[Music] 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 you're gonna 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 [Music] football became a tremendous place to hide you can hide inside that helmet you can hide behind the roar of the crowd you get the projector's 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 to see how powerful how strong how tough i was and 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 joke don't be a [ __ ] nobody disrespect be cool and be kind of a dick always keep your mouth shut nobody likes a tattletail what a fact little [ __ ] let you woman run your life rose come before hope get laid be a man be a man throw some balls [Music] 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 teens confessed to shooting an australian man for quote the fun of it 13 people were charged in the beating death of a florida a m drum major the result of a band 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 in the auditorium [Music] if you really knew me you would know i feel like an outsider at school when i'm having a bad day sometimes it's hard to talk to somebody about it if you really knew me you 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 even when i'm mad i went to for a long time i didn't have any friends so i didn't have anyone to talk to [Music] we don't really talk about feelings or nothing in our house [Music] if you really knew me you 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 ever seen him out of jail around 5th grade my mother passed away most people don't know that about me [Music] 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 going to 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 [Music] i got bullied in sixth grade i felt like an outcast i felt alone for for a long time [Music] 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 [ __ ] around here and two boys will go i don't know he is he is he isn't he could have a fighter all of the boys will go yes he is and that boy will either have to fight them or run home crying that idea of being seen as weak as a [ __ ] 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 that you feel me masculinity is not organic it's reactive it's 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 they 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 could talk about being pissed off we could 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 uh we don't cry showing emotion it's like um you're weak if you hurt just hold it in no tattletailing fight back you know everything was surrounded around um 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 used violence to solve problems the first lie 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 outer hit the hanging curve they're elevated i want to play football basketball one of the sports have fun doing it makes money like one of them tv type lives they're set up for a tremendous value 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 uh 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 was something taboo you just weren't supposed to do it second lie every boy learns is that we associate masculinity with economic 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 in life 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 then the third criteria is a culture we associate sexual conquests with masculinity seek the free this man is a legend with the ladies 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 tap that ass dude tell the truth you know you tap that ass you put in a backseat bam codex [ __ ] man i got a wife you got a dick you do have a dick 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 a former military drill sergeant little boy from the south was able to go out in the world and sort of pull himself up by its 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 it 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 that 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 [ __ ] or a [ __ ] or a [ __ ] 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 distanced 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 just 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 [Music] 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 curve if you gave the same 50 000 psychological tests to boys it would fall out on a boy bell-shaped curve if you superimposed 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 then any sex difference in the 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 got to go in there and you got to be tough but you can't see [ __ ] you know 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 tended 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-tier 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 come on come on come on 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 the 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 is a 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 that our son will be the target of violence and so we give him what we we think he needs in order to avoid that mario football players don't cry but 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 father spoke about their sons out there quality they were so emotionally open and their real joy and their friends and the men felt that on the road to manhood they themselves had lost touch with these qualities in themselves and 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 was in her mother's day car but also i was in her car 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 your father was a 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 lights 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 how you 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 [Music] 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 and you know the experience of nurturing their children and sharing in those responsibilities uh so we are getting better the fact that we're having this conversation speaks to progress but it doesn't take away 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 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 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 [Music] 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 clearer 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 so 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 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 [Music] 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 um i dealt with a lot of taunting [Music] 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 ended up being true but yeah i remember these kind of big kids coming over and yelling out hey [ __ ] 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 um 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 [Music] i never really knew why i had such a difficult time talking about how i felt until i looked back at my history and i was like well obviously that's why you know because i was discouraged with physical force from from ever expressing emotions [Music] 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 at 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 and the person who saved him on a daily basis was his best friend who he felt really loved him unconditionally starting when they're 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 [Music] one of the adolescent boys that 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 and the 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 male intimacy 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 [Music] 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 [Music] it's not just acceptable that teens are drinking doing drugs and having sex it's expected and sometimes look down on if you're not doing that you feel out of place if you're the only sober one there to bring it down [Music] we're just getting started [Music] [Music] 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 uh they'd take to drink and drugs to blot it out hey mom nice my mom and father met when they were about 17 years old and 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 okay [Music] my dad actually he was um he was kind of a wild kid like he would like to party a lot and he liked to go out with his friends one night he just made a bad move and decided to drink and drive and um 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 them in mexico [Music] nino hey 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 jessica philly and myself i would ditch class i had four abs i ran away from home i just found myself a lot of troubles and i just didn't care your ladies is 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 myself 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 all right 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 that every day i would always be high i was smoking now 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 a ticket he came back to the car and he searched me he found it in my shoe and he put the cups on me and he told me you have the right to remain silent and you're going to be taken to jail me corazon say bro no look [Music] mucho 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 [Music] 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 um 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 shamed 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 [Music] 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 gonna 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 gonna walk to get to school so if that mask requires me not to uh let people see any of my vulnerabilities that means i 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 harded shell a lot of our students don't know how to take the mask off so i want you to take one of the masks taking 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 and i want you to ball it up i want you to hit someone across the circle with your mask don't 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 what's on the mask they open read out loud they're just a front funny caring and happy okay what's behind the mask sadness and fear goofy kindness happiness silliness smile and fun okay on the back anger anger okay [Music] 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 i say sadness scared tears missing my dad trying to take care of my brothers and pain [Music] why do you think we hold back our pain people don't want everybody to know everything you got to keep your poker face on let them know what you got how hard is that to walk around every day with the poker face on [Music] it's not just an activity on paper it's about real stuff that we are dealing with as young men that we hide behind because we don't feel safe almost 90 of you have 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 gotta 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 and 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 money 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 gonna 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 me going to a kindergarten class you know my boys watch they're doing this ask them a question they can't shut up they jump it up and down waving their hands all right going to the same class when they're six in the sixth grade ask them a question what do you think i don't know whatever it's cool i mean 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 now 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 or 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 and it mean 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 i fell into that trap right it wasn't till my last year of middle school is when i got my act together and it was a teacher who 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 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 [Music] 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 have [ __ ] 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 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 give me that soft crap don't cry take your ass whip it like a man [Music] sports has gotten way confused in terms of power dominance control lack of more clarity disturbing new details about what happened inside the locker room at sayerville 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 you know when it all costs culture it's strictly about the win at the expense [Music] 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 and 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 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 [Music] won't to [Music] 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 pigeon-holed 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 [ __ ] 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 hyper masculine that we see in hollywood movies 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 over sex it's all about money power and respect a lot of rappers are imitating what they see as successful masculinity [Music] the 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 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 [Music] there's a reason the us 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 going to be a bigger issue i share this story with my kids garbage and garbage out wake up in the morning this 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 kill a [ __ ] kill a [ __ ] twice now while they playing their video game is kill a [ __ ] then they drinking or using some type of substance before the party i tell them it's gonna be 50 guys at the party all of them who listen to the same song you did all of them who played the same video games you did all of them who 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 killer [ __ ] what's gonna happen at that party somebody gonna die [Music] 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 with young people and with adult men but they're pretty potent predictors [Music] childhood is a sequence of revealed secrets today there is no sequence of revealed secrets kids are exposed to porn at age five or six 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 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 ladies your man is nastier than you ever imagined your man has been watching porno 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 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 uh 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 [Music] 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 [Music] 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 was 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 a prowl a man is supposed to always be the aggressor they say things like who's that i like to hit that i like a piece of that i like to tear that [ __ ] up so think about it hit violence terror 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 that epidemic proportions 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 walking away after talking to me and she was wearing fairly tight pants and he said but 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 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 [Music] 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 is 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 tweeting three top penn state officials are likely to stand trial on charges they covered up years of sandusky 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 fiance on february the severity of rice's attack was clear almost immediately after the assault 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 is a choice and many times the choices 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 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 others 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 of that trauma on to me my mother had like this like um just a rage towards me this day and i remember her kicking me down the hallway and choking me and slapping me and 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 out what it was that was so wrong with me that why especially that age why did i deserve this [Music] i was uh 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 then he touched me i eventually told my mom and she didn't believe me which made it worse i felt guilt around it um 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 um my capacity to murder another human being is that i didn't value my own life at the time so i couldn't value the 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 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 uh i was probably bullied the most by my dad he ruled with uh 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 that meant he was going to hit me with water rehab 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 uh terribly alone the only uh 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 and i moved on to harder drugs my world changed when i picked up a gun became a whole lot more violent people around me started dying you know 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 gonna take whatever i have uh 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 um like i would i had power for so long i had felt so powerless in my life i was that was a moment i finally stood up for myself but it came at such a huge price [Music] [Music] [Music] if you're told from day one don't let nobody 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 uh the humiliation that we've suffered the shame that we've experienced to me that's such a basic and and incredibly important part of what is going on in the violence pandemic in our society [Music] 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 [Music] [Laughter] 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 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 the homes 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 is one way to push them aside that's why we don't have to think about our culture we don't think what we're teaching our sons we don't have to think about the the role of the the media culture and helping to shape certain norms around masculinity we don't have to think about about uh 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 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 happened 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 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 and 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 i understand you are 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 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 [Music] 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 at it i'll put a note in there if i'm happy i'll put another in there that's how we'll communicate about what we're feeling for the weekend so jackson found one of my shoeboxes 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 love jackson my father has never in 30 odd years of life told me he loved me i tell my son i love him every day the father wounders any ongoing psychological emotional deficit or injury it would have been met in a healthy relationship i saw father wounds is probably one of the most serious issues in this country wounding boys become wounding men 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 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 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 abs to four a's i was very proud of myself but most of all i made my mom proud but 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 rehumanize 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 [Music] 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 going to 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 it 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 closing out too you know before when i was stuck in that man box yeah i felt the sense of incomplete um i felt that i always never was the person i was meant to be or the person my family visited 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 way in here and i feel whole [Music] [Music] 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 compare 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 uh 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 leads 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 the 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 the sun 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 in most schools is kind of the epitome of what it means to be a man or if we ever got the heart of a coach pouring it 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 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 life should help us stay true to who we are so that we don't have to wear a mask [Music] lucky [Music] i have a little bit of trouble being tough sometimes sticking up sometimes being enough sometimes i have a little bit of trouble keeping myself in line keeping myself trying thinking [Music] my [Music] what it's like to be a man [Music] what it's like to be a man i don't ask trouble but it comes sometimes and [Music] if we stand together just think what we could do those doors that we'd break through the places [Music] [Applause] [Music] till my heart says [Music] [Music] what it's like to be a man come with me come with me come see my side [Applause] come with me come with me come see this [Applause] [Music] what it's like to be a man come with me come with me come see my side [Applause] come with me come with me come see this [Music] might be confused [Music] what it's like to be a man [Music] what it's like to be a man [Music]