Walz, Vance and two concepts of what a man is

When Tim Walz and JD Vance face off at the vice presidential debate this week, how will their rival versions of masculinity land with persuadable male voters?

By Ronald Levant, University of Akron and Christopher Kilmartin, The University of Mary Washington

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As JD Vance and Tim Walz face off at the US vice-presidential debate, they’ll be exhibiting more than their oration skills or policy know-how.

They’ll also be showcasing rival versions of masculinity.

Senator Vance, Donald Trump’s Republican running mate, embodies a model of masculinity that scorns childless women and denigrates minority groups including immigrants and LGBTQ folks.

Opposing him is Governor Tim Walz, Kamala Harris’s Democratic vice-presidential candidate. Walz embodies a hopeful sort of “family man” — one who can publicly express affection for his son. He’s the kind of guy who’d help you change your tyre (or so say his fans on social media.)

With the election just five weeks away, both vice-presidential hopefuls are vying for the votes of young, persuadable men.

Polls show young American voters are divided along gender lines — with a majority of young women voters backing Harris, compared with fewer than half of young male voters — so the debate is an opportunity for Walz to win over undecided young men.

As psychologists who practice and conduct research in the area of masculinity, we have an important, potentially life-changing message for men ahead of the vice-presidential debate — and the presidential election.

We urgently need a major reset in our understanding of what it means to be a man. That means upending decades of tradition and changing how we live.

Targeting young men

This has been a recurring theme throughout the election cycle. Both the Republican and Democratic campaigns have been overt in their attempts to target young men (including through, variously, influencers and targeted ads.)

Co-founder of White Dudes for Harris Ross Morales Rocketto said the United States is “having a conversation about masculinity right now as it relates to politics.”

Indeed, much has been made of the crisis facing men in America — and for good reason.

The sexes have been out of alignment for more than a half a century when it comes to gender roles.

With the advent of second-wave feminism in the late 1960s, women loosened the restraints of their traditional roles of homemaker and mother.

They first sought to attain financial independence from men. Women (including mothers of small children) moved into the paid workforce with the force of a tsunami.

With financial independence, women then left bad marriages in droves, resulting in the ‘divorce revolution,’ in which half of all marriages were expected to end in divorce by the mid-1980s.

A little known fact is that two-thirds of those divorces were initiated by women.

Throughout this period and beyond, girls and women have benefitted from ongoing local conversations about how to navigate changes in their gender roles.

The gains in girls and women’s opportunities and achievements have been legion.

Men fare poorly

However, as Richard Reeves has pointed out in Of Boys and Men, males are doing poorly in comparison to females on just about every educational, health, and social indicator that exists.

Starting with education, boys have long been struggling with more learning and behavioural problems in school than girls. Men have also experienced steep declines relative to women in college (and beyond) attendance and degree completion.

In health, men die more than five years earlier than women and suffer more illnesses in many major categories of disease.

These poor health outcomes are due primarily to behavioural factors (and that means preventable), in which men engage in more than 30 deleterious health risk behaviors such as refusal to use sunscreen or seatbelts, not getting help for medical symptoms, and using dangerous drugs.

Men are also reluctant to use mental health services when needed; and, although they are diagnosed with depression half as frequently as women, they die by suicide four times as often.

The problem for men begins in childhood, where boys learn that the worst thing they can do is walk, talk, act, or throw like a girl, so boys are pressured to observe girls carefully and avoid anything that seems ‘girly.’

The mainstream culture divides many human behaviours and attributes into pinks and blues, much like the ambience of a toy store, and boys are taught to stay in their lane, both in terms of what they are expected to do, and what they are expected to avoid.

Women in the 1960s broke the rules and adopted many of the healthier ways of being previously considered masculine. They took assertiveness training classes to overcome the effects of their gender role socialiszation to be dependent on and deferential to men.

Distorted maleness

Meanwhile, men, if anything, have doubled down on the same tired old distorted masculine modes of aggressiveness, dominance, hypersexuality, risk-taking, utter and complete self-reliance.

They are expected to maintain a ridiculous level of stoicism that would lead a psychotherapy patient to say the last time he cried was 10 years ago when his dog was killed by a car.

The prohibition against crying is particularly egregious — after all, all humans have tear ducts, and crying relieves sadness. However, many men seem to believe that they have tear ducts for the same reason that they have nipples; a biological accident, as they’re not “hooked up.”

The traits men have been conditioned to avoid — empathy, compassion, emotional self-awareness, and nurturance — are human ways of being, and without them we are trying to play the game of life without a full set of useful resources.

Changing long-term patterns of behavior and learning new skills will not be easy but there are resources available to help – articles, books, classes and therapists.

The collection of old-fashioned destructive masculine styles draws many men to the Republican Party, and, in particular, to Trump, who has been blatantly amping up his particular, aggressive, and pugilistic brand of masculinity.

But the proliferation of groups such as White Dudes for Harris, Win with Black Men, Men for Harris, and Dads for Kamala is proof that many voters can, and do, support Walz’s version of masculinity, which showcases a modern masculinity characterised by kindness, helpfulness, and compassion.

Dr Ronald Levant is a former president of the American Psychological Association and professor emeritus of psychology at The University of Akron . His memoir has recently been published: Levant, R.F., with Bowman, A. (2024). The Problem with Men: Insights on Overcoming a Traumatic Childhood from a World-Renowned Psychologist | Koehler Books Publishing

Dr Chris Kilmartin is an author, trainer, and activist in preventing violence in schools, the military, and the workplace internationally. He is professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Mary Washington . His latest book is The Fictions that Shape Men’s Lives.

Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™.

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