From TEDxIsfeld in April 2011, Bill Pozzobon is an actor, director, and inspirational speaker - and he is also Director of the SafeTeen Boys Program. In this TEDx talk he explicates the "man code," the largely unspoken rules about what a man is and how to be a man in this culture. As the image above makes clear, these "rules" are also known as the "man box."

TEDxIsfeld - Bill Pozzobon: Breaking the Boys Code of Masculinity

Bill has worked on gender and violence issues with youth and educators for over a decade. In his role as Director of the SafeTeen Boy's Program, he trains the new SafeTeen Agents for Change and co-leads Educator Trainings locally, nationally and internationally. With humor and skill Bill invites the boys and men he works with to step into their full humanity with dignity and courage.

"I am a strong believer in the power of personal choice and heart centered action. My own personal journey and the undeniable impact on the thousands of young men I have worked with, give me an enduring passion for this work."

Bill is also an actor, director, acting teacher and inspirational public speaker who brings powerful personal narrative and a vision for a better world to his work. Find out more about his work at http://safeteen.ca

Wow. Seriously!? Leave it to MTv to come up with something as asinine as this. What men do NOT need is to be judged on their masculinity. Period.

Even worse, if that is possible, is that the guys will be judged masculine or not according to the Guy Code, another MTv show in which men discuss manly things (like porn, drinking like a man, manscaping, masturbating, ex-girlfriends, and so on).

They really should call this the Man Box, as in a little tiny box that en are supposed to fit themselves into to be considered masculine.

Via Huffington Post.

'Guy Court': MTV's New Reality Show Judges Male Contestants' Masculinity

The Huffington Post | Posted: 04/29/2013

Forget Judge Judy, now there's a court-based TV show designed especially for bros, called "Guy Court"! Faux legal drama and reinforcing stereotypical masculinity? Just what unscripted television always needed...

"Guy Court," which will premiere on MTV2 this fall, seems to take every stereotype about men and cram it into a television series. Here is the official description of "Guy Court", which seems to be a spin-off of the existing series "Guy Code," where dudes discuss dude topics (via Yahoo):

In the half-hour comedic courtroom series Guy Court, ... the laws of manhood will be upheld as some familiar MTV2 faces will determine the guilt or innocence of a variety of cases in accordance with Guy Code. Each real life case will be judged, defended and prosecuted with the perfect combination of comedy and justice.

One can only wonder what sort of "cases" this TV show will address. The aforementioned "Guy Code" features commentary on topics like girlfriends, bachelor pads, cars and "drinking like a man." "Girl Code," the show's lady counterpart, touches on typically women-centric topics like crushes, boobs and trying not to get "sloppy drunk."

There are already enough things out there that remind us what it means to be the "right kind" of woman or man. We probably don't need an MTV show to enforce it.

[H/T The Frisky]

From The Frisky:

“Guy Code” refers to another reality show which airs on MTV2 and determines the bro-ishness of topics such as bachelor parties, rebounds, wine, manscaping, crying, and shopping. (Another spinoff, “Girl Code,” debuted this week, which you can watch online.) I know these types of shows just exist for a few laughs, but I’m so over policing other people on how they perform their gender. Girls can play football and fart. Guys can drink white wine and cry. (Hopefully not in that order.) How about we just let people be people?

Exactly!

Jackson Katz - Masculinity, Guns, and Mass Murder

In a recent article at Huffington Post, cultural theorist Jackson Katz suggests we need to talk about masculinity codes and how they are related to gun violence and rampage murders. He offers seven ideas that he believes would move the conversation along and bring unhealthy masculinity codes into the open.

I'm not sure I fully agree with all of his thoughts here, but I do think it's important to examine these issues. Based on what I have read, I would be hard pressed to see this current killing as a part of this conversation, but I believe that it was certainly relevant in many of the other rampage killings committed by young men.

Memo to Media: Manhood, Not Guns or Mental Illness, Should Be Central in Newtown Shooting

Jackson Katz. Educator, author, filmmaker, and cultural theorist

Posted: 12/18/2012

Many of us whose work touches on the subject of masculinity and violence have long been frustrated by the failure of mainstream media -- and much of progressive media and the blogosphere as well -- to confront the gender issues at the heart of so many violent rampages like the one on December 14 in Connecticut.

My colleagues and I who do this type of work experience an unsettling dichotomy. In one part of our lives, we routinely have intense, in-depth discussions about men's emotional and relational struggles, and how the bravado about "rugged individualism" in American culture masks the deep yearning for connection that so many men feel, and how the absence or loss of that can quickly turn to pain, despair, and anger. In these discussions, we talk about violence as a gendered phenomenon: how, for example, men who batter their wives or girlfriends typically do so not because they have trigger tempers, but rather as a means to gain or maintain power and control over her, in a (misguided) attempt to get their needs met. 

We talk among ourselves about how so many boys and men in our society are conditioned to see violence as a solution to their problems, a resolution of their anxieties, or a means of exacting revenge against those they perceive as taking something from them. We share with each other news stories, websites and YouTube videos that demonstrate the connection between deeply ingrained cultural ideas about manhood and individual acts of violence that operationalize those ideas.

And then in the wake of repeated tragedies like Newtown, we turn on the TV and watch the same predictable conversations about guns and mental illness, with only an occasional mention that the overwhelming majority of these types of crimes are committed by men -- usually white men. Even when some brave soul dares to mention this crucial fact, it rarely prompts further discussion, as if no one wants to be called a "male-basher" for uttering the simple truth that men commit the vast majority of violence, and thus efforts to "prevent violence" -- if they're going to be more than minimally effective -- need to explore why.

Maybe the Newtown massacre will mark a turning point. Maybe the mass murder of young children will force the ideological gatekeepers in mainstream media to actually pry open the cupboards of conventional thinking for just long enough to have a thoughtful conversation about manhood in the context of our ongoing national tragedy of gun violence.

But initial signs are not particularly promising. In the days since the shooting, some op-eds and blog posts have spoken to the gendered dynamics at the heart of this and other rampage killings. But most mainstream analysis has steered clear of this critical piece of the puzzle.

What follows is a brief list of suggestions for how journalists, cable hosts, bloggers and others who will be writing and talking about this unbelievable tragedy can frame the discussion in the coming days and weeks.

1) Make gender -- specifically the idea that men are gendered beings -- a central part of the national conversation about rampage killings. Typical news accounts and commentaries about school shootings and rampage killings rarely mention gender. If a woman were the shooter, you can bet there would be all sorts of commentary about shifting cultural notions of femininity and how they might have contributed to her act, such as discussions in recent years about girl gang violence. That same conversation about gender should take place when a man is the perpetrator. Men are every bit as gendered as women.

The key difference is that because men represent the dominant gender, their gender is rendered invisible in the discourse about violence. So much of the commentary about school shootings, including the one at Sandy Hook Elementary, focuses on "people" who have problems, "individuals" who suffer from depression, and "shooters" whose motives remain obtuse. When opinion leaders start talking about the men who commit these rampages, and ask questions like: "why is it almost always men who do these horrible things?" and then follow that up, we will have a much better chance of finding workable solutions to the outrageous level of violence in our society.

2) Use the "M-word." Talk about masculinity. This does not mean you need to talk about biological maleness or search for answers in new research on brain chemistry. Such inquiries have their place. But the focus needs to be sociological: individual men are products of social systems. How many more school shootings do we need before we start talking about this as a social problem, and not merely a random collection of isolated incidents? Why are nearly all of the perpetrators of these types of crimes men, and most of them white men? (A recent piece by William Hamby is a step in the right direction. )

What are the cultural narratives from which school shooters draw lessons or inspiration? This does not mean simplistic condemnations of video games or violent media -- although all cultural influences are fair game for analysis. It means looking carefully at how our culture defines manhood, how boys are socialized, and how pressure to stay in the "man box" not only constrains boys' and men's emotional and relational development, but also their range of choices when faced with life crises. Psychological factors in men's development and psyches surely need to be examined, but the best analyses see individual men's actions in a social and historical context.

3) Identify the gender subtext of the ongoing political battle over "guns rights" versus "gun control," and bring it to the surface. The current script that plays out in media after these types of horrendous killings is unproductive and full of empty clichés. Advocates of stricter gun laws call on political leaders to take action, while defenders of "gun rights" hunker down and deflect criticism, hoping to ride out yet another public relations nightmare for the firearms industry. But few commentators who opine about the gun debates seem to recognize the deeply gendered aspects of this ongoing controversy. Guns play an important emotional role in many men's lives, both as a vehicle for their relationships with their fathers and in the way they bolster some men's sense of security and power. 

It is also time to broaden the gun policy debate to a more in-depth discussion about the declining economic and cultural power of white men, and to deconstruct the gendered rhetoric of "defending liberty" and "fighting tyranny" that animates much right-wing opposition to even moderate gun control measures. If one effect of this tragedy is that journalists and others in media are able to create space for a discussion about guns that focuses on the role of guns in men's psyches and identities, and how this plays out in their political belief systems, we might have a chance to move beyond the current impasse.

4) Consult with, interview and feature in your stories the perspectives of the numerous men (and women) across the country who have worked with abusive men. Many of these people are counselors, therapists, and educators who can provide all sorts of insights about how -- and why -- men use violence. Since men who commit murder outside the home more than occasionally have a history of domestic violence, it is important to hear from the many women and men in the domestic violence field who can speak to these types of connections -- and in many cases have first-hand experience that deepen their understanding.

5) Bring experts on the air, and quote them in your stories, who can speak knowledgeably about the link between masculinity and violence. After the Jovan Belcher murder-suicide, CNN featured the work of the author Kevin Powell, who has written a lot about men's violence and the many intersections between gender and race. That was a good start. In the modern era of school shootings and rampage killings, a number of scholars have produced works that offer ways to think about the gendered subtext of these disturbing phenomena.

Examples include Rachel Kalish and Michael Kimmel's piece "Suicide by Mass Murder: Masculinity, Aggrieved Entitlement and Rampage School Shootings," Douglas Kellner's "Rage and Rampage: School Shootings and Crises of Masculinity," and a short piece that I co-wrote with Sut Jhally after Columbine, "The national conversation in the wake of Littleton is missing the mark."

There have also been many important books published over the past 15 years or so that provide great insight into issues of late 20th and 21st century American manhood, and thus provide valuable context for discussions about men's violence. They include Real Boys, by William Pollack;Raising Cane, by Michael Thompson and Dan Kindlon; New Black Man, by Mark Anthony Neal;Why Does He Do That? by Lundy Bancroft; Dude You're a Fag, by C.J. Pascoe; Guyland, By Michael Kimmel; I Don't Want to Talk About It, by Terrence Real; Violence, by James Gilligan; Guys and Guns Amok, by Douglas Kellner; On Killing, by David Grossman; and two documentary films: Hip Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes, by Byron Hurt; and Tough Guise, which I created and Sut Jhally directed.

6) Resist the temptation to blame this shooting or others on "mental illness," as if this answers the why and requires no further explanation. Even if some of these violent men are or were "mentally ill," the specific ways in which mental illness manifests itself are often profoundly gendered. Consult with experts who understand the gendered features of mental illness. For example, conduct interviews with mental health experts who can talk about why men, many of whom are clinically depressed, comprise the vast majority of perpetrators of murder-suicides. Why is depression in women much less likely to contribute to their committing murder than it is for men? (It is important to note that only a very small percentage of men with clinical depression commit murder, although a very high percentage of people with clinical depression who commit murder are men.)

7) Don't buy the manipulative argument that it's somehow "anti-male" to focus on questions about manhood in the wake of these ongoing tragedies. Men commit the vast majority of violence and almost all rampage killings. It's long past time that we summoned the courage as a society to look this fact squarely in the eye and then do something about it. Women in media can initiate this discussion, but men bear the ultimate responsibility for addressing the masculinity crisis at the heart of these tragedies. With little children being murdered en masse at school, for God's sake, it's time for more of them to step up, even in the face of inevitable push back from the defenders of a sick and dysfunctional status quo.

“3 AM” – Slam Poetry on Living in the Man Box

Awesome spoken-word piece . . . . I found this at the Good Men Project. The poets are Carlos Andrés Gómez and Adam Falkner. The "man box" I refer to in the title is the culturally- and self-imposed space, equivalent to a small box, in which men are allowed to express themselves. We abide by a "man code" that severely limits our options and expression.

3 A.M.

Why Do Men Still Feel an Aversion to Therapy?

There is a lot of validity to the information in this article (from Pacific Standard magazine), which is why I am sharing it in full. However, my experience as a therapist is a bit different.

I see a lot of men, and I see them in a place that only works with survivors of sexual trauma (rape, incest, sexual abuse, and so on). The fact that I see as many men as I do is indicative (to me) of the decreasing stigma associated with men seeking therapy. More importantly, it also suggests that men are not as unwilling to admit that they are survivors of abuse, rape, or incest. 

As this article suggests, there are still a lot of men who cannot or will not enter therapy, no matter how much emotional pain they experience. I'm not sure how to change that, other than to create more public and cultural awareness that men can benefit from talking about their feelings, or even just seeking better coping skills for the challenges that life brings.

And maybe, as this article suggests, we need to market therapy for more traditional men in a different way. We must do something. Even though many more women than men are diagnosed with depression and attempt suicide, 8 in 10 successful suicides are by men.

There is another issue, however, that I am sure factors into whether or not men seek counseling.

I am 45 years old, 6' 1" tall and weigh about 190 lbs, with around 8 percent body fat; my blood pressure hovers around 100 over 60, my cholesterol is about 135, with a higher HDL (70) than LDL (65); I do not drink, smoke, or use drugs, and I work out at least 4 times each week.

Despite being in the 99.9 percentile for general health, I cannot get a preferred rate on my health insurance because I carry a diagnosis for social anxiety disorder. So I pay more. Any man with a family and facing a similar issue may choose to tough out his emotional pain rather than take the financial hit on his health insurance. This is wrong in more ways than I can count. The man who seeks out therapy is likely to cost less in the long term because he will not suffer from the various healths issues related to mental health issues, such as heart disease, cancers, and other stress-related illnesses. The system needs to change.

Aversion to Therapy: Why Won’t Men Get Help?

Psychologists worry about the Great Recession’s toll on men who define their self worth through work. In every corner of the globe, more men commit suicide than women. Research shows that men benefit from talk therapy just as much, if not more, than women. Yet most men still won’t go.

June 25, 2012 • By Betsy Bates Freed and David Freed 

Twenty years ago, Bob Smith’s wife questioned his commitment as a father. She demanded he see a psychiatrist. Smith (not his real name) grudgingly obliged. He went. Once.

“The idea of paying some guy $300 an hour to massage your issues,” says Smith, a Los Angeles-area attorney in his early 60s, “is ridiculous.”

In fact, the psychiatrist Smith talked to found plenty of issues to massage. His 45-minute assessment suggested that Smith was toting a veritable luggage store full of psychological baggage that needed unpacking. He recommended twice-weekly counseling sessions.

Smith was having none of it. Like millions of other American men, he simply couldn’t see paying good money for spilling his guts.

Fast-forward a couple of decades. Last year, Smith was diagnosed with a particularly virulent strain of prostate cancer that required immediate surgery, then radiation treatment. Still, he was disinclined to consider confiding in a professional all that he was enduring emotionally.

“I’m pissing in my pants and I can’t ejaculate and I want to talk to somebody else about that?” the Harvard Law School grad explains. “It’s a misapprehension that talking with a psychiatrist or a psychologist is going to move the ball forward. Some things … are what they are. The sooner you deal with them objectively, the better off you are.”

Smith is convinced. But increasingly, studies show that men like him who equate seeking assistance with weakness, or the appearance of not being able to handle their own problems, experience more soured relationships with their significant others, higher rates of debilitating illnesses, and earlier death.

The cathartic benefits of reaching out for help are hardly a secret. As scientists have come to better understand the inner workings of the brain, they have documented the potentially catastrophic consequences for individuals, particularly men, who go it alone when confronted by profound emotional challenges. Some men have started to take heed. Yet they remain a small minority. In 1998, about 1.47 of every 100 men in the United States sought outpatient help for depression; by 2007 it was 2.12 men per 100, according to a study sponsored by the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

 

 Should therapists be turning to football and jokes to reach a wider audience of men in need?

Often, that help has come in the form of “magic bullet” pharmaceuticals instead of traditional “talk therapy.” In 1998, the study shows, 56.2 percent of men who chose treatment for depression did so by sitting down and discussing their issues with a therapist. By 2007, only 42.5 percent of men interested in treatment chose therapy. Meanwhile, those who popped prescription pills in an attempt to tackle their emotional issues increased from 68.8 percent in 1998 to 73.3 percent in 2007.

While clinicians and academicians may haggle over the pros and cons of treatment approaches—many advocate a combination of psychotherapy and pharmaceuticals—there is no denying the toxic consequences of untreated depression at its most feared extreme. Distraught men are dying by their own hand in ever-greater numbers.

Suicide overtook blood poisoning to become the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S. in 2009. Meanwhile, calls to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline have continued to escalate every year since 2008, the beginning of the so-called Great Recession. That year, calls to the help line soared a staggering 36 percent.

Men account for nearly 8-in-10 suicides in the U.S. today, even though women are diagnosed more often with depression and make far more suicide attempts. Such numbers are hardly exclusive to U.S. males. Men perish by their own hand in greater frequency in virtually every other corner of the globe. Nowhere, in fact, do female suicides appear to outnumber those of males. Researchers the world over have struggled to explain why. More than a few believe that socialization, not biology, lies at the root of the deadly disparity.

Other Stories in This Series

• A State of Military Mind
• Manic Nation: Dr. Peter Whybrow Says We’re Addicted to Stress
• Just Breathe: Confirming Meditation’s Benefits
• Have You Heard the One About the Guy with Prostate Cancer?

University College Dublin sociologist Anne Cleary published a study in the journal Social Science and Medicine this year that found a common theme among 52 young Irish men who survived suicide attempts: all expressed reluctance to disclose to anyone the “significant, long-lasting” emotional pain that had threatened to overwhelm them.

They “used alcohol and drugs to cope—which exacerbated and prolonged their distress,” Cleary wrote. “Over time this led to a situation where they felt their options had narrowed, and suicidal action represented a way out of their difficulties. … They opted for suicide rather than disclose distress and seek help.”

Frank Ferrante, 60, knows the feeling.

Now a professional speaker living in San Francisco, Ferrante spent a turbulent childhood in the “very gritty, very volatile, very, very pessimistic” Italian neighborhood in Brooklyn that Martin Scorsese brought to life in Goodfellas.

From his passionate but mercurial father, a Merchant Marine born in Sicily, Ferrante began to formulate what he now sees as a “really corrupt notion of what it was to be a man.” John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, and the larger-than-life wiseguys who lived down the block just reinforced the definition: “A man is someone who can endure as much pain as possible without letting anyone know.

“As an 11-year-old watching a gigantic black-and-white TV, I wanted to be a poet. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a flamenco dancer,” he recalls.

None of which were acceptable—antithetical to masculinity, in his mind, as were the vulnerability, anxiety, and depression he struggled to hide from everyone. “What I was, was a chameleon. I guess I was good at it. But one could say, my ego smelled a rat.

“I escaped into the construction world. I did it for the next 30 years,” he says, pausing for a long moment before muttering, “Jesus Christ. ”

Even before he dropped out of high school, drugs silenced Ferrante’s doubts, reassuringly blurred his memories. He looked at narcotics as “curative”—the perfect self-medication.

It came crashing down along a twisted, violent road that included a corrosive marriage, arrests, and what he vaguely calls “more subtle things: not being present, not being available in my relationships.”

At the worst point, Ferrante, stoned, jumped onto the tracks where he hoped a subway train would provide a solution. But he misread the light he thought meant a train was approaching. Someone pulled him to safety, for the moment.

Eventually, he found his way to therapy (after getting into a 12-step program) where he explored his past, his regrets, and the very structure of his beliefs.

“It’s been a slow and arduous process of clearing stuff up,” he says. (In 2010, three San Francisco filmmakers produced a documentary, May I Be Frank, about Ferrante’s experiences. See the trailer below.)



SUICIDE RATES AMONG MEN AGES 40 TO 49 have been rising for the past quarter century, and rates among men ages 50 to 59 sharply increased between 1999 and 2005, according to the most recent government statistics available. Though the numbers are not yet in for the years since, experts say that this grim trend may well have been exacerbated by the nation’s ongoing economic malaise, in which twice as many men as women lost their jobs.

The so-called “man-cession” sent overall male unemployment rates into double digits by 2009. It hit men in the prime of their work years especially hard, with nearly one in five men ages 25 to 54 left jobless. The pallid jobs recovery of 2011-12 has favored males over females, yet about one in 13 U.S. men remained unemployed as of April 2012. That figure contains ominous subcategories, including almost 3 million men unemployed for more than 27 weeks (three times as many long-term unemployed as in the last 40 years of record-keeping), and a million unemployed veterans (many carrying the wounds of war along with the burden of being without a job). Not counted at all are the nearly 35 million American men who have simply exited the workforce.

Many psychologists worry particularly about the recession’s ultimate toll on men who once may have defined their self-worth through their roles as breadwinners, only to lose those roles amid corporate downsizing and layoffs. How have men coped? Some, evidently, by drowning their sorrows. Alcohol sales rose every year during the recession, including a 9 percent rise in 2010.

In 2003, the federal National Institutes of Mental Health began posting online public-service spots in a “Real Men. Real Depression” campaign aimed at assuring those in the throes of depression that, “It takes courage to ask for help.” The campaign uses a firefighter, a police officer, and other men who’ve struggled with depression to illustrate that there is light at the proverbial end of the emotional tunnel—but only if they first muster the strength to ask for it.

Retired Air Force First Sergeant Patrick McCathern, among those who appear online in the NIMH spots, says he’d drink to “numb my head” to the depression that tormented him. CBut then you wake up the next day and it’s still there. … You have to deal with it,” McCathern warns.

It’s a cliché, but sometimes it’s true: many men would rather be lost in the wilderness than ask for directions; and they don’t like asking for help.

“We’re self-reliant. We want to do it ourselves,” asserts Fordham University psychology professor Jay Wade, president of the American Psychological Association’s Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinity.

Oh sure, one guy might ask another to help him move a fridge if he absolutely can’t do it himself, Wade says. He may bend his bloody knuckles around the phone to call a plumber when the faucet’s still leaking after six trips to the hardware store. But when men at the highest rungs of the masculinity scale are faced with profound emotional pain, “they suck it up, move on, bury it, repress it,” according to Wade. “It doesn’t go away, obviously.”

Consider “Gary” a former big-city newspaper reporter and avid private pilot who was assigned to cover a midair collision between a small plane and a commercial airliner in Southern California in which everyone was killed, including several people on the ground. He arrived minutes after the crash. Homes were on fire. Body parts were strewn everywhere.

“You block it all out,” Gary says. “You tell yourself that detached head laying under that little tree can’t possibly be what you think it is, and do your job.”

Officials later that day released a list of names, people who had been aboard the stricken airliner, including a handful who were merely identified as “lap children.” Gary had two young children of his own. The thought, he says, of what it must’ve been like for the children and their parents as the jet fell out of the sky left him shaken.

When he got back to his newsroom, Gary says, his editor asked if he was okay. He assured him he was. To admit otherwise, he says, would’ve sent a message that he was incapable of handling tough assignments—professional suicide in the news business.

Though haunted by what he saw that day, Gary never sought counseling and says he eventually got over it. It would take him more than 10 years before he could will himself to pilot a small plane again.

“Would I have gotten back into flying sooner had I gone to see somebody? Probably,” he says. “But I just didn’t feel like talking about it, especially to a stranger.”

Statistics show that men are far less willing to visit a doctor of any kind, even when they’re having chest pain or experiencing other life-threatening symptoms, despite the fact that men die in greater numbers from 12 of the 15 most common causes of death. (Remember, women outlive men by an average of five to seven years.)

A study published last year by Rutgers University sociologists Kristen W. Springer and Dawne M. Mouzon found that health-care avoidance is most pronounced among “macho men,” those most invested in the belief that a “real” man is self-reliant and strong to the point of physical invulnerability. In their study of about 1,000 65-year-old men, those least likely to follow preventive health-care recommendations were more likely to favor traditional sex-role beliefs, measured by their endorsement of statements like, “A man should always try to project an air of confidence even if he really doesn’t feel confident inside” and, “When a man is feeling pain, he shouldn’t let it show.” Not surprisingly, those men were also less healthy.

If traditional men refrain from exposing their physical vulnerabilities in a doctor’s office, it stands to reason that they’d be unwilling to expose their emotional vulnerabilities in a counselor’s office, and that’s exactly what the evidence shows, according to Wade, the professor who heads up the masculinity division at the American Psychological Association.

To be sure, not every man needs to see a psychologist or psychiatrist, Wade and others are quick to point out. Many people adjust well on their own even in the face of catastrophic trauma, drawing on inner resources, resiliency, and guidance from family and trusted friends. But it doesn’t take a social scientist to realize that, sometimes, a genetic predisposition to depression or anxiety—perhaps exacerbated by the stresses of ordinary life—can add up to the kind of angst that threatens to overwhelm an individual’s coping mechanisms. Some individuals may initially try to “numb themselves out” by throwing themselves into their work as a distraction. As evidenced by the Irish study, alcohol and drug use are also common avenues of escape.

For many a manly man, a police DUI checkpoint and court-mandated counseling mark the first stops on the path to the therapist’s office. Often as not, it’s a wife or girlfriend who finally says, “Go see somebody or I’m leaving you.” But forcing men to sit through counseling sessions, mental health experts say, can itself be a minefield. Some men become resentful and even more noncommunicative if they are essentially sentenced to talk, even if the disempowering decision was ostensibly “for their own good.”

Where does it all begin, the foundation that in many men becomes a nearly impenetrable wall of stoicism?

It turns out, guys aren’t born as strong, silent types, just as girls aren’t emotive yakkers in the nursery. “The general public thinks masculinity comes with a Y chromosome,” says Ronald Levant, a professor of psychology at the University of Akron and the editor of the academic journal Psychology of Men & Masculinity. “In truth, decades of research show that sex differences between men and women and girls and boys are very small.”

A reluctance to share feelings is hardly exclusively a “man thing.” Many women also shun any form of help that might expose their emotional vulnerabilities. The real difference is the way most boys are socialized to act tough—and suffer social consequences when they don’t, says Levant, whose own traditional upbringing during the 1950s in hardscrabble South Central Los Angeles, where “all the fathers worked at Firestone or General Motors,” was a ready-made laboratory for his future academic studies.

Studies show, perhaps surprisingly, that most male babies actually start out more emotionally expressive than females. It’s not long, however, before they pick up on clear messages from those around them, especially parents and grandparents, that boys are strong, that they don’t cry and never complain no matter what. Sure enough, by age 2, boys are less verbally expressive than girls.

Consider, Levant says, what happens when a boy scrapes his knee while learning to ride a bicycle or playing sports. If the boy cries, his dad or coach will demand he walk it off. By ages 4 to 6, boys are less likely to register their emotions on their faces. As early as fourth grade, Levant says, boys are more reluctant to ask for help in resolving conflicts with peers. These behavioral patterns extend into adulthood.

While it may not seem obvious in these days of macho yoga and stay-at-home fatherhood, the truth is that many American men hold to traditional values: real men are embodied by the archetypal “strong, silent type” characters played by Clint Eastwood or Chuck Norris. Psychologists like Levant even have a term for it: “normative male alexithymia,” which literally translates as “without words for emotions.”

Swept up in the counterculture environment of Berkeley in the 1960s, Levant says his exposure to feminism, civil rights, and sexual freedom made him begin to question his conformity to male “rules.” But it wasn’t until years later, as a single father, that it dawned on him that he was not alone in questioning the emotionally repressed models of masculine behavior from his youth.

In 1995, he helped to create a division within the American Psychological Association dedicated to men and masculinity. The group explores, scientifically, the consequences of and alternatives to rigid social expectations of masculine behavior as a means of “enhancing men’s capacity to experience their full human potential.”

It might sound like so much psychobabble, but a critical component of his mission, Levant says, is to help men learn to be more in touch with their own feelings, to the extent that they can at least recognize when those feelings are symptomatic of a real problem—the psychological equivalent of chest pain.

As Tony Soprano learned when he finally sought help for his panic attacks, psychotherapists today, likely as not, wear lipstick. Nearly three in every four licensed psychologists who hold doctorate degrees are female, as are almost 80 percent of master’s-level students in psychology-related fields of study. This disproportion, experienced counselors say, can pose both an advantage and a disadvantage for male patients.

On the one hand, men who are interested but hesitant to sit down with any psychotherapist may regard a woman as more nurturing, empathetic, and less threatening. The patient may ultimately be more willing to open up. On the other hand, female psychotherapists who tend by their training and their own socialization to be emotive, run the risk of alienating men by trying to counsel them, however subtly, to be like them.

Instead, psychologists like Jay Wade start their counseling sessions by commending reluctant male clients for the courage it took just to show up. Then they strive to cultivate the image of therapist-as-partner. The approach is less like a sensitivity trainer beseeching, “How do you feel?” and more like a golf pro paid to help refine your swing.

Bob Diddlebock, 59, a clinically depressed freelance writer in Denver, says he tried counseling but found sessions with the female psychologist he was referred to, to be distracting.

“All I wanted to do was [have sex with] her,” Diddlebock says.

His brother-in-law at the time, a “cool guy” whom Diddlebock admired, suggested a male psychologist he was seeing. That was in 1995. Diddlebock’s been going to that psychologist ever since, as often as three times a week.

“That guy has basically thrown me a lifesaver,” Diddlebock says. “There have been times I’ve crawled in on my knees. And I’ve been able to walk out.”

That he and the therapist are contemporaries helped, Diddlebock says. So did the fact that the therapist was “very intuitive and insightful, both in a clinical and real-world way. He can go real deep on what [stuff] means, and how it reflects on my thinking. He doesn’t repeat himself.”

Diddlebock, who also takes antidepressants prescribed by a physician, figures he’s paid upwards of $30,000 over the years for services rendered. It’s been money well spent, he says. Still, Diddlebock’s younger brother, a building contractor who lives in Idaho’s Teton Mountains and enjoys elk hunting on horseback, called him a “wimp” for seeking psychological help. The brothers haven’t spoken in years.

The most optimistic psychotherapists envision a day when even the most macho of macho men will sit down with skilled counselors to off-load the emotional burdens of dysfunctional relationships and traumatic events. But old biases die hard: sessions, they predict, will likely be called “skills training” or “weekend solution workshops.” Anything but “psychotherapy.”

East of Los Angeles, at the University of Redlands college counseling center where Fredric E. Rabinowitz has practiced psychotherapy for three decades, change is already afoot. The 3-females-to-1-male ratio of students seeking therapy on campus has hardly budged over the years, Rabinowitz says, but the stigma of therapy among young men has. “They’re less judgmental about guys that go for counseling,” Rabinowitz says. “I believe that 9/11 was a big turning point for this generation. Men were seen crying in reaction to the carnage in New York.”

Depressed college men continue to find benefit in the “feel bad, take a pill” simplicity of antidepressants, Rabinowitz says, but the frequently experienced sexual side effects of these SSRIs often drive them in exasperation to his office.

“Once guys have made it into counseling, they like it,” says Rabinowitz, co-author of Deepening Psychotherapy With Men. “Once it is reframed as a sign of strength to seek help … most men find talking and processing their experience therapeutic.”

Most, maybe, but certainly not all.

Lawyer Bob Smith remains skeptical that he could ever possibly benefit in any measure from psychotherapy aimed at getting to the roots of what he concedes are anger issues and less-than-ideal relationships with others. He says he is comfortable with who he is, angst and all.

“As soon as you get in the hands of one of these guys, you suddenly have a whole panoply of problems you have to ‘work through,’” Smith says cynically. “They want you to set up meetings twice a week. I’m an attorney. I know how the game is played.”

Perhaps.

But experts warn that for men like Smith, the go-it-alone mind-set may exact its own grave price.

About Betsy Bates Freed and David Freed
Clinical psychologist Betsy Bates Freed blogs on psychological issues for The Oncology Report and is a frequent contributor to Clinical Psychiatric News. David Freed, a screenwriter and former investigative reporter for Los Angeles Times, is the author of the new mystery novel Flat Spin.