/
Dr. Ronald Levant is widely considered one of the key people responsible for creating the field of psychology of Men and Masculinities. He’s a feminist scholar, Professor Emeritus of psychology at the University of Akron, the past president of the American Psychological Association and the Association’s Division 51, the Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinities, as well as the author of numerous books and journal articles. Randy Flood, psychotherapist, and director of the Men’s Resource Center, refers to Dr. Levant as being “foundational” to the arc of his learning in the field of men and masculinities. Flood was honored when Dr. Levant wrote a book review for Mascupathy: Understanding and Healing the Malaise of American Manhood, the second book co-authored by Flood and Charlie Donaldson. And yet, when Flood reached out to congratulate Dr. Levant on the publication of his memoir, The Problem with Men, he wasn’t expecting it would lead to an interview for the Revealing Men podcast. Their resulting conversation offers a history of Dr. Levant’s career, his research, and the study of men and masculinities.
The First in a Series
Excerpts of Dr. Levant’s segment follow. Listen to the full podcast on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher. This is the first in a three-part series featuring authors who move beyond the page to reveal a bit of the inner lives of men. The next two authors in the series are:
- Doug Crandall, a writer of many styles and Public Service Faculty at the Institute on Human Development and Disability at the University of Georgia
- Fabel Marcel Price (Fable the Poet) is an award-winning writer, community advocate, and a former Poet Laureate turned nationally touring storyteller and spoken word artist.
The Study of Men and Masculinities Takes Root
Dr. Levant received his doctorate from Harvard in clinical psychology and public practice in the early ’70s. At the time, he says, family therapy was becoming very prominent in the mental health field and family therapists were considered revolutionary. “They did things that the older generation of therapists who were mostly influenced by psychoanalysis didn’t do. … I got sort of trained up in that,” he explains.
While in Boston, Dr. Levant attended workshops led by pioneers in family therapy, taught family therapy at Boston University, and had a small private practice. “In academia,” he says, “if you’re in a clinical or counseling psychology program or you’re training clinicians, the expectation is that you’ll have a small practice to kind of keep your clinical skills sharp.”
Boston University was expanding into neighborhoods and looking for a way to appease its new neighbors by offering community-facing programs. “…. I was going along, minding my own business when suddenly opportunity thrust itself into my life!” Dr. Levant recalls. At the time, he was experiencing life as a semi-custodial father. “It wasn’t going well,” he says. “…I tended to blame myself mostly until 1979, when a movie, Kramer versus Kramer, came out.”
After watching the movie, Dr. Levant says he wondered whether his parenting issues weren’t because he was bad at being a dad but because men of his generation were being confronted with a unique set of circumstances. “First of all, divorce was accelerating around then. Secondly, more and more men were taking involved parenting roles, whereas, in the past, men did very little with their children … I thought to myself, you know, this whole thing is worth looking into.”
The Fatherhood Project
This self-awareness led Dr. Levant and one of his graduate students to develop the BU Fatherhood Project, a non-credit course for dads on how to be a parent. It was advertised on the radio and in the newspaper as a “fatherhood course.” The course met once a week for 10 weeks. “We’d tell them,” Dr. Levant explains, “‘We’re going to teach you how to be a better father the same 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 watch the replay. We’re going to break it down and analyze it. And then, we’ll figure out how to do it better.’”
“You presented it as instruction like you would get for improving your golf swing,” says Flood. “You videotape it, you slow it down, and we can tell you what to do differently. And then they were more intrigued.”
Men and Women Are Emotional Beings
Dr. Levant relates how during one of the first classes, he met a father whose son had stood him up for a father/son hockey game. “This was his once-a-week outing with his son and it was pretty important to him. I asked him ‘Well, how did you feel about that?’ And his response was ‘he shouldn’t have done it.’ … Well, I agree, but how did you feel?”
Dr. Levant confesses that at this point, he knows nothing about men and emotions. But he thought there was something deeper going on. “So, we did the role play. We taped it. We played it back. I’m sitting right next to him at the monitor. I said, ‘You know, Don, look at yourself in the monitor. How did you feel?’ ‘I don’t know. I guess I must have felt disappointed.’”
“I imagine in my head, how a mother might feel in an analogous situation,” Dr. Levant continues: ‘At first, I was surprised. It’s not like her to act that way. And then I was hurt that she acted with so little regard for my feelings. And then I was worried that maybe she’s upset with me and this is her way of showing it. And then I was disappointed and annoyed ’cause I built my whole day around it and now it was ruined.’ So here I am in my head. I guess I must have been disappointed versus surprised. Hurt, worried, disappointed, and annoyed. I couldn’t figure it out.”
When Dr. Levant relayed this experience to his colleagues, they were no help at all. “’Women are just more emotional by nature,’ they said. I just didn’t buy that. I couldn’t imagine the sexes would be so different.”
Socialization’s Effect on Men and Emotions
Based on his experience with the BU Fatherhood Project, Dr. Levant was inspired to learn more about men and their emotions. He found studies that showed males are more emotionally expressive than females from shortly after birth through one year old. He was also aware of the work done by Joe Pleck that established the idea of the gender role strain paradigm. This is the thought that gender roles are neither innate nor inherent and that the aggressive socialization of children into these rigid gender roles can be harmful. And, he adds, “Bob Brannon had recently published the Brannon Masculinity Scale, which is the first attempt to codify masculinity. And restrictive emotionality was one of the norms that he put into a scale.”
This seems to be the point where Dr. Levant’s concept of men and masculinities starts to take hold. He says, “I theorized that boys who were socialized to conform to the masculine norm of restrictive emotionality had a greater likelihood of growing up to be emotionally inexpressive men. And I called that the normative male alexithymia hypothesis.” “Alexithymia,” he explains “literally means without words for emotions. And, it was an idea that grew up among mental health professionals who were studying psychosomatic disorders in the 1960s and ‘70s.”
Flood asks, “At this time, you had clearly saw alexithymia as a socialized problem. That was your theory, right? Is that males were born with an equal ability to experience emotion, cry at the same level, express fears, and things like that. But then over time, this alexithymia developed because of the way that they were socialized and trained.”
“Exactly!” responds Dr. Levant. “That’s it!”
Creating a Vocabulary
After establishing his hypothesis, Dr. Levant set out to do more research and focus on working with men to help them discover and express their emotions.
“I’d ask the men to tell me words for emotions,” Dr. Levant says. “… And with a group of eight or 10 guys, I might get 30 words, and 20 of those words would be expressions of anger: pissed off, irritated, annoyed, mad. About eight of them would not be emotions at all, but rather signs of stress: burden, zapped, depleted, overloaded. And then maybe one or two would be actual emotion words like fear or joy.”
I concluded from that, that one of the first jobs was to help men develop a vocabulary for emotions. I’d ask the client to come up with as many words for emotions as they can during the week and write it down on a piece of paper and bring it in. And I would rely on men’s natural competitive instinct. I would say, ‘The guy I saw an hour ago came in with 30 words.’ This guy is going to come in with 31!”
“Tapping into that masculine energy, right?” responds Flood. “In group, I always say who’s got the courage to talk about something they’re scared of talking about?”
“That’s another good example.” Dr. Levant continues. “By the way, some of the men that I worked with could identify what they were feeling; they felt an emotion and with some coaching could put it into words. But some, a smaller percentage, really didn’t experience an emotion at all, but rather body sensations.” “The physical aspect of the emotion only,” Flood says.
Dr. Levant goes on to give examples such as “I have butterflies in my chest,” or “My neck is really tight.”
Identifying Emotions
Flood asks Dr. Levant how he initially got buy-in from his clients. Dr. Levant likens his approach to a sales job. “I would try to link it to their presenting problem and find a way to connect,” he says. For instance, ‘You’re here because your wife feels you’re not expressive enough’ or something like that. And I’d say ‘I’m going to offer some work that you and I can do together that will help you become more expressive. You have to sell them on it. Did I sell every single guy? Of course not. But, you know, most of them.”
He proceeds to talk Flood through the steps he took with his clients: starting with a brief explanation of socialization to assigning different tasks from one session to the next. These included the vocabulary assignment referenced earlier, identifying emotions in other people, and lastly, identifying emotions in themselves.
He says, “I think I thought it would be easier for them to identify emotions in other people before trying to identify them in themselves …. I would teach them about nonverbal behavior, facial expression, tone of voice, paralinguistic phenomena like sighs, cries, and gasps, about body language. And I would say, ‘During the course of the week, when you’re talking to somebody, or even while you’re watching television, ask yourself as you’re listening to the person, what are they feeling as they’re saying this? And then go back to your vocabulary list and find words that seem to match what you’re seeing.’
“I got them kind of working here on putting words to someone else’s emotions. And then the next step, …. once they could do that fluently, I would ask them to try to identify their own emotions.” For this task, Dr. Levant required an “emotional response log.” “…Whenever you feel an emotion—or if the guy didn’t feel emotions, a bodily sensation—I want you to stop and write down what you’re aware of feeling. …Then I want you to ask yourself the question of who is doing what to whom right now, and how does that affect me? I wanted him to get the social context in there. And then I would say, after having done that, go through your vocabulary list and pick out the word or words that describe how you’re feeling.”
Consequences of Emotional Restriction
Flood asks Dr. Levant what he sees as some of the consequences with men today due to the issue of emotional restriction.
“You know, we’re seeing men not succeeding in relationships,” he says. “I can give you a clinical example of that; of how that works out. One of my clients … told me his wife complained that there wasn’t enough intimacy in their marriage. And then he says, ‘What does she want me to do? Rip her clothes off when she comes in the front door and make love to her in the foyer?’” “That’s his definition of intimacy,” Randy responds. “Sexual intimacy only, right?”
Dr. Levant agrees. “It did not occur to him that you could be intimate through conversation. And I think that’s true of a lot of men. Because, you know, intimacy requires disclosure and revealing vulnerabilities which violate masculine norms.”
Flood asks Dr. Levant to explain further. “What are some of those norms and how do they contribute to emotional restriction?” Dr. Levant responds that there are “different ways of carving up the pie,” but that his approach comes from the Male Role Norms Inventory.
Identifying Masculine Norms
“The most fundamental norm, in my view,” says Dr. Levant, “is avoiding all things feminine. This goes back to childhood socialization. Boys are told that the worst thing they can do is walk, talk, act, or throw like a girl. And anything girls do is to be avoided by boys. We’ve already mentioned restrictive emotionality—self–reliance, toughness, dominance —[and] because gay and bisexual men are thought to be feminized—disdain for gay and bisexual men. And then finally, the playboy norm, having a great deal of interest in physical sex.”
“There’s this idea,” says Flood, “that if you’re not able to talk it out, you act it out. …What are the stats on men in terms of their acting out propensity?” “We can talk about that,” Dr. Levant answers. “The norms are really inculcated in childhood. Particularly in middle school, when puberty happens. … And boys police each other for violating masculine norms, and they’re merciless. You probably remember from your childhood; I certainly remember from mine. And this kind of inculcation of a belief that because you’re male, you have to be a certain way, creates all kinds of problems.” The biggest, as he sees it is not allowing for flexibility in behavior. Others include, as mentioned earlier on, men being able to identify and express their emotions and anger management. “By inculcating these norms in childhood,” Dr. Levant says, “you create a foundation for men to feel ashamed of themselves for violating these norms as adults.”
Sharing Top Secrets
The ‘90s saw the advent of men’s growth groups. Not meant as therapy groups, they were more like large discussion groups. Dr. Levant led some of these groups and used a tool — the “top secret” task — developed by psychotherapist Irvin Yalom, to get at the thing individuals would never tell anybody. During men’s growth groups, Dr. Levant would ask attendees to write down their top secret – anonymously – on cards.
He would collect the cards, shuffle them, and then, as he describes it, … “I would turn over the cards and gasps go up in the room. ‘He’s going to read!’ And two very interesting things happened when I did that. One, the men experienced an enormous sense of relief. Why? Because up until that point, they had never had any corrective feedback and they believed that they were the only one who would behave so shamefully and that all the rest of the men are doing fine. When they find out all these men in the room aren’t doing so fine and have shameful secrets, it’s a great relief. It’s called equalization.
The second thing I found, and this wasn’t universal, but it was frequent, [was] that many of the men’s shameful secrets, —and these were adults, 30s to 50s, established adult men—many of their secrets had to do with violations of masculine norms when they were boys.”
“That they still carried shame about after all these years,” adds Flood. The men revealed secrets, Dr. Levant says, such as ‘I backed down from a fight in high school,’ ‘I had to crush on another boy in middle school,’ I was too close to my mother,’ ‘I cried too often.’
“Which shows the power, for me,” says Flood, “of that socialization. That even though they tried super hard to fit in and to do it right and to be part of the man kind of pack, if you will, they still failed at times and they carried the shame into their adult life. ‘I failed as a man and to measure up.’”
Dr. Levant concurs. “That is exactly the point, Randy. That childhood socialization leaves scars that last well into adulthood. And that gets to a new point that I’m going to bring up, which is violence.”
Stopping Gun Violence
“I’ve been kind of obsessed with gun violence,” says Dr. Levant. “Just the volume of gun violence. You know from 2023, I believe it was, to now the number of mass shootings defined as four victims—not including the perpetrator and not necessarily leading to death in all cases— has doubled! Is that astonishing? …It could be coming to anybody’s community.” “At any time,” says Flood.
“It never gets discussed as a gendered problem,” says Flood. “What are the statistics? Ninety-eight point five or ninety-nine percent of these mass shooters are males. But we don’t talk about it as a gendered issue. I always say that if women were shooting up our public spaces at that level, we would be talking about it as a gendered problem. Like what’s going on with the women? Can we do something different in how we raise them so they’re not shooting us up? It’s like [society says] boys, men will behave badly and it’s just in their nature. There’s nothing we can do about it, like hurricanes and tornadoes. Throw our hands up.
“I just don’t believe that’s true,” Flood continues. “You don’t either. And that’s where our passion comes from. Educating and trying to get people to see that we can raise young men into greater health and decrease the level of violence.”
“So, a couple of points to follow up on what you said,” adds Dr. Levant. “The FBI has a site where you can look up crime statistics and, you know, crimes involving guns, that are committed by males, upwards of 90% in cases where the sex or the gender of the perpetrator is known. But the other interesting statistic is that well over 90% of boys and men would never do such a thing. So, I wanted to figure that out. What distinguishes this tiny minority of men who do these heinous things?”
Masculine Norms and Gun Violence
Wanting an answer to that question, Dr. Levant turned to what he does well: research.
“Joe Wong, who’s the editor of Psychology and Men and Masculinity invited me to do a study and write a paper on this. And, as you probably know, social sciences tend to be siloed. Psychologists read psychology and social workers read social work.
“I went out outside of my comfort zone and I read across the social sciences, literature, sociology, cultural anthropology, criminology, social work. And what I found was the same finding across all of these disciplines, even though they use different terminology and different research methods: the men or boys who are likely to commit a violent crime are those who feel their masculinity has been threatened. So this goes back to childhood. If we weren’t so harshly socializing boys, would we have this problem?”
Emotional Learning for Boys
For Dr. Levant, one project, one question, one idea leads to another. There’s a project he’d like to see incorporated into middle school studies. “One of my colleagues published a book, The Masculinity Workbook for Teens. This, I envision as forming a module in the social and emotional learning classes in middle schools. It would be a module where a week is spent with boys who are getting all this pressure about being masculine … and all this other nonsense that I admit to having done when I was a boy.”
He thinks it would go a long way if boys had the opportunity to do values clarification and figure out who they are and what kind of guy they want to be independent of pressure. “If,” he says, “guys aren’t made to internalize a set of arbitrary norms and then feel guilty or ashamed of themselves because they failed these impossible norms in some way.“
Encouraging Boys to Be Who They Are
Flood asks Dr. Levant to envision what the future holds for young men. “Since you’re one of the fathers of the men and masculinities movement, I want to be able to get you to kind of proselytize or be prophetic in your ideas regarding how we move forward as a society and even as a counseling profession and helping young men be healthy males in our society.”
“Thank you for that question,” Dr. Levant responds. “And I have thought about it. I would love for one of these billionaires, that are looking for some social project, to fund a really solid public education campaign that would be directed at parents, teachers, coaches, religious advisors, —anybody who interacts with boys —to educate them about the harms of reinforcing these traditional masculine norms and instead working to let the boy be whoever he is.
I come back to Western civilization, which is founded on individualism and these exhortations going back to Aristotle and Shakespeare, ‘to thine own self be true,’ to be the self that one truly is, or, as Oscar Wilde put it tongue-in-cheek, ‘be yourself, everybody else is taken!’”
Big Boys Should Cry!
“One of the most destructive things I think happens with boys is the admonition to not cry,” says Dr. Levant. “‘Big boys don’t cry.’ And so, you might be told that. And then if you don’t stop crying, you might be threatened. ‘If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to really cry about.’ But think about it. All humans have tear ducts. Crying releases endorphins and oxytocin, which relieves sadness. So why do we prohibit boys from doing this?”
Flood responds that there’s the fear that men are being feminized and emasculated. “We’re not going to have tough and strong men anymore and society’s just going to get weak. We have all these fears about that, that get in the way of us reaching each young male where they are.
There are going to be musicians, very sensitive boys. And then there are going to be inherently more aggressive guys that want to get on the gridiron and play football. But let them be who they are rather than us, like you said, forcing them into these molds.”
“Exactly! To thine own self be true,” proclaims Dr. Levant. “Let them do that. That is my point.”
Man Up, Be More Like Women, Or Be Human
Dr. Levant’s work in the field of men and masculinities is well-respected and continues to be modeled by therapists. “We replicate some of these ideas into the things we do at the Men’s Resource Center,” says Flood. For example, the circling of men and giving them a chance to talk about their shame and realize they’re not alone. It helps them become stronger, more balanced men. And it doesn’t make them weak; it makes them human.”
“I was having a conversation with someone,” Dr. Levant recalls. “We were talking about the enforcement to conform to masculine norms. And the person brought up … ‘so, what’s the alternative? Should they be more like women?’ So I thought about that and I said ‘There’s an article here. The title is ‘Man up, Be More Like Women, or Be Human.’ And I attack the very idea that personality traits are parsed out solely on the basis of gender. And, one of the examples I use is courage. You know, that’s a masculine norm: be courageous. But tell me that birthing a child doesn’t require courage? …And so rather than man up or be like a woman, just be who you are, human.”
“And again,” says Flood, “we get so caught up and so lost as humans in language and in our kind of constructs and categories. …It’s like the masculine gets associated with the sex of male, and feminine with the sex of female. And I think that if we could just …come up with a different language. …Like, what is it, soft traits or hard traits? And look at it in the physical, material world. What is soft and what is hard? The value of that depends on context. We don’t want a soft basketball court. We want a soft pillow.
Whether you call it masculine or feminine, there’s just a variety of human traits. Evolved and healthy people are going to be able to read the room, read the social context, and hopefully bring forth the human trait that is required in that context to be fit and functional and not be stuck with just hard traits or just soft traits.”
Dr. Levant responds: “I think you got it! I think you got it!”
Which is just the way a student would want his conversation with his mentor to end.
Building On a Strong Foundation
Randy Flood and the Men’s Resource Center are thankful to Dr. Ronald Levant for sharing the history of how his ideas materialized and became a foundational part of our work helping men live fuller and more healthy lives. For more than 20 years, we have provided a wide range of counseling, consultation, and therapy services. These include in-person as well as online counseling and men’s support groups.
For more information about these and other services, call us at (616) 456-1178, or contact us online. Also, feel free to contact us if you have questions about this segment, ideas for a topic, or would like to be a guest on the Revealing Men podcast.
