Man Enough: Undefining My Masculinity

by Justin Baldoni

Fun fact: here’s something else I learned from Dr. Olivardia. When G.I. Joe was first introduced in 1974, he stood five feet, ten inches. He had a thirty-one-inch waist, a forty-one-inch chest, and twelve-inch biceps. Strong and muscular, yes, but still possible and not very far off from my own measurements.

Flash forward to 2002, and G.I. Joe was still five feet ten, but his waist had shrunk to twenty-eight inches, his chest ballooned to fifty inches, and his biceps bulged to twenty-two inches, close to the size of his waist. If he were a real human, he would be unable to touch his own shoul...

They weren’t the guys I competed with and against in my real life who were now making fun of me. The message was clear: if I lacked muscles, I lacked manliness; if my muscles didn’t measure up, then I did not measure up.

This whole notion of our muscularity being a barometer for our masculinity is often referred to as the “Adonis complex.” It is perpetuated in men’s fitness magazines and in the entertainment industry (including the porn industry), and it has now become a way to make money and have influence on social media.

The message is introduced subconsciously at a young age: ripped and muscular = powerful, strong, confident, manly, cool. Too chubby = slow, lazy; too scrawny = little and weak; girl = not a boy and therefore weak. This list goes on and on.

Even at ten years old, I had taken in enough of the messaging about our bodies to know that the one boy who would be below me on the man-enough ladder would be the boy who was overweight. I had taken in enough of the messaging to know that if I tore him down, it would build me up. How fucking cruel.

A teacher checked me hard that day, which completely took me by surprise, and as a sensitive kid, I took her words to heart. But my words had been spoken, and while I don’t think he heard what I said, it doesn’t matter because I heard it.

We men do this thing where we assess our perceived place on the man-enough ladder,

The strength it requires to have self-confidence and feel good about yourself in a world that is bombarding you with messaging that literally tells you the opposite is something that should be congratulated and celebrated. All in all, the message is clear, and it sells as companies profit off our insecurities because it’s been programmed into our brains from a formative age: for men, our masculinity is measured by our muscularity. And if you want to be a better man, then it’s your duty to build a “better” body.

What is a better body? Let’s fire off some of the themes/messages around male bodies: The coveted inverted triangle, where the shoulders are broad and muscular, and then the torso tapers down to a slim waist. Big and toned arms. But don’t skip leg day. Men should be tall, or at the VERY least, taller than the woman they are with. If they aren’t tall, they better be able to pull a semi, or deadlift a small Japanese car. Or be rich. Having money wins over everything. Chiseled chest. Men shouldn’t have man boobs. Bigger is better when it comes to hands and feet because apparently that’s an indication of a bigger penis. And a bigger penis is the ultimate measure of a bigger man.

Protection an...

Part of the nuanced messaging drilled into boys as we grow up is that muscles and strength also mean protection.

the other message of protection—the one I always thought was healthy—was that by being strong, I could protect not only myself but also the women in my life and eventually my own family from the attacks of other men.

But this is a good thing, right: the innate desire to have a strong enough body to be able to protect my loved ones, especially my wife?

when I told Dr. Brison about my desire to be able to protect my wife from potential attacks like the one she faced, she took a breath, looked at me like she could see through me, and then powerfully replied,

“I’m a mother—I get the protective instinct—but women shouldn’t need to be protected by their men from other men. It’s connected to the view that women aren’t seen as fully human, fully worthy of respect, but rather potentially prey for some men, and then it becomes the job of other men to rush in and protect them. I don’t want to be protected. I want to be left alone. I want to be able to walk down the street safely.”

I had become so acclimated to the message and behavior of being able to protect a woman with my physical strength that I viewed this as a positive trait without digging into the nuance of how problematic it is, and without noticing the burden that women carry while we as men (even well-meaning men) vie for power and compete with each other in the name of protection.

There is a perpetual fantasy that many men have (including myself) of rescuing and saving the women we love, which is undeniably more about us than about the women we purport to protect. We have to ask ourselves the hard question: are we doing it for them, or in some fucked-up, unconscious way, are we actually doing it for us?

The same guys that teased me about being skinny were now giving me shit for being too muscular. It went from “Where are your abs?” to “Jesus, Baldoni, put on a damn shirt!” I went from wearing two T-shirts to appear bigger to being ridiculed anytime I took off my shirt (no longer plural) because suddenly I was flaunting my abs. Here’s the thing about guys: it doesn’t matter what side of the equation we are on, we police each other. All the damned time.

I’m tired. I’m so damn tired of it. I’m part of the problem, and I’m also suffering, and those two things are not exclusive. So at the very least can we start talking about it?

The only way to change the conversation is to start having the conversation. We have to talk about these things and bring those deeply rooted messages out into the open so we can dissect them and reframe them. But where do we start?

I think of the wise words Emily often tells me when she catches me being hard on myself. She’ll say, “Be nice to my husband.” So I’ll attempt to bring some of her radical acceptance of me into my own self-talk.

I’ll compliment my hair, my eyes, and sometimes even how my ass looks. I mean, I have a pretty nice ass. Why do I feel weird typing that as a man?

After assessing the way we talk to ourselves internally, we can begin to look at how those conversations lead us to action.

Now that I’m in my thirties, a healthy and functional body is more important to me than a ripped one, so adjusting my expectations means also adjusting my Google searches, my social media, and my self-talk and making sure that I am consciously countering both the external and internal messages that love to remind me of everything I am not.

It starts with each of us, with changing the conversation we are having with ourselves and challenging our actions to follow suit.

The why ladder isn’t about perfection; it’s about being curious and being mindful about my actions. More often than not, asking three whys generally gets me to the truth of the matter, and chances are my motivations are never really the things I think they are.

Asking why is about being inherently curious about myself and using that curiosity to gather information to help me dissect, observe, and reframe the messages in my head.

What started as an idea I believed in had to transform to become an idea that everyone believes in.

Oftentimes I’ve felt like P. T. Barnum trying to sell an idea that deep down I didn’t even know I could pull off. I had to convince the people in power of my worth and value and that I’m not just that guy on Jane the Virgin or whatever they know me as.

At this point in my life, I think I’ve been known as the shirtless guy on Everwood, the proposal guy, the guy who makes those inspirational My Last Days documentaries about people who are dying, the shirtless guy on Jane the Virgin, and then most recently the TED Tal...

Ironically, out of all of those professional labels, perhaps the one that would mean the most to me is the label of filmmaker. ...

I’ve always wanted to tell stories like Mr. Spielberg—stories that make people feel like I felt as a young boy. I wanted to capture people’s attention and open them up to a world they didn’t know existed, a world where they could be reintroduced to life and maybe even their own humanity.

What got me in trouble as a child and what led to countless and embarrassing parent-teacher conferences for my parents, has ultimately become one of the things that has helped me build companies and create successful films.

I have to believe that part of my success has come from the ability to multitask and to perform highly doing multiple things at once.

I live in the tension of being confident in my competence (and my capacity to continue to learn and grow) while simultaneously feeling like a fraud who doesn’t deserve the professional opportunities I have worked my ass off for.

Of course, there were always exceptions, like a kid named Ryan, who was known to be both a standout athlete and an academic whiz and who was also extremely well-liked because he was kind to everyone. He was a young man of faith and character and rarely if ever engaged in gossip or bullying.

I don’t remember much about Ryan, as I didn’t know him that well, but I do remember feeling really jealous of him. He seemed to have it all, and people talked about him like he was a unicorn. I wish instead of being jealous of him, I had tried harder to be his friend and had been humble enough to learn from him. He seemed to have the secret sauce of what it took to be good at everything, but it also makes me wonder what he struggled with. Knowing what I know now, I know that it can be lonely when people assume you have it all together. Wherever he is, I hope Ryan is kicking ass at life and living in his bliss.

what happens when a man is a professional athlete, superior in physicality over the average guy, and also wildly book smart? In other words, what happens when a man goes outside the script he’s been given?

Because we are constantly sizing each other up, if a professional athlete clearly outsizes us in physicality, we tell ourselves that we are superior in intellect because he’s just an athlete or a “dumb jock,” but when he is also smarter than we are, we become insecure. We’ve already learned the natural response that many of us use to hide our insecurities: we put the person down so we can be lifted up.

despite these male stereotypes constraining male athletes, I think overall we still tend to believe that we are smarter and more capable than women.

We men know that it is other men who are constantly judging us, comparing themselves to us, seeking ways to kick us out of the “man club” while making sure that their spot is safe and that they might even move up a notch.

that, I struggled to get my thoughts and ideas from my head onto paper. Not because I couldn’t write but because the very act of sitting down to write felt like competing in an Ironman.

talked with me, listened to me, and challenged me to complete the assignment in a way that excited me. We brainstormed together and decided that the best way for me was a video book report. I didn’t have to type, I didn’t have to get my thoughts from my head to the paper, and more importantly, I got to tap into my love of creating, of videography, and of acting. Instead of a book report, I got to make a movie.

it was the first time in the entirety of my formal education that I felt like I was operating in my genius.

It was this epiphany where I began to realize that I wasn’t dumb, I had never been dumb, I just learned differently from others. It was the beginning of the mental shift for me regarding my own abilities and intellect.

This was my introduction to the power of mentorship. She was an expert and used her knowledge and experience to guide me in a way that empowered me to learn and more successfully complete the project than I could have done without her. By guiding me, she helped me become a better student, and without knowing it, she helped water the actor/director/entrepreneur seed that had been planted in me since I was a child.

Are we willing to mentor and give advice, and as a leader, are we willing to be mentored and receive advice? Are we willing to ask for help or input from others?

By continuing to exercise the muscle of asking for help and also giving help, we are able to gain valuable information about ourselves, others, and the messages we’ve been told our whole lives. It’s from that place of awareness that we can begin to reframe and rephrase the messages that are hindering our growth and preventing us from becoming the men we so desperately want and deserve to be.

being willing to be wrong, to ask for help, for directions, to admit sincerely when you’ve made a mistake and also admit that you don’t know the answer, makes it that much harder to “cancel” you because you are effectively canceling yourself. By humbling yourself and sitting in the discomfort of your humanity, I believe something almost spiritual happens, and regardless of who you are, you become real and relatable. Every person on this planet can identify with the universal truths and feelings of being lost, making mistakes, and being wrong.