind of make them realize that they may be immune now, but very soon they will lose that level of protection.

- I want to ask the reaction to the piece.

Did it break down along gender lines?

Did it break down along ideological political lines?

What was the reaction?

- I think definitely the second.

I had an overwhelming amount of support, which I reread often.

It was incredibly beautiful and heartwarming.

I had a lot of women reach out via New York Times to talk, to write to me about my piece.

And then I had kids from my school reach out, met boys and girls.

I really, really appreciated when the guys reached out because, you know, I've heard some of them say that I kind of threw them under the bus.

So when those boys did reach out and say, you know, I read your piece, or even my mom read your piece and she loved it, that was really meaningful.

But those who agree with Donald Trump don't agree with my piece.

And that was pretty clear.

So I think it was definitely more ideological lines than gender.

- I am curious to know, did your older brother weigh in with a review?

- Yeah, my older brother, in a very older-brother way kind of said, good job, what are we having for dinner?

- Next.

- He was, yeah, he was great though.

I had been talking to him kind of on the editing process, you know, it was stressful and I have homework and I'm, you know, freaking out.

But he was always there kind of as a rock for me, less so about the actual politics of it all and more so about calm down, you'll get your work done, this will be good, this will be great, it'll get out.

- Has this experience changed you?

And if it has, how has it changed you?

- Since that op-ed came out, I've been changed I think in some profound ways.

The first one and I think the most immediate was, the realization that I'm writing, you know, about my sorrow and my worries.

And I am in fact not, I don't want to say the word victim, but I mean, what ICE is doing across the country, it is affecting and targeting so many people that are not me and not my family.

And I have to help others first before I can try to help myself.

That is something that I've tried to keep in mind is that I don't want to be pointing fingers when I too am in a place of extreme privilege.

The second one is that trolls on social media, you have to make the best of them.

You have to laugh at them with your friends.

It's the best way, it's the healthiest way.

And third I would say is that as somebody who loves to write, the best thing you can do is give words to people's experiences.

And that's a lot of the feedback that I received is people writing and reaching out and saying, you kind of verbalized what I was feeling.

And that is the biggest gift of all.

- Naomi, you have a gift of a clear voice that helps inspire everyone.

We look forward to seeing how you shine on other issues because we know you will and we know you'll be back.

Thank you for joining us.

- Thank you, Jane.

- Thank you.

We're grateful to our guests for their insights and inspiration, and to you for joining us today Until the next time, from the other Washington, Washington, Connecticut, for Common Ground, I'm Jane Whitney.

Take care.

(gentle music) (lively music) (bright music)