My earliest memory was my father bringing me down in my mother's basement, putting up his hands and teaching me how to throw jabs and punches. I was there that he gave me those three words, be a man. Stop with the tears, stop with the emotions. If you're going to be a man in this world, you better learn how to dominate and control people and circumstances. That was the source of tremendous shame.
I left that room with tears coming down my eyes, just feeling I wasn't quite man enough. Football became a tremendous place to hide. You can hide inside that helmet.
You can hide behind the roar of the crowd. You get to project this facade, this persona, the epitome of what it means to be a man in this culture. I thought if I could manifest as a hyper-masculinity, well, somehow that would validate who and what I was.
Certainly my father would respect that, see how powerful, how strong, how tough I was, then give me the love and attention that I desperately wanted. I'd ask every man to think about what age they were, what was the context when someone told you to be a man. That's one of the most destructive phrases in this culture, I believe.
Stop crying. Don't cry. Stop with the emotions. Pick yourself up. Don't be a chump.
Don't be a pussy. No one will ever disrespect you. Be cool and be kind of a dick. Always keep your motion. Nobody likes a tattletale.
What a fag. You little bitch. Don't let your woman run your life.
Grows come before hoes. Get laid. Be a man.
Be a man. Grow some balls. So man up.
Man up. Man up. Man up.
Man up. Grow some fucking balls. Act like a man. Be a man.
Act like a man. Yet again another teen has taken his own life after being bullied for years. The details of the gang rape that took place outside a high school homecoming dance are horrifying. Three teens confessed to shooting an Australian man for quote, the fun of it.
Thirteen people were... charged in the beating death of a Florida A&M drum major, the result of a banned initiation ritual. A student was found dead, alcohol five times the legal limit in his system.
He killed his girlfriend and then shot himself. Over 20 little children dead. He also shot his mother.
The shooting was apparently premeditated. One gunman and he is among the dead. If you really knew me, you would know I feel like an outsider at school.
I'm having a bad day. Sometimes it's hard to talk to somebody about it. If you really knew me, you would know that when I'm sad, I really don't say anything about it. I used to hide emotions, like when I'm sad I wouldn't tell anybody, and when I'm mad I wouldn't tell. For a long time I didn't have any friends, so I didn't have anyone to talk to.
We don't really talk about feelings or nothing in our house. If you really knew me, you'd know that sometimes I feel like I can't be myself. If you really knew me, you would know that I don't really know my dad.
If you really knew me, you would know that my dad, he in jail, and I don't think I've ever seen him out of jail. Around fifth grade, my mother passed away. Most people don't know that about me.
If you really knew me, you would know that my mom and dad fought over me. My parents went through a little phase where they told us they were gonna get a divorce. I just needed someone to talk to about it. My mom didn't have no good boyfriends.
We were abused. I felt like just giving up on life. I got bullied in sixth grade. I felt like an outcast.
I felt alone for a long time. If you walk onto any playground in America where there's a bunch of boys happily playing, you can start a fight by asking one question. Who's a sissy around here? And two boys will go, I don't know, he is, he is, he is, and they can have a fight, or all the boys will go, he is, he is, and that boy will either have to fight them or run home crying.
That idea of being seen as weak, as a sissy, in the eyes of other guys starts in our earliest moments of boyhood. And it follows us all the way through our lives, proving to other guys that we're not girls, that we're not women, that we're not gay. We've constructed an idea of masculinity in the United States that doesn't give young boys a way to feel secure in their masculinity, so we make them go prove it all the time. If I can man up, why step down from now, you feel me? Masculinity is not organic.
It's reactive. It's not something that just develops. It's a rejection of everything that is feminine.
Sometimes my friends act like they're tough when I feel like they're not. From the beginning, we're taught as boys to lock down our emotions. We can't talk about being afraid.
We can't talk about being hurt. We can talk about being pissed off. We can talk about being angry. We can't talk about being sad. If you never cry, then you have all these feelings stuffed up inside of you, and then you can't get them out.
We put them on that trajectory through our popular culture, through our parenting styles, through our educational styles, and through assumptions about natural manhood and maleness that we pass along that are incredibly insulting and damaging. And then there's a whole social system that polices them through this low level of threat from other men if they're not man enough. Today we're going to get into how we learned masculinity as children, where we learned it from who.
Taught it to us. And I'm just going to ask some of you guys to shout out the ideas that you had on it from your childhood. In my household, we don't cry. Showing emotion is like, you're weak. If you're hurt, just hold it in.
No tattle-telling. Fight back. You know, everything was surrounded around money. Money, money, money, money, money.
Be the best. Go for the triple instead of the double. It was okay to be a womanizer. A man has to be dominant and in charge and has control.
You know, a man does everything to the extreme. Never back down from anything. A man uses violence to solve problems. The first line every boy learns in America is we associate masculinity with athletic ability. Size, strength, or some kind of skill set.
I've always felt the pressure of you need to be buff, you need to be masculine, you have to have a six pack. Those boys that can catch it down and out or hit the hanging curve, they're elevated. I wanna play football. Football, basketball, one of the sports. Have fun doing it.
Make some money. Like one of them TV type lives. They're set up for a tremendous failure and frustration in life because being a man doesn't have a single thing to do with athletic ability. You think about all the other boys on that playground. They don't just want to play sports.
They want to do computers or music or drama or debate. This past month, I took part in my first theater production. Like, now I'm looking back, like, oh, I wish I had taken part in that throughout high school. I don't know. I guess I didn't because it was just something taboo.
You just weren't supposed to do it. Second lie every boy learns is that we associate masculinity with economics. I'm not sure I'm the only one. success. My name is Jordan Belfort.
The year I turned 26, I made $49 million, which really pissed me off because it was three shy of a million a week. You know, it's been said that comparison is a thief of all happiness. So if you're building your sense of masculinity based on power possessions, there's always going to be someone that has more. That leads to an incredibly empty life of striving for things at the expense of what's really important.
I've had eight-year-old kids sit on my couch, eight-year-old boys, and I'll say, so what do you want to be when you grow up? And they'll say, a venture capitalist. There are so many things wrong with that that I hardly know where to start. The extent to which he comes in and has already been programmed, he is going to have very limited options in his life, and they will never feel authentically like his own.
And then the third criteria is a culture. We associate sexual conquests with masculinity. Seek the free! It's management. Alleged with the...
I can only imagine. I found the top five hottest girlfriends of Derek Jeter. Men everywhere, we all salute you. Associating that with masculinity is so dehumanizing. You tapped that ass, didn't you?
Told you. You know you tapped that ass. You put it in the backseat, bam, cold X.
Man, I got a wife. You got a dick. You do have a deck, don't you?
Well, those words are designed to keep boys silent, to keep them conforming to the construct. My grandfather is very much that alpha male type. He's a former military drill sergeant, a good old boy from the South, who was able to go out in the world and sort of pull himself up by his bootstraps and very much fulfill sort of the American dream in that regard. Granted, he was a white male in a particular time, which gave him access to that success, even if he was poor to begin with.
I grew up with my grandfather's voice. Hearing you need to be bigger, stronger, faster. So I was always having to prove myself. And never succeeding. That made me very insecure.
And not feeling like I was good enough. When I was a kid, I had long blonde hair. I had a very high voice. I wasn't a cool kid. I was this awkward little kid.
I sang in choir. I played clarinet in the band. But I also played baseball and football and basketball. and got to do all those different things and express myself in all sorts of different ways.
Things changed around middle school. I started to get bullied and made fun of. You could call it a fag or a pussy or a sissy or a wuss. And that's when the social pressures really kicked in.
I cut my long hair off, changed the way I dressed. I dropped my voice. I don't even know when my voice naturally broke.
I have no idea because I forced it low. I played more sports and joined all the teams. I dated the head cheerleader.
And distance myself from people who were less masculine than me. But a friend who didn't play sports was kind of effeminate. He was being picked on even more than I was. And instead of me sort of staying by his side and being his friend, I remember to some degree making the decision to push myself to not be friends with him anymore, to not go to his house, to...
And I remember him asking me why I did that. And I couldn't tell him. I didn't know what to tell him at the time. School was a training ground for me to learn how to perform masculinity.
To perform to be one of the guys. Throughout most of history, there's been this belief that men and women are fundamentally different creatures. And it probably begins with the Bible. Sex is a biological term. It refers to which chromosomes you have.
2X is female, X and Y is male. Gender is a social construct. These are expressions of masculinity or femininity, and both of these are spectrums, and they overlap. Boys and girls are far more human and far more the same than they are different.
If you gave 50,000 psychological tests to girls, it would fall out on a bell-shaped plate. curve. If you gave the same 50,000 psychological tests to boys, it would fall out on a boy bell-shaped curve. If you superimpose them, they'd be 90% overlapping. You've got the shoulders that stick out on either side, and those are very often the traits that feed into our stereotypes.
People make the assumption that because the brain is biological, that any sex difference in the brain must be hardwired. But the brain is plastic. The brain changes as a result of experience.
You go through a process called proliferation and pruning, which is that you make a whole bunch of brain connections, and the ones that you use are strengthened, and the ones that you don't use die back. Whether it's empathy or aggression or spatial ability or verbal ability, things that a child spends their time on, that's what they're going to be good at. Parents from even before a child is born. start thinking about the child differently, they decorate the room differently, they buy different clothes.
So this notion that there is such a thing as gender-neutral rearing, or that parents are not responsible for gender differences, is a psychological impossibility. We are becoming much more bifurcated in terms of hyper-masculinity and hyper-femininity. Girls'products have become much pinker, and boys'products have become much more camo and much more violent.
And it's not just in the toys. but it's also in television programming and movies. This hyper-masculinization and hyper-feminization reflect cultural tension and fear about the fact that gender is socially constructed. And we respond in ways to try to organize and simplify the world that actually end up simplifying it to such a great extent that it puts pressure on young men and young women to fit into those boxes.
You gotta go in there and you gotta be tough, but you can't see sissying out. By the time a boy is five years old, he's pretty much taught that it's not okay to cry in public. He may still do it, but the expectation is by the time he's 10 that he's perfected it. And if he's 12 and he's still crying in public, there's a problem. Oh my dear God.
Are you one of those single peer people? You are a worthless pansy ass who is now weeping and slobbering like a nine-year-old girl. Boys are not encouraged to talk about any kind of pain with anyone else. And when they do talk about pain, fathers particularly, but mothers also, tend to focus more on how to solve that, or what they're going to do, or their actions. Hit me.
Hit me. Come on. Come on. Come on, son. Come on.
Son, left. They're learning how is it possible for them as boys to be in the world and to engage in their relationships and to behave in ways that will be considered socially acceptable. And in learning to accommodate to those ideals, they're learning to conceal or just downplay qualities that are traditionally associated with girls and women. Mothers are told that if they hold a boy too closely, they're hurting his development. You're making him a mama's boy.
You want to be a flying monkey mama's boy snitch? Or do you want to be a man? Now, being a mama's girl, or daddy's little girl, that's wonderful.
But a mama's boy? It means somehow he's soft. Have a great day, sweetie pie!
We're concerned that our child is going to be ridiculed. We're concerned that our son will be the target of violence. And so we give him what we think he needs in order to avoid that. Mario, football players don't cry. What?
Football players don't cry. The reason men are less likely to show empathy, less likely to show vulnerability, less likely to bring up children in that kind of way is that they've been socialized into this. I was really very moved by the fathers who brought their little four-year-olds and five-year-olds to school in the morning and how tender these men were with their sons, how patient and...
Loving they were with these little boys. So I asked them, what do you see in your sons that leads you to say, I hope he never loses that. And the fathers spoke about their sons'out there quality. They were so emotionally open. And their real joy in their friends.
And the men felt that on the road to manhood, they themselves had lost touch with these qualities in themselves. The quandary for them was, Would they have to silence the very qualities that they most valued in their sons? It was the most exquisite sense of dilemma.
My father, we didn't really have a great relationship. His night job was drinking. He was an alcoholic.
I was afraid of him. He was a mean man. He was emotionalist.
He didn't care about much. In his eyes, going to school wasn't the power behind what we should have been doing. It was get a good job, get a lot of women, and then you're a man. My mother was more of my striving force. She taught me that education was important.
So every year, on Mother's Day, of course, I would send her a Mother's Day card, but also I would send her a card on Father's Day, and I would just thank her for playing both roles in my life. The moment I found out I was going to be a father was very scary for me. I was an undergrad and my son's mother told me she was pregnant and we were no longer together and I told her if she wanted I would raise him I would take care of him. My father didn't raise me and this is very important for me to raise my son.
It's been very hard to play both roles as a mother and father for Jackson. I was taught that men are tough they're strong. I spent a lot of nights crying. Because he did have feelings and I had to, you know, take care of that. And then one day it clicked.
And it clicked because Jackson said to me, Daddy, I'm sensitive. And I was like, okay. Okay.
So then I just started like, I started reading a lot, you know, doing Google searches on how to be sensitive and stuff like that. I started just asking him how he felt like how do you feel why are you sad are you okay he taught me how to be more in touch with my own emotions and in his as well like he would cry sometimes I would cry with him and I would tell him daddy wasn't allowed to cry growing up but it's okay you need to cry cry it took some time for me to get there men are doing better men are much more loving with their sons and speak about love and hugs and kisses, you know. Men are much more purposeful in, you know, the experience of nurturing their children and sharing in those responsibilities.
So we are getting better. The fact that we're having this conversation speaks to progress, but it doesn't take away that there's a lot of work still to do. Growing up in the household that I grew up in, there was a lot of physical abuse.
My father used to beat my mother pretty horrifically from my recollection. My father sold drugs and that's how he made his living. He was in and out of prison my entire childhood. In fact, I think he was gone the first two years that I was born, so I didn't even really get to establish that connection that most young.
Boys get to establish with their father. In middle school, it was extremely difficult to deal with because I didn't know what it meant to be a man. Like, I did not have a father figure in my life.
I just had strong women. I was bullied a lot growing up because I'm not the most masculine of men. I never have been.
Why am I ostracized and treated different? Because I don't want to fight. Because I don't see the point in having rampant unprotected sex with uncountable women and then sitting here and boasting about it over booze and smoking a joint.
And yet that's what society deems as masculine. I don't value that. And I think it's because I still am so close to my mom and to my grandmother and they're both extremely strong and respectable. Not only women, they're respectable people. And so that's...
That's to me is what I wanted to emulate. One of the things that came up in my study has to do with the mean team, which was a team created by the boys for the boys for the purpose of acting against the girls. This was a pre-kindergarten class.
In the beginning, there was a little bit of intermixing, but then by December of that first year, the boys versus girls dynamic had become clearer. and even the hierarchy among the boys had become clear. It had these rules and these ways of being and these ways of engaging each other and behaving.
One of the rules was that they couldn't play with the girls. And if you broke those rules, you could be fired and technically not be a boy anymore. One of the boys told me, I'm actually friends with all the girls.
I actually like the girls. But if Mike, the leader of the mean team, finds out, then he'll fire me from his club, and then I won't have a club. They totally understand like kind of these are the rules and then these are the consequences for their status among the boys.
When I was choosing schools for Roman to go to kindergarten, I specifically chose one that was Christian based. It seemed that there was an emphasis on family values and kindness. But by the end of kindergarten, I started to see a change in...
My son's behavior and the kids around him and I would describe it as like just a hard edge that got progressively worse. In first grade there were days where he would come home and just burst into tears and I would say what is going on and he he said well you know so and so pushed me out of line for the fourth time this week and the teacher really didn't do anything about it or you know they were making fun of me at recess or um you know. I went to soccer practice and they said I was the worst person on the team.
So it started with things like that. And by second grade, there was one day where he came home saying that he was strangled in the hallway. By the middle of the school year, I would pick him up from school. And I could see in his face that he was doing everything he could to hold back the tears because he didn't want to be made fun of even more by the boys.
And the second we drove half a block away, just the floodgates opened and he was... So sad. I just felt alone.
I wasn't doing what everyone else was doing. I was different. There's a dominance hierarchy.
There are tough guys who are on the top and there are weaklings, girls, who are the bottom of the heap. Now this is the origin of sexism and homophobia. In sexism it's that a girl isn't as strong as a boy.
With homosexuality, the gay man becomes the most stigmatized version of weakness and sissiness. What happens in your relations with other kids is that you pick out someone who appears weak in that way. You maybe bully him, but maybe it's just a more subtle kind of demeaning.
And you start hating that thing about him that you're afraid of in yourself. I was born in Salt Lake City. After first grade, we moved to Massachusetts.
I dealt with a lot of bullying. I dealt with a lot of taunting. I got picked on because I was the smallest kid, the skinniest kid, the most non-white kid, and lastly, the kid probably most suspected to be gay, which, you know, is true.
It ended up being true. But yeah, I remember these kind of big kids coming over and yelling out, hey faggot, or why don't you go back to China? I would always fight back.
I'd get my stomach punched in. I just remember coming home from school with like bloody hands just from being pushed onto the concrete and my hands kind of grazing against the concrete. It was terrorizing for me.
I would always end up crying. I felt a lot of shame from... not being able to defend myself, my dad would start giving me advice about how to fight back.
I mean, I love my mom, you know, and I love my dad, but I just got the same thing from them. Everybody's telling me to just deal with it. After a fight, I learned to just wash my own hands of the blood.
I learned to just not talk about it. I felt so down and depressed to the point of contemplating suicide many times. I just didn't feel like living anymore. I never really knew why I had such a difficult time talking about how I felt until I looked back at my history and was like, well, obviously that's why, you know, because I was discouraged with physical force from ever expressing emotions. Boys directly make the link between having friendships and mental health.
So they'd tell me if I didn't have someone to talk to about my secrets and about my personal life, I would go crazy. I would go wacko. Sometimes when I'm sad, I could tell my friends this and they could try to help me out and stuff.
11, 12, 13, 14 boys tell these very passionate stories about other boys and wanting to be friends with them and wanting to share secrets. This one boy described how he was having difficulties with his parents understanding him. The person who saved him on a daily basis was his best friend, who he felt really loved him unconditionally.
Starting when they were about 15, 16, 17, the language shifts. You hear boys actually talking about their struggles and their friendships, being hurt by other boys, feeling betrayed by other boys, wanting to have intimate friendships, not knowing how to find those friendships. From middle school, I had four really close friends and we did everything together.
Once I went into high school, I struggle finding people I can talk to about things because I feel like I have to deal with it myself. I'm not supposed to get help. They really buy into a culture that doesn't value what we've feminized.
So we've made feminine relationships, emotions, all these critical things, empathy. And so boys begin to devalue their relational parts to themselves, their relational needs, their relational desires. In good times, guys are like really...
Close to each other and they're really good friends with each other and they interact a lot but when things get a little bit worse it's more like you're on your own. One of the adolescent boys described it as if you spill your guts the way that girls do, if you tell somebody how you really feel then they can use that against you at any time. So the loss of the intimacy in their friendships, feeling often times for many of our boys very lonely, very isolated, they really enter into a culture of masculinity.
that makes these bizarre equations that mail into He has to be about sexuality. They'll start saying things like, I feel close to him, no homo. He's cool, no homo. So this constant illusion that any sign of intimacy is going to be perceived as potentially gay, they understand that if you're straight, you have no desire for male intimacy. We don't do that with women, we do that with men.
Each of them is posturing based on how the other boys are posturing, and what they end up missing is what they each really want, which is just that closeness. Drinking and drug taking are very often a way that boys relax those tight rules which say they always have to be silent and strong and when you get drunk you can hug your friends and you can tell them how much you love them. You can have sex with a girl and not feel afraid in a way that all people feel when they start having sex because it's intimate and it's unfamiliar and it's incredibly exposing.
It's not just acceptable that teens are drinking, doing drugs, and having sex. It's expected and sometimes looked down on if you're not doing that. You feel out of place if you're the only sober one there.
To the breaking door, yo! To the break, yo! Let me hear you shout. So boys take drugs and alcohol, but they're often doing it to treat loneliness. When they're lonely or in a lot of psychic pain and they don't have the words to put it into language, they take to drink and drugs to blot it out.
Hey, Mom. Hi. My mom and father met when they were about 17 years old.
They decided to leave Mexico for a better future. My mom told me, you know, go to school and get a career so, you know, you don't have to be like me. ¿Quieres comer algo? Okay. ¿Sandwich, una quesadilla o algo?
Mi esposo y yo tomamos la decisión de separarnos en 2007. He left and I was left alone with the three children. I rarely came to visit them. He told me that because he had things to do and was busy.
My dad actually, he was kind of a wild kid. He would like to party a lot and he would like to go out with his friends. One night he just made a bad move and decided to drink and drive.
And, you know, he got pulled over. They found out later he wasn't. A U.S. citizen. So they deported him back to Mexico and he's been there since I was in seventh grade.
I miss my dad very much and, you know, there's nothing I can do but visiting him in Mexico. Desde allí empezaron los problemas con Luis. Luis era un buen niño. Era muy dulce, pero ya en el siete ya él completamente cambió todo.
I noticed a bunch of different faces. There's a lot of pretty girls, and then there was like the gang members, and then the skaters, and then kids that smoke. When I decided to join a gang, it was because it was just cool. I was eventually jumped in, and you know, I claimed a color. They gave me a nickname to just affiliate myself.
I would ditch class, add four F's. I ran away from home. I just found myself a lot of troubles.
I just didn't care. I told him, Luis, are you okay? Yes. But there are times when I feel like he's not okay. Then he gets angry, he screams.
It's never a good time to talk to him. Sometimes I've felt very desperate. Around my freshman year is when I felt really depressed and alone. I would just wake up in a bad mood. Sometimes I would cry my I was up to sleep.
I didn't have no one to talk to. Like, no one could really listen to me and tell me, you know, it's gonna be okay, it's gonna be alright. Like, I got you or anything. I really felt like everyone gave up on me.
Even my mom. There's been a time where I almost did commit suicide. But I'm gonna put more pressure on my family. My mom. And my dad.
Basically all I had was marijuana. I was smoking it every day. I would always be high.
I was smoking. I wouldn't think about any troubles. I remember July 6th, we went to the cannabis club.
We got THC, wax, oil. We smoked a joint. And then next thing I know, I saw a cop flashing his lights.
He wrote us a ticket, he came back to the car, and he searched me. He found it in my shoe. And he put the cuffs on me and he told me, you have the right to remain silent, you're going to be taken to jail.
We recognize more and more that adolescents are more likely to be depressed and suicidal, but we imagine that that will be female adolescents because of the way we define depression. More removed, more quiet, not responding. What boys tend to do when they are getting depressed is actually the opposite. Boys are more likely to act out, more likely to become aggressive, using curse words and screaming at people.
But most people see it as a conduct disorder. Or just a bad kid. And what happens? Before they see the other signs of depression, which will come in adolescent males just as females, that young male may become suicidal, but no one has noticed it. Exactly at the age that we began to hear the language, the emotional language, disappear from boys narratives in the national data, that's exactly the age that boys begin to have five times the rate of suicide as girls.
The way boys are brought up makes them hide all of their natural, vulnerable, and empathic feelings behind a mask of masculinity. And also when they're most in pain. They can't reach out and ask for help because they're not allowed to or they won't be a real boy.
They're ashamed into this and they're very ashamed to break out of it. So they live behind an emotional mask that keeps boys from expressing their true feelings. I was soup to fit in, standing outside of your prison Tryna find ways I could get in Now I realize that I'm free, and I realize that I'm me And I found out that I'm not alone Cause there's plenty of people like me, that's right There's plenty of people like me, all love me despite me And all unashamed and all unafraid to speak out for what we might see.
I said it's training people like me. All outsiders like me. All unashamed and all unafraid to live out what they're supposed to be. I saw it.
This is my high school. I graduated from this high school. I never wanted to be a teacher.
I was going to be an engineer and make a lot of money. I became a teacher because I saw that my community was hurting without good teachers. And I think one of the biggest challenges was that, like, I've been through it, right? And so I want them to be able to know that they can move forward and they can succeed and they can do whatever they choose to do in life, but it's going to take hard work.
If you go two blocks away, you'll find prostitution. There's a lot of gang activity in the area. I consider it like a war zone, right?
Our kids get up every morning. They have to prepare their mask for how they're going to walk to get to school. So if that mask requires me not to let people see any of my vulnerabilities, that means I may have to put on a very tough mask.
And when I get here, hopefully I can take the mask off so I can focus on learning rather than continually wearing this hard shale. A lot of our students don't know how to take the mask off. So I want you to take one of these masks. Take the mask. Here's what we're gonna do.
On this mask, you're gonna draw what represents you. What are some things that you hold up every day when you walk to school that you let people see? And then on the back, I want you to write what is it you don't let people see?
Like, what's behind the mask? All right? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. What else to pay to get it? So what I want you to do is I want you to take your mask and I want you to ball it up.
I want you to hit someone across the circle with your mask. Don't leave your seat. Don't leave your seat.
You can't leave your seat. Open it up. Okay.
So who wants to reveal their secret? what's on the mask they open. Read it out loud, just the front.
Funny, caring, and happy. Okay. What's behind the mask?
Sadness and fear. Sadness and fear. Goofy, kindness, happiness, silliness, smile, and fun.
Okay. On the back? Anger.
Anger. Okay. I read mine.
The front says entertainment. That's what I show on the mask. On the back says pain.
Energy, frustration, happiness, friendly, heart, smile, outgoing. And on the back it says sadness, scared, tears, missing my dad, trying to take care of my brothers, and pain. Why do you think we hold back our pain? People don't want everybody to know everything.
You gotta keep your poker face on. You can't let them know what you got. How hard is that? To walk around every day with the poker face on. It's not just an activity on paper.
It's about real stuff that we're dealing with as young men that we hide behind because we don't feel safe. Almost 90% of you had pain and anger on the back of that paper. That's not a coincidence. That is real. And we're only eight here.
There are hundreds of young men out there that are having the same experience, but they don't have anybody to talk to about it. They're holding back sadness, they're holding back pain, they're holding back anger because they have nobody who is even asking them. What's up with you, man?
What's happening? What's going on? How can I support you?
I want each of you to be able to say what you need to say. Because if we're ever going to dig down to the deepness of our pain, young men, if we're ever going to dig down to the anger that we're holding behind, so we don't end up another man in jail because we just exploded on the wrong person for the wrong thing, we've got to have a safe place to deal with it. That's brotherhood. For many of our boys who are trying to find what it means to be a man, and far too many without a man guiding them, they begin to define their own sense of what it means to be a man. Our boys are yearning for help, yearning for guidance and mentorship and leadership.
What is there about being a boy in America that places boys at greater risk? We're seeing clearly that boys who come from low-income families, and when I say boys, I mean white boys as well, are less likely to go to college, more likely to drop out of school. In most schools, we start with humiliation. as a way to punish kids, write the name on the board, put them in the back of the room, send them out.
We rarely stop and ask, what's behind the behavior problem? Why is this child acting out? Denying those kids learning time actually has the effect of pushing many of them right out of school. They will kick a kid out of school knowing that a kid who isn't reading by the fourth grade is going to be in the prison system. Well, you kicked him out twice in the third grade because he did this to his teacher.
Ain't nobody in that child's life ever hugged him. Go into it. Kindergarten class. You're talking about boys, they're doing this.
Ask them a question. They can't shut up. They're jumping up and down, waving their hands.
Going to the same class in the sixth grade. Ask them a question. What do you think? I don't know.
Whatever. It's cool. In those five years the academic pilot light has started to go out because they have decided that school is not the place for them.
The number one predictor of student achievement is the expectations of the staff. The school system just announced that they didn't believe in the kids. In fact, because they were black and brown kids, they didn't think they could do well. Everybody has potential, if they're provided with the right support and the right stimulation.
I was always told like in elementary, oh you're really smart, but when I got to middle school, you're not cool with being smart. Having good grades didn't mean a whole lot. It didn't mean nothing on the playground. And so I had to figure out how I was going to fit in. So I just barely slipped by.
It's cool to be like, I don't care. Take my points. Call my mama.
Like, I fell into that trap, right? And it wasn't until my last year of middle school is when I got my act together. And it was a teacher who kind of saved me. She saw enough in me to say, I know that there's something going on with you.
I know that your father died before you were born. But you're using that as an excuse. You're too smart to act like you're not.
She said, we don't always get to choose what happens to us. But we have a responsibility to make the most out of it. And I was mad at her. I was mad at this teacher.
I was like, I'm never speaking to her again. She can't talk to me like that. But I heard it, and I remembered it, and it changed the very next day.
And my grades transformed right then, and it was really like this idea that my mom could raise me the best she could. There would need to be other voices that would help me to find my way. By the time my wrestling coach came into my life, I was really, really searching for a man I wanted to resemble.
I guess it's the type of love and admiration that you're supposed to have for your father, I felt for my coach right off the bat. And I think it was because of that yearning I had to figure out what it means to be a man. He was a family man.
He loved and cherished his daughter to death. I saw this man that was dependable, reliable. And not abusive.
My coach kind of stepped in and showed me that good men do exist. Coaches in this country have so much power, such a position in the lives of young people that they do attain this father-like status. And I think you've got all these young boys trying to seek the approval of that coach.
I'll never forget showing up in Catholic school. Just right away, just hearing out, you know, on the field, you know, like, Hurry up, you're a faggot. And you're just like, whoa. I heard it and I thought about it, and then one second later, I adopted it.
Coaches can do an awful lot of good and an awful lot of bad. I was talking to a 12-year-old football player, and I asked him the question, What if your coach told you you were playing like a girl in front of the rest of the players? The boy told me it would destroy him.
If it would destroy him to be told he's playing like a girl, what are we teaching this boy about girls? And actually, when I say play like a girl, I'm using real soft language. We have much more aggressive, demeaning, demonstrous, dehumanizing ways of making that point and making it stick.
Don't give me that soft crap! Don't cry. Take your ass whooping like a man.
Sports has gotten way confused in terms of power, dominance, control, lack of moral clarity. Disturbing new details about what happened inside the locker room at Sayreville High School. They held four fellow teammates against their will and improperly touched them in a sexual manner.
Racial slurs, homophobic name calling. Those are just a few of the findings on the atmosphere inside the Miami Dolphins locker room. We started the week players beating up women.
We ended the week with players beating up children. We are in a very serious state here in the National Football League. In a win-at-all-costs culture, it's strictly about the win at the expense of character development. I could try and take it.
With the gladiators, everyone arranger, they're secretly their saviors. Glory and gore go hand in hand, they can headlock and try and take us. Glory's contagious. I think the great myth in America today is that sports builds character.
Sports does not build character unless a coach intentionally teaches it and models it. When I did start coaching I didn't want to be a transactional coach using kids for my own identity. So I just started with a very simple philosophy.
If you're going to be a transformational coach, you've got to know what you're transforming. I coach to help boys become men of empathy and integrity who will be responsible and change the world for good. That's what sports ought to be about. And we've got a lot of work to do in this country. Many of our examples of American masculinity, be it in sports, military, law enforcement, the entertainment industry, the men that men look up to, a lot of what they're teaching is domination, aggression.
There are these hyper-masculine figures that we try to adhere to. We don't need rogues to use impassioned break. The average boy spends 40 hours a week watching television, sports, movies, 15 hours a week playing video games, and now what's new is two hours in between those other things watching porn. The predominant male archetypes that we see in film and television and other forms of popular culture are the strong, silent guy who is always in control and is not emotional. And then we have the superhero character.
The hero character engaging in high levels of violence in order to maintain that control, in order to achieve whatever goal he has in front of him. We also have the archetype of the thug, and this is predominantly men of color who are pigeonholed into much more violent roles. And then we have the man-child or the mook, which is the male who's in perpetual adolescence. His body doesn't typically have a lot of muscle, but he tends to project masculinity in other ways, through the degradation of women, engaging in high-risk activities.
All they want to do is get laid. And of course, at the end, nobody gets anything because they get drunk, they take drugs. And there have been a whole rash of these movies recently that are funny. And so you're laughing at what you could become.
What the fuck? Of course we know that media images have an effect. on people's behavior. If there was no effect, the advertising industry would collapse. Because the advertising industry is based on the idea that media images will have an effect on people's behavior.
The same kind of hypermasculine that we see in Hollywood movies or on television, they're the same kind of hyperviolence that we see in rap music and hip-hop culture. The stereotype of being violent and dangerous, selling drugs, oversexed, it's all about money, power, and respect. A lot of rappers are... imitating what they see as Successful masculinity.
Violent video games reinforce the stereotypical structures of what a man should be. The typical game character tend to be white males with, it gets this specific brunette hair, five o'clock shadow. When an emotion sneaks in for a male character, by and large it is anger. And any sort of grief is very, very underplayed and never actually discussed or processed. Kids end up really looking up to this character and what they end up idolizing is someone who cannot express themselves emotionally, cannot be honest or open with anyone around them.
When you play video games and you see the same kind of setup, it loses its impact on you because you habituate to the sameness. The video game companies know this and they are giving you endless variety, a new category, a new challenge. You're moving up ranks. They are creating this arousal addiction. Boys'brains are being digitally rewired to this technology.
Things happen like this. Microseconds. The ones that are most addictive are the most violent.
Where your job is to destroy the enemy, to dominate. If you don't have social connection and you don't have a lot of friends or you have a crappy home life, you can escape into a game. And you don't have to worry because you're saving the galaxy. If your kid sits in front of a screen for four hours a day and shoots and kills in a repetitive violent way hundreds of people, there's a good chance that kid is going to be impacted by that. There's a reason the U.S.
Army trains people for combat. by using video games. It's because it gets them used to some of the experiences.
Well, put your 10-or 11-or 12-year-old son in that context. But they're not going into Iraq or Afghanistan. And if they happen to live in a more dangerous neighborhood or a neighborhood where they're exposed to violence more routinely than they might be in some fancy part of town, then that's gonna be a bigger issue.
I share this story with my kids. Garbage in, garbage out. Wake up in the morning.
It's Friday. They're going to a party that night. They're looking forward to it.
They're supposed to be at school. They woke up late. But the first thing that they turn on is the radio or their CD. And the song is, kill a motherfucker. Kill a motherfucker twice.
Now, while they're playing their video game, it's kill a motherfucker. Then they're drinking or using some type of substance before the party. I tell them it's going to be 50 guys at the party, all of them who listened to the same song you did, all of them who played the same video games you did.
All of them who then took upon the same drugs that you did. All of them who had the same armament that you have. And then, soon as I walk in the party and accidentally step on your foot at the same time the DJ puts on a turntable, kill that motherfucker, what's going to happen at that party? Somebody going to die.
The Surgeon General put together a task force to study this. Three major findings, which have been replicated hundreds of times since, that exposure to violent media often leads little boys to be less sensitive to the pain and suffering of others, it leads them to be more fearful of the world, and it leads them to engage in behaviors that are more aggressive towards others and towards themselves. They're not the only things that cause violence with young people and with adult men, but they're pretty potent predictors. Childhood is a sequence of revealed secrets. Today, there is no sequence of revealed secrets.
Kids are exposed to porn at age 5 or 6 because they're in the middle of a video game and something pops up. Or they click on the wrong website. I started seeing it more and more.
I started seeing it in other places like music, pictures. Magazines. With my group of friends, it's more taboo to talk about.
It's kind of like something like, like, okay, everyone knows that like, I'll watch it, but let's just like not talk about it because it's extremely awkward. Your man is nastier than you ever- Porn-o since he was 12 years old! Because of abstinence-only sex education, because of the unbelievable shame that our culture has around sexuality, pornography is sex education for most people. At the touch of a button, anybody at any age, anywhere in the world, can have a panoply of sexual experiences, visual sexual experiences. Your brain is being affected.
Dopamine receptors are being over-activated, and you get addicted to this visual stimulation. And the problem is the excess, and it's in social isolation. Jimmy is in his room alone doing this. He's cutting himself off from friends, family, and knowing how to relate to girls and women.
If you're a teenager who's had no sexual experience, this becomes the social norm. And the assumption is this is what is right to do. This is what women want.
want and this is how men are supposed to perform and all of those are wrong. The way that boys and men have been trained to think about and objectify women's bodies and purchase women's bodies, whether it's directly in prostitution or indirectly in pornography and somehow that has no relation to how they think about themselves as sexual beings and women's sexuality. To me it's naive to think that there's no connection. It seemed like they were attacking her. And it didn't make any sense to me as to, is this the actual thing?
Like, does this actually happen? I think we have to be honest with our sons that our culture is sending mixed messages all over the place. Boys might be going to pornography because they have the sexual impulse. But what they get when they get there is not just sex. It's like incredible levels of...
normalized brutality and sexism that's associated with the sexual act. Somehow those boys are supposed to develop healthy sexual relationships with girls and with women. We have a rape culture. What that means is that individual rapists aren't just crawling out of the swamp.
They're being produced by our culture. Two star high school football players have been found guilty of raping a West Virginia teenager. Freshman at Stanford University and a member of the swim team is accused of raping a drunk, unconscious woman. Two cyclists witnessed him raping the woman.
They chased him down and called police. Former Vanderbilt football players are convicted of raping an unconscious classmate in the Vanderbilt dorm room on campus and then taking video with their phones. As a young man, you're taught.
A man is supposed to always be on the prowl. A man is supposed to always be aggressive. They say things like, Who's that? I like to hit that.
I like a piece of that. I like to tear that shit up. So think about it. Hit, violence.
Tear, violence. It, object. That, object. We're actually teaching them consciously and subconsciously, on purpose or not, not to see the humanity in girls.
We live in a world right here in our country. Where men's violence against women is at epidemic proportion. My first year in high school, I was going to a dance with a woman, and I was standing next to a guy, and she was walking away after talking to me, and she was wearing fairly tight pants, and he said, well, now I understand why someone would rape someone.
The way in which I've experienced men talk, oftentimes it involves doing things to women that don't seem like they're particularly consensual. When I went to college, there was this pressure to engage in hookup culture. Alcohol was this tool for me to be assertive and aggressive and predatory to find women to have sex with.
Um, so that I could go back and impress other men with it. Particularly around just other guys. You're always one-upping the other person. Talking about a woman's ass or her breasts.
There's an implied sense that women exist for us to have sex with them. They exist for us. I don't think that...
We think about the implications of that. I call what we do to our little boys and men the great setup. We raise boys to become men.
Whose very identity is based on rejecting the feminine and then we are surprised when they don't see women as being fully human. So we set them up, we set boys up to grow into men who disrespect women at a fundamental level. And then we wonder why we have the culture that we have.
Basically what you have on college campuses is young men desperate to prove their masculinity. So you have 18 year olds trying to prove it to 19 year olds. That's a recipe for failure. The hooking up, the initiations, the hazing.
What do they get in return? They get two things. These are the bonds that are the most impermeable, the ones that will last you a lifetime. And you also get the feeling that girls can't do this. So you get both horizontal solidarity with your bros and hierarchy, men are superior to women.
The most important dicta of the bro code. If you never rat out the brotherhood, you never ever betray that brotherhood. So this leads to the notion that surrounding bad things, there's a code of silence. What happens is their heads and their hearts actually come into conflict.
Because their hearts may be saying, this is wrong. I know this is wrong. My ethical compass tells me this is wrong.
I should do something about it. A man would act. And on the other hand, but these are my bros, I can't betray them.
If I do, they'll marginalize me. This is the fear that so many men have that keeps them from acting ethically. A girl was repeatedly attacked for two and a half hours, and as many as 20 people either took part or stood by and watched. Many did not step up to help, but nearly all got out their cell phones and started snapping pictures and...
Three top Penn State officials are likely to stand trial on charges they covered up years of Sandusky's abuse. Another adult man has now resigned amid accusations he knew there was a problem and did nothing. Intentionally or by neglect, the Baltimore Ravens, the National Football League, and Commissioner Roger Goodell have conducted a cover-up of Ray Rice's brutal assault on his then-fiancé on February 15th.
The severity of Rice's attack was clear almost immediately after the assault. The NFL did have the evidence that the police department did. The league is still not responding.
There are forces at work in male peer culture that keep men silent. Even men who know that something is wrong, they don't say anything or do anything because they make a calculation that if they say or do something, it'll lose them status within their peer culture. There's a choice. And many times the choice is rooted in our privilege.
So while we as good men don't perpetrate the violence, we are part of the collective socialization. The fertile ground that's required for the violence to exist. I worked for 10 years in the jails of San Francisco in a program that included a project to deconstruct and reconstruct what we call the male role belief system, to which I think virtually all men in our society are exposed. Men are defined as superior and women as inferior.
And to be a real man, you also dominate other men. So in other words, this is a recipe for violence. My mom gave birth to me four days before her 17th birthday. So she was a young girl, and she projected a lot of that trauma onto me.
My mother had like this, like, just a rage towards me this day, and I remember her kicking me down the hallway and choking me and slapping me. And the worst part about this was not the physical part of it, because that was normal for me at that time. It was afterwards she took a Polaroid picture of me crying. And I don't remember her exact words, but I remember her shaming me, and I couldn't figure it out.
what it was that was so wrong with me that why especially that age why did i deserve this i was uh I was molested by one of my siblings'father. He took me into his bedroom, closed the door, and I remember questioning in my mind, like, why did he close the door? He asked me to pull down my pants, and, uh... I remember pulling down my pants and then my underwear, and he just looked at me for a while, and, uh...
And then he touched me. I eventually told my mom and she didn't believe me, which made it worse. I felt guilt around it, that I should have somehow, I should have known better.
I knew that I was suicidal. I was a cutter. Once I was hospitalized for swallowing an entire bottle of my aunt's prescription pills, I didn't feel that there was any worth to my life and then, you know, who would care whether I was here or not. The best way that I've been able to understand my capacity to murder another human being is that I didn't value my own life at the time, so I couldn't value... Life of another human being.
A human child knows it's not loved, he or she, if they're beaten. Or if they're just simply neglected, ignored, abandoned. The men that I worked with in the prisons had suffered all of these forms of child abuse to a degree I've never seen in any other setting.
And to say they were dominated by shame is to say they didn't have pride or self-love. Whether it's homicidal violence or suicidal violence, people resort to such desperate behavior only when they are feeling overwhelmed by shame and humiliation. I grew up with three brothers and a father that drank a lot, and I was probably bullied the most by my dad.
He ruled with intimidation, you know, and fear. I was always scared when Mom said, you're in trouble and I'm going to tell your dad. I knew I had an ass whipping coming and that meant he was gonna hit me with whatever he had close to him, you know. Whether it was a fan cord he ripped out of the wall or his belt.
I was shy, I was quiet, I was always in my head. I just felt terribly alone. The only culture where I felt like I belonged a little bit was in the drug culture when I found it. I was 12 years old, I started smoking weed. At first because of peer pressure, but I soon liked it because I didn't have to feel the way I always felt.
Then I moved on to harder drugs. My world changed when I picked up a gun. It became a whole lot more violent.
People around me started dying. The guy I killed, we had conflict. I had been accepted in this drug culture when he didn't pay me.
I thought, my homeboys know if I don't do something to this guy, everybody's going to take whatever I have. Play Me For Punk, that's the story I was telling in my head. And I just felt all the fear and anxiety and everything else I had bottled up in me just burst.
And I shot him six times, and I ran. I think that was the first time I ever felt like I had power. For so long, I had felt so powerless in my life.
That was a moment I finally stood up for myself. But it came at such a huge price. If you're told from day one, don't let anybody disrespect you, and this is the way you handle it as a man, respect is linked to violence.
Boys are trained to externalize our pain. When something bad has happened to us, we need to do something bad to somebody else. Avenge the humiliation that we've suffered, the shame that we've experienced.
To me, that's such a basic and incredibly important part. of what is going on in the violence pandemic in our society. Plenty of girls live in a culture where there's easy access to guns, why don't girls and women do the shootings? The national conversation that happens almost never mentions gender as a factor when in fact it's the single most important factor. But it's unspoken, and so part of our challenge is to make visible what has been rendered invisible.
I've been forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection, and unfulfilled desires. Tomorrow is the day in which I will have my revenge against humanity, against all of you. One of the things that has provoked so much anger in American society today is this notion of a grieved entitlement.
That men feel entitled to positions of power and all that, but they don't feel like they're getting them as much anymore. That's the injury. Not that I was in power, but that I was entitled to be.
The boys that have committed these crimes, the men who commit crimes of violence every day in the streets of the United States and in the homes of the United States, are our sons. They are saying something about us as a culture. But we ignore them at our peril and I think the first reaction of so many people who are threatened by introspection, by self-awareness and self-criticality is to push them aside as if they're somehow others, they're somehow aberrational and again this idea of mental illness is one way to push them aside. That's why we don't have to think about our culture, we don't have to think about what we're teaching our sons, we don't have to think about the role of the media culture in helping to shape certain norms around masculinity.
Think about the mixed messages we're sending to boys and men about violence, which we send all the time. Cultures define manhood in different ways. And there are healthy ways to define manhood. There are unhealthy ways. So the question is, can we do better than we're doing in our society?
And the answer is, yes, we can do better. My sophomore year in college, I was in my first real long-term committed relationship and had learned that she had been raped. And I found out later that my mom had been raped when she was younger.
It was painful for me to think about that happening to someone that I really cared about and that it happened to all sorts of people. It gave me the opportunity to start thinking about masculinity in a critical way. Trying to become more of a full human being and less constrained by who I thought I had to be. I stopped playing sports in terms of collegiate competition and I went back to doing theater.
One of the characters that I played was a transgender character. I remember when my parents came to the show and my dad was really uncomfortable. He was not comfortable with his son, who was more of a prototypical man's man, changing into this very unmanned man-like person, even in the context of theater, where it wasn't really me. And this sort of began a point of friction, I think, between my father and I. His response was, why wouldn't you want to be what you really are?
The very last time that I spoke to my father, I was a senior in high school. I told him that I hated him and I never wanted to talk to him again. In kind of the heat of that moment, I decided that I should write down everything that I was mad at him for since my first memory of him beating my mom.
And so I sat down and I wrote a letter, and I had intended to send it to him in the mail. I was taking an AP English class, and the teacher resembled my wrestling coach in a lot of his characteristics. I came into his classroom and I said, something inside me needs to have you read this before I can send it, and I don't know why. And he got, I think, three quarters through the first page and he, like, fell into tears, like, tears just running down his face.
He was like, I understand you so much better now. That's why you push yourself so hard in everything you do, why you have to be the best, why you have to be perfect, why you stress out about it. Every single little thing. He looked at me and he said, you're good enough. And apparently that's what I needed to hear.
From a man. About four or five years ago, Jackson said, how about we make a box and we put notes in there every week to each other. If I'm mad at it, I'll put a note in there. If I'm happy, I'll put a note in there. That's how we'll communicate about what we're feeling for the weekend.
So Jackson found one of my shoe boxes, cut a hole in the top, and he named it the mailbox. And we do it once a week, and we open it on Daddy Sunday, which is Sundays. I wrote this one to Dad. Dear Dad, I love how we play together every Sunday.
It's really fun playing with you. Dad loves Jackson. And this. My father has never in 30 some odd years of life told me he loved me. I tell my son I love him every day.
A father wound is any ongoing psychological, emotional deficit or injury that would have been met in a healthy relationship. So a father wound is probably one of the most serious issues in this country. A wounding boy becomes a wounding man apart from some kind of intervention. In my own healing process, I took myself as an adult man and myself as a five-year-old boy. And I walked both of them back down my mother's basement steps and there I confronted my father.
Five-year-old boys are supposed to be loved. They're supposed to be tucked in at night. It's an amazing thing when I did that work because it was the first time I ever had empathy for my own father.
I started to think about, you know, who hurt him in a way that he would be so angry as he was. I think every man's journey is how do you reconnect that heart to the head to start living out of the authentic you. Today is really about self-reflection, about your story, okay? Your narrative, why that's important to self-reflect and to share out.
When I came out of juvenile hall, I knew that I had to make some changes. So I quit smoking and decided to be sober and see what I can do to change my life around. First day of school, I came in here.
You know, I was very excited. And these past two months have been amazing. I can share anything with these guys. Anything.
And, you know, they've been absolutely more than a family to me. I love them to death. I transformed from four F's to four A's. I was very proud of myself, but most of all, I made my mom proud. When I see my kids, I don't see gangsters.
I see my little brothers. What we're trying to do is to connect with them. To create a space where they can re-humanize themselves. Because they've been so dehumanized.
We feel safe in here. We can talk to anybody in here. It's like another family pretty much. So the lessons that we're being taught from early on is that being a woman or being feminine or being anything That's not within the man box within the confines of this construct is bad So what I'm gonna do next is I erase the labels man box not manly box When we take away these barriers that society places on us our parents our peers our teachers media Whatever may be when we strip those away We get to be whoever we choose to be and we find that we are some of the very things that we were taught that are not manly.
I want to just share this in closing out too. You know, before when I was stuck in that man box, I felt a sense of incomplete. I felt that I always never was the person I was meant to be or the person my family visioned me to be.
Once I got out of that man box, through this process and the work, I feel like I stand 10 feet tall and feel that I'm worthy. I have a right to be loved, a sense of belonging with the peers that I built and made a community with in here, and I feel whole. Many of us are operating from a place of tradition, just the way things always have been. We need to get men into their hearts and out of their heads.
There's freedom outside of these rigid definitions of manhood. We need to redefine strength in men, not as the power over other people, but as forces for justice. And justice means equality and fairness and working against poverty and working against, you know, inequality and violence. That's strength. And we need more men who have the courage to stand up and speak out, even when it means taking a risk.
To go into male culture and say some things that are going to make other men uncomfortable, because this is about leadership. We're asking men to use that privilege to develop a voice, to speak out, to stand up, to compile the solution. It's absolutely not about teaching boys something new.
It's not about turning boys into girls or something that they're not already, but it's actually helping them to stay with or return to what they already know. Empathy and caring for other people and being sympathetic toward people, these are not just feminine. Traits or behavior patterns, these are human patterns.
We have a responsibility to our sons to break down the systems of emotional constriction that lead so many men to have lives of quiet desperation and depression and alcohol and substance abuse and all the other ways that men self-medicate. So if we ever gave boys permission to process grief, gave boys permission to cry, to develop all of their emotions, you do away with not knowing where to go with their own pain. For mothers, if in your gut you feel you want to stay close to your son, don't be dissuaded.
The one study we have of boys being close to their mothers in a healthy way shows that those boys are less likely to engage in violence, more likely to succeed in life, and live five years longer. Whatever a father does with a son is masculine. If you like cooking, cook with your son.
If you like fly fishing, fly fish with your son. But do something with your son because every boy... measures his masculinity at the deepest level against his dad.
We have lots of kids that have no father figures at home or who just don't even have intact families. Those kids need mentors who are a regular part of their lives, who are checking in, who are spending quality time with them, and who provide the kind of moral support and example and guidance that they need to grow up. Coaches have this unparalleled power platform position. They're held up in most communities and most schools as kind of the epitome of what it means to be a man.
Boy, if we ever got the heart of a coach pointed out into the hearts of young boys with an understanding that I'm really not just a coach, but I ought to be a mentor, then you start making huge changes in this society. Media and technology today has an enormous impact on the social and emotional health of boys, and we want that to be a good impact, so we need to encourage good media. Good technology and we need to limit the downsides of the bad stuff.
We need to challenge boys and men to rise to the better angels of their nature, to rise to the best aspirations they have for themselves as human beings and as men. I think that that's a positive challenge and I think a lot of men can rise to that challenge. Everyone in boys'lives should help us stay true to who we are so that we don't have to wear a mask. I had a bit of trouble being tough sometimes, sticking up sometimes, being enough sometimes.
I had a trouble keeping myself in line, keeping myself trying, thinking I'd be fine. Ooh, it's long to start till my... As I can, not be confused, a little flight until I land, what it's like to be a man, now it's like Be a man Don't ask trouble, but it comes sometimes When it does We stand together just think what we could do Those doors that we break through the place we could go The star to my heart says I can't Be confused until I land What it's like to be a man What it's like to be a man See my side, see this side, ooh, I start, do as much as I can.
Until I learn what it's like to be a man Come on, will you see my side? Will you see this side? I start to mess as I can Until I land It's like to be a man It's like being a man