Josh Pacheco was 17 years old.
He lived in Michigan with his parents and sisters,
and by all accounts,
he was a great kid.
His sisters described him as funny and entertaining,
and his parents described him as loving and caring.
And Josh was also gay,
and because of that,
he was bullied severely by his classmates.
One day, Josh went home,
went to his garage, got into his truck,
closed the door, turned on the ignition,
and killed himself.
He was found a little bit later with a note next to his body
that simply said, "I'm sorry, I wasn't able to be strong enough."
This is Tovanna Holton.
Tovanna was 15 years old.
She lived in Florida.
One day, she broke up with her boyfriend.
The very next day, he posted a nude video of her on Twitter,
and you can imagine what happened then.
Other kids took the video and began circulating it on social media,
and they began to cyberbully her.
Tovanna's mother found Tovanna in the bathroom of their home
with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to her head,
just a few days later.
And this is, finally, nine-year-old Jamel Myles, from Denver.
Just weeks ago, he came out to his mother as gay.
She was driving him home.
He was in the back seat of the car.
He said, "Mommy, I have something really important to tell you. I'm gay."
And she said, "I love you anyway."
And she said he looked so scared and so small in the back seat,
but he told her that he was proud and he wanted to tell his classmates,
which is what he did.
And his classmates, in turn, bullied him and told him that he should die.
Four days later, he hanged himself.
[Masculinity, possession of the qualities typically associated with men]
Now, these kids all had something -
They all came from different backgrounds,
they came from different parts of the country,
but they all had at least one thing in common,
and that is that their lives were cut short
by what experts have called "hypermasculinity."
And you might hear the term also referred to as "toxic masculinity."
Now, before I talk to you more
about how hypermasculinity plays a negative role in our society
and how it harms children,
I want to offer a disclaimer.
There is nothing wrong with being masculine.
Okay?
And there is nothing wrong with being a man,
fortunately for me and many of you in the audience.
Masculinity is basically defined as a set of traits
that are associated with being a man.
And depending on culture and context,
some of those traits can be viewed as negative at times,
other times as positive.
The same can be said for femininity.
However, hypermasculinity is often -
it's basically masculinity on steroids,
and it's often characterized by a high tolerance level
for violence and aggression.
So, those of us who have ever witnessed road-rage incidents,
or if you have ever been to a fraternity party
after lots of kegs of beer have been consumed,
or if we've gone to sports bars during a really important game,
we may have seen some hypermasculinity on display at that point.
Hypermasculinity is also characterized
by a callous disregard for the dignity of women.
Women sometimes, though hypermasculine behavior,
are treated as sex objects,
and this kind of objectification leads to sexual assaults and sexual harassment.
And finally, hypermasculinity is also characteristic of a sort of stoicism.
Men who display hypermasculine behavior tend to conceal their emotions.
They have a hard time "emoting."
Except for anger, notably.
But men that have these hypermasculine tendencies
don't feel like they can show their true feelings
because to do so shows femininity,
shows weakness,
and therefore is bad.
It's interesting because there's more and more research now
that shows that hypermasculine behavior
not only negatively impacts the victims of hypermasculinity,
which are generally girls, LGBTQ kids, gender-nonconforming people,
but the biggest victims of hypermasculinity are boys and men,
because this kind of behavior leads to all kinds of negative consequences,
from psychological health consequences, physical health consequences,
increased substance abuse.
And it's also interesting that, you know,
some researchers like Niobe Way from New York University
have linked hypermasculine behavior with loneliness among males.
American men -
which is unique in the world among men -
American men tend to report
that they either have few other male friends,
and when they do,
they have a hard time talking to their male friends
about important life issues or emotions.
And this is obviously a problem
because it leads to all of these negative consequences,
and it creates sometimes a level of loneliness
that increases as men age,
and they report that their level of loneliness increases as they age.
And public health officials are alarmed
because loneliness now is seen as a risk factor
for all kinds of negative health consequences and early death.
So let me give you an example of something I'm talking about.
A few weeks ago, I was shopping at Costco, which all of us do, right?
And I couldn't help but overhear a young father with his son.
The son was about three of four years old.
The boy picked up a toy,
and all I remember was that it was a pink toy.
I don't remember what it was.
And without missing a beat, the father said,
"Put that back. That's for girls."
And the boy, reflecting his father's disgust and revulsion,
just threw it back and said, "Yuck, Daddy. That's for girls."
Now, this kind of attitude leads to hypermasculinity
and it leads to all of the negative effects that I just talked about,
and it leads to misogyny, homophobia and transphobia.
Given what we're experiencing in our world today,
this issue is taking on more significance.
Think about the news. What are we hearing?
We're talking about the Me Too Movement.
We're talking about rampant gun violence,
which, by the way, is almost exclusively perpetrated by boys and men.
And we're talking about what I would consider a hypermasculine culture
in our White House.
So it's a very important issue today, and it's taking on more significance.
So -
This is me,
and I'll get to "me" in a little bit, okay?
(Laughter)
But, you know,
I was introduced as a Law professor, I am a Law professor,
and for many years,
I've been doing a lot of work on bullying prevention.
So, early on in my work on bullying prevention -
and I've trained lots of teachers and administrators around the state -
early on, I discovered something:
the vast majority of bullying incidents
are somehow, in some way, related to hypermasculine behavior.
Whether the victim is a girl or an LGBTQ
or a person with a disability
or even racial, ethnic and religious minorities,
what I found is that either the motivation for the bullying was hypermasculine
or the tactics used to bully were hypermasculine.
And I became even more concerned
when I started to review bullying-related suicides,
and these are kids who have taken their lives
at least in part because of bullying.
And what I found was that roughly 80%
of the kids who take their lives because of bullying
are boys who were gay or perceived to be gay
and girls who the victims of gender-related or sexual bullying.
So, this obviously concerned me a lot,
and I started to pay more attention to how hypermasculine affects our kids.
What's even more interesting about bullying-prevention programs
is that they don't discuss or address head-on
how hypermasculine and rigid gender norms affect our kids in school
and how we can improve the climate of our schools
so that we can prevent bullying by addressing these issues.
We just don't talk about it.
What drives me crazy is this:
I have been doing all this work for a lot of years,
and just a few years ago,
there was this revelation in society that girls also bully.
Big surprise.
And all of a sudden, as a culture, as a society,
we just, like, lobbed on to that, globbed on to that.
And we started talking about mean girls,
and we coined this term "mean grils"
because, of course, we need another way to vilify girls, right?
And so, then we made a movie about mean girls,
and that's all we talk about.
But the evidence related to bullying is clear.
Still, the vast majority of bullying perpetrators are boys,
and the vast majority of bullying victims are boys,
but we don't talk about scary boys.
We talk about mean girls.
So,
this is me,
and you can tell maybe from the picture
that I wasn't the most traditionally masculine kid, right?
If you ask me why I was posed that way,
I honestly don't have a good answer for you.
You'll have to ask my mother.
But, you know,
I became very interested in this subject
when I started to reflect on my own childhood
and my experiences with hypermasculinity.
So I grew up in a very loving, large Lebanese American family.
I had two amazing, wonderful parents,
three brothers, a sister ...
I did very well in school.
I participated in clubs and sports.
I was a student leader throughout high school and college.
I had friends, I had girlfriends.
So my memories should be good of childhood, right?
They weren't.
When I think of my childhood, I mostly have negative feelings.
I was actually a pretty miserable kid,
and I attribute that to the fact that I did everything in my power
to conceal the fact that I was gay,
and I did everything in my power
to act like what I thought a boy should act like.
And I'll tell you some of my most memorable experiences,
and these are memories that are pretty innocuous when you hear them
and they shouldn't really be that memorable.
But for me they were, and here are some of them.
So I remember in the fifth grade,
I was brushing my friend Cheryl's long blonde hair -
because that's what ten-year-old boys like to do, right?
(Laughter)
And I was brushing her hair, and the teacher, from across the room,
yelled at me and said, "Robby Salem, put that brush down.
Boys don't brush girls' hair."
And I was devastated, I was just deflated.
And I wasn't just devastated because Cheryl's hair was a mess.
but because -
(Laughter)
because -
(Laughter)
I felt like I did something wrong, I committed a sin,
and I didn't even know what it was.
I'll tell you time -
another memory I had was when I walked into school -
this was probably in the sixth grade,
and I was wearing my cherry-red pants.
And a teacher called me up to the front,
and in front of a couple of other kids, she said,
"Robby, don't wear those pants again. Boys don't dress that way."
Now, I will give her this much: the pants were hideous.
(Laughter)
And they were also corduroys. So, visualize that.
But still, that was pretty cruel.
And then, I remember the time in middle school
that I was carrying my books in front of my body like this,
and a boy in the hallway laughed at me and called me a girl.
And you'd better believe that from that point on,
I carried my books on my side.
And this was before backpacks were a big thing,
so that's how we carried our books.
And you know, I just thought it was more practical to carry your books this way,
but apparently not if you're a boy.
So, those memories sort of pale
in comparison to some of the other things I overheard and experienced,
like the time in high school
when I overheard a group of boys laughing in the hallway
and talking about a disease that is going around,
"killing all the fags."
So,
I tried really hard to fit in.
I did my best,
and, I mean, I even pretended that I liked watching sports on TV
with my three sports-loving brothers.
Even baseball.
So, it was tough. It was tough.
And I did my best, but I was miserable.
And like Josh, Tovanna, and Jamel who I showed you earlier,
I often wanted to take my life.
So,
you know,
a few years ago,
I started looking at pop culture
and the messages that we receive, that kids receive in pop culture.
And think about the blockbuster movies, the movies that are most popular,
not the best movies, but the movies that are most popular.
If you Google blockbuster movies of 2017 and 2018,
what you're going to see are all kinds of films
that typify this hypermasculine behavior that I am talking about.
These are films often with leading male characters
who are tall, and muscular, and tough, and stoic,
and there's usually a woman or a girl in the movie
that's going to ultimately become his romantic or sex partner.
And you see fantastic explosions, and fast cars, and police chases,
and these are the most popular movies.
And the film and TV industry is not the only industry that's guilty of this.
Here are some more movies,
but the music industry is guilty of this,
the ad industry is guilty of this.
What the ad industry does when they want to target men
is to talk about how men can reclaim their manhood.
"Men are back."
"Consider your man card reissued."
"Spray more Axe cologne and get more."
Get more what?
Imagine.
(Laughter)
And this problem also exists in our video game industry,
which is a real problem for our young men today.
And of course, we see it often displayed in the sports industry.
So,
a couple of years ago, the New York Times conducted a study on -
featured, that is, Michael Kimmel, who is a scholar.
And Michael Kimmel would pull his students and he would ask them on a regular basis,
"Describe what a good man is, and describe what a real man is."
And over time, he saw themes emerging.
And here's what he found:
that his students often described a good man as honest, caring and selfless,
and the same students would describe a real man
as a take charge, risk taker, authoritative,
never cry and don't show weakness.
So it's no wonder that men and boys are confused,
and girls and women for that matter.
Can you be a good man and a real man?
It's really an open question in our society.
There's all kinds of research that is really interesting
about how we treat boys and girls differently
based on our perceptions of how they should behave,
according to their gender.
There's a fascinating study that was conducted by scholar Terry Rial.
He showed a video of a crying baby
to hundreds of adult participants in this study.
For some of the adults, he said the baby was a girl.
Other adults, he said the baby was a boy.
And he asked the adults to describe what emotion the baby was conveying.
Overwhelmingly,
the adults who thought the baby was a girl described her as scared, fearful.
The adults who thought the baby was a boy described him as angry.
So it goes without saying and it's pretty logical
that we treat our kids differently.
Well-intentioned parents treat their kids differently
based on how we think they should behave, according to their gender.
Now, there's all kinds of surveys out there
that address what are the most injurious words that kids experience.
When kids want to hurt other kids, what do they hear? What do they use?
These are the most common insults.
This is what hurts kids.
"Whore," "bitch," "slut," "fag," "gay," retard,"
all motivated by hypermasculinity.
So it's no wonder
that 85% of LGBTQ kids report being bullied in school.
It's no wonder
that 83% of girls report being sexually harassed in school.
It's no wonder
that an estimated 5.4 million students skip school
on a regular basis during the school year
because they don't want to confront their bullies.
And get this:
according to one study,
most adolescent girls fear gaining weight more than they fear cancer, nuclear war
and losing a parent.
We have a problem, folks,
and we need to start taking this seriously.
The problem doesn't have an easy solution.
We're not going to resolve this overnight.
But I think we can all do something in our own small ways.
We can affect the people around us, the circle of people around us,
by behaving in certain ways
and being more aware of these toxic messages.
First of all, let's acknowledge that hypermasculinity is a problem.
Let's also acknowledge
that misogyny, homophobia and transphobia are inextricably linked.
We're all in this together.
Whether you're a man, woman, boy, girl, gay, straight.
We're all in this together because this is harmful to society.
And in our own little way,
if you see a woman or a girl being harassed in the street -
if you're comfortable, intervene.
If you hear a homophobic joke being told in the locker room,
do the brave thing and call it out for what it is: offensive.
If your son wants to buy a pink toy at Costco,
either buy it for him or at least don't shame him.
I want to leave you with these faces: Josh, Tovanna and Jamel.
I hope we don't just remember them today;
I hope we honor them.
Let's honor them by all changing our outlook
on the messages that we receive,
and let's all be more aware and help our kids.
And if we can just start
helping boys and men learn
that in order to be a real man,
you have to start by being a good man.
Thank you.
(Applause) (Cheering)