Finding Brave 172: Healthy Masculinity and The Battle Against Man Box Culture with Mark Greene

Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Finding Brave. I'm Kathy Caprino. I'm beyond excited. I almost couldn't sleep last night to talk to our amazing guest, Mark Green calling in from Manhattan. You are in for a treat, people, and I hope you're in for more than that. I hope that this is. What do we hope is. What do we hope for this, Mark? That there's some consciousness expansion, some thinking of who we really are and what we believe. All of it, right?

Yes, absolutely.

All of it. Everyone, please meet the amazing Mark Green. With no further ado, I'm going to tell you all about Mark. And you know, I learned of Mark first of all through our amazing colleague, Mike Stallard. You're friends with Mike? Yeah. Mark, I just need a shout out to Mike. He has introduced me to so many people who have altered what the way I look at things and enriched the way I perceive the way I work. And I'm so grateful to you, Mike. He's been on the show too, but I wanted a shout out for that. So, everyone, we are talking about today, healthy masculinity and the battle against. Against man box culture. Big, big. All right, but let me tell you about Mark. Mark Green is a keynote speaker and author writing and consulting on relational practices, diversity and inclusion and masculinity for organizations worldwide. As a co founder of Think Play Partners and as a senior editor for the Good Men Project, Mark has spent over a decade deconstruct. I have to go slowly because there's so much in every one of these words deconstructing our binary riddled dialogues around manhood and masculinity. He is uniquely positioned to help men, individuals and organizations create a healthier, more connecting vision of masculine culture and identity. Thank you so much for the work you do, Mark. All right, can we, can we dive in on the question that we were just exploring before we went live here? And just to give a little context, you all know, I think if you followed my work, my sweet spot is helping women become more powerful, more impactful, more empowered, more self loving, to close those seven damaging power gaps, to make the impact they deserve and they want to make right. And as I was making coffee before the show, I thought, okay, Mark's work is all about reinventing masculinity. So I asked myself, do you think, Kathy, your work is about reinventing femininity? And the answer was no. And I want Mark to tell us, what does he think about this? But the reason I say no is this. I don't think the feminine needs to be reinvented. I think the world needs to be reinvented in how it perceives the feminine and how it in many cases in the working world diminishes, suppresses, sidelines, ridicules, and I'll go so far as to say hates aspects of the feminine. But also what I'm thinking is we want to get out of any box culture. Women want to be powerful and that's considered masculine. Men want to be vulnerable and emotional and that's considered feminine. So can we start with this idea of what is reinventing masculinity and what you think about My thoughts that femininity may not need to be reinvented? I'm dying to hear.

Well, I, you know, there's several ways into that conversation and I think one of the best ways to frame what's going on in terms of our larger culture of masculinity is to just simply view it under this overarching umbrella of domination based culture. That is to say, a way of organizing our expectations around how people behave, based on a hierarchy which functions as a structure by which those above dominate, those below. Those below acquiesce to the power of those above. You see these structures in old style business organizations. You see them. There are nations of the world that are organized around this idea of dominance and power. And typically at the top of those hierarchies in the west, it would be white men. In other parts of the world, it may be men of a certain religious belief system. But whatever the case is, it's always hierarchical. And in that regard, men may be at the top of that pyramid, but if they want to stay there, they're obligated to perform dominance over everything else, over connection, over relating, over all of the other sort of human capacities you've mentioned as feminine. They're simply expected to dominate those below them. And if they fail to do so, they lose status. So that increases the number of individuals above them that can dominate them. And it is this kind of a system which is generations old, centuries old, around which all the major institutions of the Western world have been organized, including military, religion, education, business, government, all of it. And what we've ended up with is systems that the success or failure of which depend exclusively and solely in the west on what white men were able to achieve. Now we know from diversity and inclusion research by Deloitte and other organizations that this limits the capacity for corporations, for organizations, for governments to actually be innovative, to produce good outcomes, all of that. So the sad fact of the matter is hierarchical domination based systems Fail, they fail to bring the results that we need literally as a species to survive.

I need to ask a question. Can you. I think we could all guess what performance dominance is, but can you dimensionalize it for us? What does it look like? I think we all could tell you, but can I hear it from you?

Right. Performance dominance, domination based cultures simply require. Let me just take us a sidestep here to what we call man box culture.

Yeah.

And I want to give you a quick background on it. First, a guy named Paul Kibbel working with the Oakland Men's Project in the early 1980s, their organization was attempting to understand and intercede on behalf of women. They were trying to understand why violence against women was epidemic. So what they did is they went to high schools and they asked boys a simple question. They said, what are the rules for being a man? And what they got back was some fairly simple, narrow ideas about what a man is. And at the top of the list was things like, don't show your emotions. Always be tough, Always be in control. Be a wage earner, not a caregiver. Have control over women and girls. Be heterosexual, not homosexual. And if you talk to other men, talk about sex or money or cars, don't talk about anything deep. Never show fear, Never show uncertainty. So this set of rules is really, I think, whenever I speak to groups and I ask them just to name the rules, they pretty much name these because we all know them, we all understand that that's what a dominance based culture requires in order for men to be slotted into that. And so once boys are brought into this, and they're brought into this culture from infancy, all of their natural capacities for connection, those things which you referred to as feminine, which I refer to simply as human. Right. So we need to understand that we take boys and we take certain natural human capacities for forming relationships. We wrongly gender them as feminine. So we're talking about empathy, connection across difference, caregiving, all of those ideas. We wrongly gender them as feminine. And then when boys show emotion at a very early age, we say, man up, be a man. What are you, a sissy? What are you? A girl? And we train them out of connection from the time they're born until they reach early adolescence. Meanwhile, we're telling girls, I'm sorry, but being tough, being a leader, having the ability to stand up, all those things are masculine. We wrongly gender them as masculine. So if you take this full range of human capacities, leadership, compassion, empathy, caregiving, strength, tenacity. If we taught all of our children the full range of what it means to be human, then there wouldn't be this false gender binary around what a man is and what a woman is in terms of the business context or communities or politics or education or anything. Instead, we take our children and we take half of their human capacities away from half of the connection and relationship capacities from boys and half of the leadership strength away from girls. And I remember when. You remember when Title 9 was passed.

Years ago, of course.

And suddenly girls began showing up on sports fields, doing everything that we said they couldn't, being strong, being tenacious, handling pain, fighting through competitive Sports. And within 10, 15 years, we were seeing this in championship women's soccer at the global level. So we learned very quickly that these ideas about what women can or cannot be were simply culturally defined. And we have changed that part. But we haven't had that conversation for boys yet. For boys and men.

Wow. It's so powerful. Except I want to tell you, my son, who's 23 and happens to live here just till next week, he's a sports enthusiast, so he's on all the feeds, espn and. And he knows mom's a feminist. We talk about it constantly. And he is, too. My goodness, the hate that comes out on these big, best known channels from men. When we're talking about, let's say the wnba, didn't they do fantastically or. Or women should be paid as much, or. What was in the bubble with the wnba? I think it was their weight room had nothing and the men's was decked out. The hatred. I'm looking at these comments, sure. So we've addressed it, but not really.

No, not remotely.

Not remotely.

And what you're seeing is a collision between two worldviews about what it means to be human. And it is in those comment threads that you see the most reactive, angry responses from the most reactive, angry men. And the reason they're that angry. You know, 50 years ago, we had a cultural container which basically allowed these rules of the man box to be relatively comfortable for men. Right. So men controlled the economics in the family. They were the breadwinners. They had the ability to define and structure the lives of the women around them, of their children. The larger culture had to say to everyone who was not a white male, you're second class. So women are less, people of color are less, immigrants are less. All of the. And. And they had successfully suppressed those populations for centuries. But with the movement for human rights, with the movement for women's rights, with the movement for LGBTQI people, that container is starting to Collapse. So all of the aspects of man box culture, which sort of paid off when you could tell everyone else how the world was going to work, that aspect is gone. But the demands of man box culture are still there. You have to. You're never enough. You have to keep doing all the time. You have to show power, strength, authority. And when men falter in those, and they don't have their immediate response is because domination culture teaches this. Attack someone from another group. So those voices you see in those comments threads are men who are feeling all of these patriarchal structures collapsing under them. And they've never done, you know, man box culture is about what you do, not who you are. Man box culture doesn't. Our larger culture of masculinity does not care who we are as individuals, which means we're not encouraged to share our emotions. We're not encouraged to self reflect. We're not encouraged to look at our own culpability and our own challenges in life. Instead, we're encouraged to blame an outside group. Immigrants, women, you know, feminists. Right? People of color. And that's where all that rage is coming from. A certain number of men, you know, a certain percentage of men are taking a look at man box culture and they're saying, you know what? This is not. I feel alone, I feel anxious. I feel like I'm never going to be enough. I feel like I'm constantly in arguments with my partner. I feel like my kids don't understand me. I feel out of touch. I feel disconnected. And it is this fundamental epidemic of disconnection, disconnection which some men are saying, I want something different. I need something different. And those men are transitioning to a newer culture of masculinity, of connection. But there's a large population of men who are fighting, gonna go down fighting, kicking and screaming for this man box culture.

All right, I got questions. You know what comes up for me? I did a post and a video on what is feminism and why do so many men and women hate it. Oh, my God, Mark. I mean, I. I'm guessing you might get the vitriol.

Oh, yeah.

And two men wrote, shut up, you dumb C word.

Sure.

And women wrote just as hateful things like you women are, you know. Oh, yeah, whatever. I'm not even gonna say. I gotta ask a question here. Not gonna be nice. Wake the F up. I mean, why is. Look, I'm 60. I was raised by an Italian dad and a Greek mom. And I do want to talk about genetics and neurobiology as well in a minute. But for instance, my dad, what a loving, supportive guy. I was like the son he didn't have. Somehow I knew that. I don't think he meant to communicate, but I played sports, I was number one on the tennis team. But I remember the feeling was he believed that women were, were naturally, innately. He was a scientist, he was a chemist, genetically better at nurturing. And because of that they should raise the children and not work. So I remember that question because I want to ask you. There are not about that. There are some genetic differences, right? Neurobiological differences. Women are hardwired more for connection, emotional cues. They read them better than men from the get go, I think, anyway, you're going to tell me, but here's my question. I'm 60, right? I had a 20 year career that was fraught with gender bias, sexual harassment. Not all every year, but I had it bad. Being marginalized, toxic. Boss is telling me shut up, you know, okay, so I'm on the receiving end of that dominance. When you are a man watching that men are smart, they're smart men, they're non smart men. How, how is it possible that you still fight? How is it possible that so many. Let's take the U.S. i know in other cultures things are very different. How is it possible that so many millions of men still fight this? I mean, don't they know the pitfalls of the dominance culture? Don't they understand that if I have to pretend that I have no emotions, it's impossible? Tell me how so many men, I've never asked this question out loud, struggle so much with what is so blatantly clear.

But simply they've been brainwashed by their parents. I'll tell you how, I'll tell you how the process works. And it's pretty straightforward.

Brainwashed.

When we talk about our dominant culture of masculinity, what we're talking about is an ironclad closed loop of isolation. The first part of it. And I, I will absolutely give you pushback on this question of, of whether women or men are better at nurturing.

Okay?

And I would invite you to look at the stay at home dads movement to see men who are the primary caregivers for infants and young children while their wives pursue professional careers, who are, who love the work, who are good at it and who are, who are. And I myself wrote from that space. For a number of years I was the primary parent to my son, especially after I was divorced. He was with me full time when he was 5, 6, 7 years old.

We can get Me wrong. I would never say that a man is not as good as a woman. That's my, my father who's.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

But I do think there are some genetic differences.

That that's a big, big story in our culture that men don't know how to do this. The case I would make is that we break it, we break it in boys. And this is how it's done. When boys start out very, very young, if you watch two, three, four year old boys play together, they have the most joyful, glorious level of connection. They play in ways that we as adult men can remember. We can remember our early friendships with other boys that were rich and beautiful. And we literally would go out every day and say, let's just make a beautiful golden afternoon of connection. It was effortless for us because children, boys and girls, non binary people, whoever, have this capacity to connect relationally. We know how to care for relationships.

And we have joy in it, not necessarily hierarchically. I mean, later they're taught who's winning, who's on top.

Right, Right. You look at young boys and you see that playful connection. So we know the capacity to connect is there. Watch a young boy, watch a little boy caring for an injured bird. You see compassion, you see caregiving, you see gentleness, all of these things. But then our culture comes in, right? And the culture says, listen, you don't, you don't want to share your emotions, you don't want to show your feelings. You want to be tough, you want to be strong. And Judy Chu wrote a book called When Bo Become Boys. And she was embedded, a very important book. She was embedded in a pre K classroom and she for two years was, was in that space with those boys and girls. And she saw how boys already began to hide their emotional acuity, that is their ability to read emotional cues and to begin playing the sort of disconnected version of masculinity that our culture expects of them. And she tells a story. She says a little boy came to her at four years of age and he said, Ms. Chu, I'm friends with all the girls. But don't tell, you know, Mike, the head of the boys club, because if he finds out I'm friends with the girls who kicked me out of the boys club, and I wanted a friend. I won't have a club anymore.

Now he saw it as a club.

As his group, as his, as his.

Like he was, friends don't like me. Okay?

So the thing we need to understand about that story, it's sad enough that he was not allowed to continue to have friendships with half the population of his classroom. But the real thing we need to notice there is that this young boy, at age 4, was already tracking the alpha male in his group and beginning to hide authentic aspects of himself that did not fit the rules that that young boy was dictating for all the other boys. And so. So when boys begin to get taught these rules of masculinity, they disconnect from their emotional acuity, their connection. And whenever they fail, if a boy scratches his knee on the playground and cries, the message is, man up, Be a man. Don't show your emotions in that moment. And if he cries a little bit longer, they say, what are you, a sissy? What are you, a girl? Now, that little microaggression which. Which denigrates the feminine as a way to police boys out of that half of being human, which has been falsely gendered as feminine, that microaggression doesn't happen monthly or weekly for boys. Boys are denigrating the feminine to police each other back into the man box hourly. And the things we are taught to say to each other in terms of denigrating the feminine, it doesn't end with sissy and girl or gay. There is ugly language that is used that I'm not going to repeat here. And it happens minute by minute, hour by hour, between boys for decades. So by the time a young man has reached adolescence, by the time and he runs into another pocket of really powerful research. A woman named Niobe Way wrote a book called Deep Secrets, and she's a researcher at nyu, and her book, Deep Secrets, this is the other important book that I want folks to notice out there. She did a study with boys in early adolescence. And she said, what is your simple question? What does your best friend mean to you? And these boys said, universally, I love my best friend. They use the word love without any shame. And the other thing they all said collectively, every one of them, they said, without my best friend, I would go crazy. Now, four years later, she goes back and interviews these same boys. She says, what does your best friend mean to you? And these boys say, well, my best friend Mike, you know, he lives around the corner, but I don't see him that much anymore. He's a great basketball player, no homo. So if they make any compliment about that kid, they say, no homo. And another boy described it as, yeah, my best friend. Well, that friendship's kind of on a crossfade. It's kind of fading out. And what her receipt research shows her, and here comes that language again. What her research showed her is that these boys are not focused on proving who they are authentically who they are in the world. They're focused on proving what they are not. That they are not little kids, girly or gay. And that's the exact language from the research.

Oh, Mark.

In the moment that they disconnect from these close friendships, their suicide rates become four times that of girls their age. We break them. We break their capacity for connection. And understand that if you are not tracking, you know, if you're not growing your emotional acuity, if you're not doing the simple day to day trial and error work to learn to make nuanced connection across difference. If you're stunted in that way, you never learn to connect across difference. You never learn to do nuanced emotional and relational communication. So we talk about men being unable to express their emotions. We talk about men having a difficult time forming relationships. Always very surface level. This is where it comes from. So we break them and then we say to boys, guess what? The only way you're going to be able to gain validation in your masculine culture is to be dominant. And then we slot them into the hierarchy and they get slotted in wherever they belong. Depending on their physical size, their family's connections, their race, whatever, they get slotted into that. And those who fail immediately get moved to the bottom of that hierarchy and become targets for everyone above them. And this is the system we break boys, young boys, connection. They're a rich capacity for emotional connection. And then we slot them into a dominance hierarchy. And these men who are angry and raging at feminists, they're broken emotionally and they're constantly doubling down on dominance. It's the only thing they know to do. We've seen political leaders in our country do this. They get challenged, they double down on.

Dominance over and over. Narcissism going on in our society, inability to hold pain, vulnerability, accountability.

Narcissism is disconnection. It's totally internal, focus only. And we know that emotions are created in the back and forth of relating in relationships. Emotions don't emerge. My emotions aren't suddenly born of themselves. And I give them to you on a plate and say, here's my emotion. We create that in the back and forth. You and I are creating an emotional connection right now. And as we speak, we may feel anger emerge, we may feel frustration, sadness, joy, connection, all those things emerge in the back and forth. But if we break boys ability to relate and connect and express, then their emotional lives get cut off. And when you tell a Boy, don't show his emotions. What you're basically saying is don't connect in relationship to other human beings.

Stop being human. Really? Yeah.

Naomi Way says it's traumatizing to tell a boy not to show his emotions. And all of our other issues as boys and men emerge out of that initial trauma.

Questions. Can you stay a few more minutes, Mark?

Happily.

You had said to me earlier, ask me a personal question. It's fine. I'm going to ask you some questions, but I'm going to share something personal. When you talk about this, I'm clearly tearing up. I have incredible empathy for what you're saying. But there's this dialogue that's going on because my world is what's happened to women. Of course there's this dialogue that says, well, wait a minute, women are getting programmed from day one. Be pleasing, be malleable, be soft. I mean, I bring it up a million times. I was a great tennis player and boys, I had a lot of guy friends. I loved them. Friends would call me, you want to play tennis? They wanted to beat the number one girl because then they could say, girls stink. Not one of them beat me. And I wiped the court with them. And I'd come home and my mom would go, don't beat the boys. Don't beat. Why not? Because they won't like you. This is one of 10 million messages girls get. So would you say that if you spent the 20 years you have about men looking at women and everything we've had, would you say, yeah, it's both equally brainwashing. Would you say that?

I would say that patriarchy gets internalized by men and women. And I'll tell you about a very interesting study we, you know, you and I both operate in corporate spaces as part of our work, right? So you would think that the percentage of men who have, have realized that we need, you know, inclusion and diversity in order to be successful and who are doing that work are appreciated by women in organizations. I have a quote here from an article from the Harvard Business Review and I'm just going to read it verbatim.

Okay?

First there's the dreaded wimp penalty. New research reveals that men perceived as less self promoting and more collaborative and power sharing are evaluated by both men and women and women as less competent and not incidentally, less masculine. Egalitarian men can feel the backlash effects of stigma by association perceived as being similar to women by advocating for them. This is more likely in organizations where people endorse a zero sum perspective on gender equality. Backlash against male allies is a real possibility. If women see male allies as weak, we like them, we appreciate their advocating. But if they're still buying into that idea that toughness and leadership is also dominance, dominant behavior, then we as men and women, our work together is to unlearn all of these patterns that we've been taught generationally. There's a certain percentage of men out there, Kathy, who would like to meet a woman who can beat him at tennis, who would appreciate that, who would say, look at you. That's amazing. That's power. Now, generationally, you and I are in the same generation. I'm 61 years old. So we come from a time, I mean, my mother, my mother's generation, there was a level of disempowerment there that women of my sister's generation have leapfrogged past. But there's another leapfrog process that's going on right now for young women. And sadly, I had to grow up in a culture where. Where I failed at man box culture but kept trying for centuries.

You failed at fitting into the man box culture?

Yeah, I couldn't get it done. I tried. I mean, look, let me say this.

What did you get done?

Let me say this.

Yeah.

As a very young man, I was definitely low on the pecking order. I had a late puberty. I was small, I was skinny. Eventually, I learned how to make some money. I got a mortgage, I got married. I pursued all of the markers of success, and I think I succeeded pretty well, except when you note that my ability to understand my own trauma and to be in relationship with a woman, I failed at two marriages. Right. And ultimately I ended up feeling every day of my life that I was alone, that I had friends. I had male friends from high school, but we didn't talk but once every two years on the phone.

We.

The disconnection that boys and men face, they try to medicate it with getting that mortgage and getting that car and making money and having sex and doing whatever. But sooner or later in our lives, we begin to face these crisis that are born out of the fact that we don't relate, we don't connect with our own partners, with our own spouses, with the people we work with. And as men age, sooner or later, the rules of the man box get. Get a lot of women make a lot of money. They're going to fail at those things. Which is why suicide rates in America are skewed so heavily toward not only older men, but older white men. Because men sooner or later fail at being able to perform. And the younger men kick them to the curb and go right on by.

And there's no connection to boost that.

They have no community of male friends to rely on during times of crisis. Now there's a solution to all this, right?

Yes. Tell us. We need.

I'm part of the Mankind Project and we do men's work. We get together in circle and we connect and we have the conversations we need to have in order to connect as human beings instead of placing each other on the pecking order and figuring out who's the alpha in the room. Right. Men thrive when they have a circle of friendships in which they can be honest and be authentically themselves. And this is the men's work movement. Whether you do Everyman, the Mankind Project, Hugh Min is over in London. Men's work is. And men can choose to do their work with a therapist. They can choose. They can get some self help books and read them, they can join men's groups. But men hit a crisis sooner or later in their lives and they either say, I did my work at 55, right?

Oh, wow.

And suddenly now I have those friendships again that I remember from being a young boy. I have the same joy when I call up boys and Hodgson or when I call my friend child Charles Mathis. We are, we feel this joy of connection and friendship and acceptance and understanding. I had to do that work to get there. And some men, they hit that crisis and they go right the hell on for divorce number three. Or they go right the hell on to try to double down on dominance. And sometimes all they have is that anger. The one emotion we're allowed to have is anger. So they direct that anger at feminists online and women and immigrants. And this creates political movements, this creates a White nationalism is rooted in men's sense of victimhood. My race is being erased. Right. There's a direct correlation between male supremacy and white supremacy. You go to the Southern Poverty Law center, you can read all about it. This is victimhood as identity. Because these men will not self reflect because they're broken. They were taught never to do that, never to look at themselves. Some men hit the crisis, they go to men's work, they go to connection. Some men hit the crisis, they get angry, they vent, they vent, they vent and then eventually they turn that anger internal and they commit suicide.

Oh, Mark, let me ask you something. Can you stay with me a few more minutes and we can make it a two part series? Do you have the time?

Sure I do.

Wonderful. I have to. What? I want to talk about what the heck do we do here? Because. And we will in a minute, because everything is how you were raised. I say, you are what your childhood taught you to be. Unless you unlearned it and healed it. You are, don't you? So I want to hear, okay, what do we do when we're 50, 60, and we're sensing it all spinning out of control? But I have to ask this question. You said, if I understood it correctly, look, the men that are understanding that this work needs to happen, diversity and inclusion, and are being more collaborative and less hierarchical. They're not liked by either side either. We're not sides. You know, men and women. Right. But I want to ask you this. I interviewed the behavioral science guys, David Maxfield and Joseph Grenny, and they filmed a woman, a female actor, and a male actor saying the exact same thing. And it was forceful. And they showed it to audiences, both men and women. It was incredible. And the actor said, I do not agree with the direction this team is going. Wildly, all audiences rated both the man and the woman as less competent and less valuable for being a forceful. But the female, her competence and her value dropped, you know, exponentially. So they looked at mitigating. What can we do to mitigate that backlash? And I thought it was brilliant what they came up with. They. They tested some introductory statements, and one of them was a value statement. So I teach this. When you're about to say something that nobody's gonna like, start perhaps with a value like, okay, folks, you know, I really value transparency and authenticity here. And because of that, I feel the need to say I do not agree at all with the direction the board is going in here. And I realize I tend to be able to say tough things, and it doesn't seem to be, you know, backlashed as much as it would 40 years ago. And I think part of it is, I don't mean we're dumbing it down or softening it. I mean, we're giving something a bridge where people can hear us because we're all fragile, vulnerable creatures, desperate for validation. But what do you think about this idea that both men and women were rated less competent and less valuable, being forceful? What do you make of that?

Well, I don't know the context of the research. I don't know where they got the populations that responded to the research. I will say this. We're reaching a tipping point in this culture where people. I mean, we got trained up by social media to go to the binary, and the binary is black and white, right and wrong. Me and you, us against them. And all this binary thinking has created media and culture whereby this alpha male Persona is played out by. By people both in the comment threads, but also on certain news channels, right? The angry, entitled alpha male who's simply going to condemn the point of view of everyone else. And that's a binary, right? So we get clicks and we get. We get, you know, increased viewership when we offer people binaries.

Because binary, meaning, this is right, this is wrong. There's gotta be two sides. And I'm on the right side, right?

And we create gender binaries and we create religious binaries and we create political binaries. And in that way, if you buy, if you accept a binary, if you are attracted to a binary and you decide to argue from the position of us and them, you've just lost your ability as an individual to have any agency because you've just gone for a binary. So when we talk about gender, we talk about men and women. I prefer to think of that feminine and masculine as a long, you know, continuum, right? And where some men fall in places that might be considered more feminine, some women fall. I mean, Serena Williams has her moments when she's about as strong and forceful an entity as can be imagined, right? So we're all somewhere on that continuum. And I would suggest that we. That we code switch and find you're different when you're consulting with a client than you are when you're with your family. Right? I am, too. So we move up and down that continuum, right? From certainty to, I don't know, let's see what emerges out of this. All these ideas of what it is to be a man and woman. I prefer to use the term masculinities. Right. There should be as many ways of being a man as there are men. Instead, we have a whole culture that's trying to jam men into this one narrow performance. And if you don't get far enough in, you can face a lot of microaggressions, you can be attacked, you can be fired, you can be murdered. So it's not a joke for men. We choose when we're little and we don't even understand what's fully happening yet. We align ourselves in ways so that we do not become the target. And so we. Yes, you're absolutely correct that there are ideas that are driving divisions still in our culture. But I think people are getting to the point now where they've drunk from the glass of binary so many times that they're starting to say, what am I drinking here? What is this. And that's a tipping point of awareness and awakening that is being driven in part by the women's movement, by Black Lives Matters, by organizations that are saying there's a moral absolute here. But it's not the binary. It's how we are all interconnected, how we are all interrelated, how we live richer, fuller lives when we connect across difference and collaborate and create all these wonderful, magical things that we don't get to have when we're in this little, tiny, narrow space where I can only talk to other white men. Lord, protect me from a life where I can only talk to other white men. Please. I love them. I have some very good friends that are white men. But I want the full, rich tapestry of what it means to be human. And in that regard, I have to present myself as willing to learn and hear from people who are not like me.

Oh, gosh, I love it. I got two questions, but hold it for a minute. Sports and religion. And they're specific, the questions I have. But I want to tell you something. I grew up, I always say, almost like on a balance beam.

Yeah.

A part of, but not a part of. So mom was Greek. I went Greek Orthodox religion, but dad was Catholic. And until he died, I thought he converted. He didn't convert, and he was never a Greek Orthodox. In his mind, he was Catholic. So I kind of felt what he felt. Then I sang in St Patrick's Cathedral for a year. I'm not Catholic. Imagine that. And someone turned to me and said, we don't cross ourselves like that here, because Greeks do it differently. I'm like, I don't think God cares. Okay, then I marry a Jewish fellow. So I look and present. People think I'm Italian because my name is Caprino. They're always talking to me about nuns. I didn't grow up with nuns. I'm not. I don't know what you're talking about then being, you know, looking Greek and Italian but married to a Jewish guy. I can't tell you how much antisemitism there is. But many people don't know it because. What am I saying? They thought I was a safe harbor for that hate. Wow. They don't. They didn't know. My kids are half Jewish. My husband. My ex husband's Jewish. The point is. Makes me cry. The point is, I think always having been on the outside has made me have empathy.

Yeah.

For everything. That is different. Not being binary. I am, but I'm not. I'm Christian, but I'm married to a Jew. I'm right. So I think that it came more naturally to me not having that. You know, I was a brain in high school, but I smoked cigarettes and I was an athlete. So one thing I want to talk to you about is how do we raise our kids out of this damn box? And part of it is being a part of groups that you never thought you would be a part of. But here's what I want to ask you. When you were talking about the connection that men don't have. When I think of sports and I watch my son watching sports with his friends, it seems like there's incredible connection over a unified goal of sports. Would you agree with that? Is that what sports. Exhilarating, right?

Depends. Well, it's a surrogate form.

Yeah.

Where men are allowed to express emotionally. They're allowed to express enthusiasm for the team. It's a cry.

I mean, athletes cry when they lose the championship. Yeah.

It's a. It's a surrogate method by which men are allowed to rank themselves. Oh, I'm with this team. So my. I'm. I win. Our team won. They can rank themselves in individual sports games. When they play games against each other, they can dig deep into the details, all of the statistics and the history. And I saw this guy play at that stadium. And. And they get emotional about their. It is. You could not take something as vibrant and powerful as a human being and not give them an outlet, or they would just. They would collapse. We would catch fire.

So that's what sports is. Yeah.

Men are blocked off from so many other modes of connection and meaning, but they. They are given this sports discussion and conversation because it reveals nothing about who we are as individuals. We get excited about an external thing and the minutiae of it and the moments of it and the pat. And. And it speaks to the fact that boys and men want to connect. We want to. But if you stand up.

Gosh.

Go ahead, Go ahead. We'll stand up in the middle of a.

Of a.

Of a Dallas Cowboys game with your friends and say, I'm having some emotional issues around fear in my life because I don't feel like I'm validating much besides this, you know, and they'd say, sit down, shut up. What are you crazy?

Shut up. You. This, this, and this. You know?

Right. Exactly.

Come the labels.

So the joy. We see connection. You see connection when you watch your son and his friends watch that game. But ask after five hours of drinking beer and watching the game, ask any one of the men in that room if they know what their friends are struggling with in life, if they know what they're going through.

You know, among a million women, it's the joke that your husband comes home. So how was Fred? Good. I know he's getting a doors. How is he? I don't know.

Yeah.

How's his job? I don't know. What do you know? What the hell do you know?

And this is the. This is the challenge. This is the challenge that men's work addresses. When men go into circle, that we do a thing called check in, the first thing we do. And this is common to a lot of different types of men's work. And we literally come in and we say, where are you right now? Where are you at? And there's a little silence. And one of the men says, well, I'm really joyful because I had this success at work and this thing happened, But I'm also carrying some fear and some sadness because my mother's in the hospital. And I got this. I've never had these conversations with her that we're having now. And everybody in the room goes. And your shoulders drop, and you listen, and then you get to say your piece.

That's how you run these groups.

You mean that's how men's work operates? It is. Our men bring their authentic stories about what they're experiencing, and we support each other in the processing of it. There's a lot more to men's work in terms of how different organizations do it. But ultimately, it's a chance to just be with other men and not police each other's expression, but instead hear and support each other.

How beautiful, Mark.

And it happens like this. I'm telling you. We think men don't have these. These thoughts or these feelings. They don't show it because it's dangerous, because their own wives may say, you know what? You're making me uncomfortable. Get back in the box. I've lived with you this way for 30 years. Don't do that. I'm telling you, a man cannot step out of man box culture when, without the support of the people, of the relationships he's embedded in. Now, if he goes to a men's group, he can find some support there. But ultimately, we all have to let go of these ideas of what masculinity is or isn't. And I just want to say, in defense of women, some mothers teach their sons how to be tough, how to do the man box performance. Some fathers teach their sons how to be tough, how to do the man, how to be dominant, because we know what's waiting for them out there in the world, and we're afraid to send them out there if we don't give them some armor. Right? So it's a self perpetuating, generational thing that it's. Sometimes it's ignorance, they don't know any better. But sometimes it's, look, we can be a little bit more connecting here at home, but you got to be careful out there. And a wife may say to a husband, look, I get it that you want to do this work and utter, but don't show that stuff at the office because we set up a system where I'm at home taking care of the kids and you're the only wage earner. And if they get wind that you're doing this, you may not. You may not have a job, you may lose those.

Are you saying that's the wrong way to approach it? It's keeping him in the box.

We have to have relationships in our lives that allow us to do this work somewhere. But I would also suggest that once this change begins to happen for us, anyone at work would be like, what's going on with that guy? And some may be like, what's going on with that guy? But some people might be, you know what, I'm more drawn to that person now. And those conversations begin to creep out into work relationships, et cetera. Men code switch all the time at the office. We know which people, which women, which men we can have more authentic conversations with. We know which ones are going to penalize us for it. But. But once that begins to move into office spaces, I believe that the basic goodness of human beings, that is our ability to not only be good, but to seek good in ourselves and others will grow that over time and we see evidence that it is right.

Oh, I love it. And I want to validate this one thing. You know, in my early years with my husband, my dad was a guy's guy, little, small Italian guy. You know, men do this.

I love those guys, by the way. I love those.

My little goomba father, I mean, I loved him and I could be anything with him, right? But he did everything, you know, he did the lawn, he did the, all the, you know, garage stuff in the car stuff, women inside, men outside. And I remember when gas stations suddenly went to self help, you know, self pump. And I said to Arthur, my ex, I don't really know how to do it. Can you come down and do it with. He's like, I'm not coming down and pumping the gas with you. You're A very smart person. You're brilliant. You'll figure it out, you'll read, pick up the pump. And I want to tell you, and there have been times also, you know, he couldn't mow the lawn and it was assumed I would mow the big lawn. There's no question that I would run through the dialogue. This is not it. This is not how it should be because that's not how I grew up. Dad did that stuff. Dad would have gone down and pumped the gas for me. But thank goodness I went, wait a minute, wait a minute. How do you call yourself a feminist here? How do you. You have got to figure this out. But I'm understanding what you say because it was in every cell. This is what a guy does and this is not what a guy does. So I'm expressing empathy for this situation but also that we all have to get hip to how we were programmed and start looking at the.

We all have to self reflect. I want to say something that's really crucial and this is probably one of the most important things I would say in this conversation with you. When I talk about man box culture, when I talk about creating a masculinity of connection when I talk about all these things, I am not saying we must end traditional masculinity. This idea of who your father was or who my father was, that's one way to be a man and in certain circumstances that comes naturally to some men. If I were to sit here with you and say we need a masculinity that's on a spectrum where men can find what is a good fit for them but we can't do this one over here because it looks like the past. I would be absolutely making the. I would be breaking my own rationale.

Youe would be creating another man box.

Exactly. Traditional masculinity is fine. The problem with man box culture and the problem with dominance based masculine culture is when it says that is the only way to perform masculinity and when within the system.

I didn't want that as a person growing up I went like this half the time.

Yes, you did.

And that's why I am who I am. But it doesn't work when you're forcing the system is forcing a way that all the other members of the system are not or several members can't flourish. Would you agree with that?

I would. And what we need to understand. I'm going to take a simple example. It's 1950 and you're a young boy and you're 13 and you realize you're gay, and the culture around you absolutely has no space for that. These narrow rules for how to be a man, you begin to perform them over and over and over again, and you hide something as fundamentally human as your sexual identity. You hide it, and you spend years hiding it. And every time someone says something negative about a gay person, everybody uses the F word, whatever it is. You're the loudest one. You chime in the loudest. Yeah, that guy. He's gay. He's disgusting. Whatever. The distance between the narrow rules of the man box and the thing that you're hiding, the greater the distance, the higher level of anxiety you live with. So I identify myself in various ways that are well outside the man box. I believe I have. I'm very good at nurturing and caregiving. My relationship with my son taught me aspects of myself. As I was changing his diapers, I was bathing him. As I was carrying him around at night for him to go to sleep. All the things that I did taught me about aspects of myself that made me finally come to understand who I really was. And after a lifetime of trying to do the man box thing, make money, get women, drink, everybody under the table, all that stuff, which I did pretty well, but it felt like a failure to me because it wasn't authentic to me. And I failed at it eventually because I couldn't. You can't do something right 100% of the time. So I lost a job or two, and then I failed at marriages, and then I didn't have a good year financially. And then I. All of these things. Man box culture is set up to make men fail. Sooner or later, you fail. But when I held that child, I remember when he was born. You know, you hand an infant to a man who's like, I'd really prefer to be fixing the screen door and painting the house and doing these things, because I don't know how to do this. It's not instantaneous. I don't know how these men do it, who are like my son, and suddenly they're, like, connected. I was freaked out. I was freaking. I would sit down with this baby as my wife would get in the car to go to the store to do something. Finally. You know, months went by before she finally handed me this child and said, I got to get out of the house. I sat there, and the clock stopped on the wall. It literally stopped. I was like, I don't know if I can last long enough sitting here not knowing what to do. I wish she would come back right now. And yet a year later, I'm walking around this old 1930s house we had. I'm walking in circles. The sun's going down. I'm holding him like this. I'm singing, singing to him. And I'm walking. I'm hearing my feet creak as it gets dark in the house and as he snuggles up against me and goes to sleep in my arms. And the song I sang to him over and over again, just softly as I walked in this slow circle. And I thought, my God, I'm home. I'm here. I'm me now. I have a thing that I can do. Well, that's authentic to me, right? That's authentic to who I am. And this is what men need. No matter where you are on the spectrum, if you're that guy who mows the lawn, takes care of the house, God bless you. Find your truth in that. But all the rest of us who are different and the distance of difference created this tension and anxiety daily. I would suspect that a large number of those men who are raving in the comments section and angry at feminists and whatever, they have been living with attention for a difference that they cannot even name anymore. It's been buried for so long, been crushed in them for so long. And it's only when they. When they hit that crisis point that they either move toward connection or on into self destruction.

Wow, Mark, you've given us a lot to think about. I'm going to ask you two things, then I'm going to let you go.

All right?

There's a lot we have to unpack to change this, Right? We're not miracle workers. We're gonna do what we can, every one of us. But can you give us one tip for parents of a boy.

Mm.

Or parents of anyone? Number what? What we can do to. I don't even know the language you'd use. Crush the man box, whatever. Get out of it. Create a continuum that works so that the person can authentically get on it. And number two, if you are a leader and you're the leader's listening to you and says, well, every darn word he says, I resonate with, but what can I do now? You have books, you have programs, you have workshops. We're going to send everybody there. But what can they do when they hang up from listening to this?

A step with our children. You have to remember that boys especially, but girls as well, face a version of this. The first thing we need to do in order to create a culture of dominance is we have to Break their ability to form connection. So we as parents, when we take the time to be in authentic connection with our children, and that's not the same thing as teaching and telling. We do that all the time as parents. You know, don't step off the curb, do your homework, all that stuff. But when we are in conversation and we say to our small children, you can begin in age appropriate ways. When they're four or five years old, you can say, I saw what Mike did at the playground. Yeah, yeah, Mike got mad. I don't. It made me feel bad. What do you think was going on for Mike in that moment? And then you fall silent and you let them begin to sort of explore questions of what does it mean to be me and what does it mean to be another person? And you carry those conversations. These aren't, we don't sit down and have this once a Sunday. These are little conversations that thread in and out of our daily interactions. We are in connection with our children and we invite them to talk to us about what their life experiences are. And that part of the process is where we begin to thread in why being distinctive is valuable, why that makes sense, why it makes sense that you're the way you are and why I value you for being the way you are. In this way, parents inoculate our children against a culture which says, no, there's only one good way to be. If you're a girl or a boy, there's only one good way to be.

I love it.

That's building that. Now, if you're a leader and you're looking at a population that you're responsible for providing leadership for, there's a version of this that is the same way. Beginning learning the skills you need to center relationships as part of your daily work. Yeah, you talked about it earlier. Kathy, you said, before I speak into an issue I have with how this project is going, I'm going to share a value statement. Right. What that is is a way of centering the relationships. First you say, hey everybody, I know we've been working hard. I know this has been a challenging time. I'd like to take a second here and just connect as individual, check in with people. See how you can do check ins in a business context. Say, how's everybody holding up in this process? Okay, I understand that. Listen, I understand we've been working 12 hour days. I know this project has been taxing, but I want to hear from you and then I want to give you feedback on how I feel like I'm really proud of you guys, I'm proud of what's going on here. Then we move into the nuts and bolts. Then we move into the work of it. And they say this about millennials. Even more so than people who are older. Millennials want to be seen. And we talked about this as, oh, they had helicopter parents. They got a trophy for every single thing they did. Yeah, exactly. But fundamentally, they're saying, I want to be seen for who I am, not for my cog in the wheel role in this company. And I think it is in those spaces where people get invited to bring all of their resources. This is where innovation emerges. If you're sitting in a meeting and you think, well, Bob just. Bob's leading the meeting, and Bob said where he wants to go, and my job is to agree with him, because Bob doesn't. You know, innovation dies in that moment. Everybody just gets behind Bob, and Bob's answer is the answer. Whereas when we begin to center relationships and connect with people, they feel more. They feel more empowered to go, hey, you know, I had this other idea. It's kind of crazy. It's out there, but let me just share it, because this is kind of exciting because I like you and you like me, and we're. Yes, you're my boss, and yes, you have authority, and you're. Ultimately, I get all that, But I had this idea, and it's only in context, where relationships get centered occasionally, that people feel the courage to connect in that way.

Whenever you talk, my mind splits in half, and I'm listening intently, and then I'm thinking about all my experiences that support what you just said or were the opposite, and why I died a little every year in my corporate life. Like having an innovative idea and somebody and everyone being mad about it and somebody saying, you know, that was the nail in your coffin.

Wow.

I. Oh, I had a nail in my coffin. I had a cough. I'm in a coffin. The point is, Mark, it's so. I've rarely spoken to someone who has such a deep conceptualization of work that needs to be done, but also has lived. It isn't just a pundit, pundit, you know, an expert. I'm so grateful for you. So I hope people. My goodness, if you're not questioning, inspired, wondering, I hope you have a million questions. So where do we send people, Mark, who say, what is this? I've got to learn more. Where do we go? Where do they go?

If you want to find me, you can go to remakingmanhood.com.

That'S it, huh?

There's a resource there. I'm in most social media at remaking manhood. So Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn and Mark Green on LinkedIn. But Instagram and I have a couple of books and you talked about this question of how do we help our kids. My partner and I wrote a book called the Relational Book for Parenting. And it has a lot of these ideas in it about how to grow conversations beginning at a very early age to help our children reach that tipping point of connection where they will not. I mean, literally, they get to a point where they go, why would I choose these cardboard cutout gender binaries the culture wants me to have? I'm not doing that. That sounds awful. I don't want that. The Relational Book for Parenting is a resource for that. It's full of cartoons, stories, games, ways to engage little kids to grow their ability to work and form and care for relationships. That's all we need as human beings to enrich our lives and to make a better world. Right.

And can organizations hire you to come in and crush the man box, Deal.

With how binary I present all the time. I recently did a great presentation with General Mills. The long and short of this is when we have conversations like the one you and I just had, two things happen. Men get a chance to take a breath and self reflect about why do I believe what I believe? Am I uncomfortable? Do I want to make a change? But women say, ah, now I get.

It, I get it. Now I understand more empathy.

Yep. It creates. I want to name an organization for you as well, Jerry. Gender Equity and Reconciliation International. They do this work globally. Right? There are many organizations out there, not just Mensworth, but, Jerry, Gender Equity and Reconciliation International brings men and women into the room for three day workshops. And I've done this workshop and it broke my heart and it filled me with joy. Simultaneously, because men and women told these stories about being human. A woman in one of the workshops I was in, and I think it's okay for me to share this, said tears streaming down her face after three days of us sharing our story, she said, I'm sorry. I didn't know. I thought men were made of steel. I thought I could hit them as hard as I wanted to. I didn't know it was breaking you. I didn't know that and I'm sorry. And for a woman to say that to men, Meanwhile, the men are literally weeping as they hear story after story after story of women being brutalized, being sexually assaulted, rape, all of the things that go on in the world that we're desperate to pretend aren't happening as men so the work is our compassionate ability to connect and live rich real lives and men just have to make the choice to live a good life and stop living this hierarchical caricature of being a human being I hope more men will make that choice I invite them to come to Remaking Manhood find a book, read it and start to make this shift in our lives I.

Can'T thank you enough Mark I'm falling apart over here I so appreciate it thank you Kathy I really hope we can continue this in any way yeah this discussion, this interchange people I hope you feel something here I don't even want to give it a word I don't want to prescribe but I hope it's unlocked something in you that will be very useful in the future in you building a whole life and helping others around you do the same thank you again and have a wonderful week and we will see you next week bye thank you.