Tony Porter

Tony Porter:

See, Ted, what we know: when we're defining manhood by distancing ourselves from the experience of women and girls, in essence, as men, we are distancing ourselves from our own humanity.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Welcome to Good Citizen, a podcast from the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library. I'm Ted Roosevelt. TR was in many ways the prototype for American manliness, but that paragon of manliness has been evolving over the last few years, and in this episode, we explore what it means to be a good man today. Our guest is Tony Porter. He's the co-founder and CEO of A Call to Men, an organization reshaping the conversation around masculinity. Tony is a powerful voice in ending violence against women, and it was his acclaimed TED Talk that introduced me to what he calls "the man box": the rigid socialization that teaches boys to be tough, controlling, and emotionless. In our conversation today, Tony gets personal about his own journey, the emotions he's learning to embrace, the parenting struggles he's faced, and really why real strength comes down to letting your guard down. This conversation is about breaking free from what we've inherited and building something better. Let's get into it.

Tony Porter:

So with my daughter, she could be crying, she could be upset, and as soon as I see her or hear her crying, it's like, "Daddy got you," I have her on my lap. I'm holding her, working with her and where she's at emotionally, and nurturing her, and having patience and tolerance. And then with my son, the moment I hear him crying, it's like a clock would go off. And he's got about 30 seconds of crying, which means that by the time he gets to me, his time is up. So he doesn't get the lap time, doesn't get on my knee, doesn't get held and nurtured with patience and with tolerance—all these qualities of what it means to be nurturing that boys need as much as girls. Instead, he's hearing, why are you crying? As men, we immediately go to a place of logic and being task-driven and not being emotional. Instead, we go right to solution and how do we fix things? So while I'm telling him to stop crying, he cries even more and that's the emotional response. And so it's frustrating for me that he's continuing to be, quote unquote, "emotional," while I'm trying to push him to be intellectual and logical. In that moment, I'm just doing what I've been taught to do, what had been passed down to me.

Ted Roosevelt V:

That's so true. So often these kinds of things are not so much parenting choices as reflexive actions, and that's something that really resonates with me and probably resonates with many fathers of young boys today. I noticed you said this type of response was passed down to you, which connects to something central in your work, The Man Box. Can you explain what that means?

Tony Porter:

Yeah. "The man box" is a catchy way to speak to the collective socialization of manhood. How we are taught collectively as men—as women as well—what it means to be a man. And when I say as women as well, women are taught the same thing. We just almost—we're instinctively following these rigid rules and guidelines of what it means to be a man. The teaching starts so early, some folks might think it's actually innate or biologically predetermined. Actually, it's not. It's socialization. And so we use the man box as a catchy way to speak to it.

I want you to think about a box and what are all the ingredients in that box that then define what it means to be a man. That men are taught to be tough. We're taught to be strong. We're taught that we're aggressive. We're taught that we're dominating. We're taught that asking for help is a sign of weakness. Men don't offer help. Men don't accept help. We're taught to be heterosexual. We're taught not to be gay. We're taught to be homophobic. We're taught to be transphobic. We're taught as men not to be vulnerable. We're taught not to be too nice, not to be too kind, not to be too caring, not to be too anything because it begins to look like weakness. Now, this is not an exact science. We're not saying that all men do this exactly the same. We're not saying that all men adhere to all of these examples of the man box, but what we are saying by and large, that we collectively as men know that this exists. We know when we're in the box and being outside the box.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I had a moment about a decade ago where I was in a business school class actually, but for all intents and purposes, it was a group therapy session. It was 12 people. We would sit around a room and the whole class was really exploring the interpersonal dynamics of what happened in that room. At the culmination of the class, at the very end— this is after many weeks—there was a man who was talking about his father and how he had been abandoned by his father. When he was recounting this, he started to cry, he actually started to weep. And it was such a powerful experience for me because in that vulnerability, I saw so much strength from him that he was willing to show his emotions to the group, and that was a real turning point for me.

Tony Porter:

It is enormous strength for men to express who they are emotionally, but we have to ask ourselves why? Because women express themselves emotionally without a thought. Actually, we wouldn't even consider it strength from women expressing their emotions, we would just consider it humanity. Right? Just the human experience. Why is it a tremendous strength? Because in that moment, he had to break out of the man box, as we would say at A Call to Men, right? He had to break out of the man box in the presence of men who have been taught to hold him hostage to that box. The truth of the matter is he's just embracing the human experience, but based on the social conditioning, it becomes an enormous strength.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Exactly. Another thought I had as I was doing research for this is this man box is kind of a cultural lesson that gets taught through the generations. I think that there's truth to that, but it is pretty standard in the human experience that men are seen as protectors and women are seen as caregivers. That's true in China. It's true in the Middle East. It's true. Anywhere you look in the world, there may be some tribe in the Amazon where it's not true, but broadly speaking, it is true that there is something about the human species where we self-segregate regardless of culture on those two kind of north poles for who the genders are. Do you have any thought about why that might be? Or maybe you disagree with that premise altogether, I don't know.

Tony Porter:

Well, no, I think there's truth to that. Some of it could be physicality that defines those roles. I'm not sure. It may very well be because of violence that's been historic. I believe because violence is part of our history from the beginning of time, that protection might have had more value than caretaking, and then where did that leave women in the mix, and then how has that evolved over the centuries to where we're at today? You can see it in salaries. The value of taking care of people versus acquiring just wealth in regards to capitalism, et cetera, or just business or technology, whatever we want to talk about. You could look at all of that just from a place of salary and see the difference in a childcare worker. Everything in human services, outside of law enforcement, for the most part is led by women and it's undervalued in our society. You look at all forms of law enforcement: those are not very high salaries, but men embrace it because of the power or how it feeds domination and protection. It attracts us to that line of work.

Ted Roosevelt V:

And I think about the firefighter or the cop that we lose something or that society loses something if men become less good protectors because they are more emotionally open. If you were going to run into a fire, you have to be kind of willing to put yourself at risk. You have to be willing to put your own fears and concerns aside, and if you are highly in touch with your emotional experience, that may become harder to do.

Tony Porter:

I don't know about that because when you talk to these men, their brotherhood is full of love. They've shedded tears together. They've embraced fear together. They've conquered fear. In those moments. A brotherhood comes from that that can't be broken, that they become very emotionally connected. Now, yes, they have to be able to challenge or to silo up or to manage their fear and anxiety in those moments. Yeah, I think that's part of the process. We talk about that a lot with athletes, with, particularly with pro football players. How do you manage the aggression and the anger that is fueling your play on the football field, but then when you come off of that field, you got to leave that there and then be able to come home and be a loving, kind, father, husband, partner, son. You have to learn how to manage who we are emotionally, but I truly believe that we can be both. Do we teach that? Is that part of the teaching, say like in a police academy?

Ted Roosevelt V:

I don't think we're teaching that, which is a big part of the problem. You've talked about your son who's 6'4", 250 pounds. Society must project certain expectations on him. How do you talk to him about fear and vulnerability? What are those conversations? How do you give him those tools?

Tony Porter:

Well, he's much slimmer now, but he is 6'4". He's a big dude, tall dude, and race becomes important for me. He's darker complexioned than I am and I'm dark-skinned, and there were many things that we talked about. When most parents might be excited about their kid driving first time, you don't have to cart 'em around and all of that—for me, it was nerve-wracking. And in a society— to talk frankly about race, Black boys are seen as men. So, having conversations with him around how to respond to being stopped by the police, the "yes sir"s and "no sir"s, your hands on the steering wheel, ask for permission to do everything. My son also, his friend group is very diverse culturally speaking, which is a cool thing, but I had to teach him, you can't do what other kids might do, like particularly white boys. You can't mouth off.

When Trayvon Martin was killed, my son was in middle school. And I'm picking him up from school... but if you remember when Trayvon Martin was killed, there was a lot of conversation around the hoodie. Having the hoodie up. And my son, Kendall, he prided himself on having this perfect round afro and we're having a conversation about Trayvon Martin. He said something to me that hurt me to my heart in his innocence and just not really understanding. He said, "Dad, you don't have to worry about me. I'm not going to have my hoodie up over my head because it'll mess up my afro." And I'm an inner city dude. I grew up between Harlem and the Bronx, but then, you know... raising them in a much more suburban area, kind of bubbling them up, trying to give them a better life than you had, trying to shield them from some of the things you experienced and the balancing act of that. I gotta let him be exposed to stuff so he can survive and negotiating those tension points, trying to find a sweet spot. Just having a lot of those conversations with him. Him and I have had some growing pains in these spaces together for sure.

Ted Roosevelt V:

As I hear you talking about these conversations, I mean, a lot of it's rooted in your experience growing up in this country and the race relations and very thoughtful lessons about not wearing a hoodie, which are terrible conversations that you need to have, but they are practical conversations that you need to have, and I wonder if there's any sense that you are projecting your fear onto his experience and then creating a different experience for him.

Tony Porter:

Many things can be true at once. My experience as a Black man: if you're running, people are watching you. If you're walking fast, the people are watching you. If you're walking slow, people are watching you. If you're standing still, people are watching you. And you're raising your son to understand this, to negotiate this. In that sense, you're telling him: you don't even supposed to exist, man. Because that's the reality of it. Don't run over here, don't walk off too fast over here. I'm pretty much telling you to make yourself invisible to survive. As a boy, my mother would take us into a store. It was about don't embarrass us. There are already many stereotypes about who we are as a people, so when you go into a store before we walk in, you get all the directions. It was four of us. Don't ask for nothing. Don't talk too much. Be quiet, don't misbehave, and if you do anything, one of your siblings going to give you an elbow because you're going to get us all in trouble or your mother will give you that look that would freeze you. So we're moving through the store like soldiers. But while we're moving through the store like soldiers, Ted, we're watching white kids running all over the place, going through, you know— you laugh at it, but when I laugh at it, you would see them run down an aisle or whatever, and the mother say, Johnny, come here, and he would not only ignore her, he would look back at her and say, "no!" And take off. But what I come to learn is, and this just a Tony Porter thing, it's my own belief. But that white parent, knowingly or unknowingly, is teaching that child, "This is your world and you could do with it whatever you want to do." And that Black parent, knowingly or unknowingly, is teaching that child, "this is not your world and you better learn how to move through it," knowing that reality. So then how do I teach my kids, raising a boy, a Black boy—a big Black boy—a big, dark-skinned Black boy? It brings a lot of things to focus. Anti-Blackness is such a vicious thing in our society. Just another one of those things that have just stayed with me.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Parenting is just so difficult and to have to layer in conversations around systemic racism and threats that the child might face because of it, it must seem overwhelming at times. Have you been able to access your emotions more effectively through the work that you're doing, or is it still kind of an ongoing challenge, an ongoing fight?

Tony Porter:

Yeah, I really appreciate that question, Ted. It's an ongoing challenge. Intellectually, I know what I'm feeling and I can process it and I can talk about it, but to physically experience it, it's still a challenge for me. To have tears stream down my face is a rarity. That physical relief that comes from shedding tears is still a challenge for me. For all I know and all I do, it's pretty sad, and even the times that it's happened for me, it's been in private.

Ted Roosevelt V:

I'm wondering about when, in your experience, you started to examine yourself and your own lack of emotional bandwidth and the impact that that might be having on your relationships, because that is a vulnerable and challenging and unsettling thing to do.

Tony Porter:

Yeah. It was not just relationships, not just intimate relationships. It was relationships with anyone. It was my way of thinking in general. Just my whole world. I was a social worker, I was director of a substance use program in New York State. A town called Nyack, it's Rockland County, which is about 30 minutes north of the Bronx. We called it substance abuse back then. Now I really appreciate, they call it substance use—you know, more humanizing, the persons, the people. And running the substance use program there, folks from the community would come in and provide services for those who were in substance use treatment. I had a detox program, a rehab program. It was a pretty pro-feminist community there. It put me in spaces with women who were talking about sexism and they began to engage me very strategically. They knew I had something that they wanted. I had a voice that they wanted.

They began to bring me along. And I had to learn how to talk, in some respects, all over again, that I had to really learn how to talk to women in an equitable way, the terms that I used to use that I can't use anymore. And I had many mentors—all women by the way—who were really guiding me through this process of learning how to be an anti-sexist man while at the same time you never arrive. I'm still a man, so I'm still sexist because see, Ted, what we know when we are defining manhood by distancing ourselves from the experience of women and girls, in essence as men, we are distancing ourselves from our own humanity.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Tony, what I like about your framing that you make here is this idea that there is—yes, it's helping women. Yes, it helps create better relationships, but you don't need to be motivated by a sense of, "I need to make society a better place." You need to be motivated by, if I'm understanding you correctly, "I need to make me a better person to live a fuller, happier, more fulfilling life." Is that the right framing?

Tony Porter:

No question, man. No question. You know, the American Psychological Association in 2018 did a study. Men—back then, it was men completed suicide three and a half times that the rate of women. Today, we know it to be four times that the rate of women. Women live an average of 7-8 years longer than men. 6 million men go undiagnosed annually between depression and anxiety. This man box is killing us. Trauma goes unchecked with men, but that trauma that we experience gets inside of us and we know that hurt people find themselves hurting other people. This defining manhood by distancing ourselves from the experience of women and girls has distanced us from each other as men. We can't compliment each other as men, because complimenting a man is like demeaning to your manhood. I do it with players all the time: pick a man in this room that you admire and tell us and him why. To do that publicly—for men to do that in the presence of other men—say, "yo so-and-so, when I was a rookie, he had my back, man. He guided me. He took me out to eat. He taught me this, he taught me that, and I really appreciate and love him for that." You don't hear that amongst men. There's so much beauty in who we are and how we show up in many spaces. I'm not taking that away from us, but the experiences we're talking about today, Ted, yes, there's an epidemic of violence against women and girls in our society, and the majority of it is at the hands of men. That is not in question. That's not in question, but at the same time, we're hurting ourselves as well tremendously and maybe even more so if we allow ourselves to really think about it.

Ted Roosevelt V:

There's so much in everything you're saying. There's that silence of, well, this is the way that it is and I'm not even going to think about it. I'm not going to address it. You sort of accept it as the way that it is, and I am just really impressed with you and trying to find ways to sort of help people break out of that cycle, recognizing that you're in the man box. If you're listening to this podcast and you're like, ah, this is sort of resonating with me—what are other road signs that tell me I'm in this man box more than I realize?

Tony Porter:

You know how authentic you are. You know how much of a role self you are, R-O-L-E versus your whole self, W-H-O-L-E. It's important for we as men to examine that and have conversations around that. It's important for us to really to look at and examine, who am I emotionally speaking? Is anger the only emotion that I give myself permission to express? When I think about equality and equity for women and all people, where am I at on the spectrum? How does that resonate for me? I also ask men about friends. Do I have one friend that really knows me? What many of us do is if we have four friends, we silo it up. I'm going to tell this friend maybe about relationships. I'm going to tell this friend about work. I'm going to tell this friend about kids, and so I can keep full control over it. I'm not being vulnerable. I want us to think about vulnerability versus being in control because that's where we get to grow. Because vulnerability is what's needed to take risk in life, right? Am I exploring the trauma that's happened in my life? These are all things that, if we're down with some self-exploration as men, to really just begin to examine ourselves and ask some real questions.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Tony, we ask everybody on this podcast what it is to be a good citizen. One of the interesting insights from that is that nobody—we've talked to leading politicians, leading CEOs, people that are experts in their field like yourself—and nobody has given a description of what it is to be a good citizen that is the stereotypical characteristics of what you might find in the man box: always be in control, be authoritarian, low or little empathy for other people. These are very much not the answers that we're getting, which in talking to you is sort of this aha moment for me about the man box. So for you, how would you describe a good citizen?

Tony Porter:

For me, being a good citizen is meeting men where they're at, reaching in and grabbing the hearts of men and doing that with an understanding that there could be a long distance between the head and the heart with a lot of detours and roadblocks because of all of our life experience. The importance of being transparent and being vulnerable myself in relationships with men—if I want men to give of themselves, I have to be willing to give of myself. I have hope for men. I believe in the healing of men, so to show up in that way with abundance of love, that's the operative word, regardless of whether I know them or not, right? I don't know you, Ted, but I love you. I love what you're doing, and I love the way you're showing up. And to be that way with men, I think that's my role and that's my responsibility.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Tony, thank you so much. Let me say, I've loved this conversation and I love you for being a part of this conversation. It has been very impactful for me. It has been profound for me, even though we've only had a short time together, and that lets me know that you are clearly doing great work out there, so keep it up, please.

Tony Porter:

Well, it was great. I appreciate the way you did it. It was a great interview. You're real skilled at it. Appreciate that.

Ted Roosevelt V:

Tony, thank you so much for confronting this important issue and doing so with such honesty and vulnerability. Sharing your personal challenges as both a parent, and simply just as a man, no doubt resonated with so many listeners, including myself. Listeners, be sure to look up Tony Porter's TED Talk, A Call to Men, and his book, "Breaking Out of the Man Box: The next Generation of Manhood." Good Citizen is produced by the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in collaboration with the Future of StoryTelling and Charts & Leiisure. You can learn more about TR's upcoming presidential library at trlibrary.com.