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,"

They are struggling in the classroom.

American girls are 14 percentage points more likely to be "school ready" than boys at age 5, controlling for parental characteristics.

By high school, two-thirds of the students in the top 10 percent of the class, ranked by G.P.A., are girls, while roughly two-thirds of the students at the lowest decile are boys.

In 2020, at the 16 top American law schools, not a single one of the flagship law reviews had a man as editor in chief.

Men are struggling in the workplace.

One in three American men with only a high school diploma — 10 million men — is now out of the labour force.

The biggest drop in employment is among young men aged 25 to 34.

Men who entered the work force in 1983 will earn about 10 percent less in real terms in their lifetimes than those who started a generation earlier.

Over the same period, women's lifetime earnings have increased 33 percent.

Pretty much all of the income gains that middle-class American families have enjoyed since 1970 are because of increases in women's earnings.

Men are also struggling physically.

Men account for close to three out of every four "deaths of despair" — suicide and drug overdoses. For every 100 middle-aged women who died of Covid up to mid-September 2021, there were 184 middle-aged men who died.

Richard V. Reeves's new book, "Of Boys and Men," is a landmark, one of the most important books of the year, not only because it is a comprehensive look at the male crisis, but also because it searches for the roots of that crisis and offers solutions.

I learned a lot I didn't know.

First, boys are much more hindered by challenging environments than girls.

Girls in poor neighbourhoods and unstable families may be able to climb their way out.

Boys are less likely to do so.

In Canada, boys born into the poorest households are twice as likely to remain poor as their female counterparts.

In American schools, boys' academic performance is more influenced by family background than girls' performance.

Boys raised by single parents have lower rates of college enrollment than girls raised by single parents.

Second, policies and programs designed to promote social mobility often work for women, but not men.

Reeves, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, visited Kalamazoo, Mich., where, thanks to a donor, high school graduates get to go to many colleges in the state free.

The program increased the number of women getting college degrees by 45 percent.

The men's graduation rates remained flat.

Reeves lists a whole series of programs, from early childhood education to college support efforts, that produced impressive gains for women, but did not boost men.

Reeves' has a series of policy proposals to address the crisis, the most controversial of which is redshirting boys — have them begin their schooling a year later than girls, because on average the prefrontal cortex and the cerebellum, which are involved in self-regulation, mature much earlier in girls than in boys.

There are many reasons men are struggling. Many men just seem less ambitious. Continue reading

Dr Jordan Peterson, a clinical behavioural psychologist currently on a talking tour in New Zealand, has drawn protests over his criticism of the #MeToo movement and his huge online following of disaffected young men.

"If you're stuck, so to speak, in a small isolated community and there's very little to do and no economic future and a fragmented community because so many people have left, high rates of poverty and single families and multi-generational histories of alcoholism and so forth, you set the stage for nihilism and suicide," Dr Peterson said.

"The idea that these communities are viable is simply not the case."

Dr Peterson has grown in popularity with conservative thinkers partly due to his strong criticism of university academics and school curricula.

He said boys in particular are not encouraged the way they used to be and the talk of 'toxic masculinity' has missed its mark.

"The unshakeable belief of the radical left is that the West is an unquenchably oppressive patriarchy and what that implies is that it's the fault of men," he said.

"And what that implies is that any males ... who are ambitious and who desire to take their place in the uppermost reaches of various hierarchies of authority are actually contributing to the despoiling of the planet and the fundamental oppression of women and minorities.

"And almost of all of that is complete nonsense." Continue reading

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Anyway on this particular day I found myself in the midst of hundreds of teenage boys in matching kit being made to run around, disconsolately.

It must have been the cross country or something.

They were being bossed about like they were in the army. It looked so miserable, poor luvvies.

They were students from Auckland Grammar, the "prestigious" boys school.

I live in the Grammar Zone, which is supposedly an advantage, although I could no more imagine sending my son to that school than I could packing him a cheese and pickle sandwich and waving him off to Mars.

But maybe I'm being a little unfair. Because Grammar principal Tim O'Connor has introduced a "healthy relationships" programme to try to teach young men to have respect for women and be informed about consent.

(My mum used to teach sex education at Hamilton Boys High. Seemed to be the thing in the 70s - the era of the Little Red Schoolbook. We also did a lot of tie-dyeing)

I don't want to be a downer, but I wish I was as upbeat as Mr O'Connor in thinking that a school programme could have "a major effect" on how young men form relationships. I'm not sure any school lesson can teach you not to be an arsehole.

Because you don't learn about gentleness and empathy on a whiteboard.

We learn the most important lessons, not from book learnin' or even by being instructed by a teacher with an expensive PhD and a cheap suit, but by mirroring the behaviour of those we see around us.

This happens below the level of conscious awareness, so it is not easy to change even with the most well-motivated campaign. Continue reading

• Deborah Hill Cone is a NZ Herald columnist.

And even if fathers are around, their sons don't engage with them much: boys spend 44 hours in front of a TV, smartphone or computer screen for every half hour in conversation with their fathers.

Why does any of this really matter, I ask the American psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who cites these figures in his new book Man (Dis)connected: How Technology Has Sabotaged What It Means To Be Male.

Why do boys need fathers?

Zimbardo, professor emeritus at Stanford University, replies that everybody needs a mother and father because they give different kinds of love. "Mothers give love unconditionally - because you came out of her body, a mother loves you. You bring home your report card and it's all Cs? Mom will say, ‘It's OK. Momma loves you anyway. Try harder.'

"Fathers give love provisionally. If you want your allowance, if you don't want me to turn off your computer, then you've got to perform. That's always been the deal with fathers and sons - you don't get a pass just because you exist, just because you got my name on your birth certificate. You're going to do it because you want your father to love you and admire you. That central source of extrinsic motivation is gone now for almost one out of every two kids."

The book, by Zimbardo and his co-author Nikita D Coulombe, is about why boys don't man up as previous generations of males ostensibly did. Continue reading

• Stuart Jeffries has been a Guardian subeditor, TV critic, Friday review editor, Paris correspondent and is now a feature writer and columnist for the paper