Defining Healthy Masculinity & How to Build It | Terry Real

What makes a great Morani is knowing which moment is which.

The episode opens with a parable rather than a definition. Terry Real invokes the Morani, a warrior who is lethal when fierceness is called for and who lays down sword and shield to be tender when the moment calls for it, and he locates greatness in knowing which moment is which, not in any single register. Andrew Huberman then sets the stakes: rates of depression and suicide at an all-time high in men, fewer men in romantic relationships, many without a single close friend, and conflicted public messaging about how to show up in those relationships. He previews the thesis that relating is a skill requiring action and feeling, that feelings must be processed and communicated in a specific way and sometimes not communicated at all, and he flags fraternity as belonging to a group of men who give honest feedback and hold you accountable. Pressed on 'What's going on with men?', Real answers that the old role has shifted, that men are searching and grappling over what to be if not what their dads and granddads were, and that there are few healthy examples modeling the new territory.

Real gives the confusion a political edge. He says part of it is a reaction to feminism, reports that someone summarized his work as 'Women have had a revolution, and now men have to deal with it.', and describes a backlash and a global resurgence that celebrates the most difficult, unattractive aspects of traditional masculinity. He calls the biggest response regressive, a return to being powerful, dominant, entitled, aggressive, and points to politics where autocracy and dominance are celebrated. He offers his own location as context: he grew up in the '60s at the height of feminism and considers himself a feminist family therapist. Huberman, for his part, frames the episode as zero-cost-to-consumer science information separate from his Stanford roles, and he openly disclaims expertise, saying he is not formally educated about this topic and, later, not a clinician.

Real separates two senses of patriarchy. Political patriarchy is the oppression of women by men, which he says plainly exists, especially outside America; as a psychologist he is more interested in psychological patriarchy, the dynamics of patriarchy that can operate between two men, two women, a mother and child, or two races, and that he calls a straitjacket toxic for everybody. He concedes traditional masculinity has some positive traits and is not completely black and white, but judges much of it unhealthy. The essence of that traditional model, he argues, is stoicism: the more invulnerable you are the more manly, the more vulnerable the more girly. He calls this a lie, since human beings are vulnerable, and links it to chronic anxiety, depression and the perpetual question of whether one measures up to a standard that is not real.

I'm here to tell you that traditional masculinity is harmful.

The mechanism he names is disconnection. In this culture, he says, boys are turned into men by disconnecting from feelings, from vulnerability, from others and from the mother, all relabeled as autonomy; he calls the story of achieving autonomy baseless and simply patriarchy, and offers the monosyllabic adolescent who will not answer his mother as a mandate rather than a psychological necessity. He returns to the point later when discussing male depression, writing that the way boys are turned into men is through disconnection and that 'the cost of disconnection is disconnection.' The broader loss is relationality and the beauty of connection: humans are pack animals designed for intimacy, and he attributes to Vivek Murthy the claim that lack of intimate connection is as bad for the body as smoking a pack and a half of cigarettes a day, adding that he has been saying this for 40 years and wrote about male depression back in the '90s.

Huberman supplies a cultural history that complicates Real's picture. He describes the 1940s and '50s template as very narrow and, Real adds, pretty inhuman in some ways: provider, protector, stoic, no feelings, logic, with etiquette so scripted that there were even diagrams warning men never to stand with hands on hips or tilt a hip because that was feminine. Huberman notes the script was simpler and more accessible but masked a lot, and traces an expansion from the late '80s and '90s: the first gay male characters on television (he cites The Real World: San Francisco and Will & Grace), gender bending associated with David Bowie, hippies, rock and roll and Bon Jovi types, an artsy phenotype, and a general buffet of maleness. Born in '75, he says men in their 20s and 30s now seem comfortable with self-expression and feel they have options.

A sponsor break interrupts this history, after which Huberman continues that most of the '60s look actually happened in the '70s, quoting Steve Jobs to that effect. Real then draws a distinction that checks Huberman's optimism: having gay men in the public eye is not the same as saying the role of straight men had changed. His sharper objection is about the younger men Huberman describes. They have access to emotion in ways older men did not, having been raised by feminist mothers, but he says many bring traditional male privilege along with it, arriving at 'I'm emotional now. Come and take care of me.', and he reports women complaining that these guys do not stand up and are kind of children. He also notes these men are the ones whining that women are not attracted to them, 'and there's a reason for that.'

Real's alternative is progressive masculinity: men who are big-hearted, strong, connected, and giving. He argues the element that has not changed across generations is giving. The 1950s husband was responsible and fought dragons but came home expecting 'where's my martini and slippers?'; the post-'60s man was allowed feelings and a little vulnerability, but it was still about me. What is missing in the culture generally, he says, is relationality. He distinguishes gratification, a short-term hit of pleasure that the captains of industry flying private planes to see him have mastered, from what he calls relational joy, the deeper satisfaction of simply being there and being connected, which he illustrates with parenting. His verdict is that the culture is anti-relational and narcissistic, and that even where the terms of patriarchy have moved, the narcissism and lack of relationality have not.

Huberman presses the emotional question into a decision tree: if men should feel their feelings, should they feel them alone or in the presence of someone else, and at what point does expression become the emotional privilege of making someone else take care of you? He raises the older Type A / Type B framing, in which people who hold everything inside died early of heart attacks while those who vocalized and even screamed fared better in longevity, and he is careful to say he is not recommending screaming at people. Real's answer reframes the whole target: healthy expression 'looks like a negotiation and not a demand.' He states flatly that he does not care about the feelings, he cares about the connection, and warns that a man who has recovered feelings but still does not give a damn about his partner's feelings has made only a small step. The goal, he says, is to move beyond selfishness because it is in men's interest to do so.

I don't care about the feelings. I care about the connection.

The concrete illustration is Real's own nervousness before the interview. He called their mutual friend Bea, whom Huberman identifies as the therapist Bea Voce, said he was nervous, and she walked him through what would happen; afterwards he was 'chilled' and calls it a blessing. He uses the story to define the skill: men lose the capacity to ask somebody for help when cut off from vulnerability, but it is ask, not demand, and it is reciprocal, since Bea then talked about her relationship and he supported her. Huberman distills two healthy forms from this: asking for help by naming what is on your mind, such as being nervous or sad, and, when a woman is upset, the words 'What do you need?' or 'What do you need from me right now?' Real's response to the first is simply 'That is water in the desert.'

That is water in the desert.

Real uses the discussion of self-esteem to explain why men cannot hear criticism. He distinguishes self-esteem that comes from the inside out, 'I have worth because I'm here and I'm breathing.', worth that cannot be added to or subtracted from and is the same as everyone else's, from the outside-in, performance-based version men are taught, worth derived from big muscles, landing a job, giving a partner an orgasm or hitting a homer. Because performance-based worth collapses into shame when performance fails, he introduces the Icarus syndrome: in the absence of worthiness men feel they must earn love, leave wives and kids and fly off into the sun to be worthy of it, while the family sits wondering where Dad is, when 'Just sit down and be still and be connected. That's all you need to do.' He calls it a bill of goods and a scam. Healthy self-esteem, for him, is the capacity to feel proportionally bad about bad behavior while holding oneself in warm regard as an imperfect person.

What we have is what I call the Icarus syndrome.

Huberman restates the target as accepting responsibility when you screw up while not falling into shame, still holding onto a sense of goodness, and Real gives him the line 'I'm a good guy who screwed up. I'm a good guy who behaved badly.' The counterintuitive clinical claim is that lack of self-esteem is what makes men unaccountable: confronted with an imperfection they go into shame, cannot feel proportionately bad, and ward off the criticism with the defensive moves women complain about, because admitting imperfection is too overwhelming. Real therefore says he teaches men self-esteem as a way of helping them be accountable, and that without healthy self-esteem a man cannot afford to be accountable. When criticism arrives with characterological assassination, he advises good luck countering it and, drawing on 40 years of marriage, says the skilled move is to duck under the horrible delivery rather than react to it.