Justin Baldoni argues that conventional masculinity teaches boys to suppress emotions and reject anything labeled feminine, stunting their development. He says fathers showing vulnerability and flaws gives boys permission to be fully human instead of conforming to rigid rules.
Chapters
To be a man. The ideal way to be a man is to be a human. It's not to reject all of the things that we deem feminine in society. It's not to reject all of these quote unquote weak things. And if you think about it, let's go back to language. What do we. What do we learn when we're 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 years old? What do we teach our boys? Don't cry if you fall down. Get back up, brush it off, right? Let's be resilient, be tough, be strong, be brave. Take physical risks. Don't be a girl, don't be gay. Insert homophobic slur here. So without even realizing it, we are programming and brainwashing our young boys to not only not trust the feminine parts of themselves that society deems to be feminine, not like them.
What we social scientists know is that there is no trait at all that's only for males and no females, or only for females and no males. What there are are these continua, right? And some of us fall anywhere along those paths.
We are literally raising boys, this generation of boys, to become robots, to become. The irony is to become these sheep that don't think for themselves. And yet the very thing we need to become human beings is already in us. We've just deemed them weak. Why are you choosing to reject the things that make you human, that make you compassionate and empathetic and sensitive? These are the things, and they are the cures for all of the ills plaguing humanity today. You know, I was trying to unpack. How is it that I was so close to my father? Maybe between birth and nine, eight or nine or 10, I wanted to be with him, I wanted to hold him, I wanted to cuddle with him when I fell asleep. And then something happened, A moment happened in school because of media, because of magazines, because of something that I was consuming for both of us where I suddenly became not his little boy, but his competition, his adversary, if you will. And we don't let adversaries in. We don't let our competition in. We're both men in the world now. And the second, we both are men in the world. We're acknowledging that we live in this patriarchal structure that's built on domination, right? That's built on getting to the top. And therefore we can't subconsciously let our guards down with each other to just be son and father, father and son. So there's this invisible force that I felt over the course of my life. We need to be letting our children in, especially our boys. And how do we do that? Here's going to be my little piece of advice. Vulnerability. What I learned was that my father stopped showing me anything that could be perceived as weak. I no longer. He wanted to maintain the idea of the superhero, the teacher, the father, when in reality, when I needed most growing up, once I reached that age, was for him to bring himself down to my level and show me his weaknesses, his flaws, his humanity. It is in the. It is in the. That effort to deconstruct all of that, to let it go, to open up, to open the gates, to let it out, to cry, to be emotional, be vulnerable in front of our children, that we allow them in. And when we allow them in, we're then telling them this. They are enough and that I'm enough. And it is my imperfections that make me perfect. So it's the vulnerability that opens the gates. That's the only way we can get rid of that invisible force of masculinity that stops us from being close to our fathers, our brothers, our friends.
