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Hey, what up, Ears Edition listeners, It's Roy Wood Junior, your correspondent for The Daily Show. You're about to hear one of our original Daily Show podcasts, Beyond the Scenes. It's the show where we dive deeper into segments and topics that originally aired on The Daily Show. We chat with the shows writers and producers and experts. This episode is about male intimacy and vulnerability and why men are
in a friendship recession. I'm joined by Ted Bunch, who's the co founder of a Call to Men, and developmental psychology professor at NYU Naobi Wade to discuss how boys friendships evolve as they get older, what men can do to prioritize their mental health, and how therapy can be transformative for a lot of men. We hope you enjoy it, and if you like the show, check out the Beyond the Scenes podcast.
Wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to Beyond the Scenes, the podcast that goes deeper into topics and segments that you might have seen on the Daily Show. This is what this podcast is. This is how you gotta think about this podcast. You have a go bowling, right, You know you want to go bowling, and bowling, you're just going in. You have a good time, the stars, the bowling pins, and the bowling ball. But this podcast, we're all the extra shit that you need to be able to bowl.
All right.
You gotta have the goofy clown shirt, you gotta have the big ass clown shoes, you gotta have beer, you gotta have wings, you have to have an inability to bowl. All of the skills that are required to make bowling fun. That's exactly what this podcast is. So I'm Roy Viginia. Today we're gonna be talking about a topic that has come up on the show quite a bit, male vulnerability and intimacy and why it is important that men go to therapy.
Roll the clip.
We know that women are going through it, but we have to acknowledge that men are going through to you. Guys are angry, you're depressed, and you're lonely. In fact, fifteen percent of men say they have zero zero friends and the other eighty five percent they don't have friends either, but they was too sad to fill out the survey. Now, luckily there's a tool that can help you with all of this. Paravey therapy is amazing. You pay someone to
unload all your bullshit on them. They're like prostitutes for the feelings. The problem is men don't use it. In fact, they're almost half as likely to go to therapy as women. Men out here treating therapy like Nick Cannon treats condoms. They're here to help you, Nick. But we know why men is this way, because, starting from a young age, we cheat them that they can't have feelings.
Today, I'm joined by co founder of a Call to Men and co author of the Book of Dares one Hundred Ways for Boys to Be Kind, Bold and Brave, Ted Bunch. Welcome to be on the scenes. How you doing Ted, I'm good, Roy, Thank you so much. Happy to be here with you, and Yob. You got a voice of stature right there. That's a voice of statue. And I see for the people listening, you got one of them grown men. You got one of them, Coach Goate's I just want to do whatever you tell me
to do. Ted also joining me as a professor of developmental psychology at NYU and author of the book Deep Secrets, Boys, Friendships, and the Crisis of Connection. Her book was also the inspiration for the Oscar nominated film Close Neobi Way, Welcome to the show, Naobi.
How you doing.
I'm doing great. I'm so happy to be here Roy with you and Ted. I'm really excited about this conversation.
Well, I'm happy to be a part of this as well as a father of a six year old. I definitely you know, if I'm gonna be honest, just up front. You know, I didn't come from a home. This is why I feel like this discussion is very important. You know, I had two parents that everybody worked odd hours. My dad worked mornings and nights, so I rarely saw him
other than pick me up from baseball practice. My mother worked until nine pm because she was going to law school in PhDs and all of the secondary degrees that you get to build your income. So I didn't see my mom but right before I went to bed, and first thing in the morning on a way to the bus stop. So this idea of intimacy and hugs and conversation and that was not I knew I was love. I felt love, but you know, I came up in an era where intimacy within a family, especially man to man,
was more incidental than intentional. So in coming up with ways to be intentional with my son. It's these types of stories and stuff within the show that have really helped me because you know, and and I'll start with you, Ted, because you know, the act of being a man is something that's just said, but it's never really detailed. It's never really laid out in specifics. You know, people tell you a man while you're crying, be a man. What does that mean? My knee hurt. I It's okay to cry,
It's okay to feel. So Ted, let's start off with talking a little bit about, you know, defining how society views manhood and masculinity, or as you refer to it, the man box. Explains us what the man box and what does healthy manhood actually look like.
So thank you Roy for that, and I appreciate what you're sharing about the difference from you growing up and then the type of parent you want to be, the intentional father that you want to be around nurturing and supporting your son. And our parents did that too, to the best of their ability, but we know much more now. And so when we talk about the man box, which is a term that a call to man coined more
than twenty years ago. That's a short version of saying the collective socialization of manhood.
Right.
The manbox just sounds cooler, right, But we can talk about the man box. You can imagine all the things that we're taught around manhood and masculinity. Even if we were to ask a six year old boy or a sixteen year old boy what it is. What have you
been taught about what a man is? They'll say, be tough, be strong, make money, carry a bag, rite a bag of money, don't ask for help, don't be vulnerable, don't be weak, right, because those things that vulnerability, that weakness, those things where you need to ask for help are not what men do. And I'm putting that in quotes based on this male dominated society. It's what women do. And if you're a man that does that, then you fall in short of the manhood that you're expected to
live up to. So there's a few things that happen in the MAOX. One of them is that we're all taught that on some level, women and girls have less value than men and boys, that women are the property of men, and that women and.
Girls are sexual objects.
These are the things that we're taught and we pass these teachings down to our children as well as that we're not supposed to openly express emotion, that we're not supposed to show weakness for fear. You're not supposed to act like a woman or a girl. You're not supposed to ask for help. I do want to unpack just for a moment, that less value property objectification piece Roy, if you don't mind. So we're taught our collective socialization, right, it's just kind of in the air that women and
girls have less value than men and boys. So if I say to a little boy you have to throw that ball hard on their son, you throw like a girl.
Everybody knows the answer to that.
We've never had this conversation, but we know the answer, right, And it's not that it's true, but we know what the answer to that is.
Just recently, at a golf tournament, you had Tiger Woods slide of tampon to another golfer as a way to say that that sho he just the drive, he just check.
The on.
Tiger Woods thought, oh, there's surely no cameras here at this televised golf tournament that will slide you a woman joke. I didn't mean to cut you off taking No, that's.
That's that's a great example because this is done everywhere because like that six year old boy, right, what does he what does he leave that situation when that man he looks up to says, you have to throw her on it, you throw like a girl and girls still just fine?
Right?
But does he leave that interaction thinking that girls are equal to him or less than him, less than And we're giving him those messages all day long, and Tiger continues to give those messages. So it's not just Tiger, it's all of us. That's our collective socialization, and that women on some level of the property of men. So if I'm in New York or LA or Chicago or Texas and I walk over to a man today who's hitting his wife for girlfriend, I say, knock it off.
He says to me, shit, you wales though that's my business one way or another. And the other is around the objectification.
Our boys are actually taught to objectify girls, and they're taught that by men in their life. They're taught that by messages they're getting in all different areas. Right, And it's not that we're doing things well, this is let me give a quick example, high school boy in your community, or in your community, Naobi, or anyone who's listening here, a great kid, seventeen year old kid who wants to take a young woman out to go to a movie. He's just taking her out, right, He takes her out
to the movie. His name's John, her name is Keisha. He takes John, takes Keisha out, gets on the group text with a couple of his boys and says, hey, guys, I'm taking Keisha out to the movie. They give him a little crap for that, but he takes her, takes her back home, perfect gentleman. He gets it back on the group text and says, hey, guys, I'm back. Is the first thing in those boys good boys ask him is how with the movie no right? So where did
they learn that from? So that's the manbox, that collective social that.
Did you get? I guess did you get their grab my mood? Didn't she right? Because the only purpose to spend time with her is the conquest. That's what they're taught.
Okay, So, Niobe, you've studied young boys friendships and how these relationships change as they get older. Can you tell us more about what you found in your research.
So I've been listening to boys and young men since nineteen eighty seven, a long time, and I started off as a high school counselor listening to boys and thinking about surprise that what they were talking about was not was I what I expected. They were talking about their friendships, their desires for close friendships, their desires for intimate connection with other guys, and that led really to a lifetime of being fascinated by First of all, was this typical
of a lot of boys? But secondly, why aren't we telling this story? And so what's interesting to me is that when you listen to young people, when you listen to boys, I would say, anywhere from your son's age all the way up to basically twenty four to twenty five, they tell something very different, and in terms of their socialization, especially when they're younger and they're less pressured to man up,
which is that they want close friendships. You hear twelve thirteen fourteen year olds talking beautifully about their desire for friendships, their desire to really trust someone, to not be laughed at. That not being laughed at, by the way, is a big one. Being able to share something with or not laughed at that being able to trust them. And then as they get older, they basically the pressures to man up starts to happen and they start to disconnect from
what they want. They start to sort of everything that becomes a joke, even though even though basically that they don't see it as a joke because they're looking for that connection. And right at the point where boys start to disconnect from their own desires for closeness, especially with other young men, you see the suicide rate goes up,
You see all kinds of stuff. Mass violence happens right at that age between sixteen and twenty five, where men are being asked by the culture young men to basically disconnect. And this is the part I really want to say Roy on your show. This is a human desire. This is a human desire. It's not a girl thing. It's not a guy thing. It's not a gender identity thing, or a sexuality thing, a gay thing. It's a human desire to want to connect to other people deeply emotionally.
And the only way we connect, Roy, this is the whole point and Ted, this is the whole part of Ted's work too. The only way we connect is that we're vulnerable, we're expressive, we share our feelings. We're also stoic, right, Ted, I mean in relationships you need to be able to be stoic, you need to be able to be soft. But we only value half of our half of ourselves,
and especially for young men. So if we only have value the side of the hard side of ourselves and don't value the soft side, first of all, we're not gonna have relationships. We're not gonna have good relationships. Secondly,
we're going to be in trouble. So if we raise kids to go against their humanity and go against their nature, which is to be loving human beings, and we raise them to go against that and to actually value this sort of only the hard side of themselves, that that's the man up part, then we shouldn't be surprised that a lot of them struggle when they get older and need therapy, right right, I mean that you know why do so many men need therapy in the first place?
All of the causations that you've just laid out, is that part of why you think men are stuck in I think, as you've called it, a friendship recession in a way, because you can't be real with your friends. You can't be open in eyes for fear of being teased or being called a girl.
Man, why you crying?
Exactly? Everything that I'm saying comes directly from the mouths of boys. I mean, they will say things like, it might be nice to be a girl because then I wouldn't have to be emotionless. I mean, I just want adults listening to that to register that comment it might be nice to be a girl, because then I wouldn't have to be emotionless. We are asking human beings to be emotionless, and then we expect them to have healthy relationships.
It is a human desire and that our boys, as Nao be said, start out with all of these things that they want to express, and actually when we allow space for them to talk about it, they're thirsty to talk about it. They really are, and so on men. By the way, Once we remove that, it's it's that there's a shaming of being vulnerable and talking about it. So we start teaching. We start teaching our boys not
to experience those feelings. When we tell our boys to stop crying, then they don't they don't get to express what they're feeling. When we tell them to stop crying, we're also saying stop feeling, and so then they push that those emotions down and the only thing that's expressed with that's accepted is anger. Aggression, that's what's seen as an emotion that men can express. And lust you can
express that as well. So those are the harmful things, and it directly ties to anxiety and depression and suicide. All of those things are tied to this. So the boys don't develop a language to express how they're feeling. So we become these men who also don't have that language, and so we don't no doubt to ask for help because when we tried to ask for help, that's spends seeing as a weakness or something that men don't do.
How much of all of this that we've been laying out, because what's interesting about this whole discussion is that men are going through Hey show your emotions, Hey, women can do it too. Meanwhile, women are cooking on the feminism side of the game, and go on, we are girls, girls, strong, girl power, we gon march, we can do whatever we want. So it almost seems as if both sides are getting or having two different types of awakenings concurrently. That also
kind of but hits. How much did the lack of women's rights in the thirties and the forties and the fifties, and even if you really want, because I'm not gonna put this solely on slavery, but I also want to put it in the context that for a long time in America, the man had to go do the work, and the woman was at the house and you was in the kitchen, and maybe the man felt that he could never share because no matter what the burden of
providing was passed on, he has to do it. And then we got to a time where we didn't have to live like that anymore, but men were maybe subconsciously passing on that rhetoric to their next generation and then their next generation, and by the time we got to the nineties, the idea of what a man should be was molded by what a man had to be at that time, and we thought that that, Like someone said to me, something I thought was very profound, don't confuse
the tact that you use to survive with the tactic you need to go on. How much does the history of gender dynamics play a role in a lot of these bad habits being passed down from generation to generation.
Yeah, So in a male dominated society, right, because that's what it is, and it's patriarchal society to male dominated society, and then you do have women who are seeking liberation because coming out of all of that, in the same way that in a white supremacy society you have people
of color who are seeking liberation. Right, all of those things because these constructs exist, and there is an antiquated notion of manhood and masculinity that I think is so woven into the fabric of our society that when it's challenged, then sexism rears its ugly head right and seeks to put down what women have achieved or are doing in those kind of things, as if it's taking away from men.
But it's not.
It's not just this one pie and that everybody's pieces a little smaller. It's an expansion of a pie, right, It's much bigger than that.
So this allows men right to really look.
At our authentic selves too, that we don't just have to be this rigid notion of manhood. That there's so much more to you and to me and to the men who are listening. There's so much more to who we are that we can now embrace our full authentic selves.
Also, because there's things.
That you may have wanted to do or your son may want to do that the man box says, oh, no, no, no, you're not supposed to do that.
Right.
I have flowers in my picture all the time when I'm on zoom.
Right.
It took me years to accept that, Oh, I can go buy flowers because I like flowers in the house.
I don't have to bring them to a woman to have flowers in the house, or to my wife to have flowers in the house.
That actually, I'm the one who likes the color. I'm the one who likes the smell of the flowers. And it took me. It took me a while to really accept that. Now that's my authentic self. I love flowers. So now I'll go to the floorers and I pick out what I want. They say, do you want me to do it? Put in a vas for you, mister bunch. No, I want to take them home and arrange them, because you know what, Roy and Aobi, I like flowers. So there's so much that we're missing as men that these
rigid noses of manhood patriarchy harms all of us. It really does. There's lots of wonderful things about being a man. I don't want to not be a man. I don't want to not be a father. And this is not an indictment on manhood. Actually, it's an invitation of man. It's not about calling men out for wrong behavior. It's about calling men in to a healthy, respectful manhood.
So what boys have taught me is that we've split right, our culture, our modern culture, I call it boy culture, but it's called we call our modern culture has split us into thinking that thinking is masculine and feeling is feminine. Herd is masculine and feminine.
Right, you get where I'm going, right, Get where I'm gowk?
Yeah, right, you get what I'm saying.
Masculine, feminine. Right.
That sounds like every argument I've had with everybody I've dated in my life.
Goodness gracious.
If you live in a culture that says, basically independence, thinking the self stoicism is masculine, and vulnerability, emotions, sensitivity is feminine, you're going to be messed up because ultimately you are half hard and half soft as a human. And again, I'm not doing the human thing because it's my own you know, ideology. I'm doing it really because that's what the boys are yelling at us about. Like
they are. They're saying exactly what you just said, Ted, They're saying, I am actually half what you call feminine. I am vulnerable, I am sensitive, I'm emotionally intelligent. I like flowers or I don't like you know, whatever it is, but things that have been associated with femininity, and you're trying to push that down in me. And that's how I actually build relationships and friendships. So like, what's your problem?
And I feel like young people, honestly, Roy, have been yelling at adults for almost a century and saying what is wrong with you people? You know that basically we get it. Young people get it. Ted. You know that young people get it all the time. And so I think when it comes to the women's issues, this is what I think, Roy. I think that women, obviously, and I definitely identify as a feminist and I'm definitely part of the feminist movement. Women are angry because for lots
of different justified reasons. So you know, I'm not diminishing that in any way, but the reality is that we keep on seeing the symptom as the problem. So we keep on thinking that it's basically from women's from a feminist perspective, we keep on thinking, well, it's men's problems, so if you fix men, then the problems should go away. But it's all of our problems. Roy it's the culture that we have all created with obviously, this hierarchy that
some men have been more influential than other men. You know, you're talking about white supremacy, et cetera, et cetera, and some you know, and some women have been more powerful than other women. But basically we have a creative society that doesn't make any sense where we've gendered basic human qualities. So then that means is that women are getting mad at men when we really what we should be doing
is trying to change the culture. And the more we sort of blame it on men, actually the more men just feel attacked. I've heard that a lot, you know, the men just feel attacked when we have to see it as a collective problem.
Before we go to the break, I want to I want to delve in for a second with you iov about your work that you did where you essentially walked me through this. You had one hundred and fifty boys ages thirteen to eighteen.
Well, I followed them over over four years. So I followed them, Yeah, I from twelve to thirteen and follow them over four to five years.
Okay, how did you measure intimacy and see it slowly start to dissipate in their relationships with other boys at the same age, because you were essentially looking to see how they related and how they spoke to other boys. And when did the dissipation of feeling and turning into creatures of action when that started happening.
When you listen to twelve year old boys, they will use the language of love. They will talk given a safe space, right, not getting a safe space, they won't do it. When they talk about their friends, they say I love him, I can't live without him, or I want to find a friend that I could really rely on and not be you know, and be myself and be a real self. So the language, it's right there in the language. It's literally they're talking love. They're asking
questions about love. They're thinking about love, both heterosexual love, romantic love, platonic love, all sorts of love. They're wanting, they're having questions about it, and it given a safe space, they actually ask it. Then as they get a bit older, it's incredible because remember it's the same kids. So it's the same kids. Over time, you start to hear this, I don't care ted you know this language, I don't
care whatever. It's all good. It's all good, you know, like, no, I don't have you know, I don't connect to someone that much anymore, but it's all good. You know, that whole pressure to sort of sound like you're totally and vulnerable. So you hear in the language, and then you also hear the anger, You hear the sadness, and then sometimes in the worst case scenarios, you hear the depression and the sense of feeling totally isolated and not knowing what to do about it, and a lot of anger at
why is not anybody paying attention? Why is not anybody paying attention to these basic human needs? And everybody's calling me? You know, in some cases mass shooters, I've read the mass shooter manifestos, it's the same thing. They feel like nobody's paying attention to their suffering.
Right there, I want to take a break, and I want to come back and jump more into that, and this is beyond the scenes, will be right back they will be before the break. We were just talking about how men feel like they don't have a way to express their feelings without being criticized or compared to being a woman or having their feelings not be received properly, and so as a result, it can bubble up in
a number of different ways. Now, this study that you conducted with a number of boys over the course of four or five years in their teenage years, you're seeing that a lot of the conversation in verbiage as they became more emotionally disconnected, was similar to some of the verbias that you've seen in some of the mass shoot
of manifestos. What are some of the other ways that this type of you know, and I don't want to say dysfunction, but the absence of vulnerable that's not a word, you knew what I was trying to say, Just Dan.
Don't laugh.
Vulnerability the lack of stop laughing, ted, I see, how does the lack of the inability to be vulnerable?
There? I did it?
What are some other negative ways that it manifests itself?
It can show up in a lot of ways.
It can show it outwardly, right, because these are hurt kids and it can show it outwardly where they're hurting other kids, maybe it's bullying or gun violence, all of these other things where they're trying to establish some sort
of power, some sort of affirmation. And when we talk about the emotional disconnection that NAO be brought up and then you leaned into a little bit there, roy, I do want to say this that those emotions when they stop from that first year of the research to the last year of the research where they're not vulnerable, where they're not looking for that connection, or at least admitting
they're not. They're looking for it, they're not admitting it is because they're becoming more and more indoctrinated.
In the man box.
And the glue that keeps that man box together is homophobia. Yeah right, So in other words that yeah, so that when they start saying that there's an emotional connection other boys or men in their life even or even women in their life, because we're all social, we're all swimming in the same water, right ye are saying oh no, you don't don't say that, you don't do that, they push them back into the manbox because that glue, that homophobia is the glue that keeps that man box together.
It doesn't work without it, right, it doesn't work without it. So they're punished when they show their emotions. They're punished when they're vulnerable because it's seen as weakness. So they're really being taught that, okay, I can't it's not safe for me to talk about it. It's not safe for me to hug my friend and say, hey, man, you know what, I really do love you, you know, and
I'm glad you're in my life. And then they're saying things like you know, things that I don't even want to say it, right, yeah, they push them back into the manbox.
Right, yeah, yeah, they say things I know, homo. So my my, my, and my interviews you get things directly.
Which to define just real quick for I listen. Yeah, when you say no, homo, it's like a man, I love you, no homo, as if to say I love you, but not in a gay way, which assumes that love means intimacy.
And exactly well between men and boys, it does. We don't say it. They don't say it when they talk to a girl.
Yeah, right, so it really is there's homophobia within that, right, yes, it's so.
Yeah, if we didn't live in a homophobic society. No homo actually wouldn't necessarily be homophobic, but because we because we right, so so the idea, right, the idea don't be such a girl or no homo is misogynistic and homophobic because we live in a homophobic, misogynist society. So it's it's but I think I really like that image that I'm going to use it again too and quote you.
Of course, is the glue. It's the glue. It's it forces young men to actually adhere because there are consequences if you don't, and the consequences I hear about in older men and I mean older teenagers sorry all the time, the consequences of being teased, pushed around, if you don't play sports, if you don't man up, if you don't
do things that make you look straight. And this is the thing roy in our culture right now, it's okay according to the kids in New York City right now, it's okay if you have an aunt who's gay, you have an uncle who's gay, maybe you even have a you know, a brother who's gay. But I'm not gay. So there's this weird sort of almost backlash going on that like it's cool. It's cool that, you know, you if people do that, people love each other. But don't
think I'm gay. Yeah, let me clarify, don't put that. What I mean. So, the men who are the least secure of their masculinity are oftentimes the most likely to adhere to masculinity. So, you know, the oftentimes you get athletes, for example Roy, really well known athletes who are actually breaking the gender boarders all the time, you know, hugging each other, kissing each other because they don't have to prove their manhood because everybody else slaps on the exactly exactly exactly.
Ying is allowed that the Super Bowl, you lose, the Super Bowl crime.
Crime exactly exactly exactly. You see some of the most tender things between well known athletes. And so it's just interesting to me to think about the homophobia drives and that's part of the culture. I mean, come on, I just it's stunning to me that we still think in a culture we still raise our kids Roy that thinking that thinking is masculine and straight of course, and feeling is feminine and and gay because obviously femininity is linked with being gay in a homophobic world.
I also like that thinking is masculine feeling is feminine, and that when women.
Think exactly exactly.
When women right, When women exactly and show their intelligence and all those things, men say things like, yeah, well she need to be in the kitchen or she you know, they're doing things that that that diminished that right exactly because it challenges again this patriarchal notion of male dominance.
Yeah, when we talk about that as parents. So last year I had the pleasure of going on Finding your Roots with the wonderful doctor Henry Lewis Gates. And amongst all the things that I found out about my family tree, I knew that I did not have when I was born, I had one living grandparent. What I did not know before that television show was that my father lost his father when he was four and from that time on there was no male head of household per census data
every eight years. That was done when my father was living with his mother, you know, well into adulthood. So as far as I know, there was never another man of the house in my dad's life, and so it really reconstituted a lot of how I viewed how he raised me. And so there was one thing that always came up with that, I'll getting into like this isn't me like unearthen family trauma and drama or anything like that.
But I just know that one thing my dad would always say whenever he was losing an argument with my mama was I pay the bills. Because my mom was pouring all of her money into grad school and second degrees and third degrees and law degrees.
You ain't run the house, you know. You know, we get to when we lose the argument. We started bringing up for seeds.
But what I didn't realize until I became a father myself was that was the first thing that I defined as manhood was my ability to provide and clothe and feed. And it wasn't about feeling and connecting with my son. I knew that was important, but it was not what I prioritized because the idea of paying the cost to be So the example you get is the example you see. There was no book, There was no doctor SEUs for this.
There was no beasting bad about fatherhood. So you know, how do how do fathers provide you know, a model not only to their sons but to their daughters about what they need from a man when they go out and start dating, Like, how can we as parents, especially as fathers, set a better example and roadmap to what
masculinity looks like. Because I feel like the issue that I'm dealing with as a as a forty four year old man, I can say that the issue I'm dealing with is trying to relearn something while also teaching it to someone at the same time.
So, your father, with the belief that I'm the provider, I pay the bills all the things, those things are important.
Being a provider paying the bill are.
Very important, and that's an important thing and so but whatever the woman in the household does, right, your mom working, somebody's taking care of children to whatever she's doing is also just as important.
Absolutely.
So the problem is that are again women have less value than men and boys. So whatever men are doing is always elevated. Our default setting is to give men the benefit of the doubt. Our default setting is to elevate what men do over what women do. So what women, Oh, she stays home and takes care of the kids. Have you stayed home to take care of the kids.
You run back to your job.
That's work, right, So it isn't like that's not work, but it's.
Not valued because women do it, and honestly, when men do do it, it is valued.
Oh what a great dad, He's doing all of those things right when women are juggling this all day long work and home and their relationship with their spouse as well. So we often put much more value on what men do and not on what women do. And that's that's really the way it plays out. Which is which is which is harmful and it's disrespectful.
And I want to add something one other division that we do. We don't listen to young people. So we think we know, we think we know how it is, we think we know how we should do it. And if you actually listen to five year olds up until as I said, up until whatever in the twenties, they tell you a story about who we are as human, what gets in the way, and how to solve it. A five year old boy says to his mom who comes into the kitchen of the mom's going through a divorce.
The mom doesn't want to have a sad face a sad home, so the boy says to his mom. Within a split second, seeing his mom with a big happy smile on her face, he says, Mom, Mommy, why are you smiling when you're feeling sad. And what that five year old is showing is he can he's or he is asking why are you faking in emotion? That's a deep feeling. That's a deep feeling. Another five year old boy said to his mom, Mommy, are you yelling at
me because your mommy yelled at you? I mean, think about how genius we come out into the world as humans with that natural intelligence, and then what happens is we grow up and we become less intelligent. And I'm not just being snarky when I say that we really do become less intelligent. We become more cowed over by our cultural norms, and we don't listen to our heart, we don't listen to our minds. We start believing in
things that we know are not true. My daughter asked me that at eight, why do we believe in things we know aren't true? You know, and we start believing in things about ourselves because seven year old boys were I promise you they know this stuff we're talking about right now. They don't even be taught this stuff.
What role does society play, especially in black and brown fathers, you know, dealing with all of these extra cultural pressures when they're outside the home and being able to or not being able to partition those stresses and bringing that into the house because I'm sure to some degree my dad not to some degree, my dad dealt with a
lot of racism because that was his calling journalistically. So you get a nice full day white folks yelling at you at a couple of protests, and you come home, Yeah, you might be a little bit more on edge, and you probably are also a little bit more disconnected with your child because you're still processing your own stuff that's going on out there in the real world.
How does mental.
Health play a role in men sometimes misplaying the role of father?
Fortunately, mental health, talking about mental health, accepting mental health is becoming more and more acceptable among men. And it's really because men who have an influencing platform, people like yourself, Roy, who can talk about mental health being important. Other men are listening to that and saying that, oh, okay, so you know, maybe it's not about weakness. Maybe I do need to do that because we know on some level that this isn't working for us either, right, men know that.
But when we talk about again the construct of racism that so we have men who living in this man box and distressors around that not asking for help, so we don't go to the doctor when we need to, We don't ask for help when we need to. All these other things, anxiety and depression are really off. The charge suicide is about three and a half times higher
among men than among women. Men are living only about six years five and six years less than women for all of these things, including not getting medical checkups for prevention. But we go in more for intervention all of those things.
But then when you have the issue of black men and men of color, the trauma, as you said, of just dealing and walking around every day a racist society is a very traumatic thing, so much so that we do it so much that we it's kind of like we don't even pay attention to it anymore until it's extreme, like you know, some like George Floyd or something.
But we're dealing with these traumas all the time, and.
Our boys are too, right, the boys are also, so they have to have a place to be able to talk about that, to debrief about it, to see that it's not about them, that it's not that anything wrong with them. It's actually the opposite that they're that they're good and that they're worthy and that they are enough, but they're not getting these messages. So we need to lean in, especially for our boys and for our black men. But again because of this, they need to prove that
yourself in this man box. And black men haven't really had the opportunity in the same that white same way that white men have, right, because white men can do it, and so black men can do it. You know, you'll see it more in sports, entertainment, music, that kind of thing where you'll see many more images of black men who are really successful, where white men get to play
out this power and control thing in all areas. Right, So it can be exaggerated also, but it also can be something where it's really harmful for us because it limits us so much as black men. It really is a limiting thing, but it's also a way of protecting ourselves.
I Naobi, I want to direct a question to you, and Ted, feel free to jump in. I'm gonna paint you the scenario. Yeah, and you tell me what the hell I should have said to this child? Okay, So I take my boy to a kid's birthday party and like a five year old just turns to me and we're just watching.
It's not my child, it's someone else's child.
I don't know whose child.
And he asked, with a straight face, why do men work harder than women?
Yeah, and I just.
And you know, you don't want to give the wrong answer and poisonous child. And then he takes it back to his family, goes and then yeah, telling those Daddy told me that me and oh, and I was like, hey, we all work hard and we have to look to make sure that the work that we see the work. Just because you don't see the work doesn't mean that the work isn't happening. And I just kind of ate
my pizza and drifted away from this child. Before you ask more deeper philosophical questions, what role does media play in influencing the perceptions of you know, what it means means to be a man, what fatherhood means. You know, there's the type of content that we're exposing our children to also kind of perpetuate those roles just a little bit absol.
As I became more.
Conscious of gender equity within the home, Like there was a show as a pepper pig, I was like, oh, let me make sure Mama Pig out there doing some stuff too, and then it ain't just Daddy Pig coming in the house with a briefcase.
Yeah.
Yeah, so I had to run every show through a filter. But what role does media play in a lot of this?
Okay, So first I want to ask I want to give you some support for how you responded to that point. But I do think that when people say things that make as if what we're trying to fight against real, like men work harder, men are more human than other people, or men are smarter or whatever, it is the best way to deal with that, whether it's little kids or your colleagues, roy is to ask questions about it. So tell me about why you think they work harder. So
what's the example? And then the idea is to say, okay, so tell me about what your mom does, like, tell me what right, so that you're engaging the conversation, because ultimately, what I learned from working with college students is if you say you're wrong that you know it never works.
So I basically try to figure out what is the mindset that's making them think that, and then all of a sudden, introducing like, let's think about what women do let's look go into what your mom does you know and so that they can begin to recognize it without being told they're wrong. And I think media, of course reinforces I mean, it reinforces this incoherent, immoral, amorl story.
We tell about ourselves that there's some humans that are more human than others, there's some human qualities that are more valuable than other human qualities, and we repeat that story. So media just reinforces it. And I don't care what kind of media it reinforces it.
Now.
Obviously shows like this are critical because this allows us to disrupt those narratives. So I don't want to make media all blankets, but obviously it does. I mean, you know, we are living right now in an immoral, a moral, immature culture, and we got to disrupt it with these kind of conversations.
On the other side of the break, we're going to talk solutions. And I want to know how hopeful you all are for this next generation of men coming down. How hopeful are you from a six year old, I want to know. I want to hear it straight out your mouth. This is behind the scenes. We'll be right back beyond the scenes. We are around in third and headed for home. It's been a wonderful, wonderful discussion here. How can somebody prioritize their mental health? And if you
are a man that is in a friendship recession. Now I'm not talking about teenagers. We're talking about grown men. What tools can men take to build and deepen and strengthen the connections that they already.
Have normalize it. When I'm in classes, I will get a switch within four seconds. I'm not exaggerating. Boys will tell I will read a quote for twelve year old boys that says something soft, you know, I love him so much from my book Deep Secrets. They will start cracking up. I'll say, why are you laughing? They'll say, the dude sounds gay, and I'll say, well, I didn't look at his sexuality. I'm just telling you that eighty percent of boys sound like that at some point in
their teenage years. And they will say inevitably, for real, And I'll say, oh, yeah, for real, that's really what what teenage boys say. And guess what happens roy within force. I'm not kidding. They will immediately start talking about their own friendships, their desire for friendships. All they need is the permission to feel and the permission to ask. And once they know it's normal that they want friendships that they then they can. Then they know how to do
it. It's natural. I wish the world could hear that the questions that twelve year old boys ask when given a safe space, because they are geniuses. They're geniuses in terms of understanding how love works, how relationships works, how humans work, and so I just they normalize it and then in their homes and teachers and bosses, you just got to make it normal so that you create spaces where friendships are valued. Teachers, put don't separate out kids that are friends,
put them together. Put them together and then talk about how they can help each other learn the material that they learn it better with each other than by themselves. So don't do that thing. And we're going to separate you because you guys are friends. It's like no, no, Actually use that relationship to learn. There's a beautiful study at UVA that shows has been replicated. The subject of the research stands in front of a hill and has to estimate the steepness of the hill with a backpack
on their back. Okay, it's an experiment, a research experiment. They're standing next to a best friend in one condition, standing there a stranger in another condition by themselves or with someone they know who they don't know very well. Okay, so in each condition they have to estimate the steepness.
Of the hill.
You got it right, Hm, Those that are standing next best friend see the hill as less deep. So what's incredible is that we actually see the world as less difficult when we're standing next to someone who loves us. We see that the math problem, the whatever you're doing is less difficult when you're next to someone who loves you. So use that in education, Use that in the workplace. Put people who are close together working on teams together. You see what I'm saying, So you disrupt the even
at home, talk about friendships. We got to think as parents to say, tell me about, you know, thinking about our own friendships. Talk about with your kids. I don't share the intimacies of my own friendships, but I talk about when I feel get my feelings hurt with friends. I talk about how that made me feel bad when so and so didn't return my text and I wrote her three times that you didn't write back, and that made me feel bad and then I asked them for advice.
They're teenagers, so I'll say what do you think I should do? What do you think I should say? And I see you do that with my son as well, by the way, and so they what the message they get for and this is this is normal, This is normal. This isn't some weird thing that you have to you know, you have to get special help for.
You bring up a lot of great points and you know, and you're talking about your kids, and I'm a father also, they're between twenty one and thirty three now. But would it was not unusual at all for me to ask, especially my boys, on scale of one to ten, how do you feel today?
Right?
Or to have those conversations that were informal conversations around how they're doing, and to really lean in and ask more and more questions. So that's really important to your question, Roy. For men, it's normalized that we're taught to not ask for help, to not need any more, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, all those kinds of things. And when we do spend time with each other, it might be around going and having a drink, or it might be
around a sporting event or watching a game. That's where the bonding happens, right, And what we need to be able to do, And what's helpful is that we really lean into the strength and vulnerability, right, Like, I'm really going through something, right and I want to share that with you, and I don't. What men often say is okay, man, well you know it'll get better.
Let's just move on.
They don't really lean in and process in the same way that women are taught, honestly in our society to use more language and ask more questions, right, Because I'm sure I'm sure your wife asks more questions about what you're feeling that you might ask her. You just want to know you're okay, good, okay now to talk about anything else, right, So.
You don't ask enough questions. Therefore you don't care. It's like I do care. I pay the bills. Don't you see this fee? This warm heat in this house?
We absolutely care, but we're not comfortable asking those questions because we've been told you don't go into that emotional space.
You stay away from that emotional space so much.
So that even when we go to and thinking about your listeners, I bet if there's a woman listening to the podcast there's a man in her life, her brother, her father, Mancy's dating her husband who's going to the she gonna make sure she goes with him.
Why because he's not going to ask the questions that he needs to ask.
Because even that, for us is vulnerability, right, Even that for us it is like, oh, I don't know, I just want to get in and out.
You go to doctor, yes, but you ask them about this well? Truth? Right?
So vulnerability is a strength, it really is. And honestly, when men become vulnerable, they're respected for that because other men see that, Wow, that was vulnerable, and that's his strength.
So it isn't something we need to run away from.
And that's going to give us a better sense of well being, a better sense of mental health, to really have health mentally and to be able to support everyone else along the way. And it's going to really make us feel better too, and it's modeling it for our children as well.
How does therapy play a role in this? Men are half the country, We are eighty percent of the suicides according to the CDC. Where does therapy of any kind help with anything that you all have just been talking about.
I want to say something that's very specific to me being a woman, and I hear this from other women friends. So therapy is huge because it allows the space. And this is what happens Roy in between heterosexual relationships almost always is women feel I'm going to now be the voice of all women across the world, Roy, are you ready?
So basically that we are a burdened with the care of our children and the care of our husband, and now with this new emotional awakening of men, we now have to be the therapist for our husbands as well and our partners, and there's a lot of anger about that, like, we can't be the therapist, we can't be the caretaker of the therapist that everything you know for our husbands. And then the dynamic I see in my friends. I do not do research on this, but I see it
in my community is resentment. Is that the woman doesn't have time to be the therapist to her husband. He wants her to because he feels safe talking to her. So I would say, therapy, that's not your wife, it's not your partner, that's not your romantic partner. Whatever it is. It could be a friend, could be a friend, but a professional who really knows basically how to make you
reconnect with your own humanity. So I would very much encourage therapy, especially in terms of understanding that you need multiple people to support you. This whole notion that we could rely on one person in our life, you know, our spouse or our partner to be the end all be all is getting in the way. It's getting in
the way. We need multiple people. We need our moms, our grandmas, our aunts, our uncles, our therapists, our best friend, our partner, we need we need a community to build, you know, to make us fully human and so that we act like humans. And we're still stuck in this model, Ted, you know this, We're still stuck. We put all our emotional eggs into one romantic basket and then expect us to be happy with this one person, and that's just not real.
Therapy is very important and we don't need to even call it that. When I encourage men to get therapy, I'll say, man, you just need you need a sounding board, you know what I mean. You need somebody who can share objectively what they might think not you know, it's great to have a friend, but we're not always objective, and we kind of want things to get better for you and it me. It may not require us leaning in to really ask more questions that really get to
a real solution that's meaningful, that's more meaningful. So really encouraging therapy for men. I encourage therapy for men. I've been in and out of therapy for different things throughout my life. My children know that my children have also engaged in therapy at some point in their life because it's not something to run away from.
It's actually they needed a sounding board too. And I would say even just.
Go to share any frustrations you have about me or your mom, like, just go to start talking about things where you can share some things that you may not feel totally comfortable sharing with us at this point. So therapy is essential. It will prevent depression. The anxiety among manager is off the charge. As you said, suicide is really three and a half times higher than women and eighty percent of suicide, I believe you mentioned for the CDC.
So there's something that's not right, that's not working for us as man. So this is the fix. So with all of that being said, let's end it here. We've already kind of unpacked ways that we can try and change the culture. What hope and optimism do you have for the future of manhood?
Yeah, I have a lot of hope. Yeah. Ahead, it looks like you're not finished. Really well. You know, we gonna see how this will grow up.
You know, you got to understand my sample size is one, y'all, the one studying one hundred and fifty people and writing books.
I'm not writing books. I'm just raising one. He seems to be doing good so far.
He's definitely in tune with his emotions and expressive about it, way more so than I was at the same mile marker.
And that's what we need to allow, right.
We really need to allow our children like your son to embrace and express his full range of emotions.
And we need to do that too.
When he's going through fear, we can say, you know, I feel afraid too, and this is what I do, and I want to work through that fear because on the other side, no matter how it turns out, it's always good that I've worked through that fear. So we're not saying don't push our children to confront things even if they're difficult.
We want them to, but we.
Don't want them you know, we don't want to motivate them by denigrating them or using girls or women or others to say, don't be like that or don't be like this.
Right, those are the kind of things that we really want to do.
We want to help them express through their language what's going on. So I have a lot of optimism about men, about manhood. I think that we've reached a point where it's clearly not working and we know that, and so now it's just a matter of time of how do we need to purge what needs to happen so that we can start talking in real ways that really connect with our humanity. That's the real thing, really connected with it on it just as there's a racial awakening in a lot of ways, and it's.
Difficult, it's painful.
People are being triggered all the time, right, So it's difficult, but we have to get through it. And the same thing here around our own mental health and our own sense of well being.
I think first of all, we have to make sure we're locating the problem where the problem is. So the problem is not men, the problem is not women. The problem is not non gender conforming people, right, the problem is not black people, it's not poor people, it's not immigrants. The problem is a culture that doesn't align with our nature and a culture that doesn't nourish the best angels
of our nature. Right, So the idea is, if the focus is on valuing both the heart and the soft sides of ourselves equally, equally, men and women, non gender conforming, I don't care what your identity is. Your heart is soft. If that's our goal, which it should be, then it becomes easy because we're naturally hard and soft. And the hope is and I work with. Remember I teach at NYU, so I see one hundred college students a semester, and the hope with I see those young people across race,
across class, across nationality, all sorts of young people. They are starving roy for this conversation. They are starving for it. They are literally, I'm not I'm not even exaggerating, they're yelling at us in those in my classes I teach of like, what is wrong with you people? And this is what we want? Why are you still saying academic achievement is more important than close friendship? Like why are you still saying that? Because that's not what's important in
the world. I just have to say the fact that they even this close scot this nomination. It's just about boys friendships. That's all the film is about. And then something happens because the friendship gets in the way, and the enormous response to it means that cultural change is already happening, right, It's already happening.
This has been a wonderful conversation. I cannot thank both of you enough for giving me a piece of your time and given our viewers a little bit of knowledge. That's all the time we have for today, ted Naobi, thank you so much for going beyond the scenes with me.
Thank you so much.
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