The Search for Modern Masculinity
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the role of men in society used to be pretty clear-cut. Provider, protector, I want to be a figure of strength and stability. Big muscle guy, like fights when he has to, like that kind of thing. As kids, we played soldiers, we played with guns, we played cowboys. I grew up in a household

where my mother was a stay-at-home mom and my father worked. But in recent decades, major changes have impacted what it means to be a man. They're massive and they're very, very quick in cultural terms. A blink of an eye across the course of human history. That's researcher Richard Reeves. He says as women gained more equality and entered schools, universities and the workforce...

men were no longer assumed to be primary providers for their families or to be in charge, to be leaders. Men have had the old script torn up but not replaced. And so that gap

Right now, I think it's why this has become such an important debate and why so many men feel so destabilized. It's like the kaleidoscope has been shaken and the pieces haven't set yet. And that's just left a lot of young men really uncertain. When Richard started looking into this topic, he found huge achievement gaps between men and women in education. The number of men who said they don't have a close friend had gone up.

more young men in their 20s than women were still living at home. I kept seeing data points suggesting that there were a number of issues that seemed to be, on average, affecting boys and men a little bit more and that weren't getting the kind of attention that they perhaps deserved. And so it felt like there was something of a vacuum in the conversation about boys and men.

Richard says researchers and policymakers weren't really talking about this, but other people were. And then I saw that vacuum being filled by some pretty reactionary voices online. And I thought that was because sort of boring people like me, public policy people just weren't paying enough attention to it. And I think that the whole issue of men and masculinity should be more boring. And as one of my sons said, well, you're the man for that job, Dad. Yeah.

Okay. Kids always give the best compliments, don't they? Mm-hmm.

Richard says he's observing a lot of boys and men asking big existential questions. How should I be a man today? Right? How do I form relationships? How do I succeed? What does it mean? So I would say that it's a more open question than it has been for a long time. On this episode, changing ideas of masculinity, a void of positive messages, the manosphere, and how men are reinventing and re-envisioning their roles.

We'll also take a look at fatherhood from an evolutionary perspective and how being more involved in present dads affects men's brains. To get started, let's stick with Richard Reeves. He is the president of the American Institute for Boys and Men and the author of several books, including Of Boys and Men, Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do About It.

So he spends a lot of time researching this stuff, but it's also personal. I'm the father of three boys. I have three grown sons and have raised them in both the UK, where I'm from, and the US, which is my new home. And so part of this is the experience of just raising boys into men in today's world.

From where you sit, what do you see going on in terms of the discussion about masculinity and what it means to be a man? I think it's really important to make a distinction here between what's happening to masculinity and what's happening to boys and men. And most of my work is focused on what's happening to boys and men in ways that are very measurable. So huge gender gaps in education, in higher education. It's about 60-40 now on

college campuses, or to take a more tragic example, the fact that the suicide rate is four times higher in men than it is among women, and is now actually slightly higher among young men than even among middle-aged men since 2010, a big rise in male suicide. And it's important to state that doesn't mean that there aren't at least as many problems, different problems perhaps, but for women and girls, it's very much not a zero-sum game here. It's not one or the other.

But that's important for this conversation about masculinity, because I fear that what's happening is that because there are some real challenges for men today, I think, especially as they navigate this world of like no longer being defined quite simply as sort of primary breadwinner, right? That kind of protector provider role was pretty simple, right?

It had all kinds of problems, not least the massive gender inequality that it implied that women would be economically dependent on men. And so what I observe is a lot of men asking the question, how should I be a man today? I do think we've done a better job of telling men, young men especially, what they should not be.

how not to be, what not to do, what not to say. And all of those are very important. I don't want to be misunderstood. But I don't think we've done a very good job of saying what they should do. Yeah, and I think...

For girls, for women, you know, in my own experience, the message has been get out there, do your thing, lean in, you know, get the job, get the degree. And the world has to change. But on some level, for boys and for men, the message has been you have to change.

That's right. It's been more that it's about fixing you at the individual level. I think one of the great insights of the women's movement has been that we need to think more structurally. We need to look at what are the structures of the education system, the labour market that are kind of holding women back. Right. So I think that by and large, we've gotten past the danger that we sort of blamed women for.

for why they weren't making leadership positions. I don't know if this will echo with you, but in the 80s where women were told they had to wear shoulder pads and do assertiveness training and deepen their voice. I mean, famously, Margaret Thatcher in my old country, she had voice coaching to make her voice deeper and stuff. And so basically the message to women was like, if you want to succeed, you've got to be more like men. You've got to look like men, act like men, sound like men, et cetera. And a lot of women were just like, no, screw that.

I do want equal opportunity to be the CEO or the president or whatever, but I don't actually, why do I have to start acting and looking like a man to do that? That's not what feminism was about. So it's changed the structures of the labor market, but the same thing should apply the other way around too. If you see these huge gender gaps in education, for example, we shouldn't basically say, well, you know, if boys just weren't so lazy and they paid more attention, they sat still for longer.

In other words, if they were just more like girls, then they'd be fine. And so the problems of boys become seen as problems with boys to be fixed at that level. And I'm not suggesting here we don't all have responsibility for the issues we face, but to individualise the problem in that way. I think it's been a huge part of the problem here, rather than saying, well, look, how are we doing as a society and raising boys? And I also think the messages really matter here. I think one of the

great lessons of the women's movement has been that these messages of empowerment that you just referred to and we've got girls on the run girls who code black girl magic you go girl the future is female very powerful messages and we've also taken the old message away from men which was well you're going to need to get a good job because you're going to have to kind of raise kids and find a wife and you're going to be the breadwinner and all that we've torn that up as well which is great but what have we replaced it with for men

And then enter the manosphere online, which has a lot of, you know, which has a lot of questionable messaging about, you know, everything is destroyed and you need to be this kind of guy and you need to be that kind of guy. And, you know, all women are terrible and feminism is terrible. And there's a lot of hard to take messages out there in that realm.

Yeah. And what's interesting is that they do end up these online influencers. Their message is very zero sum, actually. It's very like if we want men to do better, then we need women to sink back down again. And it's very reactionary. It's very much like the reason that men are struggling is because women are thriving. And so it frames it in that kind of gender war dynamic, which I will say is also a bit reflected on the other side of the debate, too.

And so the worst of this is when you see what feels like sometimes quite like anti-male rhetoric on the progressive side of the argument and then kind of anti-feminist rhetoric on the right side of the argument as if somehow we can't rise together, right? As if this isn't, we're not in this together. And so both sides, I think, kind of play into this zero something. These reactionary online figures are,

The most powerful thing about them is they have typically quite simple messages. And they are basically, we need to go back to the way things were when men were men and women were women. And women knew their place and men knew their place, etc. And they hearken back to a world where the male role was much more clearly defined, but it was defined in a position over and above women. The new gender roles don't feel clear. And as a lot of these men see women flourishing, but they themselves don't feel they're flourishing. They

They are very open to that message that we just need to go back to the good old days in their language, which, of course, were not the good old days, not least for women. But absent any other message about how they're supposed to be other than just be less. Right. Just don't be like that. Don't be toxic. Right.

absent any other message, I do think that that makes those calls, those reactionary voices, much more appealing to many young men. And so the answer is not to just dismiss every man who turns to those figures as just a kind of rank misogynist. It is instead to say, maybe that means we're not doing a good enough job of offering a positive alternative, a positive vision of masculinity. Maybe we are actually driving too many of our men into the arms of these reactionaries because we feel uncomfortable having this conversation.

The term toxic masculinity in many ways has poisoned the conversation about this whole issue because it's applied in such a sweeping fashion anymore. Where did that term come from?

And what has it come to mean? Toxic masculinity was a very, very limited term until about 2016. It was an academic term. It was used by psychologists working with a very, very small number of men in prisons, typically, for whom their trauma and their own sense of identity had basically ended up wrapping up.

their sense of themselves as men, their ideas of masculinity with violence. And so it was a term that was used a handful of times in obscure academic journals until about 2016. And then suddenly the term broke into the mainstream and became used as a term for more general behavior on the part of men. And the problem with it is that the first problem is it came just used too broadly. It was applied to

All kinds of things, like an unfortunate phrase that a guy used in a coffee shop or whatever. And so it comes to mean stuff that men do or that a man has done that I don't like. And so it loses all of its force, actually. And the second problem with it is that by putting the word toxic next to the word masculinity, then

then it doesn't matter how hard you try. You are inviting the idea that there's just something intrinsic to masculinity, a bit like the Christian idea of original sin. There's just something within you that's just kind of bad. And the best you can hope to do is kind of tamp it down. It's just not a very inspiring message, right? You just say to men, look, one day you might, you too could be not poisonous.

It's just, it's not, it's not aspirational. And so it frames masculinity in this really, I think, unhelpfully negative way. And what's interesting is that feminist scholars now and people working in these spaces, people working on kind of violence against women and so on, they've kind of realized that actually this, it's a term that just drives many, many more men away from,

from a good conversation about this and it invites them in. Just off the bat, it's a bad framing. And he was kind of slowly realizing as a term, it's just really unhelpful and it'd be better if we just stopped using it. Let's talk a bit about some of the realms where boys and men are struggling because I think that's all part of why this conversation is happening and why there is this void in terms of what it means to be a man today.

Why are boys not doing as well in education now? Well, the gaps are huge in education. You can see in high school, if you look at the top 10% of high schoolers by grade, in terms of their GPA, two thirds of them are girls. You've got twice as many girls as boys in that top 10%. I mean, if you look at the bottom 10% of students in high school, two thirds of them are boys.

And so you see, particularly in English and literacy, where the boys are about a grade level behind in the average school district, see these big gender gaps. The question then is kind of why? And I think there's a number of reasons. One is that boys just develop a little bit later than girls on average. And so they're just a little bit behind developmentally. That's again, these are all on average, but girls do mature a little bit sooner and in ways that really help their academics.

And then secondly, we've seen a real massive decline in the share of male teachers. It was 33% in the 80s, and it's now 23% of teachers are male. And so we've really emptied out a lot of the kind of men from teaching. That seems to matter.

for boys in terms of seeing role models. And the third thing we've done is we've, we've really moved away from more hands-on learning styles, more technical education, more vocational education. And that, that actually seems to be one of the ways that boys actually do a little bit better. They learned a little bit better that way. And so we've moved away from CTE and vocational training, which is bad overall, including for many girls actually, but it's particularly bad for boys. And so like inadvertently we've created a,

education system that's just a little bit less boy-friendly than girl-friendly. And I think it's largely for those three reasons. And developmentally, what's happening with boys that makes them perhaps less suited for the classroom or having a hard time in the classroom?

Well, the main thing is that they just develop the frontal cortex develops a little bit later in boys and girls. That's a bit of your brain that actually is triggered very significantly when you hit puberty. And puberty occurs on average at least a year earlier in girls. And one of the things that happens during that period is it develops this frontal cortex. And the frontal cortex is the bit that's associated with what you might call sometimes it's called executive functioning skills or non-cognitive skills, right?

And they're really kind of life skills. So it's not about intelligence per se. It's about those organizational forward planning skills. And those just developed earlier in girls, so the average than in boys, but not in things like standardized tests. So boys, interestingly, boys aren't really behind on things like the SAT and the ACT.

So it's not that they don't have those kind of more cognitive skills, like intelligence. Boys are not less intelligent than girls or vice versa. But girls do seem to get their act together a bit earlier. I wanted to ask you about something that's sort of anecdotal to my own life as a mother.

And I'm wondering about places where boys can express or kind of experiment with physical aggression or physical prowess. I remember like when my son was growing up, when he was really little and we would go to the playground in our neighborhood, you know.

none of the kids could be physical in any way. And the parents would jump in and be like, no, no, we don't hit, we don't do this, we don't push, which is all good. But then at some point when he was a little bit older, he met these other boys who had grown up differently and they were very physical and they were like wrestling and pushing each other into the sand. And I remember seeing his face the first time he got knocked on his butt and

And it was kind of like this, whoa. But then two seconds later, he's all about it, right? And they were wrestling and pushing each other around, but it was joyful. It was kind of like a bunch of bear cubs, you know? But I think sometimes we don't give boys anything

that opportunity to kind of experiment with the strengths they have and then to step in and say, no, you use that strength for good or in this situation, but not in that situation. Yeah. And it's again, it's a great example of the need for us to be able to hold a balanced thought here, which is to be understanding that on average, there's more physicality, especially about boys growing up, right? They just are a bit more physical in ways that

Can be good or bad, right? Just to identify. But to embrace a degree of physicality without that in any way being an endorsement of bullying or violence. And I fear that in our correct attempts to...

move against bullying and violence, we've actually ended up seeing that kind of all physicality is either violence or it could lead to it. I'll give you an anecdote from my own life. A friend of mine just took her boy out of a school. The final straw for her was when they banned tack.

in the playground, right? Because someone had fallen. And she's like, my son kind of lived for break times where he could run around with his friends and kind of play tag, right? And they banned that. And schools have famously banned all kinds of physical things. And I think there's a general problem here, not recognizing that we're all physical creatures to some extent. We're not brains on a stick. We are bodies, especially kids and growing kids, right? We're like, we are physical beings. And actually, so what we eat and how much sleep we get and how much we get to

is important for girls as well as boys, but boys do have this kind of tendency to a bit more roughhousing, like wrestling, as you say, and so on too. And we have to find a way to be okay with that without in any way that seeming to signal we're okay with that when it kind of turns darker. And so again, just want to make sure we don't go too far in taking that physicality out because as you say, it's done well, it's a joyful thing. And more importantly, it's

To the extent boys are more physical, actually denying that fact is not going to help because it will find another outlet. And so much of this is about channeling natural impulses into good directions as opposed to bad directions. That's, for me, that's the definition of growing up, isn't it? Isn't that the difference between being a boy and a man or a girl and a woman? It isn't you don't have some of the same instincts. It's that you've learned what to do with them. And that's the job of society is to teach us what to do with those instincts, not to deny those instincts exist in the first place.

Richard and I also talked about emotions and how men express them or not. He says those skills are more important today than before. The need to get better at those emotional skills, or I like to think of them as relational skills and the ability to kind of relate to someone, whether it's in the workplace or in the family.

the need for those skills has really risen, partly as a result of these changes we've been talking about, which is like it used to be possible to kind of go to work and come home and not actually have to do all that much skilled work in terms of relationships. Everyone knew their roles, everyone knew their place. There wasn't as much, work used to be much less relational.

But the need to have those relational skills has really increased very rapidly, both in the labor market and the family. Even being a parent requires a lot of relational skill. And I do think there's a bit of a lag here. I do think that the kind of relational skill level required by the average man 50 years ago is much lower than is required now. Women are quite rightly demanding much higher levels of relational skill. Employers are demanding more of it. And children need more of it.

And so I do think that's a challenge for us as men is to sort of upgrade our relational skills for the requirements of the modern world. But to do it in that positive way too, I sometimes think this debate is sometimes basically like, well, you know, if men were just more, if they would just cry more and they were more emotionally available. In other words, if they were more like women, then they'd be good, right? There is still a bit of a tendency to treat men like malfunctioning women in that debate, right? And to the extent there are some differences in the way that men communicate,

them set to each other, then that's important to acknowledge as well. So men, for example, are better at communicating shoulder to shoulder very often than face to face. That's a well established psychological phenomenon that actually men do stuff. We go on road trips, we fish, right? Men appear on the average to need to be doing stuff in order to be conducting their friendships. Women are just better at sitting down, getting a cup of coffee and talking to each other. I just, I

Again, I'm stereotyping horribly, but it's supported by the evidence. And so what that means is like, it's okay to develop your relational skills in a slightly more masculine way, but you do need to develop them. What are the conversations you wish we would have about masculinity? What are the conversations you had and have with your own boys and with your friends about this topic?

Well, the first thing I would do is I really hope that more broadly we can expand our ideas about gender and gender equality to include boys and men. Right now, just too many of them feel like that's opposed to their interests rather than inclusive of them. And so that's just like you want I want I want us to make sure that they feel seen and heard in their in their issues. I think there's just so much power in feeling like.

I see you. I get you. I've got your back. And I do actually think, by the way, that's where some of the kind of prominent figures on the more conservative side have actually really found an audience because basically what they kind of often all they do is say to men, yeah, I get it. You are struggling. That's all they say. They just inject a tiny bit of empathy and it turns out that's incredibly powerful. But what I'd really like us to be able to do is to have a conversation along similar lines to the ones that we've just been having here, which is to say,

We've got to recognize that you can get these differences between girls and boys, men and women on average, right?

Of course, it doesn't mean it's true for everybody. Like we know what it means when we say men are taller than women, right? We know that doesn't mean all men are taller than all women, right? We know it's an average. We know the distributions overlap. That's true of so many other things we think about, right? So maybe it's that risk take. It's about physicality. It's about being a bit competitive, maybe. It's around issues around sex drive, et cetera, where just on the average, you see these differences and they're okay. That's okay.

What we shouldn't do is kind of pathologize them just because they are associated with one sex rather than the other. I mean, we've got to give ourselves a bit more permission to just have a good faith conversation about some of these differences without pigeonholing anybody, without forcing anybody into that box. This is how you have to be a man. This is how you have to be a woman. But also just take a step back and say, but overall, on average, there are some differences and that's okay. We don't need androgyny to have equality anymore.

And right now, that's a bit how it feels. Don't you agree? It's like a little bit like, like the only way for us to be equal is to kind of be androgynous. And we're not, we're not. And I honestly believe that one of the great blessings of the women's movement, which is still to be completed, has been to just allow us a bit more room to breathe around that. So guess what? We don't have to be androgynous. We don't have to destroy masculinity or femininity in order for us to be full equals in every aspect of life.

Before we left, I wanted to ask Richard one more question, how he has defined for himself what it means to be a good man in today's world. Well, I'll be honest, this has been a journey for me, too. From thinking about the role of my father to a much more feminist world, I consider myself to be a very strong advocate for gender equality. But I will say on a personal note that I've struggled a little bit then to sort of just honor that.

the ways in which I perhaps am a little bit more masculine and for that to be okay. I feel like sometimes I've,

felt a little bit like I'm at war with myself. And what I've come to believe is that the way I think about mature masculinity, which I much prefer to non-toxic masculinity, I think mature is really good, is determined by the fact that you generate more than you need for yourself. It's about being generative. And of course, that could be in the traditional way of being a kind of provider, but I think increasingly it doesn't just mean that. I think it just means...

You're just giving more than you're getting. There is a kind of old anthropological idea about being a surplus generator, that generating more than you get. And it could be time. It could be love. It could be money. It could be any number of things. And ask what we can give to the world around us, starting with our family and then moving out to the community. And make this a bit more about giving than getting and a little bit more about doing than thinking.

Richard Reeves is the president and founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men. He's the author of several books, including Of Boys and Men, Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do About It. We're talking about masculinity and what it means in today's world. My name is Shane McEwen. I'm a physical therapist doing at the University of Scranton, and I'm from Gen Z. The idea of masculinity itself is...

being competent and like capable in the world like being able to be an independent person who's able to handle situations as they come up like they can live their life without really having to

rely on other people. And yeah, they can get things done for themselves. My dad, like my grandfather, like a lot of the men in my family that I've seen, what I would say, like successfully raise a family and have a job, like buy a house, that kind of thing like that.

Those people in my life have helped a lot. And like the fathers of like my friends growing up, like I had some friends who it's not that like their dad's a bum, but like when they're not being a good dad, that's not very like masculine. Your father should be a good shaping influence in terms of what masculinity means for you.

But I think a lot of it also with Gen Z comes from like fictional characters and stories, books, TV, movies, video games. Like they all are based around a lot of the time, like guys who are doing like big manly things like Captain America is all about setting up for the people who can't do it themselves. And big muscle guy like fights when he has to like that kind of thing.

Coming up, a group of men is rewriting the script on masculinity and looking for new ways to express their feelings. I didn't talk about challenging things with men in my life. That's still to come on The Pulse. This is The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. We're talking about masculinity and how some people are reimagining it. We also asked men of different ages to describe what masculinity means to them.

My name is Art Tung, and I was born in the year 1953. As kids, we played soldiers, we played with guns, we played cowboys, but there weren't a lot of masculine models in Asian culture. So a lot of my heroes were players on the Red Sox. I Spy, which featured Bill Cosby and Robert Culp. ♪

And I idolized Robert Culp. I liked the way he walked. I liked the way he carried himself. Kind of this prominent jaw type guy and cool. They were both cool.

They couldn't be flustered. They weren't excitable. They just calmly did their work. I went to a boarding school. It was an all-boys school, and my schoolmates did enforce gender standards. And if someone seemed too emotional or too high-strung or too effeminate, they would call him a fairy.

Like Art was just saying, masculinity can sometimes feel like a set of restrictive rules that boys learn. Dancing was gay and that made me not want to do it. Wearing stylish clothes as a boy was like metrosexual. When you see a girl on the street, don't feel sorry about letting them know how you feel. Generally, asking for help is considered an unattractive or a bad thing.

There's a group of men in Philadelphia that's organizing workshops and discussions for men to rethink those rules, to reimagine masculinity, and to become better role models. Alan Yu reports. Brandon Alcorn grew up in the 90s. He learned that as a boy, he's not supposed to dance or wear colorful clothes.

But a year and a half ago, he went with his partner Betsy and their foster daughter to get a pedicure. It was something I had never really done. I think that I had some discomfort around it, both from a gender identity discomfort with it and like this is a new experience and knowing I'll be a man going into a place that is mostly women. But he says it was a positive and important experience for him. He put on a light blue nail polish.

I want kids to grow up knowing that men can paint their nails and girls can work in construction and these gender norms that are so ingrained from such a young age can be... that's not the truth. He's painted his nails a few other times since. I didn't realize how closed off I was to some parts of myself.

Last year, he went to Cuba with Betsy. There was a live salsa band as part of a large street festival. They both danced to the music. Brandon was reminded that he had always wanted to learn how to dance, so he signed up for a class. That was both terrifying and nourishing to me every time that I went. Moving my body is still something that doesn't come naturally to me. I still feel

A few things led to these changes. He had been living in West Philadelphia for a few years. In his neighborhood, he saw people who are queer or just comfortable expressing their gender identity in a way that he had not seen before.

And in 2020, a friend introduced him to a Philadelphia group called the Masculinity Action Project. The group started as a rally for men to speak out against domestic violence more than 10 years ago. They continue to rally, raise money, and advocate for causes like domestic violence prevention and access to abortion.

But the program also grew to include training on topics like masculinity and mental health, consent, and men doing their fair share of housework like cooking. They also hold workshops, like a recent event at a park in Philadelphia that was part of a festival about consent. This is called, like, let's take a trip, right? They explored the concept through discussions and games. They're going to offer an idea.

And so if you're cool with it, then it continues, right? If you're not cool with it, you would say... When Brandon first found out about the group, he was interested in changing male behaviors he thought of as harmful. Talking with expertise about things that I don't really have expertise about, taking up a lot of space in conversations, not doing very much care work in office spaces like cleaning the dishes, planning the parties. Members in the group offer support and hold each other accountable.

That happened last year to Toby Fraser, one of the group's organizers. Toby volunteers for a hotline for victims of domestic violence. His job is to connect people to shelters. He

He was trying to find a place for somebody in a shelter, but the shelter turned them down. And I reached out in a pretty aggressive way to say, hey, this is wrong. I disagree. I need you to talk to me about it and explain your thinking because this isn't okay. He later thought that his email was too rude and aggressive.

I feel very comfortable saying and feeling in an insidious way, like I should get my way. The thing that I think is correct, and that's how it should go. He asked Brandon for help. They talked, and Toby wrote an email to apologize.

Brandon says there have been plenty of times when he messed up and asked Toby for help. And he says what feels so different about this is that now he has a group of male friends that he can discuss these problems with, something he never really had before. I didn't talk about challenging things with men in my life.

I definitely didn't talk about mistakes I made. I didn't talk much about things I was struggling with. We were planning activities or talking about sports or playing video games. They weren't a source of support in times of need for the most part for me. Brandon says he is thinking about this a lot more now that he and his partner are foster parents to a seven-year-old boy. One of the things that's really important to me

is just modeling a different way of being for him so that he can see me make mistakes and be vulnerable and disagree with my partner in a way that is always respectful of her as a person and her humanity and is never something that is threatening or intimidating or filled with rage or physical violence or any of those things. And he can also see me be playful and goofy and cry when I need to cry.

Vichette Wu is another longtime member of the group. He says the group is important because whether they want to admit it or not, all men are looking for some kind of support system when they feel vulnerable or feel like a failure. Many of us are kind of suffering in silence. I really believe that a big part of the reason that the alt-right became popular is because they claim to offer solutions to these things.

Part of the group's approach is learning about problems that men help to cause and therefore should help fix. For instance, members of the group fight against gender-based violence and advocate and raise money to ensure people have access to abortions.

they come to the group in different ways. Liam Laird joined the group after transitioning to masculine years ago. Like I'm masculine presenting, I have a deep voice, I have a mustache and a beard. Liam is also an associate professor of women's and gender studies at West Chester University. His academic interests have always been in queer and sexuality studies, not in masculinity directly.

So he uses the group to think about how he wants to be masculine. I feel like the only sort of masculine characteristics I want to embody, if any, are ones that are sort of tempered through or by femininity. Also, I'm not as attached to masculinity and masculine characteristics, not having grown up as a man. So I really struggle with that.

because I don't want to dismiss men's sort of need, I guess, for masculinity, but I also question that. Organizer Toby Fraser says the group knows the odds are against them when it comes to changing masculinity in a big way.

They are a small group of mostly like-minded people. But Toby says by introducing different paths and ideas about being men, their movement can grow. And if we can model a group in a way to be masculine that is accepting of all the different ways that you can be masculine, then those people who aren't in the group yet can see that and say, oh, I want that. I want to feel more comfortable in who I am.

That story was reported by Alan Yu. You're listening to The Pulse. I'm Maiken Scott. You can find us wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up, how men's brains are changed by fatherhood and by being involved and present dads. Their brains were responding just like a mother's. These men who had not undergone gestation had the same neurological responses to caring for their babies. That's next on The Pulse. ♪

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This is The Pulse. I'm Mike and Scott. We're talking about masculinity. Fathers, their presence in our lives or their absence, have a big impact on us. That came up a lot when we asked men about their take on masculinity and what it means to them. Here's Robert Dieters, who's in his early 60s. My dad was a... I get choked up.

He was a sweet man, taught me to respect people, to be kind to people.

He was a lot of fun, always joking around and having a good time and just a great man. I miss him dearly. Being a father also brings about a lot of changes. My name is Ryan and I'm in my 40s. I'm a husband and a father of two. Ryan says he sees his role as a provider, a protector, a figure of strength and stability.

When I became a father, it certainly made me become more in tune to my emotions. We have a son and a daughter, and I found, you know, kind of equally both children, there was, you know, certainly a vulnerability, a softness, but there were things that certainly connected back to the importance of being a protector, being a provider, and those things, the responsibility and accountability of that was something I feel on a daily basis.

And now scientists are learning more about how fatherhood changes men in surprising ways. Sarah Bleffer-Hurdy is an evolutionary anthropologist and primatologist who has made big contributions to understanding female behavior. I never expected to write a book about men.

But she did. It's called Father Time, a natural history of men and babies. In her own lifetime, Sarah has seen fatherhood completely transform before her very eyes. She was born in 1946 at the beginning of the post-war baby boom, and she grew up in an affluent part of Houston. Women took care of the babies, and men were the providers.

It never occurred to me that men ever had anything to do with babies. Growing up, I had never seen a man

So much as change a diaper. On some level, evolutionary science seemed to rubber stamp this division of labor among mammals. Males evolved to compete for status and mates, while females nurtured the offspring. But Sarah had seen in her own research work that this model could be fluid. I was aware that in other animals, when males spend a lot of time

in intimate proximity to babies, they actually can kind of switch from ignoring or savaging them to caring for them. I knew that. But I had no idea that something like that was possible in my own species. If this transformative power of babies could affect the males of my own species the way it does in some other animals. And this changed for me

Because the world around me was changing, Megan. In the book, Sarah argues that the changes in fatherhood that she's witnessed in her own lifetime are not just cultural, but biological.

In your own childhood, you describe in the book how, you know, your father was nowhere near when you were born, as was very typical back then. But how did he show up as a father in your life? How did he interact with you kids? How active was he in your life? He was a warm individual and loving person.

though he didn't like being inconvenienced, and there would be these eruptions of anger if he was ever inconvenienced. And he was very lavish in his financial support, but basically there wasn't a lot of interaction. He was at his office during the day, and at night he'd come home and go to parties. Ha ha ha!

You know, it was not an intimate family life in that sense. Having grown up with a father who certainly provided for all of you, but otherwise wasn't all that involved, when you got married, were you thinking about what kind of father is my husband going to be? Did that even occur to you? You know, I gave no thought at all to whether or not he would be a good father or a hands-on father.

It just never occurred to me. And even after our first child was born,

It was different in the sense that he was present in the delivery room and the doctor handed our newborn daughter Katrinka to Dan and Dan said, oh, it's the happiest moment of my life. And I think, you know, he felt that way. But then he handed the baby back to me and I went to sleep in the hospital bed with Katrinka with me because we had gotten permission to have the baby room in that was just beginning and they wanted babies to be near their mother afterwards. So

So they could begin to bond right away, which is so different from now when hospitals are actually encouraging fathers to bond with their babies shortly after birth. You can see posters in hospital and they urge men to take your shirt off, have the baby skin to skin with you after birth. Well,

Well, that is very different. And I think young people today kind of take this for granted. But Sarah says this represents a massive change in the involvement of fathers in their kids' lives right from the first moments. The amount of time men spend with children and housework doubled between the time I was born and the time I was high school and then tripled by the time I had my first child. So men were doing more now.

You know, they were serving as soccer coaches and they were Boy Scout leaders and so forth, going to parent-teacher meetings, but they weren't actually engaged in hands-on baby care. That's where the 21st century, you really start to see a division. By the end of the 20th century, we were starting to see this emerging. But by the 21st century, it's happening under our noses. It's no longer possible to ignore. And what do we know about

about what happens in the brain when men are more consistently around and exposed to babies. That was such a wake-up call because I have to tell you, scientists were a little slow to get onto this. It was the year 2000 before two women in Canada who had been animal behaviorists and knowing that

Males and some other animals, prairie voles and some species of hamsters, are changed by being around babies. Got a small grant to look at men in a Lamaze class in a hospital in Newfoundland in Canada. And then they found out what happened after the men were exposed to babies.

Well, this was kind of the opening of the floodgates for this kind of work. Their prolactin went up. Prolactin is a hormone. We get it. It gets its name prolactin, prolactation, because it's associated with lactation in mothers and in maternal behaviors. But it goes up in men as well when they're exposed to babies. Their testosterone goes down and they,

They have surges of oxytocin, just like mothers have at birth and also during lactation. Well, this was mind-opening. From then on, there was like a gold rush. I mean, scientists around the world wanted to go study this new organism, nurturing men.

Sarah says one of the most exciting discoveries in this field came from Ruth Feldman, a developmental psychologist and neurologist in Israel.

So the Feldman lab started to film mothers and fathers while they were interacting with their babies and then put them in a magnetic resonance imaging machine and follow what was happening in their brains when they watched the videos of them interacting with their babies. And the mother's brains were,

had just very strong activity in places like the amygdala and the hypothalamus in the oldest, most ancient primal portions of the brain, brains that are really connected to the primary emotions of an animal. The father's brains, and this was a sort of a traditional Israeli couple, the father who was really kind of helping the mother out, he wasn't the primary caretaker. The mother was really the one engaged in gross in daily activities

24-hour care. What was more activated were the newer parts of his brain in the frontal cortex. That fit with our traditional picture, so it was very exciting information. The study also looked at gay male couples who were raising babies. They then monitored what was going on in their brains. These men who were primary caretakers right from birth with no woman involved at all. And the Feldman lab reported that, well,

What was going on in their brains was kind of interesting because not only were the newer brain portions in the frontal cortex activated, but so were these areas in the hypothalamus and the amygdala and these more ancient areas.

areas of the brain, their brains were responding just like a mother's. These men who had not undergone gestation, not undergone giving birth, were not lactating, had the same neurological responses to caring for their babies. Well, this was really remarkable and just set me thinking, how can this be happening in children?

an ape, because we humans are apes, with a phylogenetic history such as ours. And that's what I set out to understand in Father Time. It was like a mystery story. And changing ideas about masculinity had a lot to do with it, because as these gender straitjackets were loosening, a lot of these men realized, oh, I can do this.

I'm good at it. It's a source of satisfaction and meaning. So I think that it is revising our sense of what's possible for men. And, you know, it used to be thought caring for babies would be emasculating. This came out, you know, in an early study. Lee Gettler was the first author. It was kind of the gold standard study showing how testosterone goes down in men after they become fathers.

And they had an incredible sample because these men had been monitored regularly.

From birth, they followed the men through childhood, and then when they got married, and then the birth of their first child. They've been monitoring testosterone levels all this time, but after they had a baby, it plummeted. And this really showed, you know, this isn't just men with lower testosterone are more likely to go to Lamaze classes and help mothers with the babies. This is what happens to men when they're exposed to

to babies. It sounds to me that men's brains are set up in such a way that they can go either way. And if given the chance to be around the baby, to bond with the baby, they respond very much in the same way that a woman or a mother responds to a baby. That's right. The potential for nurturing is there.

But I think through most of our history, it has lain light. And now let me ask you this, because if I think about this in an evolutionary way, for most of history, humans were living in a condition of war where there were constant threats from other people.

And perhaps it was the most advantageous for men to not get too involved with the babies, but instead kind of like stay in the state of war. I'm afraid that's true. And I think that war is really the enemy of father involvement with children.

there's quite a backlash. Yeah, there are a lot of men out there who are saying that men are becoming too feminine, that there is this drop in testosterone. That means our men are basically out in the park wearing babies and getting weak. Well, the threats to masculinity came to the fore when

The study about the falling testosterone came out and the headlines were there. And then there was a follow-up study showing that actually testes size may be correlated with fatherhood. And the headlines were, your testes shrink. And it was like masculinity endangered. But there is a flip side to this. And you have to think about what happens next.

When you have kind of untrammeled male competition, and I feel like I know something about that from the monkeys that I used to study. Sarah studied langur monkeys, but she says this is also true for some chimpanzees and gorillas.

When you have untrammeled male-male competition, when males enter a breeding system from outside it, they will kill the infants in that group because the mother who's no longer lactating will resume ovulating sooner and

And this decreases the time before she becomes available to them to mate with. Okay, that's adaptive for males, very maladaptive for females, very maladaptive for infants. But also, it turns out, if it happens enough, the groups where it's happening year after year disappear. So going forward, where do you see fatherhood going? Well, when I

When I started this book 10 years ago, I was much more optimistic than I am now. And I think the circumstances which we have in the 21st century, some of which are just unprecedented, men spending prolonged time in intimate proximity to babies, really getting involved, and they're finding it very satisfying to

But the circumstances allowing that are gradually being eroded, their forces afoot. Reproductive control is a very important part of this story. You take away that, women go out of the workforce. You take women out of the workforce,

And they're no longer contributing as much. Their priorities no longer matter as much. Males have less of an incentive to help because they're the breadwinners again. And to be a caring male takes a certain childhood, takes certain examples when they're growing up. In the past, the societies with the least involvement of men with children are those who have been the most bellicose. That's not encouraging.

But when you talk to the men who've gotten involved in their children's lives, a lot of them find it a real source of meaning and satisfaction. Isn't that something we need at a time when we're talking about men undergoing, quote, deaths of despair from suicide and drug addiction? They need more meaning in their lives. They need to feel useful. Men need to feel useful.

Sarah Bleffer-Hurdy is an evolutionary anthropologist and primatologist. Her new book is called Father Time, A Natural History of Men and Babies.

That's our show for this week. The Pulse is a production of WHYY in Philadelphia, made possible with support from our founding sponsor, the Sutherland family, and the Commonwealth Fund. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts. Our health and science reporters are Alan Yu, Liz Tong, and Grant Hill.

Marcus Biddle is our Health Equity Fellow. Charlie Kyer is our engineer. Our producers are Nicole Curry and Lindsay Lazarski. I'm Maiken Scott. Thank you for listening.

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Listen to the Consider This podcast from NPR. Singapore is one of the busiest cities in the world, but biologist Philip Johns is fascinated by a different inhabitant on the island, otters. At rush hour downtown, the otters would swim toward each other and there are literally tens of thousands of people who are on their way to work. How ideas, emotions, and creatures coexist. That's next time on the TED Radio Hour from NPR.