WW 02: Safe spaces, echo chambers & the Alpha Male
Jason Rogers on the convergence of modern masculinity and emotional wellbeing
Welcome to the second edition of Wellwatching – a series of conversations in which I speak to people touching the wellness industry in different ways, to gain a comprehensive understanding of what ‘living well’ might look like in the future. You can read the first interview here.
For this chat I spoke to my friend Jason Rogers, an Olympic Medalist, LA-based writer and freelance cultural strategist. His work, which focuses on the evolving state of masculinity, has appeared in Men’s Health Magazine and the New York Times.
We spoke about wellness in the context of modern masculinity, including: why the portrayal of men’s wellness is still dangerously macho, the good and the bad of online men’s groups, and how dismantling toxic male gender expectations is critical to improving wellbeing for all.
You can keep up with Jason by subscribing to The Mandate Letter, where he writes weekly(ish) about the culture of being a man.
Tell me a bit about yourself: What do you do, and why do you do it?
I’m a writer who focuses on interesting niches within the lives of men, and how they reflect the ways in which masculinity is changing.
The catalyst for this work was my career as an athlete. I was a fencer for almost 20 years and was blessed to participate in two Olympic Games. While I was succeeding as an athlete in public, I was struggling with issues related to intimacy, sex and relationships in private – and I felt totally abnormal. I didn’t feel comfortable talking about them with anyone for a long time, because my idea of what a man was had been shaped by this alpha-male athlete culture. Over the past 10 years, I’ve been on a journey to uncover, understand and reduce the pressure of these invisible forces on me.
After 10 years in advertising, I started writing full-time to explore these themes further. Last year, I launched The Mandate Letter, a newsletter about the evolving state of masculinity. Each week, I look at various related topics like men that push the boundaries of what’s expected of them in culture or how a focus on men’s wellbeing is influencing media and brand communications. I also write feature articles on interesting manifestations of modern masculinity, such as how elite surfers are embracing safety (NY Times), and men’s romance book clubs (Men’s Health).
How do you think people’s understanding of wellness has changed over the past few years in the context of modern masculinity and emotional wellbeing, but also more broadly? What do people need, want and expect?
More men are comfortable with the idea of opening up about their mental health and the social pressures they feel, which I think has been driven by both public discussion and digital communities.
In the public sphere, more men who seem to embody the “Alpha Male” archetype – as in, the men who other men think ‘have it all’ – are being more transparent about their difficulties with mental health. In sport for example, Michael Phelps has recently partnered with Talkspace to discuss his struggles at the height of his Olympic career. Similarly, the documentary The Weight of Gold captures other Olympians’ stories of poor mental health.
On a more intimate level, emotional vulnerability is being further popularized by online therapy services such as Talkspace and BetterUp. These services seem to be reviving what was a healthy culture of male emotional openness with men’s groups in the 1970s and 1980s. Back then, it was more normal for men to congregate in person and discuss difficult feelings. It seems that digital technology is creating new ways for men to rediscover this tradition and offering them new communities in which to open up.
As a result, there is a greater openness to these services – they’re becoming more normalized.
How do you see the wellness industry evolving to cater to people’s overall wellbeing? What are the trends that you’re most interested in at the moment?
I’m really interested in the rising normalisation of vulnerability. In the past, vulnerability has been perceived as an indication of weakness, but in reality, it’s an expression of courage and strength. If you’re able to talk about your struggles, you’re more likely to find ways out of them because you’ve articulated what the problem is. Then you can almost ‘distribute’ the problem out to people that can help you, whether that’s through a professional resource or a community. Brene Brown has been pivotal to this conversation among both men and women.
I’m also interested in how the conversation around wellness within masculinity will evolve. At its worst, niche communities about topics like CrossFit and supplements (the bro-y kinds) often articulate masculine wellness as purely physical and performance-based; that is, focusing on pushing limits and breaking barriers to reach an optimized, archetypal self. In reality, this sort of ‘wellness’ can be quite punishing on your body and mind and ultimately unsustainable. It tends to detract from the idea of living a holistic, balanced life where you invest your energy across areas of your life to create total wellbeing.
Who or what is driving and influencing these changes?
Social communities are a key accelerator. Increasingly we’re using our favorite platforms to build community and connection based on common emotional needs – just look at how wellness is exploding on TikTok. But there's still a need for person-to-person connection, especially within mental health and modern masculinity. The resurgence of men’s groups, for example, is a great thing because we're all Zoom-fatigued from the past year. Having places where men can get together physically to discuss this type of stuff in person is important.
I think the combination of these digital and physical spaces will be what drives emotional wellbeing forward. At the same time, we’re witnessing a broader cultural conversation around the patriarchy: what it is, how men knowingly and unknowingly perpetuate it, and how this affects other men as well as women and non-binary individuals around them. It’s an important backdrop to the smaller shifts we see within those communities.
What do you think is wrong with the way business and culture currently approach wellness and wellbeing? What are the barriers to fixing these issues?
Despite the fact that emotional wellbeing has become very visible in culture, we still see epidemic-level rates of depression and suicide, especially among middle aged white men (Rolling Stone). As a society, we’ve taught boys and men, through osmosis and gender policing, to repress their emotions. They then bottle feelings up, and over time stop talking about or even feeling them anymore. That leads to emotional crises later down the line.
The media continues to perpetuate this. The continued focus on Alpha Male characters mean that other forms of masculinity don’t get air time, and while it’s okay for us to indulge in fantasy versions of humanity, it becomes problematic when it’s the only representation that we’re seeing. Most people think they can tell the difference between fantasy and reality, but emotionally we can conflate those two things in our minds, which creates unhealthy expectations of what being a man ‘should’ be.
I also think that certain brands in the male sexual health & wellbeing space exacerbate rather than improve this narrative. Early advertising for Roman and Hims, for example, framed the use of their products as a way to avoid embarrassing conversations at the doctor’s office – in other words, men can get what they need without having to be vulnerable with anyone. This prevents men from realizing that talking about these issues helps resolve them.
Finally, we have to be careful that communities don’t reinforce negative thinking. Social media bubbles can offer support but also compound and reinforce unhealthy shame, rage or other negative feelings of its members, which can result in a disproportionate emotional response to an originally less-serious issue. I recently explored (Men’s Health) ‘male enhancement’ communities where men, unsatisfied with their size, discuss techniques for enlarging their penises. They’re rife with dangerous ‘advice’ that can lead to damaging physical and emotional outcomes.
How do you think your work / your area of expertise is helping to improve people’s wellbeing and help them to live better?
When men in the worlds of media, entertainment and sport – spaces that feel most ‘alpha’– continue to stand up and make a public commitment to be vulnerable, it really makes a difference. When I wrote about my battle with sexual performance anxiety (Men’s Health) a couple of years ago, and then did subsequent live Q&As on forums like Reddit, other men told me that I’d inspired them to see a therapist. If I can help people do that, imagine what celebrities with huge platforms can do. There is a reason that actor Justin Baldoni’s TED talk on rejecting the notion of ‘man enough’ is one of the platform’s most popular.
There’s still a way to go, but I think that brands & entertainment are starting to understand the cultural responsibility and creative opportunity of celebrating a more diverse spectrum of masculinities. Axe / Lynx’s repositioning was a good start. You could argue that they were just trying to stay on the right side of culture, but nevertheless they used their ad spend to publicize a more authentic expression of masculinity. The more that culture can offer permission for people to be authentic versions of themselves, the better.
I’ve also been working to understand the trans male experience, which can offer a pivotal understanding of how masculinity can and should change. I really admire the work of Thomas Page McBee who, as a trans man, is brilliant at interrogating the construct of masculinity in ways that I’m simply blind to. Reading about his experience of transitioning helped me better understand and reprocess my own life experiences.
Ultimately, I think that these shifts will also have a positive knock-on effect for women's emotional wellbeing. Men's emotional difficulties often translate to emotional labor for their partners, as well as aggression towards women more broadly. Men opening up about their emotions leads to more positive wellbeing for everyone: men feel better, partners of men feel less under pressure to ‘fix’ their issues, and society will be more free from toxic gender expectations.
Where do you think men’s wellness will be in 5 years?
In general, I hope that we continue to see more guys speaking about their struggles honestly and openly, without shame, in public or in intimate groups. And in turn, I certainly hope that advertisers will begin to not just question the way they portray men, but actually adopt like an active and proactive approach towards portraying gender relationships in a positive way.
More specifically, men’s sexual health and wellbeing is one of the last areas where I think men still feel a lot of shame and aren’t discussing openly. This conversation is just getting started and it’s a massive opportunity.
What's been your biggest wellbeing breakthrough over the last year?
My shift in the way I think about physical movement for my wellbeing. When I stopped being a competitive athlete, I still exercised in a way that was a very conditioned habit – I felt like I hadn’t had a ‘successful’ day unless I'd worked out.
A few years ago I discovered my love for surfing, which has inspired a much more holistic approach to movement. I’m not trying to have the strongest muscles or fastest reflexes. Rather, I'm trying to do things that will enable my body to do things that I love, for the longest period of time. That’s gotten me into things like mobility work, which will help me continue to surf injury-free (hopefully!).
What does wellbeing mean to you?
I think wellbeing isn’t so much about how you feel on a moment-to-moment basis, but rather how you structure your life to bring you back into alignment when you’re feeling out of whack. It’s so important to have the right emotional scaffolding – in the form of family, friends, community, professionals – to support you. My go-to communities are my men’s romance book club and my surfing buddy Whatsapp group.
What’s the next challenge that you’d love to take on?
I want to continue writing about how masculinity is changing. I'm also exploring how I can advise brands on how to tell more authentic stories about masculinity and the lives of men. Ultimately, my biggest goal is to write a book that builds on all of these themes – I’m currently working on how to bring that into the world.
You can find more about Jason and his work here, here and here.
I found this article very interesting. As a member of the baby boomer generation,I’d be curious to hear about whether men entering heterosexual marriage still feel the expectation to be the main wage earner. In my generation, the few couples I know where the woman was the primary wage earner had some real struggles.