Men and Masculinity: Fatherhood, Emotional Insight, and Redefining Traditional Roles with Dr. Ron Levant Part 2

On this episode, Dan is once again joined by Dr. Ron Levant

Join in on Part 2 of this amazing episode as Dan and Dr. Levant continue to talk masculinity, mental health, relationships, and societal perceptions. Dr. Levant shares insights on emotional intimacy, stress management, and the impact of masculine norms on mental health. He also discusses his personal journey, trauma, and the evolution of fatherhood. 

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Transcript

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 12 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 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.
This week, I got another text from a listener where they said, great podcast, Dan, keep up the great work. Well, thank you, random listener. So if you want to shoot me a text, use the link in the show notes, just click on that and send along your message.
Also, you can now send me a voicemail. In the show notes, you can click the link and record a message on SpeakPipe right from your phone or from your computer. It's really wonderful to hear from you.
Today we have part two of my conversation with one of the world's foremost experts in men and masculinity. If you haven't listened to part one, you certainly can, but it isn't required listening for this episode. He's Professor Meredith 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 an author and editor of over 20 books and treatment manuals. Links are in the show notes, so you can easily check these out. In part two of my conversation on men and masculinity, we discuss interventions for normative male alexithymia, emotional intimacy, fatherhood and changing societal attitudes, navigating trauma and challenging norms.
We begin this conversation with my guest answering my question about his new book where he discusses interventions for normative male alexithymia. So without further ado, it is my pleasure to welcome Dr. Ron Levant.
This is the second book I've written with one of my grad students, Shayna Pryor, who has subsequently gotten her PhD, and she's now on active duty in the Navy, serving in Singapore as a Navy psychologist. But she's, I love my students, they're all great, and she was terrific. She and I did The Tough Standard, and then we did this book.
Now, this book is unusual. Basically, what it does is it brings together 40 years of my work on Norbit of male alexithymia and in one place, and it provides a deep dive into the science behind what I did, because psychologists think of themselves as scientists, practitioners. I was the model I was trained in, probably the model you were trained in.
I mean, we had to learn a good deal of science, and we're kind of encouraged to think about, if we're in practice, about our work, what is the scientific evidence for it? There's not scientific evidence for everything, but where there is scientific evidence, we need to take that into account. So it brings together kind of the theory of normative male lexothymia assessment.
I give two versions. I present two versions of the normative male lexothymia scale, the original one, and then the new one, which is the brief form. I essentially present the whole science behind the psychometry there, you know, essentially the structural equation modeling and how we figured all this out.
I have two manuals that I've developed for what I call lexothymia reduction treatment or ART. I always say that psychotherapy is more art than science. That's where the ART kind of thing comes through.
So, I always like to work these subtle jokes into my work. It just makes me happy. I don't know what it does to other people.
Totally, yeah. So one is for individual therapy, and the other is for group therapy. I have a clinical trial, it's not randomized, but it's a clinical trial of ART, showing that it reduced normative male alexithymia, as well as the endorsement of masculine norms.
And so that's reported with all the science, the big table with all the results.
So would you be able to give us like a teaser? So, you know, for folks who want to really dig into it, obviously you want to get the book through. But for like maybe a specific intervention for working with men to reduce alexithymia?
Well, the first thing is that, and you kind of have to assess this, but I start off with the assumption that many men do not have a good vocabulary to express emotions. And I found this out when I did some men's groups, and I asked men to name emotions, and I'd write it up on a flip chart. And, you know, group six or eight guys, I might get 30 words.
Twenty would be expressions of anger, furious, pissed off, burned, you know, irritated, you know, those kind of words. And then about eight would not be emotions at all, but they'd be signs of stress, like burdened or zapped or burned out. And then one guy might give an actual emotion word like joy out of 30.
So the first thing is, you know, I'm working with a client individually. I explain to him the purpose of this intervention.
I ask him to think about, I test him in the course, in the context of the actual session. He doesn't have very many words for emotions. I suggest that he think about that during the week and write down as many words for emotions as he can.
And I often, you know, add a little kicker relying on men's competitive spirit, saying, my last client got 30 words, and I could be sure this guy is going to come in with 31.
That's a nice little trick.
So emotion, so that's, you know, before that I do a lot of psychoeducation explaining, you know, why we're focusing on emotional expression. And I explain a lot of the socialization processes and all that so that the man gets an idea of why we're doing this. And then I ask him to develop a vocabulary list.
And then I ask him to learn to identify emotions in other people, because I think that's easier than identifying it in yourself. And so I will explain sort of nonverbal behavior, facial expressions, tone of voice, paralinguistic things like sighs, cries and gas, body language. And I will say, okay, during the course of the week, as you're interacting with people, take a moment and ask yourself, what is he feeling as he's saying this?
What does his facial expression say? What does his tone of voice say? So I get him to tune in to emotions to other people and get him to start thinking about reading that.
Because you can, as psychologists, we read it all the time in terms of people's emotional behavior. Now, this isn't, by the way, this is a manualized treatment, but it doesn't take a whole session. And it has homework exercises.
So it can fit with any model of therapy. And if you're working on depression or anxiety, you can continue that work, but you build this in. And by the way, this is very helpful if you're treating anxiety, because alexithymic men would have a real hard problem with exposure therapy.
Because you're asking them to identify subtle differences in their anxiety levels in response to threatening stimuli. And if they don't even know if they're anxious to begin with it, so that's just one example. I mean, I think improving men's emotional expressivity and self-awareness will increase their uptake of psychotherapy of any kind.
But I just use the exposure therapy as an obvious example. So now the next step is identifying your own emotions. Now, Dan, I have to tell you, I've worked with some men who actually don't feel an emotion.
They're very Alexis Heime. What they do feel is something in their body, which is a physiological beginning of an emotion. So they might say, well, I feel like I have butterflies in my chest or a tight band across my forehead or my legs just seem to want to walk away from here, or I've got tension across my neck.
So they'll do that, but they won't say I'm sad or fearful, whatever. They're more Alexis Heime. So the exercise I give them now is I ask them to keep an emotional response log.
It can be anything. I usually suggest, you know, slip some 3x5 cars in your shirt pocket, right? And just pull it out.
Whenever you're feeling either an emotion or a bodily sensation that you don't understand, write it down. What are you experiencing? Tight band across my forehead.
Okay. The next question is who is doing what to whom and how does that affect you? You know, what's going on in your world that in which you have this tight band across your forehead?
An example might be, I was expecting feedback on an important report from my supervisor at noon, and here it is 1.30 and I haven't heard anything. Okay. Then go through your list of words, emotion words, and pick out the ones that kind of might express what you're feeling.
Apprehensive, apprehensive, fearful, anxious. So you see, this is like emotional kindergarten. We're helping, I'm helping men kind of make the linkages between their bodily sensations in some cases or their emotions and being able to put them into words.
And it's emotional kindergarten, because for men who are alexithymic, this was probably interrupted around the time they were in preschool or early elementary school. So we're going back to the basics. I mean, I know it sounds very simplistic, but it works, you know.
It's just, this is the way it has to be. If a guy can't tell you what he's feeling, you know, you've got to take all these steps.
It struck me while you were talking, and you were saying, you know, part of what you would do in your psychoeducation is explain to men why it's important. And I realized that we hadn't actually, we haven't said this in this conversation. And I think it's probably because for you and I, we just presume that everybody would think it's important.
But, and you did obviously give this specific example of somebody who's in, you know, exposure therapy for some sort of anxiety or whatever, right? You gave that, but in general, why is it important that men know what they're feeling?
Great question. Great question. It's important for stress management, for relationships, and for mental health.
And let me take each one of these. So what's the most effective ways that humans have to deal with stressors ranging from minor hassles to major traumas?
I would think talking about it with someone.
Exactly. Talking about it with a trusted other person. But if you can't put it into words, you can't talk about it.
So that really effective, common, more or less easy access way of coping with your stress is gone. You don't have access to that resource because you can't do it.
You can't put it into words. Yeah. And so what do men who are stressed out do?
Well, a lot of them turn to alcohol to numb the feeling, especially if it's a bad feeling. Others kind of get irritated and angry and get into arguments or fights. Some men soothe themselves with pornography, which is like nowadays two clicks away on your computer, pretty much.
And I mean, you wind up getting it even if you don't want it sometimes. And or gambling, which is a huge problem in my state now that they've legalized sports betting. We're getting a lot of people with gambling problems.
But so yeah, so if you can't do this, talk about your feelings with somebody else, receive some support, some empathy, get a little perspective on things, figure out a way to solve your problem. Then you're left with these unhealthy ways of dealing with stress. The stress doesn't go away.
Living is stressful. You know, I mean, we experience stress every, I mean, I do, and every single day, you know, not major traumas, but stuff happens and you got to deal with it. And so that's one, relationships.
Most relationships, except the most superficial, require the disclosure of feelings. I'll give you an example from my practice. I had a man who complained to me that his wife wanted more intimacy.
And he says, what does she expect me to do? Rip her clothes off when she comes in the door and make love to her in the foyer? He could not conceive of intimacy through conversation.
He had never experienced intimacy through conversation. His idea of intimacy was sexual intimacy. And somebody wrote to me once looking for a book.
One of my clients would like a book for her husband to explain to him what emotional intimacy means.
So you and I as psychologists, we obviously we deal, our lives are emotionally intimate with our clients. We serve a particular role, but we take deep dives into our clients' emotional lives. And we have to monitor our own emotional lives.
We call it counter transference or whatever framework you use. But you're working with distressed people. We're humans.
It affects us. So we have to deal with our own. I used to schedule in a break every three clients so I could do some transcendental meditation when I was in full time practice just to kind of de-stress from what you absorb when you're doing psychotherapy.
You're shaking your head, so I think you know what I'm talking about.
Yeah, but whenever I hear these folks who are seeing eight clients in eight hours, I'm like, how do you do that? That's insane.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, now three is about it for me.
And then I've got to, you know, and I'll write notes, you know, but I'll also, you know, I'll sit quietly in a chair. I used to do this thing where I would close my eyes and just think the word one as I monitor, you know, kind of focused on my breath in and out. And I do that for 10 minutes.
And that would that would kind of get me ready for the next client. But it would, you know, help me dispel kind of the energy that I've absorbed from my last client. And we do absorb sometimes very negative energy from our clients.
And so you have to deal with that. So relationships.
And then there's mental health. So, you know, here's an interesting fact that your audience may not know that men, boys and men, meet criteria for depressive disorders half as frequently as women. That's a huge difference.
That's like a gigantic effect size. You know, most of the sex difference effect sizes, like I say, are very small. But that big, that's huge.
Yet men complete suicide three to four times as frequently as women. And suicide is most notably connected to experiencing depression, right?
How do we explain this? Well, the prototypical symptoms of depression, sadness, crying, guilt, anhedonia, or inability to feel pleasure, these things violate masculine norms. And so Michael Addis and some others have kind of proposed, Bill Pollack too, that there's a masculine type of depression that is based on externalizing rather than internalizing.
That instead of feeling weepy and depressed, which would violate these internalized norms, we get angry and aggressive, irritable, or we drown it out in alcohol. So they suggest if you have somebody who obviously meets criteria for alcohol use disorder, also think about the possibility that it's a masked depression underneath that, or a guy is always getting into bar fights. So again, these masculine norms, and particularly the inability to put emotions into words, also affects mental health for men.
So that's why it's important, you know, stress management, relationships and mental health.
One of the things I've always sort of thought about this one, thinking about masculinity is sort of like, is there anything that sort of adaptive about this traditional masculinity? What are your thoughts about that?
Well, I would say yes, but it's adaptive, the kinds of things that are adaptive about masculinity are adaptive for all humans. Self-reliance, aggression when necessary.
You know, emotional control in crisis situations. In other words, these are, some of these masculine norms are adaptive in specific situations, but not across the board, and not only for men. I mean, one of the things I think that gets us so confused is thinking in terms of gender norms that men are this and women are that.
Yes, so indeed, some masculine norms are adaptive in certain circumstances, and not only for men. I think the problem with masculine norms, first of all, is they're defined as masculine and the expectations are required for boys and men. You know, that's the thing that this workbook that Chris Regolith put together is trying to help boys realize, no, you be the guy you are, not the guy they're telling you to be.
You had asked me about things that had changed. Now, I don't know that I finished my answer to that. Things that have changed.
You know, I think obviously fatherhood has changed completely. You know, the young fathers today typically share parenting. You know, I'm talking about heterosexual men, married to women, that kind of situation.
I realize that's not all there is, but just that is a focal point. You know, they typically, you know, they either take the morning shift and get the children dressed and fed and off to daycare or school, or the evening shift of picking the children up and getting them settled in their homework and making dinner. You know, men do all these things today, young men who are fathers.
Wasn't the case when I grew up and wasn't the case actually. It became the case after my divorce, but before the divorce, my first wife and I were kind of a pretty traditional couple.
What else has changed? Well, one of the masculine norms is really based on homophobia.
In my scale, it's called disdainment for gay and bisexual men. Now, that has largely changed as a result of the obergaph... I'm not sure I pronounced that, but the Supreme Court decision that led to gay marriage, and I think society in general, obviously not everyone, accepts the idea that gay and bisexual people are just normal variants, human variation.
The thing about this whole issue is practically everybody knows somebody or has somebody in their family who's gay, right? And it's like, okay, you know, when you break it down that way. Admitting vulnerability is something that periodically high-profile athletes have attempted to break through.
Do you know who Kevin Love is?
Yeah.
He's a basketball player, used to play for the Cleveland Cavaliers, and I don't know where he plays now. But he had a panic attack in the middle of a game. It wasn't evident.
He basically left the game and went into the locker room and stayed there for a considerable amount of time. And then he came out. I think he played whatever remainder of the game was left.
The next day, he gave an interview to the press, and he disclosed that he suffers from panic disorder. He had a panic attack. He's seeing a psychologist.
It's helping. He's taking medication, too. And then he goes on to talk about the lies that he grew up with, that men are supposed to be invulnerable.
And he says, you know, anxiety disorders affect everybody, irregardless of their sex. And the notion that we're immune somehow from these things, and we don't have to take care of them. It was a beautiful, you know, interview.
And I mean, this has been going on since Terry Bradshaw, what, 20 years ago, revealed he was depressed, maybe 30? I don't remember how far back that goes. So, yeah, so every now and then a high-profile, usually an athlete will disclose that they're struggling in some way, and they will make themselves vulnerable to the public in so doing, and model a different kind of way of being a man.
So I think that's something that has changed. And it's hard to tell what effect it has had, because we don't really have any good studies that look at that.
So getting back to what we were talking about at the beginning of this conversation, this idea that these masculine norms are culturally based. And so, because I've wondered about that, the subscale sort of the negative perceptions, just for lack of a better term, negative perceptions of homosexuality or homosexuals or whatever it is.
It's the same for gay and bisexual men now. Right.
So that in a lot of, particularly in the circles probably that you and I travel in, which are very highly educated sort of context, that is going to be very infrequently endorsed. But that in, and particularly I'm sure there'd be subcultures within the US, but also if we went, you're talking earlier about Afghanistan or whatever, if we go in other places, that hasn't changed. Right.
And so, I don't want to nerd out too much on this, but has, if you were to give the male role norms inventory, you know, this week to 300 social science or humanities graduate students at the University of Akron, do you think that that factor would still hold up? Do you think it sort of still would load on to that latent factor of male role norms?
No. Well, yeah, no. Actually, I did do a...
Of course you did. Of course you did, Ron. Of course you did.
Not exactly the way you described it, but I went back to some of my data spanning 17 years with different versions. The MRI has evolved. It started out the original, then the revised, and then the short form, and then the very brief, and then the two adolescent versions, three adolescent versions.
But I went back to through 17 years of data and combined, created a data set with about a thousand and four men in it. I just looked at the men, although I often give it to men and women, but I was focusing on the men. And the mean score, so the scale, as you mentioned earlier, has these statements.
And the participant is asked, to what extent do you agree or disagree with the statement that the president of the US should always be a man, right? And it's a seven-point scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree, and four is no opinion, right? So anything below four is tending towards rejection.
So the mean score overall, you know, the total scale score in this sample was three points something. So clearly, the majority, on average, men and spanning 17 years worth of work, so that's almost a generation, do not endorse traditional masculinity ideology. Now, some subscales are higher and some are lower, but this was the total scale score, which by the way we've shown can be used because the male world norms inventory, and here I'm going to nerd out on you, is a bifactor model.
And a bifactor model is one in which the variation from individual scores loads not only on their subscale, but also on the total scale score, sufficiently that you have adequate reliability. It's a structural equation modeling technique. Right, right.
So yeah, and then you think about it, you know, you know, you're an established adult. That means you probably have a primary relationship. You have some kind of vocation.
You have financial obligations, whether it's car payments or a mortgage. You may have kids. You're too busy to worry about whether you're masculine or not.
You just got too much on your plate, you know, and it makes sense that they, you know, that they would say, I don't know. I don't feel these things that strongly.
So a couple more things that I'll let you go, because I know we've been going for a while. That has just been too engaging to stop. What if any of...
Actually, let's do this. So you have a couple new books coming out. Another one you have.
So I'll read the title and tell me if I got it right. The Problem with Men, Insights on Overcoming a Traumatic Childhood from a World-Renowned Psychologist. So could you...
I think that's not yet released because I couldn't get a copy to sort of look through it before I chatted with you, but could you tell us a little bit about that?
Yeah. Dan, it's a memoir, and it's a special variation of memoir called Memoir Self-Help. So it's the story of my life, and as I was explaining to you beforehand, I suffered trauma as a child from an abusive father from a very early age, age of two, as a matter of fact, and from anti-Semitic bullies from the age of five.
And somewhere around nine, I joined the YMCA, took a boxing class, learned how to defend myself. And the next time a gang of boys would say, there's the kike, let's get them, I got into my boxing stands, and they were laughing at me. You know, and I went pow, pow, pow, and the kid was on the ground.
And the word got around that, hey, that kite can fight. So, and then I dealt with my father, who was still bullying me up until the time I was 13, by essentially beating him up and running away from home in Southern California to Texas.
How did I do that? I had a girlfriend who was also 13, who had an older sister, who had a boyfriend who was 17, and he had a friend. And I left my home with nothing but my wallet and the $5 I had earned from mowing a neighbor's lawn.
And I persuaded those two boys to drive me to Texas. Because I had a friend from where I grew up, Southgate, who had moved to Texas, and we had corresponded. How I did that?
How a 13-year-old can persuade two older boys to drive him? I have no idea. I should have been a salesman or something.
But anyway, that's what happened. I went to Texas. I got a job stacking hay.
I made enough money to get a room. And I kept it going for a few weeks. And then I got sick.
I got bronchitis. So I called home and got a bus ticket. And I came home, and my father never laid a hand on me again.
So, but, you know, as we all know, traumatized children often develop into delinquents. And I became a juvenile delinquent. And I committed many bad acts.
You know, one was shadow boxing, some play class windows. I got expelled from high school. I had this truancy scheme, where second period, they took role.
And so we would stay through second period. And then we would find an excuse to leave class. We'd meet up at one of our cars.
We had cars back then. And we'd drive to Long Beach. I was living in Southgate, California.
It was like, I don't know, 15, 20 miles. And we'd hang out at the beach, and come back for seventh period, which was gym. And I was on the Junior Varsity football team, so I had to be there.
And then I got caught, and I got expelled. So how did I get from there to here? You know, well, I graduated from high school and was trying to figure out which branch of the military I was going to join up with.
And a friend came by, and he was going to take an admission test at Los Angeles City College. It's a community college. And he wanted me to accompany him because he was a little nervous.
So I said, sure. I took the test, got in, and for the first time in my life was encouraged about learning and rewarded for doing well and discovered that I was actually really good in math. You know, I went through trigonometry and then Calculus I, Calculus II, got all As and all that stuff.
And, you know, the faculty, you know, faculty in junior college don't have Ph.D.s like us. They have master's degrees, but they're good people, and they know they're working with first-generation students. My father only had an eighth-grade education, and they know we have challenges.
So they were great, and I spent a year and a half at community college and jumped from there to Berkeley, which was the flagship university of the University of California system. So that's kind of what changed my life, and recently, last five years ago, I started a scholarship, a kind of way of paying it forward to kids who were like me maybe at LA City College.
And the book is really about my life, I'm sorry, about my life and how I got from there to here, from abused child and juvenile delinquent to somebody who's listed in the Stanford University Elsevier Database on the top 2% of scientists in the world. I'm very proud of that.
Yeah, well, you should be. And I think, yeah, I don't want to be too analytic here, but I mean, it seems to me like based on your experience and then how the idea of how can we help dads be more skilled dads? You know, I mean, you talked earlier about the experience with your daughter.
So, you know, that, again, you can tell me if I'm wrong, but that you didn't have those models. You didn't have that model, and you found yourself in this situation deficient. And so then you saw a need in the community, but then there's also, I would imagine, a part of, well, I want to know how to be a good dad, too.
Right.
And how that would lead in, and, you know, even what your dad was like, you know, and then I'm sure, you know, he passed some of that along to you. Thinking like, how can I, again, this gets back to that research is me search thing. How can I push against this?
How can I be a better person? How can I learn to do these things? And then how can I bring this to other people as well?
Well, sure. I mean, you know, I didn't get from my childhood to my late adulthood in one fell swoop. Right.
You know, there was a lot of learning, a lot of therapy. Although it's really hard to do this now, but I actually, so when I went to grad school, psychoanalysis was king. All my supervisors, except for John Schlein, my advisor, who was Rogerian, they were all psychoanalytic.
All the practica. And we students, you know, kind of revered psychoanalysis back then. This is like the early 70s.
And we all wanted, but it was so expensive. And finally, I guess, 1980 or something, I had enough money. So I went into psychoanalysis three times a week for four years.
Wow.
That's commitment.
Yeah. That's a lot of money, too. Back then, insurance, Blue Cross Blue Shield, paid for 10 sessions a year.
That would be like three weeks.
No, and that helped me a great deal. You know, as well as my wife helped me a great deal, and my friends and other family members. My mother was always in my corner, I have to say that.
My mother was, so I spent probably the first three and a half years of my life just with my mother and my brother when he came along, because my father was in the Navy during World War II, and he was basically at sea for months at a time. And whenever he gets shore leave, it would be like really brief, and then he'd go back out. So it was me and my mom, and she was the most wonderful caregiver a child could ever want.
And, you know, I don't know if you remember Yuri Bronfenbrenner?
I've learned about, yeah.
Yeah, he, you know, his famous comment that every child needs at least one parent who's absolutely nuts about that kid, absolutely crazy about him. And I had that in my mother. And I think that's what, you know, became the basis for my grit and resilience, you know, because my mother believes so much in me.
I believed in myself. I never thought I deserved any of the abuse I received. I used to use this phrase about my father, even with the minor stuff, that it was just so...
This is like a seven-year-old. It's so arbitrary. I don't know where I learned that word.
You're precocious from an early age.
But at least, you know, to illustrate, I didn't think I deserved it. I didn't think I deserved the treatment I was getting, which reflects that kind of thing that a child gets from a parent who absolutely is crazy about it, and they get this belief in themselves, and that helps them, you know, develop the grit and resiliency to go through. I mean, you know, can you imagine how many kids at eight or nine would say, I'm getting beat up all the time.
I got to learn how to fight and seek out a class at a YMCA. And then I also bought, my uncle gave me a set of weights, and I bought a speed bag. And so I worked out with weights and punched the bag and took the class.
And then the next kid that tried to beat me up got beat up himself. So, and then that stopped. So, you know, a lot of things, a lot of things.
So, Ron, before I let you go, I wanted to ask you one more question. So, what pushback over the years have you gotten from your work, responses to your work?
A fair amount. You know, I've always been open that I view things from a feminist social science perspective. And people say, well, feminism studying masculinity?
That seems really weird. But, you know, the feminists were the first ones to kind of get away from this essentialistic perspective and make a distinction between gender and sex. And gender is, you know, something more psychological, and sex is something more biological, and they're not always the same.
And that, you know, kind of formed the basis for Plex gender role strain paradigm. And I've also always believed, I think because I had such a great relation with my mother, I've always, you know, just respected women and believed in their equality. I never had any of these, you know, male dominant attitudes.
But being a feminist is a lightning rod. The president of the university, I told you, did I show you that?
Right, yeah, you told me that story, yeah.
I laugh when I think about it. What is this guy Levant trying to make fathers into mothers? When today, it's just parenting, you know.
There's no fathering that's so different from mothering. I mean, do you have children by any chance? Do you know what I'm talking about?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, do you parent any differently than your wife?
I mean, I think we do. And I think that that's probably, you know, I mean, part of it's just probably personality.
Rather than gender.
Right, yeah. I mean, you know, it's difficult to know. I mean, but, you know, again, you know, I was socialized in a certain way, and so was she.
Right, exactly. But you both have grown beyond your childhood socialization. Right, right.
Yeah, totally. And so do you still get pushback?
I would say some. You know, like with it, are you familiar with Division 51? APA's Division 51?
Is that the men in masculinity division?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, I was the leading person in founding that division. And, you know, I would say some of the leadership recently has...
I'll go back. Do you remember when we released the guidelines for psychological practice with boys and men?
I do.
That was released. Those guidelines were released in... or they were accepted, I guess, by APA Council in August of 2018.
And they caused quite a stir when they were released. Do you remember that?
Yeah.
You know, Fox News put up a picture of Ryan McDermott on his website and kept it up for days. Ryan had to spend a substantial amount of money for security. I was being threatened.
I got threatening emails, threatening phone calls. Other people did as well. So it went from Fox News to Breitbart to Blaze to Quillette.
And essentially the right wing media sphere attacked APA. But then the mainstream press, Atlantic Monthly, New York Times, Washington Post, New Yorker, chimed in and said, wait a minute, maybe APA has something here. Do we want to raise our boys to be emotionless?
And so what happened, and then the really interesting thing is Gillette. Gillette had a Super Bowl ad. You know how expensive Super Bowl ads are?
Millions of dollars.
Could be 7 million for 30 seconds, right? They released their Super Bowl ad early to catch this wave, and the Super Bowl ad was the one that introduced the term toxic masculinity. That was never part of Division 51 or guidelines.
We never used that term. We would never use that term. You know, that's just not a psychological term.
We talk about traditional masculinity ideology, right? But that became a widely accepted term. You hear it used all the time.
I don't like it at all.
But they released their ad early, you know, risking a substantial investment to kind of catch that wave, illustrating how much of a phenomenon it had become. And so masculinity, you know, is a topic of contemporary conversation. You know, senators like Josh Hawley feel, you know, qualified to write a whole book on it.
This is the guy, by the way, who raised his fist to the January 6th insurrectionists and then ran away when they invaded Congress. Do you remember that? Do you know what I'm talking about, Missouri Senator?
So yeah, so masculinity has now become a topic of national conversation. And we get a lot of pushback. But the fact that it's even a topic of conversation, in 2000, I'll give you an example, 2013 APA released a report on violence.
It never once mentioned masculinity. It never once mentioned that the vast majority of violent crimes are committed by boys and men, well over 90% depending on the crime, 97% in some cases. Never mentioned it in 2013.
Most recent version does. Masculinity was not on anybody's radar screen. And my last book, The Tough Standard, kind of was focused on masculinity, its role in violence, is interesting.
While most violent crimes are committed by boys and men, the vast majority of boys and men would never be violent. So you have to ask yourself, what characteristics could we identify that would lead boys and men to become violent, particularly gun violent? And I did write a paper subsequent to the book where I looked specifically at gun violence, and what I found was in the language of Division 51, discrepancy strain, or in more common language, threatened masculinity.
So boys and men who feel their masculinity is threatened are the ones who are more likely to be violent and even gun violent. And do you know about the Remington Settlement? Remington makes an AR-15, which is a military assault rifle, and the specific one that was used in the Sandy Hook Elementary School Massacre by Adam Lanza, and their ad for it.
And if you want me to, I can share the screen and show it to you. I don't know if you want me to show it to you. Okay, I'll send the ad to you.
But let me describe the ad. It's a picture of the weapon running diagonally across the page. You've probably seen these.
They have that curved thing in the middle where the cartridge goes. They're a long gun. So it has a picture of the weapon.
Down on the right-hand corner is their logo, which is a serpent. Very fitting, right? And on the other bottom corner, it has a caption that reads, Your man card reissued.
And based on that ad, the parents and survivors of Sandy Hook won a $73 million settlement from Remington. Now, they didn't have the advantage of my research. They basically said the ad was pitched to unstable men.
They had no idea how accurate they were. And my view of that ad is if Remington's aims were to increase gun violence, they couldn't have written a more precise ad.
Because it's a pushback against the threat, so the threat to my masculinity.
Yeah. It's a way for you to reassert your masculinity against those bad people who've been dissing you or something like that. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, that's, yeah.
Isn't that, isn't that, I mean, feel that. Isn't that just horrendous? Yeah.
Somebody's insulted you, so just take this military assault rifle and gun them down. I mean, what kind of thinking? Is that psychotic?
It seems psychotic to me. I don't know. What do you think?
Yeah.
I don't know. I'm just a psychologist.
What do you know, right?
Well, Dr. Ron Levant, this has been a Levant. Excuse me. Let me do that one more time.
And this is just for everybody listening. So many people mistake it and say Levant, it's Levant. We have learned.
There's one thing to take away from this conversation. It's Dr. Ron Levant. This has been incredibly insightful.
That's a wrap on part two of my conversation with Dr. Ron Levant, to whom I am most appreciative. And as I said at the outset, I'd love to hear from you. So please reach out by sending a text or leaving a voice message.
Until next time!