Broadcasting from the most beautiful city in the world, I'm your host, Dr. Dan Cox, a Professor of Counseling Psychology at the University of British Columbia. Welcome to episode number 11 of Psychotherapy and Applied Psychology. Here we dive deep with the world's leading applied psychology researchers to uncover practical insights, pull back the curtain, and hopefully have some fun along the way, in an attempt to bring new ideas to practitioners, those training to be practitioners, and the applied psychology curious.
In previous episodes, I've told you that you can click the link in the show notes to send me a text. So the other day, I get a text and this is what it said. Hello, I saw you at the Suicide Prevention Conference and your presentation was incredibly validating.
My team is hoping to use the information shared to change our protocol on how we teach our students to effectively work with suicidal clients. And as a bonus, I found your awesome podcast. Thanks for your awesome and important work.
So I read this text and it makes me feel quite good. And so I go to respond and I can't figure out how. So after about an hour of sleuthing, which includes contacting the company, I learned that I, in fact, cannot respond to texts.
So first, let me respond to the person who reached out. It was lovely to read your comment. And if there's any way at all that I can be helpful, you can shoot me another text, but please leave me a way to contact you directly.
Secondly, for those of you who are interested in contacting me, feel free to use the link in the show notes to send me a text. It's actually a really easy way to contact me, and maybe what I'll do is respond to texts at the beginning of episodes. But if you want me to respond to you directly, be sure to include a way to contact you in the text.
Or if you want to find me in social media land, probably the best way is via LinkedIn. And the show notes is a link to my LinkedIn, so please feel free to click on that and either follow or connect with me there. So now on to the show.
Today, I'm thrilled to have one of the world's foremost experts, maybe the world's foremost expert. I don't know, it depends on how you think about it. This is a pretty strong argument, but anyway.
Today, I'm thrilled to have one of the world's foremost experts in men and masculinity. He is Professor Emeritus from the University of Akron, former president of the American Psychological Association, former editor of the journal The Psychology of Men and Masculinity. He's been the author or editor of over 20 books and treatment manuals.
And despite being retired, he has two upcoming books, Assessing and Treating Emotionally Inexpressive Men and An Autobiography, The Problems with Men, Insights on Overcoming a Traumatic Childhood from a World-Renowned Psychologist. In the show notes, what I'll do is I'll have a link to his website, and you can go there to see all of this and the many other things that he's been up to. This episode is part one of my conversation on men and masculinity.
In this conversation, we discuss fatherhood, parent education, normative male lexithymia, gender role norms, interventions, and much more. We begin this conversation with my guest answering my question about how we got into studying men and masculinity. So without further ado, it is my pleasure to welcome Dr. Ron Levant.
As you know, in psychology, we often say that research is me-search. Yeah, so the first thread, backing up for a second, I'm going to give a little background, I'm going to go back to the story. You know, so I got married early, became a father early, and then got divorced early.
And part of my reason for going from the West Coast to the East Coast is that my ex-wife had moved with my dog. My daughter to New York, and the only way I could resume my relationship with her was to go to graduate school in East Coast. And I wound up at Harvard, which is your relationship with your daughter, my daughter.
Yes. Yeah. And so but I was a divorced, semi-custodial father of a daughter.
And and as such, it was very difficult.
And in 1979, the movie Kramer vs. Kramer came out, you know, and I saw myself in the character, the Dustin Hoffman, Mr. Kramer. You remember, he just was doing, you know, his this story was Meryl Streep playing Mrs. Kramer, decided she was going to go off to California to find herself.
That was actually a thing, as if yourself could be found in California, right? No matter where you live in, there's a whole bunch of cells in California. You just have to go there and claim it.
I always found that funny.
But anyway, I saw myself in the character portrayed by Dustin Hoffman, you know, who, you know, suddenly he had to be the hands on parent for his eight or nine year old son. And I had my daughter living with me during the summers because my ex wife wanted to use the summers to travel. So she dumped Karen off, my daughter's name is Karen, off with me in Boston.
And I'd have her for the summer because I was, you know, I had a more flexible schedule in the summer.
Because you were going to graduate school at Harvard.
Yeah, I was going to grad school at Harvard and it didn't go well. You know, my relationship with my daughter was often difficult and rocky. And we know that, you know, divorce is tremendously impactful on the kids.
And it was in my case as well. So when I saw that, when I saw that movie, I had what I call a slow moving epiphany. It wasn't like an epiphany in a flash.
Suddenly you realize something. It sort of dawned on me over days and maybe weeks. That maybe it wasn't that Ron Levant just sucked at being a father, but that men of my generation had really not been prepared to be hands on parents, which was true.
You know, I was a boomer. I mean, you know, I never had to babysit my younger brother. My parents wouldn't trust me.
You know, when the girls went to HOMEAC, we boys went to wood shop in the seventh grade, you know. So boys in my generation, there was never an expectation that you'd be anything other than like your own father was, which was the, you know, the good provider and the chief disciplinarian. You know, when we, when, you know, when I ever I did something wrong, I had to go see my dad, not my mom.
Right. I started to think about this and I, I decided, you know, being an academic, decided to do a lit review on parent education. And I found that all of the, you know, the, the studies and reviews that I found never mentioned where the parent group included dads.
What year is this about?
1979, 1980. And so I wrote a paper. I don't think I ever published it, but it was titled, Parent Education Is Synonymous With Mother Education.
So I had a grad student at the time, Greg Doyle, and he and I were both runners and we were training for the Boston Marathon. And so we had a lot of time to talk. We do 10 and 15 mile runs, you know, during the week.
I meet him a couple of times. And I, you know, and so we cooked up this idea of, well, why don't we develop like a father-friendly parent education program? And that became his dissertation, Greg's dissertation, which was like a quasi experimental design, like basically an own control.
So he recruited, I think, 16 dads. Eight were in the experimental group. Eight were in the delayed treatment group.
And so they took all the tests. And at the end of the first group, the second group went through the treatment. And we had created a workbook that we used, Parent Education for Fathers.
Oh, look at that.
And that was the workbook for the fathers. And then we had a leader's guide. So, you know, it was a real thing.
And Greg did his dissertation and graduated. And then at that time, I was at Boston University on the faculty.
So what, not in the specifics, but what was the experience of the program?
Yeah, eight sessions. Met once a week in the evenings for a couple of hours. And some of the, here's what the agenda was.
Part one was other directed communication skills. Attending, listening and responding to content, listening and responding to feelings. You know, kind of what you would teach first year students in a counseling psych program.
Right, yeah, how to be good listeners.
Yeah, and then the second was self-directed communication skills, speaking for oneself, self-awareness, speaking for oneself, genuineness, acceptance. So we were, you know, kind of Rogerian kinds of qualities were built into this. I was, by the way, trained by a first-generation Rogerian who was John Schlein.
So I kind of had that background of kind of the Rogerian approach. And in the course of this Fatherhood Project, a little bit more about it. So BU at that time, Boston University, yeah, Boston University, and that's my first faculty job.
I was in the counseling psych program there. BU at that time was in trouble with its neighbors because it was expanding into the surrounding communities and they were kind of up in arms, and the university wanted some way of making peace. So they're looking for community-facing programs that would, in the words of the president, that would help the residents of the greater Boston area appreciate the advantages of having a university in their midst.
And I was tapped to be one of the people doing this. I was given release time and money to run a community-facing program offering a non-credit course to members of the community, which was called the Fatherhood Course.
My dean knew about Greg Doyle's dissertation, and there was another program another faculty member had that was focused on women. I said, why don't you run a father's program out of the university? So that's kind of how it got started.
With the money we got, this was in the early 80s, video equipment was insanely cool. And I bought an insane amount of it.
You know, I had three total setups with decks, special effects generators, cameras, microphones on tripods, you know, the whole nine yards. And when men came into the room, they were duly impressed with our equipment. You guys have really got it going on.
Look at all this stuff. And we would tell them, hey, you know, we're going to help you become a better dad the way you might have learned a sport like golf or tennis. We're going to do it.
We're going to videotape it. We're going to break it down and figure out how to do it better. And you'll be good to go.
I mean, this kind of sounds like what a good counseling skills training program or procedure would look like. Practice it, record it, watch it, find where you're struggling, do it again, do it again, do it again, right? Focus on micro skills, the things you're struggling with.
And that's what I'm sort of, I mean, it may like coming from your background in, you know, my training was much later, but the Rogerian stuff, the Rogerian approach was very much from what I understand, where a lot of the skills training really came in to psychotherapy and applied psychology.
Well, not so much in my grad program, but at BU, when I, my first faculty job, you know, they were using Ivy's book.
Right.
On micro skills, I think it was, you know, so we were, I had to teach masters in doctoral practica. And so I was, you know, using that curriculum, essentially the Ivy micro skills curriculum. So yeah, so this applied, you know, I adapted this to, to this situation, to the fatherhood situation.
But now here's the interesting part of this. You know, we were doing this, oh, and we got, we really caught a wave. The program opened in 83.
And the father's role was just starting to change visibly. And you started to see dads in Harvard Square, carrying infants in snuggly packs, you know, chest packs or pushing strollers. And so, you know, we got enormous media attention because we were doing this.
The Christian Science Monitor, when they found out about this, because what we would do is we'd put out a public service announcement through BUR, which is the NPR affiliate in Boston, that we're offering this course and then call this number to register. It costs like $200 for a non-credit course. And the Christian Science Monitor got word of this and they came over, and they did like a huge spread in their newspaper.
I think it went on for four or five pages of newspaper. Wow. And then what happened is the rest of the media world caught on.
So I was on Oprah Winfrey. I was on 2020 with Barbara Walters. You know, it just exploded.
Do you have any of that? Any of that video?
Oh, yeah.
Oh, that's great.
Yeah, I have the print stuff. The video is in a format that I don't know what to do with. I think it's either beta max or three quarter inch.
So if anybody's listening who knows how to take any of those formats and digitize them, email Ron and we can get this online because this is a part of history.
It's Levant at uacron.edu. There you go.
So we got an enormous amount of publicity. Now, the president of the university at that time, John Silber, he was a very ornery person, and he wrote a letter to my dean with one of these clippings or something. He wrote a handwritten note.
He says, What is this Levant trying to do? Turn fathers into mothers?
So needless to say, the president wasn't thrilled. But it went very well. But during the course of doing this work, one evening I noticed that one of the dads seemed to be kind of upset, just his nonverbals.
And so I said, Is something wrong? And he said, Yeah, my son stood me up for a father-son hockey game. The guy was a divorced father.
And, you know, obviously connection with his son was important. And I said, Well, how do you not knowing much about men and emotions at that time? I said, Well, how do you feel about that?
His answer, He shouldn't have done it like that. You know, I didn't ask him what he should do. I asked him how he felt.
I said, Okay, I agree. He probably shouldn't. But how did you feel?
He looked at me blankly. So I said, Okay, let's role play this. I asked another father to play his ex-wife.
Excuse me. I asked another father to play his ex-wife as she delivered the news to him that his son had forgotten about the date and had gone off with some friends.
And we videotaped it. And then we played it back. And you can see his face falling into a frown, his shoulders slumping.
So I'm sitting right next to him, looking at the monitor. I'm saying, Watch yourself in the monitor. How did you feel?
He's going like this, scratching his chin. I guess I must have felt disappointed. I thought to myself, I guess I must have felt disappointed with all this coaching.
I wondered and kind of imagined in my mind, how might a mother feel in an analogous situation, like a daughter standing her up for a shopping date? Well, at first, I was surprised because it's not like her to do that. Then I was hurt that she acted with so little regard for my feelings.
Then I was worried that maybe she was upset with me, and this is her way of showing it. And then in the end, I was, you know, annoyed and irritated because my whole day had been built around this and now it was run. I guess I must have been disappointed to surprised, hurt, worried, irritated, annoyed.
What's going on here? I went back to my colleagues in the counseling psych program. Ron, men, women are just more emotional than men by nature.
I didn't like that answer. I didn't think that was true. Now in my doctoral program, I had the opportunity to specialize in child clinical.
It was a clinical psych program. And I had to know more developmental psych than my classmates. And I was aware that there was a subfield in developmental called emotion socialization, where there's a research of a variety that you could never fund today, where they actually put video cameras in people's homes and videotape them around the clock and then coded all that video.
You know, you think about that, what an enormous research job that would be and what a budget you'd have to have. And so I went back to that literature. And this comes to like this later topic of normative male lexothymia.
I went back to the literature and I found some very interesting things. First, that boys are more emotionally expressive than girls as neonates. But neonates don't do much.
They cry and they sleep.
What's a neonate?
Hours after birth. Neonatal. Right.
Neonatal. So, I'll do that again so we don't have...
No, no, you're fine. Keep going. Keep going.
We're great.
But at six months of age and one year of age, babies do a lot more. And the same difference was found in a study done with six-month-old babies and one-year-old babies. By two years of age, another study found that girls were gaining on boys, particularly in the verbal expression of emotions.
That is, they use more emotion words like, I'm sad, I'm afraid, I'm lonely, what have you. And then between four and six, boys appear to lose their facial expressivity. So this is an amazing study.
I don't have penis envy, but I have research envy sometimes.
Tell me about it.
But this was a brilliant study. So basically, the experimenter brought in a mother with one of her children, boy or girl, between the ages of four and six. The child was in one room with the experimenter and was shown a series of emotionally stimulating slides.
The mother was in an adjacent room watching her child's face on a TV monitor. The question was, could she identify the slide shown to her child in terms of what emotion it was supposed to stimulate?
So if the image was something that was supposed to make the kid feel angry, she wouldn't see the slide, she would just watch the kid's facial expression. And if the kid would, she would try to guess what basically hit their emotion.
She had to tell what emotion the slide was pulling for.
Right.
Yeah, so at four years of age, mothers of boys and mothers of girls were equally accurate. But as the children age, mothers grew less accurate with their sons. So that by the age of six, there were significant differences.
Small, most sex differences are small, as Janet Hyde has shown. And so you have to say, well, what's happening to boys between four and six? They're in preschool and elementary school.
And little boys know that the worst thing they can do is walk, talk, act or throw like a girl. And girls are emotional. So the boys aren't.
So the boys, you know, were being policed by other boys. You're a crybaby, you know, or you're to this or that. You know how boys are.
And it led to these. This is a cross-sectional, not a longitudinal study. So that's a limitation.
But nonetheless, it's showing that at different ages, boys facial expressivity decreased over that two year span. So at this point, you know, I know very little, but two years before I started the project, the Fatherhood Project, or three years, I did a postdoc with Joe Pleck. Joe and I both have our doctors from Harvard, but in different programs.
Harvard has, ever since World War II and Henry Murray, has a history of killing its clinical psych programs, and then they re-emerge because the scientists don't like them. So he was in the program immediately before mine, and I was in the new one. And so we didn't know each other, but he was at the Wellesley Center for Research on Women, and he had a research postdoc in the summer of 80, and I applied for it and worked with him.
And his luck would have it, he was reading the galleys for The Myth of Masculinity, his landmark book, and he asked me to proof a couple of chapters. So I kind of got knowledgeable or semi-knowledgeable about the gender role strain paradigm and the idea, you know, that of social learning, essentially, that it's through a process. I mean, his whole theory is based on the idea of social learning, that children learn their gender roles through a process of reinforcement, punishment and modeling.
And that's kind of the foundation of the gender role strain paradigm. So, with that kind of background knowledge and my exploration of the emotion socialization research, I theorized that boys who are reared to conform to masculinity norms, particularly the norm to restrict the expression of emotions, would lose their facial expressivity over time, because it's just not cool for a boy to be that emotional. And right around that time, I actually wrote a paper, and I called this the normative male alexithymia hypothesis.
That is that boys who are reared to conform to these norms have an elevated risk to grow up to be alexithymic. And let me define that term for your audience. Alexithymia, A-L-X-E-I-T-H-Y-M-I-A, literally means no words for emotions.
And it's a clinical construct that was originally defined in relationship to psychosomatic disorders, which as you know have no organic basis and subsequently spread to other problems like PTSD, eating disorders, et cetera. And so I thought, hey, this may not be the same thing as clinical Alexithymia, but it resembles it. You know, that the reason I called it normative was to emphasize the influence of masculine norms.
Some people think normative means that it's frequent. No, it's really, let's talk a little bit about prevalence. We don't know how prevalent it is in the US, but a study was done in Finland, and about 17% of men met criteria for clinical Alexithymia and 10% of women.
So there was, you know, the sex difference right there. I didn't know about that study at the time that I was doing this. I learned about it much later.
So those two influences, the Fatherhood Project and working with Plec kind of came together. And I left BU in 1988 and went to Rutgers, and it was there that I developed the Male Role Norms Inventory, because that was the next logical step. So if we're talking about masculine norms, we need a good way to measure them.
And the only thing we had at the time was... Gosh, I'm forgetting the name of the... Do you remember the name of...
It'll come to me. We had a scale developed by one of the early men's studies scholars, but they had attempted to... They had kind of postulated, I think it was eight norms, but the attempt to factor analyze the scale and show that it had that structure failed.
So the instrument really wasn't widely used. And so I was tasked with teaching a research course, and I said, you know what? It's a small group.
I could lecture to y'all, but what about you be my apprentices, and we do an actual research project?
That's great.
They loved it, yeah. We actually did it, and we published it, and all of their names are on the article.
That's the original Male Role Norms Inventory.
Right, exactly.
And so for those who aren't familiar, and please jump in here, but that the Male Role Norms Inventory are items like, I believe that men shouldn't talk about how they're feeling or things like that. So it's my belief. So right.
And so it's not so men and women, anybody can take the measure. And it's so like my belief that it is okay or it's not okay to do certain things.
You know, basically, it measures beliefs about how boys and men should think, feel and behave. That's exactly what it is. And everybody of any gender identity or sex has opinions about that or beliefs about that.
So, you know, can be given to people of any, you know, women, transgender people, what have you. So it's really a belief about, you know, what is normative for males in our society. So that makes it kind of a social constructionist perspective.
And it, you know, kind of flies in the face of these essentialistic, gender essentialistic views that says that masculinity is due to the white chromosome and testosterone and all that. We could talk about testosterone if you want. You know, it basically and the proof is in the pudding.
I mean, a current masculine norm from Jim O'Neill's gender role conflict scale is restricted affectionate behavior between men. Men are not supposed to show physical or verbal affection to each other. But in Abraham Lincoln's time, the norm was the exact opposite.
Men hugged, kissed, wrote flowery poetry, and when they traveled to visit each other, and by the way, back in those times, you didn't get on the interstate in your Lexus and drive. I mean, it was a stagecoach or a railroad or even a horse, right? And so when they traveled, they slept in the same beds.
So I mean, I can get all kinds of examples abound. I mean, just in terms of emotions, compare Italian men to Irish men. Italian men are very expressive, you know, and they with their hands and Irish men are, you know, basically inexpressive, I guess is the way.
So culture, you know, culture, historical era. So it gives the lie to the idea that masculinity is somehow inherent or essential to men, which I think is really the fundamental premise of the psychology of men and masculinities, and the idea that there could be many masculinities. We talk about that a little bit.
So that's kind of how I got to where I am.
So then one of the premises is that, let's just use, I guess, normative masculinity is culturally based, culturally defined. So I think it's the six factors, I could be wrong on that, on the male role norms, or the...
Seven, okay, that was close, that some of those would, you know, that men in certain cultures would be higher on some of those than men in other cultures that would be lower on those.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And part of my early research was actually looking at that.
I did a number of studies comparing different groups of men and women on the male role norms inventory. So we did African American versus European American college students. We did two studies with Chinese college students.
We did one with Russian college students. And then other people took my work and did it in Pakistan, South Africa, and a number of other places. Yeah, so looking at how the endorsement of these norms varies by culture.
And so could you speak a little bit about that?
The United Nations has, if you go to their website, they have a gender equality measure that they've ranked all the countries in the world on. And as you can imagine, the top ones are Northern European, particularly the Scandinavian countries, Scandinavian countries are the highest. You can imagine Afghanistan under the Taliban is among the lowest.
China, which practiced foot binding of women into the 20th century. You know what that was about, as women were thought to be more attractive if they had small feet. So they bound girls' feet so they wouldn't grow and talk about cruelty.
And of course, during the one child era, there was an epidemic of female infanticide in China. So China is not going to be high on gender equality. Russia is not very high.
So you do find these cultural differences that kind of gives added support to the gender role strain theory and the idea that gender roles are essentially socially constructed.
In the US context, let's just sort of the US. North America sort of do you think or how do you think those norms have changed over time? If at all?
Oh, I think they have. I think they have. You know, I grew up in the 1950s.
And if anybody wants to know what the gender norms were in the 1950s, just watch. You can get on YouTube, the sitcoms, Leave It To Beaver, Father Knows Best, you know, and don't forget in the 1950s, women couldn't get a credit card. They couldn't open a checking account.
You know, so it was a very patriarchal society. But in the gender norms of the 1950s were essentially the norms that we measure today.
But society has in fact been changing. I mean, and the impetus for the change is really women. So let's talk a little bit about that and I'll come back to the norms that have changed.
In the 1950s, the percentage of mothers of small children that were in the workforce was in the single digits. I forget, four or five percent. By the mid 1980s, over 50% of mothers of children under the age of six were in the workforce.
From single digits to 50% in three decades.
So therefore, women gained financial independence from men. The next thing that happened, starting in 1965 and peaking around 1985, was what was called the Divorce Revolution. Divorces, starting in 1965, just accelerated and got to the point that half of all marriages were predicted in a divorce.
Half of all marriages, that's a huge, huge percentage. Now, a little known fact about the Divorce Revolution is two-thirds of the divorces were initiated by the wives. We put it all together.
1950s, you know, women are like that, you know, Washington Chief's kicker recently described at a commencement address. Are you familiar with that?
Yeah, yeah, the Harrison Butker.
Harrison Butker, thank you. Yeah. That was basically their role.
By the 1980s, they were empowered, and they started entering college, and now they earn more than half of the college degrees in this country. They occupy more than half of the spaces in graduate and professional schools, less so in engineering, but more so in medicine, law, clinical psychology, all of those. I mean, when I went to grad school, 80% of my classmates were men, and at the University of Akron, 90% are women now.
So the major impetus for changing gender roles has come from women, and it makes sense because they were oppressed. They didn't really have full rights, and they were really dependent on their husbands. Not the case now.
You know, Richard Reeves wrote this book of Boys and Men and, you know, documents that boys and men are doing more poorly than girls and women on just about every educational, social and health indicator you can imagine. But what he misses, what he completely misses, is the effect of gender roles. That women gave up their traditional gender role.
You know, I have a scale that measures femininity ideology. Very few women endorse, very, it's very, people don't believe it anymore, that women should be dependent and nurturant and all this stuff. Women can be whatever they are, but men's roles haven't changed.
You know, we've had decades of intergenerational conversations between mothers and aunts and children about how to navigate gender in the changing social world. Whereas boys are simply told to man up, be a man, toughen up. Come on, we've got to change the way we socialize our boys.
I don't know if you're familiar with this book. I'm going to bring it in here. I'd like your audience to see it.
This is one of our colleagues, Chris Rigolouth. He's a member of the division. The Masculinity Workbook for Teens.
This is a book that can be used in social and emotional learning classes in middle school. And it asks boys to kind of really think about what kind of guy they want to be. It explains the guy code and all the pressures.
It asks them to talk about the pressures they feel to behave a certain way. It asks them if these pressures fit their personalities. You know, it goes deeper.
So the idea, I mean, we need something like this desperately. Boys need something like this to kind of allow them to escape the man box, this set of restricted norms that you and I grew up with having to conform to. I mean, I don't know personally, but our generations did.
We need to break that cycle. So that's kind of my answer to your question, but I remember the question.
So you have a couple of new books coming out, but one of your new books, Assessing and Treating Emotionally Inexpressive Men. So in there, you talk about some about treatments, interventions, programs for working with, whether we want to call it normative male alexithymia or emotional inexpression or whatever you want. Can you tell us a little bit about that or tell me a little bit about that?
Sure. This is the second book I've written.
That's a wrap on part one of my conversation with Dr. Ron Levant. Please be sure to check out part two, which if you ask me, it gets pretty provocative. And please reach out.
I'd love to hear from you. Until next time.