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Religion News Service spoke to filmmaker and actor Justin Baldoni about masculinity and his faith, childhood and experience on “Jane the Virgin.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Your book is about undefining masculinity, not redefining it. What’s the difference?
What I learned early on was that redefining masculinity would create the same problem.
The problem is the definition.
I think we can have an idea of what masculinity is; the problem is when we enforce that on other people, and ourselves.
That’s how you create generational trauma.
The whole idea of undefining it is to take masculinity out of this rigid box that says, “This is what a man is and if you’re not these things, then you’re not a man.”
We teach our young boys at an early age to hate the parts of themselves that look like girls.
We’ve been socialized to have a disgust for the feminine not just in ourselves, but in one another.
If you look at the Bible, the Qur’an, the Baha’i writings, the prophets of God have always been the example of a balance of masculine and feminine.
Jesus is deeply sensitive, empathetic, compassionate, forgiving, right?
There are stories of Jesus weeping in the Bible. And yet he also had all these traditionally masculine qualities.
Isn’t being strong having the full gamut of feelings and emotions and attributes that God created for us?
If it is, then why are we doing something different?
The reason is because of socialisation.
So we need to undefine masculinity to make room for anybody who is a man to be a man without policing.
What are some of the biggest ways your Baha’i faith informs how you’ve come to understand masculinity?
In my faith, (the prophet) ʻAbdu’l-Bahá tells us that “the new age will be an age that’s less masculine and more permeated with feminine ideals, or to speak more exactly, will be an age in which the masculine and feminine elements of civilisation be more properly balanced.”
And this is really the impetus for all my work, this idea that God created us to be two wings of a bird. One wing is male and the other wing is female, but it’s not until the wings are equivalent in strength that the bird can fly.
What I love about my faith is it’s not about disregarding the masculine. It’s about finding balance. I love being a man.
This is not a book about man hating.
I believe that the rigid definition of masculinity has hurt a lot of people.
But more than anything, it’s hurt men.
Men are struggling and we need to open ourselves up to all of the parts of us that make us human.
I want to teach boys early on that their sensitivity, their empathy, their compassion are not just feminine qualities. These are embodied in the masculine as well. Continue reading
- Before he was a New York Times bestselling author, a filmmaker or an actor portraying the charismatic Rafael in the hit series “Jane the Virgin,” Justin Baldoni was a teenager with major insecurities.
- In his new book, “Boys Will Be Human: A Get-Real Gut-Check Guide to Becoming the Strongest, Kindest, Bravest Person You Can Be,”
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