Detoxing Masculinity (with Ronald Levant and Shana Pryor)

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Intro – 00:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: Welcome to Relationscapes. We're mapping the stories and ideas that shape who we are and how we connect with each other to build a better world. I'm journalist Blair Hodges and our guides in this episode are Ronald Levant and Shana Pryor.

RONALD LEVANT: Men die in the US on average 5.3 years earlier than women. They have more diseases in every disease category, and researchers say it is not due to biology. It is due to behavior.

BLAIR HODGES: Masculinity is having yet another moment—from TikTok alpha gurus and tech bros up through the rise of the manosphere. When society feels unstable, many people try to get back to basics. The problem is, those “basics” are a bunch of rigid, outdated masculinity norms—norms that helped create the very problems we're facing right now.

In this episode, we dig into the research with psychologists Ronald Levant and Shana Pryor to understand how culture shapes masculinity, why it’s linked to violence and poor health, and what it might take to build something better. Their book is called The Tough Standard: The Hard Truths About Masculinity and Violence, and Ronald Levant and Shana Pryor join us to talk about it right now.

 

Masculinity Discourse Goes Viral – 1:59

 

BLAIR HODGES: Ronald Levant joins us. Ronald, welcome to Relationscapes.

RONALD LEVANT: Thank you, Blair. It's good to be with you.

BLAIR HODGES: And we're also joined by Shana Pryor. Shana, nice to have you.

SHANA PRYOR: Hi, Blair. Thanks for having me.

BLAIR HODGES: We're talking about your book you wrote together, The Tough Standard: The Hard Truths About Masculinity and Violence. I'm excited for this episode because masculinity is a big topic of conversation right now, and it feels pretty polarized. As psychologists, where have you seen masculinity discussions happening and what do you see sparking them?

Shana, let's begin with you.

SHANA PRYOR: Well, I mean, especially in the recent media and even among Instagram influencers, you have a lot of interesting voices. You've got a lot of people with different ideas. I feel like the topic of masculinity has been going on for a long time.

I see it a lot in my work in the military. And then you also see it in many social spheres where people are talking about roles for men, especially with developments in feminist movements over the last hundred years or so. But, yeah, I see it everywhere.

BLAIR HODGES: Ron, given your history, you've been studying this for decades, do you see the stakes at the current moment as being higher than usual? Is it a bigger topic of public conversation? What's your perspective longitudinally on where it's at?

RONALD LEVANT: Oh, yes. I mean, those of us who study the psychology of men, of masculinity, were ignored for decades. But what broke through was when the American Psychological Association published guidelines on psychological practice with boys and men. The American Psychological Association, your audience may or may not know, is a large association of about 150,000 psychologists and consists of a broad range, from people who offer psychological services, to people like me who teach in universities and do research.

And that kind of happy coming together of researchers and clinicians has allowed APA to essentially develop what we call evidence-based practice. That is, scientists conduct the research that provides guidance for best practices, and they work on sets of guidelines for practitioners.

So, for example, APA has guidelines on psychological practice with girls and women, on older adults, on LGBTQIA+ people, and racial and ethnic minorities, and so on.

When I was president of APA in 2005, I requested funds and staffing to develop guidelines for psychological practice with boys and men. This was particularly important because research at the time—and I think I started this in a presidential elect year, 2004—research was showing that men were really reluctant to use psychological services even when they were severely depressed and at risk for attempting suicide.

And so I thought we really needed to get some science in on this. What do we know from the science? Can we develop guidelines? So it took a long time, thirteen years for these guidelines to be finally accepted. And that speaks to a number of things, but especially the rigor of the review process. There are multiple levels of review, and at each stage we had to respond to many questions that were asked. The guidelines were finally approved by a nearly unanimous vote in of the governing body of APA, the Council of Representatives, in August of 2018.

Now, it didn't immediately have an impact, but what happened was, in the following year, in January, APA's magazine published a story on the guidelines. And its public affairs department issued what used to be called “the Tweet.” Now I'm not sure what it's called. [laughter] And the tweet, as you know, tweets strip away context. So the tweet said, “APA guidelines say on the whole, masculinity is harmful.”

Well, that led to a firestorm. Fox News put a picture of one of the authors of the guidelines on its website. People doxed us. We were getting hate email and hate calls. It went from Fox News to Breitbart and Blaze and Quillette, and we were just getting beat up by the right-wing media.

But then after a couple of weeks, the mainstream media kind of stepped in. So you started hearing from the Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, the Washington Post and publications like that, essentially saying, “Well, wait a minute, we read these guidelines. They're not as bad as you guys say. They offer very helpful guidance and men are in need of these services.” So that essentially elevated the whole discussion of masculinity and made it part of the national conversation.

I'll add one more anecdote. Gillette had purchased a Super bowl ad. And as you may know, Super Bowl ads are incredibly expensive. It could cost 7 or 10 million dollars for 60 seconds. They release their ad early because they wanted to catch this wave. And the ad was essentially the vehicle that coined the term “toxic masculinity.” That was not part of our guidelines. It is not a term Shana or I ever use. Because psychologists don't talk about people that way. But that's really the story. And it has remained a topic of the national conversation from 2018, 2019 to this very day.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, we see it coming up any time someone's trying to give a simple explanation of cultural dysfunction. I think changing gender norms can be used as a way to scare people into thinking this is why such-and-such happens. We see masculinity come up around topics like sexual violence, gun violence, economic turmoil, mental health disparities.

So masculinity, it seems to me in my amateur experience, that it really has become more and more of a public focus, something that more people are talking about. We'll return to that “toxic masculinity” phrase a little bit later.

 

Does Biology Make the Man – 8:41

 

BLAIR HODGES: But first let's start with the idea of “biological determinism.” I think a lot of the heat around the topic of masculinity happens because people aren't being clear on what they mean when they say masculinity.

Like you say in your introduction to the book, a lot of people think that just is synonymous with male. To be masculine is to be male or have male biology. And that's why any critique of masculinity feels like it's just an attack on men as an entire category. But you're taking a more psychological view of masculinity.

Let's start there with that definition of what you even mean.

RONALD LEVANT: It's really a set of social norms. We're all familiar with social norms, and social norms are culturally based. Different cultures have different norms about how close you can stand to each other, how much emotion you can express. I mean, compare the norms for emotional expressivity in Italy as compared to Ireland, for example.

So masculinity is a set of norms for how boys and men are expected to think, feel, and behave. And even more importantly, for how they're expected to not think, feel, and behave. There are a lot of prohibitions, and that's why masculinity is often talked about as kind of a constricting definition, because there's so many don'ts and not too many do's.

BLAIR HODGES: So it pertains to the thoughts and feelings and beliefs and behaviors that are considered appropriate for boys and for men, and things that are not considered appropriate. And your book gives us a good intro to how the field of psychology itself has shifted away from a biologically determined definition more towards a social construction view.

And when people assumed it was biologically determined, psychologists were developing scientific ways to measure masculinity. Tell us some of this history to give us an idea of what we thought masculinity was and how science would show us the way.

SHANA PRYOR: I mean, I want to talk about a little bit of this overestimation of this idea of testosterone, the overemphasis on biology and what biologically it is to be a man.

RONALD LEVANT: Right.

SHANA PRYOR: Like more testosterone than estrogen.

BLAIR HODGES: It's going to make you manly and aggressive and big.

SHANA PRYOR: Well, not even that, but it's saying that this is how it is, that this is just the way men are. When in reality, psychologists study it from a social perspective. And of course, absolutely, there is a biological component to gender, naturally. But that's such a smaller piece in comparison to the overall product when we think about gender and gender identity, what we think about socially.

It's like what Ron was saying earlier. It's like what has been reinforced and seen as a good thing, that when it's reinforced, it comes with benefits and it comes with pride and it comes with all those things. And what does it mean to be punished as a man, right? To be looked down upon or belittled or even socially isolated.

BLAIR HODGES: One example of an actual scientific test would be like, let's see how much testosterone a person has and then that explains how aggressive they are. As though we can measure how manly a person is in these scientific ways. But now the paradigm is shifting to social construction, to seeing how people are kind of taught to perform.

Like, who's to say that being taught to be aggressive doesn't elevate someone's testosterone or whether testosterone is even correlated with aggressive and violent behavior at all?

Ron, what are your thoughts on that?

RONALD LEVANT: Well, I have looked into testosterone. I'm not a biologist, I'm a psychologist. But testosterone and estrogen circulate in the bodies of people of any gender identity. As humans have both of them. Testosterone kind of seems to be, and these are from non-human animal studies, seems to be necessary for aggression. But the big problem with testosterone is there's no dose response relationship.

You can give a non-human animal 200 times the normal dose of testosterone and it does not increase their aggressive behavior. On the other hand, in the animal kingdom of which we're a part, but I'm talking about non-human animals, social factors seem much more powerful.

So for example, take chimpanzees. Once the alpha male or the leader of the troop has been selected, there is no violence in that troop, you know, until a later point when that leader may have been injured in some fight and appears weakened, then the rising alpha males might attack him to replace him.

But so the idea that somehow men are what their Y chromosomes tells them to be is wrong. Here's another example. So one social norm for men today is men should not be affectionate with each other. And I'm not talking about gay men, obviously.

BLAIR HODGES: Sure. Like holding hands with your friend or something walking down the street.

RONALD LEVANT: Or hug when you see each other. But in Abraham Lincoln's time, the exact opposite was the norm. Men hugged, kissed, wrote flowery poetry. And when they traveled—and you know, traveling back then was not getting on the interstate in your Lexus, it was a much more arduous thing—they slept in the same bed.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

RONALD LEVANT: So these are norms, and then you look at different cultures and variations.

BLAIR HODGES: Your book shows how psychologists were coming to terms with how masculinity differed amongst different cultures and how there were different ways to reward or punish deviations from expectations about what it means to be a man. So this is this idea of social construction, the idea that communities, societies, humans, people, help set the parameters for what it means to be a man.

 

Gender Role Strain – 14:39

 

BLAIR HODGES: Feminist scholarship also helped out, getting this new gender role strain paradigm going. Maybe talk a little bit about that. And the gender role strain paradigm that psychologists started working with.

SHANA PRYOR: Yes. So the gender role strain paradigm, I can speak to this one in particular. So what we're talking about before when we were talking about biology, right? Old, like we call them essentialist views about gender where men are masculine and women are feminine. And that's just the way the world works, right?

It's the “men are from Mars and women are from Venus” type thing. When the gender role strain paradigm came along, that actually helped introduce this idea of, no, it was actually socialized. And there are three tenants of it. There are three different types of strains when we think about strain paradigm that describe its impact on men.

You have trauma strain, which indicates that the socialization process that boys go into to become men is inherently problematic and traumatizing for them and creates problems. Dysfunction strain is this idea that masculinity norms inherently cause problems in men. And we’ll probably talk about that a little bit more here, but we think about lack of emotionality.

BLAIR HODGES: Like, boys don’t cry.

SHANA PRYOR: I mean, you go into your work sphere, you might be doing really well, you know, because you don’t have to engage emotionally. But when you go home to your wife or your children and you feel like you're not as much of a father as you'd like to be, you can't connect with your wife, right. That's where you see a lot of those negative impacts come into their lives.

And then you have this idea of called discrepancy strain. So trauma strain, dysfunction strain, and discrepancy strain.

RONALD LEVANT: Discrepancy strain is when a man or a boy feels or is made to feel that he doesn't live up to the masculine norms. And, you know, this is how boys get socialized into conforming, because boys get called out, you know, if they do anything, if they walk, talk, act, or throw like a girl, you know, and I'm talking elementary school. They get called out by their peers. Sometimes they get beat up by their peers for doing that.

So the gender norms, particularly for boys, are enforced and sometimes enforced violently. This is why I think we need to kind of interrupt this at an early level while boys are still questioning, kind of what does it mean to be a guy?

They're telling me I got to be tough, but I don't really feel like being tough. I like to take care of my little sister, you know, but they're telling me I can't do that because that's girly. So things like that.

SHANA PRYOR: If I could say one other thing about discrepancy strain, too. We think about the way boys and men police each other, as Ron was saying. But I think an important piece that we don't often talk about is how women police boys and men. Right? So it's not just the friendships that do it, but it's also the intimate partners, the mothers.

That unfortunately, there are some women that will say, “man up,” right? Or even feel that men who, their partner who cries in front of them is unattractive to them now. And I think that's a big piece of it that reinforces this idea that they should go back into their shell and I think even harms them more because those are people that they've grown to trust.

BLAIR HODGES: I think the strain paradigm is helpful because it basically says there's these certain norms that people are expected to live up to. And what psychologists want to figure out is what happens when people don't, and what kind of strains does that put on them? What are the consequences for them? Because it can be really psychologically harmful, even to the point of being traumatic.

 

The Seven Norms Aren't So Normal – 18:30

 

BLAIR HODGES: You were surprised in your research that most men don't fully conform to all the norms either. It's actually very unusual to find men who tick all of the sort of manly boxes, right?

RONALD LEVANT: Yeah. I put together data from three studies spanning 17 years and found that the average score on a scale that we used to measure what we call masculinity ideology was below the neutral point. Meaning that on average most men did not endorse traditional masculine norms.

BLAIR HODGES: Like what are some things on that list?

RONALD LEVANT: Well, there are seven norms on that list. The first is avoid all things feminine. That's the number one. Don't do anything girly.

BLAIR HODGES: Don't paint your fingernails. Don't play with dolls.

RONALD LEVANT: Yeah, don't go over and comfort somebody who's sad, for example.

Then restrict the expression of vulnerable and caring emotions. Vulnerable emotions are emotions that make you feel vulnerable, like fear and sadness. But that the caring emotions are also prohibited because the most honorable way to be a man is to never need anything from anybody, ever. Independence, feeling lonely or feeling a need for another person, that's off limits.

Then it's being tough, being dominant, being self-reliant and having an extreme interest in physical sexuality. And finally, gay and bisexual men are thought of as effeminate. Although I don't subscribe to that idea, but I mean that's a cultural idea. Another norm is to disdain gay and bisexual men.

BLAIR HODGES: And your research also found that while most men don't personally affirm all those as being like important to being a man, that there was a small percentage of men who really affirmed it and were all on board with it.

SHANA PRYOR: It's kind of like a bell curve. You can think about it that way.

RONALD LEVANT: Explain that a little more because the audience may not know that.

SHANA PRYOR: Yeah, so a bell curve is very much like a bell. So you have it tapering off at both sides and then you have the large part of it being in the center. And so when we think about the large part in the center, which is the big hump of the bell. That's where the majority, like the average, the majority of men fall. But at the ends where it starts to get really narrow, where you get the lip of the bell, you see that narrow there at the lip of the bell. Both of those ends represent the higher levels of the highest, highest levels of masculinity, it is a small subset of men. And then the lowest, lowest levels of masculinity is a small subset.

RONALD LEVANT: But we should also say that the bell curve that I put together is skewed to the low end. So it's like somebody pushed the bell curve down to the low end.

BLAIR HODGES: What do you make of that? Like, why do you think it's shaped that way?

RONALD LEVANT: Well, because the men in these studies were established adult men. And when you're an established adult, you've could have a partner, a job or vocation, you probably have financial obligations like car payments or a mortgage. You may have kids. You're too busy to worry about what you are. You're masculine. "I've got to work the night shift so I can buy groceries for my family."

SHANA PRYOR: You know, I also think that we have the ideals that are put forth. But people will ultimately make their own way, right?

So for example, I don't know if you ever been on a college campus or on like a hospital campus. And you know, these engineers design these sidewalks to go very specific ways. And sometimes they are not ideal, right? But they don't know the human condition. They're laying out the path work. But when people start walking on it, they'll find that you'll see the little trails in the grass and those types of shortcuts. People start to pave their own way.

So when we think about this idea of masculinity, it's kind of like some engineer, when we think about society in general, just laid down these norms. But people will often go off the path to do what fits better for them.

BLAIR HODGES: Go ahead, Ron, did you have something?

 

The Power of Shame – 22:56

 

RONALD LEVANT: Let's talk a little bit about the upper end. There is a thin upper tail of men who endorse all these norms. And one of the things we find is I did a study looking at gun violence, and most gun violence in the United States is committed by boys and men.

Depending on the specific crime, if you look at FBI statistics, it could be as high as 97% of the crimes, the gun violence crimes are committed by boys and men.

And yet the vast majority of boys and men would never do that. So my question was, what identifies this tiny slice of men? And we have more than one mass shooting a day in the United States. So we've got a horrible problem with gun violence.

It's the men who feel that their masculinity has been threatened or that somehow they haven't lived up to it. And I'll give you one really compelling example. Sandy Hook, the elementary school shooting. The parents and survivors won a settlement from the maker of the gun. It was an AR-15, which is a military assault rifle. They won a $73 million settlement with the gun maker. Why?

Because of how Remington advertised the gun. The ads for the gun. They were like a little box, and it showed the gun diagonally across the page, a little logo for the company, which, by the way, is a serpent. That tells you something about that company. And then over on the other corner, bottom corner, is a caption, and the caption reads, “Your man card reissued.” They were marketing these guns to men who felt their masculinity had been threatened. And by God, they were going to get even with this weapon.

BLAIR HODGES: Right. The studies that show the men who are most likely to commit that kind of violence are often the most masculinity-norm endorsing men or the ones who feel most conflicted about those norms, these outliers.

RONALD LEVANT: Well, the way to put it, the precise thing is these are the men that feel the most shame about not meeting those norms. And shame is something Shana can talk a lot about.

SHANA PRYOR: Yes, the shame. It's shame. And Ron had mentioned feelings of rejection. Those are two big pieces when we look at why men might not seek help. Or why they might hold their emotions back in a little more than they should.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And this is the problem. Like this is part of the masculinity norms is to do this. So it becomes a self-reinforcing problem.

 

Men and Feminism – 25:57

 

BLAIR HODGES: I also, it dawned on me in reading the book, I loved the point you made that men lack a feminism type of movement for men. There is a kind of new men's rights thing. But that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about feminism as a way that women sort of became plugged into the history of what it meant to be a woman, felt the oppression that was involved in that, and could begin to theorize about it, to resist it, to come up with different ways to be women, to say they want to wear pants or they want to be in the workforce more or they want to make a choice about whether they have kids.

And feminism, a lot more women are taught about what that is. Men, on the other hand, don't often get a sense of the history of masculinity, like we lack a similar movement for men to see where men's gender norms come from and how harmful those can be to men.

RONALD LEVANT: Exactly. Yeah, we do. This whole movement of women, really, you have to go back to the 1950s when women couldn't get a credit card. They had needed their husband's approval for that and fewer than I think the amount of women who were mothers of small children who were in the workforce was in the single digits.

By 1985, 50% of mothers of small children were in the workforce. From single digits to 50%. So women gained financial independence from men. And the next thing that happened, starting in 1965 and going to about 1985, was the divorce revolution. And a little-known fact is two thirds of those divorces from ‘65 to ‘85 were initiated by the wives.

So basically, put it all together, women gain financial independence from their husbands and they leave bad marriages in droves. And women have been having these intergenerational conversations. Shana, you may have had this experienced as a girl or a young woman, you know, kind of helping young women learn how to navigate a social world in which gender roles are changing.

Problem is, men haven't kept up. They have to give up this notion of adhering to these masculine norms. And in one of my lectures, I say, let's replace “man up” with “human up.”

SHANA PRYOR: Yeah. I think for a lot of men, they don't have anything pushing down on them to change. And in reality, they have women pushing up. They're being like, hey, we need more of this. We need more of this.

BLAIR HODGES: Which can cause retrenchment or even like pushback of feeling like you're encroaching on our territory.

SHANA PRYOR: Yes. And I think for me, you know, I know Ron and I differ slightly in some cases is that I kind of believe that it really comes down to inflexibility with men. I think you can express yourself as masculine. I mean, that's perfectly okay. But I think the idea that you inflexibly do that, you know, it's not a one size fits all.

So you have, like I said, you have to be able to be vulnerable with people you trust. For example, you have to be able to seek help. Right. Because we all need help. We all need social support. And where men get into trouble is when they don’t have that flexibility.

I use even something as trivial as clothing. You know, we can talk about that. Women have fought for flexibility. We have fought for this ability to be strong but sensitive, even just wear pants. I mean that’s old, old news. But even down to what men can wear. And I always ask, why don't you guys wear dresses? Right? And they laugh.

BLAIR HODGES: Exactly.

SHANA PRYOR: But it's like, I get that. I mean, it's funny, but it's kind of like well, think about it though, right? What would happen if you wore a dress? If that became socially acceptable. And men just do not have the same freedoms as women do in that area. And it's the way they've hurt themselves.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Not only the same freedoms, but also the same social incentives. Like, womanhood has been denigrated or sort of oppressed for long, the idea of wearing a dress would seem silly to men who think women are inferior. Like, why would I want to take on the trappings of what's traditionally been associated with women if that already to me represents an inferior person?

SHANA PRYOR: Exactly.

BLAIR HODGES: That's Shana Pryor. She earned her PhD in psychology at the University of Akron and she's currently active-duty Navy, stationed in Okinawa. She studies masculinity, gender, and men's experiences of sexual trauma and interpersonal violence.

We're also talking with Ronald Levant, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Akron. He's also a former president of the American Psychological Association and has conducted masculinity studies for decades.

 

Gender Ideology All the Way Down – 30:55

 

BLAIR HODGES: I wanted to talk about gender ideology really quick. This is a term that's been used in popular discourse right now to talk about trans rights and queer identities kind of as a perversion of the natural order. So people I hear saying, “Oh, all this talk of trans people and stuff, this is all ‘gender ideology’ that's being put on to kids or like, you know, brainwashing kids,” or whatever.

But your work suggests that we need to hit pause and take a step back and recognize that gender ideas themselves, like gender ideology, is what anyone would have, because ideology is really just beliefs about what the norms should be, the origins of those norms, and then a moral evaluation of those norms.

So maybe say a word about that. The way that gender ideology is currently being used as a weapon to paint trans folks and non-binary folks as sort of coming up with this bad “gender ideology” versus “the truth” when in reality everyone's got a gender ideology.

SHANA PRYOR: Yeah, I think people like the boxes. They like when things are easily put into boxes. Men are from Mars, women from Venus.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

SHANA PRYOR: And I think with trans rights and gender fluidity, you know, that's kind of—I think RuPaul said, made a mockery of gender norms because its's really exposing this idea of performance. You have biological sex. Which is one thing which we talked about before, biology. But then you have how you express yourself. The identity piece. And I think a lot of people get scared when those boxes are now becoming shades of gray and are becoming blended together.

BLAIR HODGES: It's valuable to call that out. Because whenever gender ideology gets used as a weapon to say, oh, there's something wrong about that, it's a reminder that gender as a performance and gender as an experience is socially defined and socially transmitted.

Ron, I wanted to ask you about traditional masculinity ideology. So we're still using that word, ideology. Again, we're using it neutrally here. Sometimes that word gets used as a negative label. If it's ideology or it's ideological, it means bad. So talk about what you all mean in your research by traditional masculinity ideology here in the United States.

RONALD LEVANT: Well, ideology just simply refers to a set of beliefs, and we all have beliefs about all kinds of things. I think beliefs are vastly understudied psychological idea. I can't pick up a book that is really a textbook on beliefs. There really isn't one. And so it's just simply beliefs.

And when we say “traditional” masculine ideology, particularly when it comes to masculinity, what we're really referring to is the post-World War II version, which kind of held sway for so many years. It's the John Wayne version. Watch out, pilgrim, or I'll plug you. Yeah, make my day.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay, so the characteristics, I think of a white guy, strong, muscular, heterosexual.

RONALD LEVANT: Cisgender.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And there's a patriarchal element to it. Like men should sort of lead. They should be in charge. They have particular roles. And race, like you said, race is a big component of that as well, being cisgendered. So the idea is that you are what you are from birth, a man is a man and a woman is a woman, and that's the way it is.

RONALD LEVANT: And you've never seen John Wayne cry.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. There's certain things John Wayne should be and do. The stoic or strong presence. Not a huge emotional bandwidth. It's pretty narrow.

 

Re-thinking Toxic Masculinity – 34:53

 

BLAIR HODGES: And this is where it's interesting that your book doesn't use the label “toxic masculinity.” We mentioned this earlier. Shana, this is a good moment to talk about toxic masculinity compared to what you all are looking at with traditional masculinity ideology.

SHANA PRYOR: Yes. First, if I could, I wanted to correct something I said previously. I was talking about RuPaul when we talk about transgender. Right. There's also drag. Men who aren't  trans, who do identify as men. Dressing in drag. Right. Dressing as women. And RuPaul does dress in drag. Not trans.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Important point.

SHANA PRYOR: But so I don't want those things being conflated. When we think about this idea of, you know—

BLAIR HODGES: There's other episodes that'll cover that too. Like how some drag folks are trans, but a lot of them aren't. So yeah. Don't conflate drag with being trans. Correct.

SHANA PRYOR: Yeah. I just wanted to grab that first.

BLAIR HODGES: Perfect.

SHANA PRYOR: On to toxic masculinity. I think it’s a fancy and sparkly word and a sparkly thing to say. It kind of gets a point across pretty strongly. However, we don’t use that term, as Ronald mentioned earlier, in research and even in my own practice. Right. Simply because it gives this idea that, in my view, it gives this idea that there can be a good kind of masculinity.

And I think looking at things in duality terms like good and bad, toxic and healthy, I actually think just kind of create more of an issue. Because we're doing the box thing again. Right?

BLAIR HODGES: See, this is where for me, this is where I would push back a little bit in the sense of like, I think having the label “toxic masculinity” can be helpful if we're emphasizing it as a modifier. So toxic masculinity, not masculinity is all toxic. And I think some people get confused about that.

So when you talk about toxic masculinity, some people would immediately push back and say, “how dare you attack men. This is really bad. You're saying masculinity is all toxic and problematic” instead of saying, no, no, there's masculinity and there's also a toxic kind of masculinity that can happen.

So to your point as researchers who are looking at this from a psychological perspective, you're just trying to be precise in your terminology. And I'm thinking of toxic masculinity as kind of a pop culture sort of thing that can get a conversation started if we are willing to dig into it. And the thing you all point out about masculinity is, you're not saying masculinity itself is just completely problematic. You're saying when masculinity norms become obligatory, when they become hierarchical and inflexible, they have harmful outcomes.

That's where you're saying masculinity itself can be a problem because there's healthy masculinities, but then there's also these not healthy ones. So the toxic masculinity label, we can kind of like put that aside. As long as people recognize you all are looking at masculinities, that there's like some really negative things that can be done with masculinities. And also masculinities can be a really positive thing in people's lives.

SHANA PRYOR: It can happen with femininity too. Right?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

RONALD LEVANT: Let me talk a little bit about the toxic piece. I think it's really important that phrase toxic masculinity has been taken to mean that all men are toxic.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah.

RONALD LEVANT: And so when I talk to people about it and I say, okay, if I say this is a toxic or poisonous mushroom, you know not to eat it. But you don't think all mushrooms are toxic and poisonous.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Right.

RONALD LEVANT: You know, and some mushrooms are not toxic. In fact, they're delicious. In fact, we’re going to have some for dinner.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Okay!

So that sets the table. Well, so, I mean, we're thinking about the positive elements of masculinity, we're thinking about some of the negative elements of masculinity. And now we've kind of laid out some of the ideas about traditional masculine ideology that it's straight, it's white, it's patriarchal, it sets up a hierarchy. It has to do with proper men's emotions and how they relate to each other and to women, and maybe even how they feel about gay people or non-binary or trans folks, right?

 

Traditional Masculinity Harms Emotional Health – 39:09

 

BLAIR HODGES: So let's talk about the consequences of traditional masculinity ideology, how boys are socialized, and the kind of negative side effects you've seen in your research.

First, the emotional side of things. Ron, do you want to start, about what kind of emotional side effects you see from traditional masculinity ideology?

RONALD LEVANT: Sure. The biggest negative impact of the traditional masculine norm of restricting the expression of emotions is that men have a condition called alexithymia more frequently than women. And let me define that. Alexithymia simply means no words for emotions. And I did a study that looked at all the studies that compared men and women on various scales measuring alexithymia and found that men had higher scores.

It was a small difference. But most sex differences in psychological traits are small. That's just the nature of the game, that we are not from Mars and Venus. We are more alike than different. We're human. Both genders have tear ducts. And this idea that men shouldn't cry, well, why did God give us tear ducts if we can't cry?

And everybody knows that if you're sad, crying releases hormones that make you feel better. And then I always say, what shortest sentence in the Bible?

BLAIR HODGES: "Jesus wept." I do know that one. Yes.

Yeah, but those things get punished, right? Like sadness, fear, affection. So you found these men who grow up who can't use a lot of vocabulary, don't even really have the language to talk about how they feel.

RONALD LEVANT: I have worked with men who not only do what you say, but they don't even experience an emotion as an emotion. They experience it as a bodily sensation, like a tight band, they'll describe it, “I feel like I got a tight band across my forehead. I got butterflies in my stomach. My shoulders are all tense.”

They actually do not even feel like “I'm apprehensive” or “I'm lonely,” or they just feel the physiological components of an emotion. And I've worked over a number of decades trying to do research on this that also develop a way to help men regain their emotional expressivity. It's a very simple kind of manualized treatment.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Give us the basics on it real quick.

RONALD LEVANT: Sure. Many men do not have an extensive vocabulary of emotion words. And I've done this in groups where I asked men to just give me words that identify emotions, and I'll write it on a flip chart or something, and I'll get about 30 words. 20 of them will be expressions of anger, furious, mad, pissed, you know, and then about 8 will not be emotions at all, but there'll be feelings of stress, pressure, burdened, zapped, burnt. And then one guy might give you a real emotional word like joy.

Okay, so the first step is I always ask men when I'm working with them clinically, I want you to think about emotions and write down as many words for emotions as you can. And I often rely on men's natural competition. I'll say the last client I had got 30 words, and I can be sure that this guy is going to come in with 31!

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. Shana, how have you seen it manifest in folks that you're working with? You work with people in the military. It's stereotypically thought to be very masculine. And it seems like a lot of this alexithymia, for example, can result in things like depression, isolation, anger. Is this kind of what you're seeing as you're working with people there in the field?

SHANA PRYOR: Well, I do want to make a distinction with. I know Ron coined the term “normative alexithymia” versus alexithymia, which is a neurological condition. So it's important to make a distinction between the socialized issues with emotions and then a neurological illness.

BLAIR HODGES: But man, imagine having both. [laughter]

SHANA PRYOR: Yeah, but there is research that indicates that women—just going back to the socialization piece really quick and then I’ll get back to your question—women have been taught to use emotion words more often, are taught to be more in line with their emotions. And so they've practiced and they've used, they've developed those sections of their brain, to a level that's more available to them when they're adults. But boys and men are not. So it's like you don't use it, you lose it, basically.

BLAIR HODGES: Well, this is the big lie too, I think, is that the idea that women are super emotional and men aren't, which in reality men's emotions are often just funneled into these very small, narrow, “acceptable” things like anger. And they're very emotional. They can be very emotional. So it's also not true at all that men just don't feel or have emotion. Like it's there, it's just been socialized in different ways.

SHANA PRYOR: Yeah. In clinical practice I always use the anger iceberg with men especially, but I use it with women too. When you're in something like the military, men and women both experience the stressors similarly where you have to bottle up the emotion. So when we think about men and women that have to go do their jobs. Especially if its protecting the and national security, sometimes you do have to put your emotions on the back burner. I'm not saying that you shouldn't do that. I think that's incredibly important to do. Because if we all wear our emotions on our sleeves all the time, that's not healthy either.

So what people think when they, when we say, you know, you should be more emotional, as I say, well, how the hell am I supposed to do my job? You know? So it's not that we want you to go from one end to the other, you know, we, we want you to be able to turn it off, turn it on, turn it off, turn it on. And that's often my approach for working with men. It really depends on what their job is in the military.

But for men that do have to have a lot more control, or men and women that do have to have a lot more control and they have to be on it when they're in their job, it is teaching them how to be flexible. That flexibility piece is important.

BLAIR HODGES: And I think even just having the language can be helpful. Like for example, if most of the things I feel, I just put them in my anger category, then I might become disappointed at something. And that instead of thinking disappointed, I think pissed off. If I don't have a lot of these categories to think through, then I'm just, I can funnel a lot of different complicated feelings into anger, you know?

And I'm missing out on all the complexity of emotions, like what it's like to feel happy and sad at the same time. Or, you know, there's just a lot of emotional bandwidth that's being sort of stamped out as men are brought up.

SHANA PRYOR: I've learned that a lot of people are afraid about what will happen. I try to be careful how much I use the word afraid whenever I say that. People, especially men, shut down instantly. They'll say, I'm not afraid really.

BLAIR HODGES: Okay. But yeah, masculinity norms. [laughs]

SHANA PRYOR: I mean, sometimes I become afraid and sometimes I get scared when I feel a lot of strong emotions, right. Because you're like, okay, this does impact my work a little bit. It is distressing. And so what I hear from a lot of people say, well, when I open that door, I don’t know if I’m going be able to close it.

And it’s almost like this fear of I’m going to lose control. But in reality, it’s practice. It’s practice. It’s learning how to soothe your own emotions. 

 

Traditional Masculinity Harms Physical and Mental Health – 47:06

 

BLAIR HODGES: Let’s talk a bit more about some of the negative side effects that you’re seeing as a result of traditional masculinity ideology. What are some examples, Ron, of ways that men's physical health can be affected by traditional masculinity ideology?

RONALD LEVANT: Well, that's a good question and thank you for that, Blair. Men die in the United States on average 5.3 years earlier than women. They have more diseases in every disease category. And it is not due to biology. It is due to behavior.

Men engage in 30 controllable behaviors that put their health at risk. They don't wear seatbelts when driving. They use more tobacco products. They consume more alcohol. They do not have as healthy diets. They do not exercise regularly. They do not visit their physician regularly. They do not take medications as prescribed. They practice unsafe sex. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

So it is behavior, and this behavior has the consequences of more morbidity and mortality. And I consider myself a health psychologist because my research and some who I practice has been working with men who have chronic illnesses like diabetes and things of that nature. And the work consists really of helping them develop better habits and learning to stay with the protocol that the physician has recommended.

I'm not the physician. I'm a psychologist. But when I had my office, my office was in a medical office building. So I got a lot of referrals from physicians. And so I capitalize on that. And I said, hey, I'm going to start a diabetes group. Send me your diabetic patients. I would get a group of patients and I would work with them on just better health habits.

And the other thing is emotional control of being able to say no to yourself. That's what I'm talking about. And being able to adhere to healthy habits when your masculinity tells you, “hey, I can do whatever I want. I'm a guy.” That's my point.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. So this physical health side of things, there's also mental health problems that traditional masculinity ideology can cause. Maybe. Shannon, do you wa want to speak to some of those things that you're seeing when people really try to adhere to these traditional masculinity norms, the kind of harm that can come to mental health?

SHANA PRYOR: Yeah. Well, I mean, as Ron mentioned earlier, right, the high suicide rate and men, white men in particular, but also Native American men, are the highest rates. But we see increases in depression and anxiety and even PTSD in some cases. So, you know, when we live our lives inflexibly, we’re going to experience the backlash from that from our own bodies.

Right? Like Ron said, developing bad behavioral pieces too, if you’re not eating well or taking care of yourself. And you're also not allowing yourself to engage in social support. Like you're really just burning the candle at both ends.

And let's say you are physically healthy, right. And you've managed to do okay in that sphere.

If you don't have a knowledge about your own emotions or how you're feeling or what helps you feel better or gathering support from others, you're not going to do well at all.

 

Traditional Masculinity and Violence – 50:41

 

BLAIR HODGES: So that gives us a sense of how traditional masculinity ideology can affect individual men and their physical and their mental health, it also has big consequences interpersonally, and in society. And this is where we can talk about violence, physical violence, sexual violence. For example, what does the research suggest about traditional masculinity ideology and sexual violence or about how masculinity and sexual violence intersect?

Is it the case that, like, most men are actually these animalistic sort of sexual predators who are just holding ourselves back from doing violence? Ron, you wanna speak to that?

RONALD LEVANT: Yeah. It comes to the “avoid all things feminine” norm. And for boys, that means avoid girls. And when I was a boy, we used to say, don't go near girls, they have cooties. The girls probably said the same thing about the boys.

So boys, essentially, most boys do not get to know girls as persons in the same way. They know the boys that are friends with them. They know, like, Jimmy's really good at baseball and Tommy likes to write. And so they have intimate knowledge of their male friends and zero knowledge of the girls.

And then suddenly they're in middle school, puberty hits. And I'm talking about obviously heterosexual boys here. I haven't really explored how this works out for gay and bisexual boys. But with heterosexual boys, which is the majority of boys, okay, suddenly they're interested in girls, but they see them one dimensionally, as a sex object, because they haven't had this experience of knowing girls as persons the way they've known boys as persons.

And I think that's a huge problem. And it leads to the phenomenon we call objectification. And that really applies to teenage boys all the way up through adult men who will kind of view a female only through the lens of her sexual attractiveness and nothing else.

BLAIR HODGES: And we should also mention too, men can experience sexual violence themselves. Sexual violence can happen between men. It can happen. Women can commit sexual violence against men.

But, Shana, I wanted to throw it to you about the idea that most sexual violence and most physical violence is committed by men. And also most men aren't committing sexual and physical violence either. So how do you all, as researchers, make sense of that information? Because it can become too easy to just say all, oh, this is how men are, biologically programmed to be violent and to be sexually assaulters and we're actually just kind of lucky that more men aren't doing it.

What does the research say about that? The fact that most of this violence is committed by men, but also most men aren't committing that violence.

SHANA PRYOR: I think a big piece that I always think about with the literature, especially on sexual violence, is that things are very underreported. You know, we know 1 in 3, 1 in 4 women, 1 in 9, or 1 in 6 men. Right. So the rates of sexual violence are high in general. And I do think there are probably more female perpetrators than we let on or that we believe in, certainly not more than men, but a decent size of it.

But we think about, you know, why some men go on to commit sexual violence. A lot of it is honestly, sometimes I wonder if it's a cluster of norms, right? So there is that risk-taking piece, there is that avoidance of femininity piece. And if we think about college, right? Research indicates sexual violence is largely clustered in the college years. And it's not just in college, but also in the military. Like that is run mostly by people in their early to mid-20s for some people, the military is their college. So the idea of this age range, right. We see that a lot where, you know, it can be something like lack of sex education.

And then it could also be clout, right? Like if you sleep with, you know, such and such woman, right. Or so many number of women. And that's seen as a positive thing, is seen as even that you're more masculine than other people. And I think that can lead to not being able to be courteous to other people.

I also think that this emotionality piece, if you're not in tune with yourself in your own emotions, how are you going to be in tune with your sexual partner’s emotions? So if they appear to be hesitating, are you truly tuning into that and being courteous to that? Do you have the ability to do that if you aren’t able to do it yourself?

So I don’t think it’s necessarily that a lot of—sexual violence is such a spectrum when we talk about this. But when think about rape, right, which is at the far end of the spectrum, a lot of it is about power. But when we think about sexual violence, a lot of it is this gray area. And we think about college. It like your brain is not fully developed until you're like 25. So your decision-making is not ideal.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. So it sounds like we need to foster more social solutions. These are more social problems than they are biological problems is kind of what the impression I'm getting from your work.

SHANA PRYOR: Correct.

BLAIR HODGES: Ron, do you have anything to add to that?

RONALD LEVANT: No, I agree with most of what Shana is saying. I think fraternity culture, and I was in a fraternity for one year and then resigned when I was in college, is a big contributor to it. And there's this kind of belief that persists that I think fosters it, that many men think other men are getting a lot more sex than they are. That motivates them to be competition, maybe a little bit too aggressive. And of course, you know, fraternities. I mean, my memory of fraternities was kegs of beer.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, yeah.

RONALD LEVANT: It was disgusting. Friday night, bring out the kegs, and everybody gets sloppy drunk.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And decision making's affected and all.

RONALD LEVANT: All sorts of things happen that shouldn't happen.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And it's important, I think, to recognize, like, how people are socialized. So. So it's easy to blame women, for example, if they go drink around young men and then say, well, that's kind of how it is. Instead of doubling down and saying, actually, men shouldn't do that, whether there's been alcohol involved or not.

Like, it's important to think about, again, instead of essentializing and saying, “these are biological problems and boys will be boys and girls need to be careful,” instead to say, “you know what? Boys should not be like that,” and have that be a bigger part of the focus rather than kind of just throwing things back on whether girls are making their right choices or wearing their right clothes. Masculinity norms sort of offload responsibility onto women is the problem I'm seeing.

SHANA PRYOR: Yeah, I mean, it comes down to that idea we're talking about. Where for a long time it was everyone else that had to change. And, you know, people are just not settling for that anymore. So it's that push up from the bottom that I was talking about earlier.

 

The Many Intersecting Pieces of Human Identity – 58:09

 

BLAIR HODGES: That's Shana Pryor, and we're also talking with Ronald Levant, and together they wrote The Tough Standard: The Hard Truths About Masculinity and Violence.

As we talked about at the beginning of the interview, there are different masculinities shaped by local cultures, particular people's experiences. This is where the idea of intersectionality comes up, I think.

And this is the idea that people are intersections. They have different things about them that help make them who they are. So a person might be a man, but they also might be Black. And being a Black man would have maybe different pressures or different expectations than being a white man, for example, someone might have different privilege.

Someone might be from a different country, or different ages. There are all these intersections. So men aren't just men. They're men and they're also dads, or they're men and they're also single. Let's spend a second to talk about the intersections of masculinity and what you see and why intersectionality is an important thing to take into consideration when we're thinking about masculinity. Shana?

SHANA PRYOR: I mean, intersectionality is amazing when it comes to flexibility. It's understanding that one size does not fit everything. What we're taught culturally, it dictates a lot of the way that we behave. So I'm here in Okinawa, Japan. And masculinity here is seen a lot more with—there is that stoicism piece, but there's also that taking care of the family and honor. So if we think about like, that's Asian American masculinities, right? Which, there's stereotypes about that, right? Because we put it through a Western lens, most research on masculinity has this Western white, heterosexual lens.

When we put the Western lens on it, we say, oh, they're effeminate, they’re weaker, a lot of stereotypes. And if we think about, I know you mentioned kind of Black masculinities too. I mean, you have to contend with the fact that there’s privilege as a man, but there is kind of oppression as a Black man.

So we think about intersectionality. It’s just the blending of all of our identities of age, race, religious orientation, sexual orientation. All those things kind of blend together to make our own unique masculinities, if that makes sense.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. And Ron, I wondered if you could speak to the fact that there's a lot of variation between men and other men, and maybe even as much, if not more as between men and women. And the same goes for women. Like, there's so many differences between women, maybe as much as there is between women and men.

But so often we just think about how men and women are different instead of the fact that, wow, you know, actually women are pretty different from each other too. Maybe even as different from each other as they are from men.

RONALD LEVANT: Yeah. When you take up the theory of intersectionality, which, by the way, I should mention, is part of what's being condemned in the United States as “critical race theory,” intersectionality grows right out of that.

BLAIR HODGES: Kimberlé Crenshaw is the theorist. She's a Black scholar.

SHANA PRYOR: Right.

RONALD LEVANT: Kimberlé Crenshaw, I'm really impressed. You've done your homework. So here's a good example. In the Mexican American community, you have two versions of masculinity. Machismo, which is very close to traditional masculinity ideologies. It's that the guys on the thin upper tail of the distribution, they check all the boxes. And then you have caballerismo, which is kind of the family man, the emotionally generous man, the man who takes care of others.

So they have these two distinct ideologies for masculinity in the Mexican American culture. That's the only culture I know that has, you can point to specifications like that, but variations exist. One of my former students, now, Dr. Baron Rogers, his dissertation was developing a scale for African American masculinity, which he started out by interviewing Black men in barbershops in the United States. Barbershops are focuses of social interaction in the Black community. This is where Black men go. And a lot more happens there than simply cutting hair. I mean, in fact, probably some therapy happens there, too.

And then when you intersect gender ideology with sexual orientation, you get all kinds of interesting things in terms of the different kind of categories of masculinity within the gay male culture. The bears and the—I forget all the different categories.

BLAIR HODGES: Twinks.

RONALD LEVANT: All of these are different identities that people adopt. So, I mean, what is the bottom line to this all? Well, we're more different than we think. There are just endless variations. And then people can freelance. They don't have to adopt a preformed identity, they can just say, “Hey, I'm Ronald Levant. I have all my quirks and all these things, and that's who I am.”

 

What Kind of Man Are You? – 01:03:37

 

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, perfect. That's exactly where I want to go. There's a part of the book where you say there's a question people ask men, like, “What kind of man are you?” And it's put to someone as an insult, or to question whether they're living up to those norms. And you say, we can actually use those same words, but ask the question like this: “Hey, what kind of man are you?” And you're asking it with empathy and curiosity and you're expecting variety. So even in the way you ask that question, you can open up space for people to find more healthy ways to perform and to occupy gender.

RONALD LEVANT: Absolutely.

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah. The question you ask in the book is, “what if we teach our sons that there's no one right way to be a man?” That's a terrific question. So what I'll close with is, where do you think we go from here? What kind of suggestions do you all have? If people are looking for more healthy versions of masculinity, if they want to learn more about masculinity, become more comfortable with it, where do you direct people, Shana?

SHANA PRYOR: Well, I would start by having some of these conversations. I mean, even with your siblings or your father. Or a father figure in your life. Or your sons, grandsons. I would start with that. The more conversations we have about it, I think the more we can kind of brainstorm these ideas on practically making our own paths, so to speak, what that might look like.

BLAIR HODGES: The trick is that, traditional masculine ideology is going to be right there to sort of police that. Ron, what do you think? What's your suggestion?

RONALD LEVANT: Well, I'm actually promoting a program now, and I've had conversations with the city of Akron and I've have feelers out to a number of places, a number of communities with violence prevention programs. I mentioned that we have, you know, an epidemic of gun violence in this country. I think we need to start in middle school.

We have this class called SEL, Social and Emotional Learning. And I have a curriculum for it. A friend, a colleague of mine, developed it for boys, where it would be kind of like a masculinity workshop. And the reason why middle schools is because boys get tremendous pressure from their peers in middle school to “man up.” That's really where it's most intense. And it combines with puberty and gender identity and all these things.

But so I would like to see SEL classes for boys in which they can talk about the pressures they're feeling. They can talk about who they think they really are. They can talk about, you know, what kind of guy they really want to be if left to their own devices and help them form their own ideas about what it means to be male rather than just be forced to kind of conform to a set of norms.

And there's no space for that that I'm aware of in public school education today.

SHANA PRYOR: Also, when we think about the way people have changed, right. The feminist movement, even how people of different races, those kinds of things. And I know you had mentioned, Blair, that, yeah, the masculinity thing is going to rear its ugly head, and it will, but we have to learn how to create these spaces for ourselves. And I think programming is a piece of it. Absolutely. But I think when we think about masculinity, it’s like, what does it mean for you? What does it mean for the people around you? I think we have to just be prepared to face that piece that's gonna rear its head, right?

BLAIR HODGES: Yeah, it's going to take a lot. So school programs can be helpful. I think movies, film, TV, like getting different role models and having discussions happening in media. I think gaming culture, I think a lot of interventions can be made there. I think ongoing academic work into what masculinity is is really important. I think shifting parenting styles is going to be a part of it. Public awareness campaigns.

I think there's a lot of different things we're going to need if we're going to make cultural shifts. And we should, as we've acknowledged, expect opposition to that in the name of, “That's all gender ideology,” when as we've already mentioned, it's gender ideology all the way down.

That's just what we're facing here. So your book really helps clarify that for people.

Again, it's called The Tough Standard: The Hard Truths About Masculinity and Violence by Ronald Levant and Shana Pryor. They're also putting out a new book, Assessing and Treating Emotionally Inexpressive Men. A great resource for therapists and other people who work with men to help assess and treat their issues when they're emotionally inexpressive, as Ron described earlier.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises – 1:08:34

 

BLAIR HODGES: All right you two, let's close with everybody's favorite segment! Or maybe it's just my favorite segment. I love to ask about regrets, challenges, and surprises. You can pick one of these: Something you would change about this book now that it's out, what the most challenging thing about writing it was or something that surprised you the most in writing the book.

Ron, let's start with you, and then Shana.

RONALD LEVANT: Well, it's always a challenge when you're thinking of writing a book. You know, it's a couple of years of work at least. It’s 400 pages of manuscripts. It is a lot of research and fact-checking.

BLAIR HODGES: Decades of research in this particular book, right? 

RONALD LEVANT: Well, and for the book you're going to research specific areas. Then we worked together on these books. There's developing a relationship with your co-author and kind of understanding each other and knowing what each other's strengths and weaknesses are, and being able to work with each other in a productive way. That cannot be understated. The relationship that goes into being co-authors is really critical.

BLAIR HODGES: That's a challenge. Were there any points of real contention or bones of contention that you had to negotiate on or just kind of pick one side or the other? Can you think of any examples of that?

SHANA PRYOR: I think we worked really well together actually.

RONALD LEVANT: Yeah. I've known Shana since she was an undergrad. And I've always seen in her a drive to kind of really excel. And I think one of the first interactions we had, she looked me right in the eye and says, I'm going to get my PhD.

SHANA PRYOR: Yeah.

SHANA PRYOR: I think with Ron, too, I think he's just been an amazing mentor, someone who's able to, you know, just. I've learned so much from and I've enjoyed watching, so I consider him a lot whenever I'm thinking about my own future career.

But when I think about, like, what was hard for me with this book was just kind of contending with my own identities, right? Where I'm kind of like, all right, what does a white woman know about men and masculinity? And realizing that there might be some men, like, “you don't know what it's like.” And I don't. I'll never know what it's like. But I have my own unique perspective, and I have a drive and a care for this. I think that was what it was for me, was just trying to say, what's my place in this? Where can I be most helpful?

BLAIR HODGES: Well, thanks a lot. This has been great. Again, the book is The Tough Standard: The Hard Truths About Masculinity and Violence.

Ronald, Shana, thanks so much for being with this today.

RONALD LEVANT: Well, thank you for having us.

SHANA PRYOR: Yes, thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

 

Outro – 1:08:34

 

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to Relationscapes. There's more to come soon. If this episode meant something to you, let me know! Leave a rating or review in Apple Podcasts or Spotify. That's what DCHanson did, they reviewed the show and said "Relationscapes is helping me get uncomfortable with a lot of the preconceived notions I grew up with."

Same for me! Thanks for saying so.

Mates of State provided our theme song. Relationscapes is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm journalist Blair Hodges in Salt Lake City, and I'll see you again very soon.