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Joe Gidjunis: If you've ever witnessed kids fighting, you know it's not like John Wick masterfully taking down the bad guys, and more like A Christmas Story where Ralphie lets loose on Farkus.

female: Ralphie.

Joe: I've been in three fistfights in my life all before I was 16, suspended twice.

I was bullied a lot.

You learn something about yourself in these moments and after each fight I remember classmates telling me I became a man.

What they didn't know is how uncomfortable that made me.

Thinking I'd have to repeatedly fight just to exist and in doing so earn some hypothetical masculinity badge.

Striking another kid to achieve manhood is not the takeaway I want my son to learn.

There were months of restraint before fighting my bullies.

Looking back, I only remember being offered two paths to become a man strength and aggression or womanizing and manipulation.

The manhood I witnessed celebrated toughness, power, aggression, misogyny and dominance, and for centuries, gender norms for good and bad, they shaped the world through exploration and ingenuity while simultaneously enslaving people, escalating war and marginalizing women.

Over the past half century, there has been a reckoning of masculinity with varying success.

While critics of traditional masculinity called out old school machoness, society stopped short of advancing a more positive, healthy, and purposeful path for men.

By squandering this opportunity, it created a vacuum of uncertainty.

As a dad, I didn't see myself as less of a man for changing diapers, packing lunches, or hugging my son when he cries, but I couldn't help but feel conflicted.

Was I doing it the manly way?

Was I being strong enough?

Was I losing anything by stepping away from the old rules?

Loud voices are championing a call to return to a shallow version of manhood that never really served men nor their families.

It continues to lean into aggression and shame, being emotionally unavailable.

Worse, it peer pressures men into an unattainable box of behaviors suited for man child rather than mature adult.

I was getting myself twisted trying to fulfill this paradox until I realized the rules I grew up with did me more harm than good.

It's time to retire some of this nonsense, but which parts?

What should masculinity mean to my son's generation?

And what was the world teaching him when I wasn't around?

I don't believe masculinity to be inherently toxic.

Like everything important in life, it needs balance.

Where do we find dads living a healthier masculinity, one that celebrates our strength, rejects oppression, and builds connection.

This is "Grown up Dad."

♪♪♪ Joe: Let's be upfront about this.

Some people are nervous about starting this conversation, worried that by focusing on men's problems, they'll be branded as whiners or woke, tagged as being insensitive and neglectful to women's struggles.

Humans can care about two things at once.

My wife, for example, she's a leader in her organization and she's encouraged when men seek healthy masculinity.

She heard about an innovative program where men work to heal personal traumas through storytelling.

I knew I had to check it out.

I got on a plane and headed to Saint Louis, Missouri to attend Unmasc.

It's organized by the leaders of a nonprofit called The Village Path.

The group recruits men to deliver personal stories about traumatic masculine events in their lives to an auditorium full of strangers.

male: At just two years old, in the midst of a fight with my mother, my father decided that it was perfectly fine to use me as a tool for control.

Joe: The topic of Unmasc really focuses on on healing and around exploration of one's masculinity too.

Why was that so important for you to have an event around that topic?

Jermar Perry: So we kind of want to kind of recreate and reimagine what masculinity can be if not for ourselves, for our next generation of young men who identify as men come up in the world.

Joe: For you Tyrell too like you've had a real challenging masculinity journey yourself.

Tyrell Manning: Growing up in this space as a black man, I feel like there comes a lot of extra pressures.

I think always understanding that at any moment I could somehow disrespect my masculinity, and so I just think about those things and the way we police, especially you know young black boys around like our masculinity and I think it's just become so stressful, but we have to explore it, and understand the ways in which like we just make up all these rules and regulations when it's like we're just human.

Jermar: So when I was younger I had this really cool Knight Rider bike and I'm thinking of Michael Knight, I got a black numbers only jacket on.

Tyrell: I love that Trans Am.

Jermar: The Knight Riders bike is like this cool like dashboard just like kit and, you know my mom is taking me for like a spin around the park.

I'm learning how to ride the bike still, and then I fall off the bike and I see like blood and I start to cry.

And my mom goes, you know, well boys don't cry, and from there that's kind of when it clicks that you're supposed to hide your emotions.

Now as we age into adults and we get wives and we get partners and then they go, why don't you cry, you know, and then you know you take it back to that moment where it's like, should I be emotional, should I not be more emotional, like you know it's confusing.

And I grew up not showing emotions at all.

I went maybe two decades maybe crying about five times or less.

Joe: I feel like for me masculinity has more been weaponized against me than ever used to build me up or support me and I'm honestly I'm angry about that.

I'm angry that I'm still consumed, I think at times with being like, am I being the right masculine, am I being the right kind of man in this world?

Tyrell: It becomes just a stressful thing to be a man, it's just a constant battle.

Joe: In your experience, what are men trying to undo?

Jermar: They're trying to undo their childhood traumas.

They're trying to undo how they work within their work relationships, they're trying to like redo and understand boundaries.

I'm trying to undo all of those things too, right?

Why is my first reaction anger?

Why do I have to calm myself down every time before I have a conversation?

Why do sometimes I can't control that, right?

I can't take that deep breath.

Sometimes I may say things where I do need to apologize to the children, to my wife, to my community, to people, because I'm just interacting and lashing out without actually taking that one second pause to breathe before I can collect myself.

Joe: What do you think the role models for us were growing up for masculinity?

Do you have, do you picture anyone or fictional, nonfictional like?

Jermar: It was Mr. T. Joe: Mr. T from "The A-Team."

Jermar: Mr. T from "The A-Team" like the gold chain, just like the bravado, the like just to fix it all, I got it covered like, but also, you know, Mr. T was scared to fly planes, right?

And his character didn't fly, right?

Murdoch had to shoot him up with the tranquilizer, right?

And you know, Mr. T would pass out and he'd wake up and he'd be angry Mr. T again, right?

Well, it wasn't a lot of people in the 80s who looked like me on TV.

So for me, it was Mr. T was like that person, like for me growing up.

Joe: Theme songs for "The A-Team" and "Knight Rider" are always accessible in my brain.

In that era, boys like me grew up with the Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Norris trifecta of -- kicking men who didn't apologize for getting the job done.

They weren't soft, didn't open up about their insecurities, and often were alone when they heroically saved the day.

As entertaining as these cliches are, I wouldn't consider them healthy or realistic.

I think men struggle with finding a better standard bearer, because it's a lot harder and way less sexy to watch men confront their inner demons.

It's easier just to punch someone, right?

I searched for a leader having the tough conversations and I found Richard Reeves, author of the book of "Boys and Men," which made President Obama's summer reading list last year.

He's also started a research institute by the same name.

Joe: I am struggling with masculinity.

I am struggling with-- Richard Reeves: Your own masculinity?

Joe: My own masculinity.

Richard: Well, aren't we all?

Joe: Oh God, I'm not the only one.

Richard: We're in an era where that's the right question to be asking.

Joe: How do you talk about this in a way where we can respect everyone and have a meaningful conversation?

Richard: The idea here is that the world is already made for boys and men.

That's all we ever research.

And to the extent that that was true, I don't think that's true today.

And so we've ended up with a gap of good information, investigation of what's happening with boys and men as boys and men.

The problem with the current debate is that, too many people have come to believe that equality requires androgyny.

I just don't think that fits with people's actual experience.

We don't want to trap people in these boxes of masculinity and femininity.

That doesn't mean we have to destroy the boxes all together.

We've got to find a way as men and as boys I think, to express and articulate a positive vision of masculinity, to challenge for me, to challenge for my three sons, it's a challenging time.

But if we just back away from that discussion altogether, it's not like questions about masculinity won't be being asked, especially online.

Joe Rogan: Soft times create soft men, soft men create hard times.

Andrew Tate: I am absolutely sexist and I'm absolutely a misogynist.

I believe a woman is given to the man in marriage.

Nick Freitas: Where are all the masculine men?

It's like, well, when modern feminism decides to compete with masculinity as opposed to being complementary to it.

You end up with guys like this.

Joe: So then how do we start that conversation?

Because the messaging I feel like I receive if I'm not bench pressing 350 pounds and like in a perfectly fit body, I am not the ideal male.

I know that's not how I wanna be, but I'm also struggling to find the right way to understand my own feelings.

Because I also don't want to pass those insecurities onto my son who should not have to deal with that.

I feel like the message is still, you know, go do something for yourself, go be selfish, go do anything other than be at home and be with your kids.

Richard: So the mythology around this is that men just wanna go their own way, be the cowboy, and then they get kind of ensnared into marriage and child rearing kind of against their way you catch the man, right?

Well, that is complete nonsense.

Men are now more likely to say that getting married is more important to them than women are.

That becoming having children is now ranked as more important among men than among women.

And so there's this growing recognition, I think, among men.

That's not the opposite of masculinity, that is constitutive of masculinity.

That's what makes us men.

Joe: And I've said this, I feel stronger the more I'm with my family, and I have not gotten that message, and I don't see that message around me.

Richard: The old model was really clear, breadwinner, homemaker.

We have taken away a lot of the unfairness and been left without very much clarity.

Especially for fathers, like if you're not gonna be the breadwinner, the head of the household, the provider, are you still a father?

And the answer has to be yes, but it has to be yes in a new way.

And so by moving away from that traditional unfair model of marriage, we have to be really careful not to make dads feel benched.

These are real problems being experienced every day by actual boys and men, who are actually struggling.

Joe: Is this also being played out in the political sphere too, because you talk about that neither side really has the right message.

Richard: I really worry right now that the basic message from the right is be more like your dad.

Traditional masculinity and that the message from the left is be more like your sister.

More feminine, be more caring, cry more, be more nurturing.

And so caught between those two ideas of either going back to an old fashioned, narrow view of masculinity, not very appealing to most men today.

Very few boys and young men are turned on by the idea of just jettisoning their masculinity.

The solution is don't neglect the problems of boys and men because you falsely think that that means you somehow care less about women and girls.

Joe: The Pew Research Center released an extensive survey on American conceptions about gender and masculinity.

Republican men feel wronged.

They say the country doesn't view their masculinity as an asset, with only twenty eight percent of them reporting society sees it positively.

Compare that with Republican women, Democratic men, and Democratic women, where about half of each group say the country perceives masculinity as a positive.

Republican leaning men are also far more likely than Democrats to call themselves highly masculine.

Men who identify as conservative rate themselves as highly masculine three times as often as liberals.

And when Democrats rate themselves, about half of black men, forty percent of Hispanics, and about one out of every five white men consider themselves highly masculine.

Nationally, the idea of what masculinity should value is softening.

Sixty percent of Americans say people don't value men enough, who are caring or open about their emotions.

Additionally, most say it's acceptable for a man to take care of the home and children while his wife goes to work.

Danny Freeman: We're gonna make some pesto, we've got some chicken marinating, we've got some fresh corn.

I made some fresh pasta, so we got a lot, hopefully enough.

Joe: I'm just so excited.

All right, put me to work.

I'm cooking with chef Danny Freeman, known online as Danny Loves Pasta.

The chef invited me to cook and meet his husband and kids.

Danny fuses old and new methods to create colorful and eye popping pasta his family loves to eat, but being in the kitchen was not his first dream.

Danny: I was a lawyer for about ten years, and then a few years ago when my grandmother passed away, I got really inspired to start making her recipes.

I was very close with her she was Italian American, a great cook.

Joe: You incorporate so much color into your dishes like it's one of the first things I noticed about everything that you do.

Danny: I make a lot of fresh pasta that uses different vegetables, herbs, spices, all different things to get different--basically every color of the rainbow you can get.

My daughters are still young, so I do a lot of colorful pasta for them and pasta like their favorite characters and things like that.

Let me grab the corn then before we.

Joe: So you became a dad four years ago, tell me about that process.

Danny: It's something that we talked about for a long time.

I'd always wanted to be a dad ever since I was young.

Joe: Do you like, you remember being wanting to be a dad?

Danny: Yeah somewhere in my parents' house they have something from kindergarten where it was like, what do you wanna be when you grow up and mine was a dad.

Joe: No way!

I'm always interested when I hear that 'cause that's not any kind of the information I got growing up like that was not a thing you would inspire.

Danny: I do get a lot of inspiration from my own parents and my own father.

I mean, I think I had a very negative association with masculinity when I was growing up.

It was like this is the model of how you're supposed to be tough and into sports and you know a certain way.

And this is who I was.

I mean, from the youngest ages I remember a sense that I was that wasn't right.

Who I was was not right.

The world around me was telling me, you know, if you're not that way, there's something wrong with you.

And as I grew up, I think I shifted to be like well, why do I need to care about that definition?

I think after becoming a parent, I think I realized how shallow that traditional definition is, at least for me.

I think about so many aspects of parenthood that maybe traditionally were done by women are so much tougher than the things that you know we're told is tough and manly.

You know being up with your kids all night it's a lot tougher than anything else, but if you think about like a toddler having a tantrum.

At the end of the day when you are so frustrated and you just want to be over, like learning how to be in touch with your emotions, stay calm in that moment, stay present like help your child through it, that is a lot tougher than flying off the handle, and like being angry and loud.

So now when I think about caregiving versus you know breadwinning versus these different things, I don't always think of them in terms of masculinity because that definition sort of failed me.

All right, so I did not tell my daughter to say this, but when I took her to the bathroom, she whispered in my ear, "I love being your child."

And I said, "I love being your daddy."

So those are the moments that make it all worth it.

Joe: Definitely all worth it.

Danny: All right, who's hungry?

♪♪♪ Maurice Patterson: The most masculine thing you can do as a man to take care of your kids, and to be there for your kids.

Joe: This is Maurice.

He's a new dad who's loving every second of his role.

I met him at a park in Brooklyn, New York while taking his daughter to the playground.

What's your favorite part about being a dad right now?

Maurice: The moments, the little moments like watching her eat, like the way she eats now isn't how she ate when she first was born, you know, just watching that development the way she was when she was one, she's not that way at three.

She's reaching my favorite stage, that seven months, eight months where they're eating solid food but can't quite talk.

They're learning to walk, can't quite walk yet.

Joe: So you've got two now, are you done?

Maurice: No.

Joe: You're not.

Maurice: Nope.

Joe: You want more kids?

Maurice: Absolutely.

Joe: How many more kids?

Maurice: In a perfect world, ten more talking about 12-- Joe: You said ten more.

Maurice: Yeah, in a perfect world, I want 12.

Joe: You want a dozen kids.

Maurice: A dozen.

Joe: You want to field a football team of kids.

Maurice: Just like that, just the way you said its just like that.

Because I love watching kids grow.

I like them, but watching them become these individuals and they chase their dreams and, you know, when you look in the kid eye and you see a little twinkle when they talk about the things that they love that, that right there, that's enough for me to be like okay, I'm here for another one, and another one.

Joe: It's ironic how he described his hope to have another one and another one.

I was struggling with an identical decision.

I needed some expert advice, someone who talks to men all day about their health.

I found Dr. Joshua Gonzalez who's a board certified urologist in Los Angeles and men's health expert who's working on becoming a dad himself.

Joshua Gonzalez: I think it has to do with how I grew up.

So my parents divorced when I was like four years old, but it's a little bit superficial, and not really how I imagine I would want to be as a dad.

Fortunately, my stepfather came into my life not too long after my parents divorced.

The relationship that I had with him has really kind of been the inspiration for a future relationship that I hope to have with my kids.

All of the men in my family, they showed masculinity by being the breadwinner.

They were never around for those sort of big moments in childhood and and weren't always great at showing affection, showing love.

Joe: I'm trying to figure out how to talk about traditional strength in an evolved way and understanding, that there's a lot of different ways to show those traits.

Joshua: Working in men's health, a lot of that has to do with sexual and reproductive health, right?

And so when men feel inadequate in the bedroom or they're having trouble getting their partner pregnant and you know, having trouble conceiving, they feel emasculated.

So there are these still these certain qualities that we attribute to being a man, to being masculine, those include being able to, you know, father a kid when you want to.

So when men feel inadequate because they can't fulfill those what we consider basic masculine roles.

Joe: Where do we get these ideas from and how do we start to feel like we can be more than just this one part of our body.

Joshua: That's a good question.

I mean, I think a lot of how men view masculinity and view themselves in their manhood has to do with how they were brought up.

I think there probably needs to be a shift when talking about these kinds of categories because clearly, the examples of masculinity that we've had until now, don't work for everyone and don't work for every situation.

And so I think there is a need to kind of reimagine what it means to be a man.

Joe: He used the word reimagine.

That was the exact rabbit hole I had tumbled down.

What do I want it to mean for me to be a man?

It's an existential question that smacks you in the face when you have a little human watching your every move.

When my son turned seven, my wife said she wanted to be one and done.

She asked me to consider having a vasectomy because there were health risks for her were she to continue her birth control.

I struggled with the decision being one and done wasn't my plan.

I love being a dad and as an only child myself, I always wanted my son to have a sibling.

By having the procedure, I thought I'd lose something essential to my manhood.

I needed to talk to some men about this, but I didn't know anyone who had this procedure.

At least that's what I thought.

Turns out a lot of guys my age have had it.

Cops I knew, coaches I worked with, fellow business owners, medical professionals, my producer Josh, I had no idea.

The more I looked into it, the more I realized I was feeding the old masculinity tropes again, one doing me more harm than good.

And with that framing, it became clear that this procedure is a safe and logical choice.

Historically, so much of this responsibility has fallen to women, yet in the same way my partner and I decided to conceive, we wanted to decide together to stop.

Joe: I've chosen to get a vasectomy this year.

But it was something I definitely delayed for a while.

I'm curious if you come across that a lot.

Joshua: You're not you're not alone, you're not alone.

We run into this all the time, more so now than previously.

You're seeing a lot more men come in for vasectomies, and taking their role in their reproductive future more seriously, and making active decisions to say, "Okay, I'm done having kids, I'm done with family building and I wanna make sure that I play a role in, you know, my relationship and our family."

Joe: I wonder why I felt so attached in a way, it's like that that would be a part of my identity as a man.

Joshua: Yeah, I mean it probably goes back to evolution and biology, right?

Like we're animals meant to procreate.

Joe: I get that, but I also like there are other ways that I feel traditionally strong, and I'm wondering just why I held on to that for so long and I'm kinda like, I thought should have done it actually soon.

Joshua: I mean, we spend our whole lives on learning things that don't suit us, and I think this is just another one of those things, right?

You've you've made peace with it, you're ready to let it go.

Joe: I'm having my vasectomy today.

Still a little nervous.

♪♪♪ Joe: I've been researching this episode for a year and I'm still missing some puzzle pieces.

The election results last year also made me reconsider what men think and what we're fighting for, but regardless of political ideology, we need more creative ways to talk about masculinity without benching anyone.

We need to stop handcuffing men to tired definitions.

We need to find more ways to honor strength without oppressing others.

And we have to question what we've been taught because I'm tired of masculinity harming me rather than lifting me up.

Back in Saint Louis, Jermar told me something I want to remind myself moving forward.

Jermar: I want to imagine a place where my nephews, my future sons, their future sons don't grow up with these clouds hanging over them of masculinity and this toxicity.

Where we kind of check men when it comes to being angry.

But you know, before it's all said and done for me anyway, I wanna be ahead of the curve and forging a different way than I was raised specifically for men.

Joe: Throughout my life I've heard I'm too masculine.

I've heard I'm not masculine enough.

Both are equally irrelevant and it's not a path I care to walk.

In contrast to what many of us were raised to believe, masculinity and femininity are not opposites, their values overlap.

Let's drop this falsehood and open up a better dialogue.

We need to have these conversations even if we don't know the answers because our silence is leading to acceptance of those shouting the loudest.

I want all of our kids to have a healthier relationship with masculinity, a world where they have more than only one bad option.

Let's start here, how has masculinity harmed you?

Are you comfortable with how traditional manhood has shaped raising a family?

Can we hold conversations about what men need to succeed in their homes and in their communities?

Can we all build a healthier masculinity serving ourselves and others?

Let's forge a new path together.

Better dads, better world.

This is "Grown Up Dad."

Joe: I'm here on Muscle Beach in Los Angeles and in this entertainment capital of the world, there's still some work I need to do on my image transformation.

This is for you, Hasselhoff.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ announcer: A classroom doesn't have to be in a building.

With over 60 flexible and affordable online programs, at Eastern University, you can earn your degree without missing the moments that matter.