“We are men. We’re going to mess up. We’re going to say the wrong thing. We’re going to be tone-deaf. We’re more than likely, probably, going to offend you. But don’t lose hope. We’re only here because of you…” Justin Baldoni, Actor/Director, TedWomen 2017
Over the 18 minutes that Justin Baldoni spoke to a predominantly female audience, he covered a lot of ground. Most of it was solid ground. And most of it is in agreement with so much of what Mindful Masculinity is all about.
Active self-awareness. Honest personal assessments. Accountability.
But there is something about these last few sentences of his TedTalk that have never felt right to me. In the succeeding eight years since I first heard Baldoni’s talk, and having purchased and read his book “Man Enough,” my skepticism has grown about whether his approach to helping men stop suffering can productively advance the cause of men and gender equality.
Baldoni is the first in my series about the Bell Curve of Male Suffering Voices because his book (published in May 2022), his Man Enough podcast, his many essays and interviews over the last seven or so years, have left me feeling like he represents this far left side of the bell curve.
This is a place where speakers see the vast expanse of men as individually and inherently broken. Their saving grace? Adopting traits and behaviors traditionally deemed female.
NOTE: In December 2024, Blake Lively filed a lawsuit against Baldoni for his repeatedly violating her physical boundaries and making sexual and other inappropriate comments on the set of the movie “It Ends With Us.” Baldoni was Lively’s director and co-star in that movie. That case is scheduled to begin May 18, 2026.
Undefining masculinity isn’t easy stuff
In his TedTalk, Baldoni hits so many valid and productive points when he offers up vignettes from his own life, especially about the gracious and loving examples his father and grandfather set as male role models.
He also speaks about what too many men are afraid to say, and what so many women I’ve known refuse to believe is true:
“I think for the most part I’ve just been kind of putting on a show, but I’m tired of performing. And I can tell you right now that it is exhausting trying to be man enough for everyone all the time.”
As Baldoni states, men are told that masculine is the opposite of feminine, instead of seeing all human behaviors and traits as simply human behaviors and traits.
(p.s. The 15,000+ men and women who have taken Clearer Thinking’s Gender Continuum Test pretty much validate his point with their responses to the survey.)
Also, Baldoni asks men to not “suffer in secret.” He asks men to stand up against misogyny. He asks men to be vulnerable — and be capable of showing that vulnerability and being present to it directly with other men.
Where Baldoni veers off of a productive path is stating that the “only way” for men to be good humans “is if men learn to not only embrace the qualities that we were told are feminine in ourselves but to be willing to stand up, to champion and learn from the women who embody them.”
I am pretty certain billions of men on this earth embody good human qualities every day of their lives. We can easily learn from them too. In fact. Justin himself points to his father and grandfather as having so many of those female traits.
Clearer Thinking’s results clearly demonstrate that for the majority of the 18 traits they track, there are only modest differences in the way men and women embody nearly all of them. The one true outlier is “unselfishness,” with a borderline strong effect size difference.
Rhetoric matters
My issue with Baldoni and so many others like him is their tendency to paint men and women with broad strokes that I feel work against the goals we are attempting to achieve — an increase in flourishing and decrease in suffering for both genders.
But people like Baldoni feel compelled to ask for permission for men to try to improve themselves, because men are a broken class of humans.
Baldoni does and so many influencers essentialize men as inevitably “tone-deaf/offensive.” I hear their words as: “Being male means being kind of dumb and dangerous.”
His “we’re only here because of you” line feels like groveling or outsourcing agency — as if men can’t self-author their own growth without female assistance and validation?
And I think that my reaction is inherently human. So this week, I tested my theory on Facebook. I posted the following text, accompanied by a picture of a female speaker on a stage.
A woman is on stage speaking to an audience mostly filled with men. She speaks the following:
“We are women. We’re going to mess up. We’re going to say the wrong thing. We’re going to be tone-deaf. We’re more than likely, probably, going to offend you. But don’t lose hope. We’re only here because of you...”
How do you think the female audience would respond? How would you respond?
Here are what some women wrote:
We are human and, regardless of gender, we may all be guilty of those things at one time or another.
It sounds subservient and fawning, not humble and authentic.
She implies that we mess up because we are women. Time to retire that false message. Ditch the guilt.
At first blush: it turned my stomach.
The women responding to my post were especially repulsed by Baldoni stating “We’re only here because of you.”
Kind of a weird message. How are we here because of men?
I would change that last sentence to “we are here in spite of them!”
American men have continued to suffer through one “masculinity crisis” after another for the last 70 years, in part due to the rhetoric and framing placed around the strong insights about masculinity, the accurate personal development solutions and the genuinely good intentions that leading voices bring to the conversation.
As two of my most treasured friends stated so perfectly on my Facebook post:
We work on ourselves for our own well-being.
I don’t think it is okay for anyone, male or female, to take this thought. No one should improve for anyone’s benefit. Any improvement should be for personal growth. The benefits will come to others, but if one is not improving to just be a better person, it’s not sustainable. The motive is wrong.
The crazy thing? Baldoni contradicts himself in other promotions of his book and the overall topic of masculinity. In an April 2021 interview with Esquire Magazine as part of the release of his book “Man Enough” Baldoni answered the question “Is there anything readers should know going into the book?” in part like this:
“What I want to say to any man who’s reading this is that this book is an invitation. It’s not a condemnation. It’s not an attack on men. Because I love being a man. I believe there’s amazing aspects to being a man.”
You can’t have it both ways Justin.
You cannot broadly paint men as fuck ups, tone deaf, etcetera, and then say you’re not attacking men. You are. Whether you did it for effect with a target audience or not.
Humans can be tone deaf. I’ve experienced dozens of women tone deaf to my lived experiences. I’ve had dozens of women in my life offend me because of their lived experiences and conditioning.
We’re all human. There’s no need to label or pre-judge ANYONE, male, female, non-binary, however someone identifies and presents themselves.
Can we all please start from the same imperfectly human place? Isn’t that the common ground that binds us and helps us unite in this effort?
Closing with the opening
For years now, men have been told they must prove emotional competence to be taken seriously as collaborators for better relationships and societies. This conditioning makes “We’re going to be tone-deaf” land with many men as self-undermining, self-humiliation, stereotype reinforcement, or performative guilt.
I have seen in various environments how it lands poorly with men who feel individually conscientious and resent being collectivized, and hear it as identity-shaming, not accountability. That’s not “men being fragile.” It’s a normal human reaction to collective labeling.
Like we saw on my Facebook post.
Baldoni’s approach, in a room predisposed to rewards for contrition, works as bridge rhetoric for a targeted audience. But my own small “gender swap” test suggests the same move can trigger backlash because it frames growth as something men do for women, not something men do as men with agency.
We need to be extremely conscious of the tripwires people use in their descriptions of men, the issues surrounding masculinity and the potential solutions.
Men are pre-judged — by men and women — based on wildly outdated stereotypes and archetypes that do not dignify today’s individual man as a unique being with a blend of stereotypical/archetypical traits (as so much qualified research has proven.)
What men need more of is non-judgmental, accountable, self-authored growth.
Gender expectations ARE shifting. I see it in the research I read, and I hear it from young men who talk to me about their lived experiences.
Men need to stop diminishing themselves. We do not need to apologize for being imperfectly human. We do need to be honestly mindful and accountable for anything we do that harms others and apologize for not correcting those behaviors.
All of us need to reject gendered apology framing. Pre-empting criticism reduces the likelihood of honest and productive conversations and collaboration.
Over the next few weeks, we’re going to dig deep into rhetoric, audience composition and incentive structures, and hopefully have a conversation about more productive ways to move forward.
Stick with me.
Hold me accountable.
Challenge me.
I don’t want your validation or your applause. That’s a hollow victory if the emotional gain comes at the expense of real progress.
I want your honest engagement, because ending America’s need for Justin Baldoni TedTalks is long overdue.
