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Bro Code Article 35, a bro must never watch a romantic comedy.
>> [LAUGH] >> Bro Code Article 8,
a bro must never send a birthday card to another bro.
>> [LAUGH] >> Bro Code Article 41, a bro never cries.
The Bro Code has 125 articles, and I first learned about the bro code
available at brocode.com from Mason, a junior in high school.
I never met Mason before, but he'd agreed to meet with me, or more accurately,
he'd had his arm twisted by his mom my former coworker.
I've spent the past three months talking to boys and young men like Mason.
I reached out to them because I wanted to understand what it means to be a man in
2020.
What I found, is that our culture's definition of masculinity is broken.
It's outdated, it's flawed, and
it's emotionally and psychologically dangerous.
In the past 50 years in America, we've redefined what it means to be a woman.
Young girls today are told that they can do anything, be anyone.
The author Ruth Whitman jokes that if parents today were naming their children
after virtues like the Puritans used to do, no girls would be named Charity or
Grace or Patience.
Instead, half of all baby girls born in America would be named empowerment.
>> [LAUGH] >> Or assertiveness.
>> [LAUGH] >> Of course,
it's still incredibly difficult to be a woman in 2020.
Girls today, women today, they face centuries of prejudices that have
calcified over the years and we're just beginning to chip away at the surfaces.
But we're at least beginning to have nuanced conversations around what it
means to be a woman.
Young girls today are taught that, femininity can take many different
forms our boys though, have been left behind.
There are many interpretations of masculinity and
millions of men subscribe to their own definition.
But our culture is predominant definition
of masculinity equates masculinity with machismo.
We tell boys to equate sensitivity with weakness.
We tell them to man up, to suppress their emotions.
We tell them that boys don't cry, and tell them to take it like a man.
We put our boys in emotional straitjackets.
When I was in high school,
you could hardly go a day without hearing the words no homo.
When a guy saw another guy in the hallway he would often maybe hug him and say no
homo, just to indicate that in case anyone was wondering he definitely isn't gay.
Now the University of Oregon Sociologists, CJ Pascoe,
has actually done research on no homo.
Sifting through more than 1,000 different tweets that included the phrase.
And what she found is that many of these tweets,
simply expressed a positive emotion.
Something innocuous like, I love chocolate ice cream hashtag no homo.
>> [LAUGH] >> I did my own search online,
and I found that many tweets were from young men to their male friends and
they express things like I miss you, or let's hang out soon.
Pascoe concluded that no homo is a form of inoculation
against insults from other guys.
It's a shield that allows boys to be fully human.
Now I want to be clear that this isn't about sexual orientation.
As gay man it's true that I've been unusually sensitive to stereotypes around
masculinity in my life.
But it's also given me a different perspective,
a view that's unvarnished of our culture expectations of manhood.
Meanwhile I've watched straight friends, as well as gay friends,
as well as myself, suffocate under the weight of these expectations.
In infancy, there's no difference between the sexes' need for
emotional connection or in their capacity to show emotion.
There's actually some evidence that male infants are more emotionally expressive,
than females, but soon that begins to shift.
The Harvard psychologist William Pollack notes, that by adolescence,
boys become shame phobic, convinced that peers will lose respect for them or see
them as lesser if they talk about personal problems or discuss their feelings.
The author Liz Plank notes that boys have their gender constantly surveiled for
any sign of misstep or mistake.
Boeys Che says, become fluent in emotional self-censorship.
There's a George Orwell story called Shooting An Elephant.
And in the story there's a colonial police man who's tasked with
killing an elephant running wild in his village.
And he's told to do it without showing a hint of hesitation or remorse or regret.
But he's torn apart inside.
The sentence that Orwell uses to describe how the police man felt,
is he wears a mask and his face grows to fit it.
From a young age, our boys wear masks.
And those masks soon become how they view themselves,
hardened, tough, unflappable.
They become disconnected from the emotions in their life, suffer for many intimacy.
It's that disconnection that leads to a loss of empathy.
Speaking with Mason, I was stroke by how his language went talking about girls,
was alluded in violence Pound, nail, hammer.
Women were dehumanized, objects,
a means to claim a place in the hierarchy of masculinity.
This is dangerous, this disconnection, this loss of empathy,
it leads to isolation, loneliness, desperation, needs to men lashing out.
97% of school shootings has been by man.
Men are three and a half times as likely as women to kill themselves.
Nearly half of domestic violence or
female homicides are the result of domestic violence of men.
Our boys are trapped.
Our men are suffocating.
And they can't even tell us that they're suffocating,
because we haven't allowed them the emotional vocabulary to cry out for help.
So what can we do about it?
We can start with our parenting.
I feel so lucky to have been raised by my dad.
My dad and my mum passed away when I was one, and my dad raised my brother and me
on his own, and he is the most emotional and sensitive man you'll ever meet.
He cries like 12 times a day.
>> [LAUGH] >> He calls me honey and
my special one every single morning growing up.
My dad woke me up by coming into my room and
softly singing, here comes the sun by The Beatles while turning on the lights.
>> [LAUGH] >> My dad has shown me that men,
straight men, can be sensitive, and that compassion, and
vulnerability form the foundation for the strongest relationships.
Change starts with parents.
Parents can encourage boys to talk about their emotions.
And parents can talk to their boys about their emotions too.
In doing so they can normalize emotional discourse.
This is especially important for fathers, and father figures.
Or maybe it’s a male rule model or school teacher.
Men need to see emotional, reciprocal healthy relationships with boys.
That connectivity that’s built on depth and nuance.
And we can stop gendering things.
So much focus has been on asking women to lean in to speak up,
be assertive, power pose in the bathroom before that next big meeting.
>> [LAUGH] >> We can also tell boys to be sensitive,
to be vulnerable, to listen more.
We can treat people as people first and foremost not as men and woman.
Gender today tells us how to behave instead of letting us behave in
a way that's natural to who we are.
If something's aggressive, we can say that it's aggressive and
call it that not masculine.
If something's feminine, or if something's nurturing,
we can say that it's actually just nurturing and not feminine.
These categories are constructions on our culture.
There's nothing inherently more masculine about being braver or strong, any
more than there's anything more inherently feminine, about being gentle or kind.
We can rewrite the rules of our culture.
The woman's movement has redefined what it means to be a woman in 2020.
It's time we redefine what it means to be a man.
Thank you.
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