Bill Cunningham, the great American. Of course, masculinity and more or less is on the ballot this November. I can't think of masculinity being on the ballot. And of course Nikki Haley and others are advising the Trumpster to tone down that bro stuff and talk about women's problems and men's problems. Normally in our society we focus upon women
one way or another. But there's a great book by doctor Ronald Levant, Professor Emeritis of Psychology, University of akronym More, former President how about this of the American Psychological Association, devoted forty years of his life to studying masculinity and doctor Ronald Levant, welcome, I think for the first time to the Bill Cunningham Show. And let me begin by saying, it's fascinating you studied masculinity. Why did you begin this
line of work about forty years ago? And secondly, what have you found if anything?
Wow? Well, okay. I got into the study of masculinity through the study of fathering, and as we say in psychology, most research is research. I got into fathering because I was struggling with the role of being a divorced partially custodial father of a tween age daughter at that time.
And as I kind of started working with fathers and what I tried to do, I was on the faculty at Boston University at the time, was trying to provide fathers with parent education skills because at that time, in the early eighties, men were just beginning to be visibly involved with children. You could see men carrying infants in
chess packs or pushing rollers in Harvard Square. And as a result of, you know, kind of doing that work, I discovered that many men have difficulty expressing their emotion except for one, which is anger. And that was kind
of what led me into this particular study. But what really fueled it with my childhood and I had a emotionally and physically abusive father who did not need to be so mean and bad that he was, And you know, it kind of got me curious as to what makes men become so violent, and that was really I read their stuff.
You know, a girl, dad is a problem today, and you say, why are so many men problematically unable to describe how they feel? I have difficulty explaining how I feel. I'm not supposed I got the shields up. You then say, neglecting their health. If my wife did not insist that I go to like seven or eight doctors every year or two, I would never go at all. I don't explode in rage except maybe on the golf course and then resorting to violence of some thing. As an attorney,
I don't think I've ever done. But men are programmed to be like their father. Is it nurture or is it genetics? Is it the fact that we spend millions of years defending the cave or defending our heart and health? And I see myself as a protector and this bleeds over to my personal behavior, and that men often die alone, and that they refer why are why? Why is that the case? Is it genetic or is it nurture or both?
Well, it's both. But we can't do much about the genetics, but we can do a lot about the nurture. And as a psychologist, I have tools to deal with the nurture. And so that's kind of why I focused on it. And it has to do with it, starting with how we raise our boys to conform to these rigid masculine norms, particularly about crying. You know, big boys don't cry, or no, or worse, you get threatened. If you don't stop crying, I'll give you something to really cry about. That's it. Yeah,
you know, and so you know, obviously it's both. You know, we don't know how to change genes, but we do know how to change behavior. And let's talk about health. Men die now, and this has gotten worse six point three And this is us six point three years sooner than women. Okay, it used to be in the fives. And men have more diseases in every major category of illness. And while there are some small genetic factors associated with female sex hormones that give them a slight advantage, the
bulk of the evidence suggests it men's behavior. Men put their health at risk through not wearing seatbelts, not using sunblock, not visiting their positions when they're sick. Well, you're laughing, so you know what I'm talking.
Absolutely, absolutely, And you talk about cigars. The guys that I play golf with, cigars are in their mouths constantly. They have health problems that they want to hold inside themselves and not express. Wearing a seatbelt of something I resisted for decades because it wasn't a macho image of Steve McQueen sunblock. I used to play get outside, work, play golf, never wore copper tone. You didn't think about it. Well,
women are just different. So well, I guess getting back to the election, you say that supposedly the country is ready to elect the first female president, Kamala Harris. But does she possess enough masculine traits in her personality to persuade those undecided that she can lead a divided nation? And I ask you the question. According to the polling, trumpsters up about ten points with men and down about ten points with women, just the opposite for Kamala Harris.
And so is America ready for a female president? Especially one may I use the term minority? Are are we men ready for that commander in chief?
Well? I hope so. But let's look at sort of a term that's kind of been bandied about in this election, which is the alpha male. Now, the primatologists dull who recently passed away that there really are two versions of the alpha male. Now, remember he studied chimpanzees, not humans. But in the chimpanzee troops, there are two versions of
the alpha male. There's the dominant alpha who achieves this power by force, right, and who tends to be have a short tenure because all it takes is a coalition of threer for other chimpanzees to overthrow them, okay, and that happens frequently. And then there's the populate what du All called the populist alpha, which again we're talking about chimpanzees, so that populist term has to have a little quotation
marks on it. But what he's referring to are chimpanzees, the male chimpanzees who achieved their power by taking care of the troop, by providing resources like food and shelter, by caring for sick or injured members of the troop, And that particular alpha has a long tenure and is actually thought to be loved by the other chimps. If you look at the current election, the contrast is very similar. Although Harris is obviously not a man, but she represents
that populous alpha. She leads by taking care. He has recently said, she's if she wins, she's going to be a president of all the people, right right, and she just doesn't care what you're whether Republican, Democrat, independent, He is going to do for you, whereas Tom Trump clearly is you know, the dominant alpha.
He's in a garbage truck. And the other thing that you never see Kamala Harrison address or something feminine. Same way with Hillary Clinton. It was always in a pantsuit with their chest out and looking upwards because she they figured they got the female vote already. But let's go
after the alpha male. One thing you bring up about the alpha male, I think a Planet of the Apes in all those series, Caesar what was ahead of the Planet of the Apes at one point, and he was smaller than the orangutangs, but he had a little bit of strength, but he had the wiles of a male
to manipulate the group. And in the business setting or in life, if you have a Caesar type chimpanzee, and this guy isn't the biggest, the strongest, the bravest, the best looking, but the personality as such like a Napoleon for example, a smaller guy who can actually dominate, that's important.
So when it comes down to politics, isn't it important for female candidates not to have a feminine side in a sense because they want to communicate to the tony benders of the world, the alpha males of the world, that I'm like you I'm tough and I'm mean, and I can curse. I considered bar with Governor Whitmer and use the F word. In fact, I said this recently in a mating here at iHeartMedia that basically women use the F word and aggressive language much more than males.
If a male in that setting with a lot of professional females which dropped the F bomb here and there, people would look at them. But if a woman does it, you get patted on the back. Man, you're one of us. Is that part of the diet, part of the mechanism.
Yeah. There have been a number of studies of successful women in a variety of settings, in the military and the corporate world and in politics, and clearly, you know, they have to demonstrate what are called stereotypically called masculine characteristics. But these are easy to attain. You know, when I was a college I went to college at Berkeley, the University of California, Berkeley in the sixties. I'm an old guy,
but the women that I know do it. At Berkeley, we're taking assertiveness training classes to overcome the effects of their gender role, socialization to be dependent on and different to men. And I think women who succeed in the political world and the corporate world obviously have to take on masculine characteristics because these worlds are male dominated, and to succeed, you know, you've got to play by the guy's rules.
Right, Are you ready for the big question?
Absolutely?
I look at society and it's less and less and less likely that a poor Wide or a poor Black male is going to grow up with a father figure in the home. Very unlikely if you live in a poor Hispanic area or a poor White or a poor Black area. Males tend to get what's important what is not important from the street and the breakdown of the family and faith the last thirty to forty years is exhibited by the crime rate and by drugs, incarcerat failing.
Most of the human beings in college are female, and when my wife attend at the University of Cincinnati in the nineteen nineties in law school, hers was the first class with the dominant female students. Women succeed in our
society much more than men succeed. We're more likely to be on drugs, more likely to be in jail, more likely to have drinking problems, more likely of health problems, more likely not to live as long, but all of society is structured to build up the female and tear down the male as part of the debaucherous behavior we see in our society today caused by lack of male figures growing up as a little boy proper.
No, I don't think so. I don't think that. Give me. Juri Bronson Brenner, who is a world famous developmental psychologists, after studying multiple families over dozens of years, concluded that every child needs at least one adult who is absolutely crazy about them. It doesn't matter what their gender is. You know, it can be a mother, it can be
a father. You know what I think. I mean, I agree with the facts that you presented, But what I think has happened is that if you go back to the nineteen fifties, where women couldn't even get a credit card with a male signing for them, is that, you know, the se what's called the second wave feminist movement that began in nineteen sixty seven, that women have dramatically changed their gender role, you know, from the sixties to the present, and as a results, have achieved the kind of success
you've talked about. But sadly, men have remained duck and attached to this outmoded model of masculinity that was prevalent in the nineteen fifties. Men have not changed, you know, they've changed some, like the men's participation in parenting has actually changed rather dramatically, but for the most part, taking care of their health, being able to express their emotions,
men have really as a whole, not changed. And part of what I try to do as a psychologist is try to encourage men to recognize that what is so called they're so called feminine side, their emotional intelligence, their compassion, their empathy are not feminine but human, and they're you know, like very valuable traits to have and every human it has the capacity for them. Now.
Lastly, when I look at the Muslim world, whether it's Afghanistan or Syria or on Iraq Egypt, I could not imagine a worst place for a woman or female to exist than in the world in which you're literally the property of your husband or the property your father married off. Platoral eradication. They have terrible circuit. They have not the ability to In Afghanistan right now, women cannot be heard
in public. She's clothed from the top of her head, to the bottom of her faci beaten on a regular basis, she has no rights at all, and that has been going on for decades, if not centuries. What is the Can you briefly comment, if you can't, about what happens in a billion households around the world where women literally are beaten marginalized by men and their conditioned to do so.
Have you studied any of the problems of women in Syria, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, terrible circumstances that their status is ignored in this country?
Yeah. Absolutely. The United Nations publishes a gender equality index where they rank countries based on the extent to which the sexes are equal, and the countries you mentioned are down at the bottom. The United States is number seventeen, so we're not great. The highest countries tend to be Western Europe, particularly the Scandinavian countries. And I visited Norway several times and to me, the different for instance, palpable.
The women that I met there are so empowered, although you know, women in the US are somewhat empowered, but not like the women in Norway. So I think it really depends on kind of the society and the ability of women like in the United States. Essentially, look, in the nineteen fifties, less than the only single digits of mothers of small children were in the workforce. By nineteen eighty five, fifty percent of the mothers of children under the age of six were in the workforce. Okay, that
was a dramatic change that women took upon themselves. And the next thing that happened was what we call the divorce revolution that began in nineteen sixty five. Who went to eighty five where two thirds of the divorces were initiated by the wives. So look at what happened. Women gained financial independence from men, and then they lived left bad marriages and droves and the statistics you reported earlier.
They then populated, you know, colleges and graduate in law schools and medical schools, and they're just you know, as we as well known, girls and women are doing much better than boys and men on every educational, health and
social indicator there is. And my hope is that we start raising boys differently, that we stop forcing them to conform to these outmoded masculine norms of being unemotional, tough, and dominant, and recognize we're living in a totally different society and they need to develop those bills that are labeled feminine, like emotional self awareness and compassion and empathy to succeed in today's world.
Well, we have to go, but we only scratch the surface, not even scratch the surface. But the book is the problem with men. Insights on overcoming a traumatic childhood from a world renowned psychologist, that's you, doctor Ronald Levant. The book is everywhere. Once again, thank you for coming on the Bill cunning Game Show and doctor you're a great American. Thank you very much, thank you, God bless you. Let's continue with more women dominate the world. Yet they convince
everyone they're victims. It's a nice psychological ploy, but we know what it is. Bill Cunningham, News Radio seven hundred WLW