The only time that you hear toxic masculinity used is when it's chastising a man's bad behavior. I'm tired of men coming into my office. with these preconceived, notions of what their masculinity has to be that are completely false That kid didn't F...ing ask to be here. That's on you. You gotta show up.

You are listening to American Masculinity hosted by Timothy Wienecke. Tim, a former Air Force sergeant is a licensed psychotherapist and award-winning men's advocate. This show offers insight and education, not a substitute for therapy. We take a nuanced look at the roles men inherit and the systems that shape them, grounded in real stories and committed to the quiet work of carrying forward what serves you and letting go of what doesn't.

What is the American masculinity podcast about? And who the hell am I to tell you anything about masculinity in America? Hello and welcome. My name's Tim Wieneke, and I'm a licensed mental health provider out here in Colorado. I've been in practice since 2017, helping men, veterans, and first responders build more fulfilled and connected lives while helping them process the trauma and pain that they've experienced to become better men. Prior to that, I have a number of allyship awards in helping other communities. Numerous accolades and awards in the military for all my work around interpersonal violence and sexual assault prevention. Hopefully, by giving you these two almost opposing, it can feel, roles that I've played in my life, it starts to give you a better feeling for what we're going to try to do with this podcast. Between all that time, it's given me a nuanced and broad range of understanding around what's happening with guys in this country. I've been involved in conversations around gender since I was 20 years old. I've been thinking about these things for a long time and I care deeply and passionately about them. And I remember when Me Too first started to be a thing, I was excited. I was excited to see some of the more egregious men get caught and get punished finally. I was excited to see hopefully some men take on some of these things, but also just to see people be safer in the world with more accountability happening. Over the course of years though, I've found the push of the movement to become more and more problematic for me. And it really was a slow burn on it. And it wasn't really articulated for me as to why it was bothering me until a book that I read recently, Of Men and Boys by Richard Reeves, this book here. The book shares a lot of really good information about what's going on with men, how they're struggling, and he even gives a bunch of really good policy ideas on things that we could be doing to help improve situations. The thing that was pivotal for me, though, was early in the book, when he discussed the idea of toxic masculinity in popular culture. The only time that you hear toxic masculinity used is when it's chastising a man's bad behavior. And so far, there hasn't been a narrative or active conversation on what counterbalances that conversation. So the only time that we hear about masculinity is generally with a negative context, as though every man is misbehaving because he's a man. It's garbage. It is incredibly narrow and destructive for that to be the commonly held view. It's hard though, 82 percent of all violent crime is committed by men. So, how is it that violent crime isn't masculine? These conversations are important to highlight and have because if we don't, we're basically telling the majority of men who aren't contributing to those crime statistics that they are the problem for that violent crime solely because they are men. On the other end of things We hear the right kind of expounding to this idyllic view of old school masculinity, you must be a provider. You must be violently capable. You must be stoic and you must be sexual For that to work They also want to put women and others back into the boxes of the past because it's such a narrow view that it only works if everybody else is subjugated on some level or shoved into some place that they don't need to be. That's also destructive. And not just for the people we're trying to shove into the boxes of old, it's destructive for men. By having this incredibly narrow view of masculinity and this incredibly narrow path to that part of yourself. All the little bits and pieces that don't quite line up start to rub. And that leads to some pretty dysfunctional behaviors. It leads to some pretty nasty self talk, and it leads to an awful lot of shame for things that don't need to be shameful. People are complex. Gender is complex. There are men and women, and there are people that don't identify as either. I'm tired of these very polar conversations because I'm tired of watching them hurt people I care about. I'm tired of being hurt by them. I'm tired of men coming into my office. with these preconceived, pregenerated notions of what their masculinity has to be that are completely false and muddle the reality of the masculinity that they bring in with them. Those things, their fathers and mothers gave them that empower them in their life. It taints that I want this place to be somewhere where you can come and hear my thoughts with my experiences as a valid expert on the topic. But more than that, I want to bring other experts on. I want to have nuanced conversations with informed people about these topics. I want to get into the gray of these subjects so we can come out with a clearer understanding. And I want you to be able to walk away with some tools, understanding and stories. They're going to help you navigate life either as a man or someone who loves men and wants to help them. I'm really passionate about this. I've been excited about a lot of the ideas I'm going to share for years. And I'm so glad that that book came out and finally gave me the last little lever I needed to articulate what was happening and my discomfort with it. If you found this podcast, it's because you're looking for these conversations. I think you're looking for deeper understanding of manhood. I think you're looking for somebody who's actually going to have a conversation around masculinity and masculine topics instead of simply screaming about what is or isn't right. I know that I'm going to be sharing my opinions rather forcefully sometimes. But I'm also hopefully going to be able to find folks to come on and talk about, and maybe not debate, but trade ideas, trade thoughts around these things, other clinicians, other experts in various fields. I think this can be helpful to starting to move the conversation from this very toxic, very argumentative, very polarized way of discussing these things so that we can start connecting with each other so that men can start to articulate themselves with their partners and their loved ones better about what's happening with them. And so that people who love men have a better understanding of what their guys might be going through and how to make their lives a little better, too. So hopefully that's what you want. Hopefully that's what you're looking for. Because if you are, I'm going to do everything I can to make this useful to you. We're just getting started. This is episode one. I have taught for about a decade, but I haven't taught to a camera. So while I'm sure there'll be mistakes along the way, I'm going to be doing everything I can every time I turn on this microphone and this camera to make better content and better information for you. In addition to giving you that information, I also want to have some personal skin in the game so that you know me a little bit better In order to get to know me, I feel like it's important to start the conversation with some questions that I'm going to ask every guest that comes on. Hopefully it gives you a little bit more insight to me personally and you know, just to make things fair for the guest. So the first question I'm going to ask everybody is what's a truth about masculinity that you learned before you were 12 that remains true today? For me, it always goes back to my father, as you would expect. my father was a, stoner, biker, partier guy, very rebel without a cause. That was his movie. That's what he really focused on building his life around. And in many ways, because of that, he was often checked out by the time I was a teenager. But when I was young, he was around a good bit. And I was lucky enough in the eighties to have my father around, which was not fairly common back then. And the reason I talk about that is because what my father taught me about masculinity was about how men engage as fathers. So for the last few decades, we often treat fathers as though they're only a provider, that they're just a pocket book that a father's role is not to be in a child's life. And the more we learn about it, the more we realize that that's destructive and that kids need both parents if they can have them. There's benefit to having a masculine and a feminine parenting approach and back then, my father's friends were like him. They were, partying bikers and that led to a lot of really dysfunctional family sets and a lot of guys that weren't necessarily involved with their kids. And my father was always really interesting about it. He was really patient and kind and would like commiserate with the guys who were trying to be in their kids lives and unable to. But whenever he heard one of his buddies talk about being checked out or giving up or not wanting to be around that kid. He'd get angry. And that was strange. My father wasn't an angry man. He was pretty laid back most of the time. But he would come at him. And his line would always be the same. That kid didn't F...ing ask to be here. That's on you. You gotta show up. And it was this duality of the guys that couldn't be there for the kids, the guys that the system were denying access to the kids, the guys who just couldn't get their lives together to have the money to be the support that they wanted to be for their kids. My father was pretty supportive with them. He commiserated with them. There was sadness on his face when he'd hear him talk. There was anger at the system. There was anger at the women involved. He understood and supported their desire and their push to be with their children. But if that man wasn't pushing, he had no patience for it. And that always resonated with me on a lot of levels, but specifically about how a man should be in a kid's life, that if we bring children into this world, or we're going to choose to be mentors, uncles in touch with children, we need to make sure that we're pushing ourselves to be the best versions of ourselves we can be for them and to push the system to allow space for us to exist there. It's one of the things that I'm proudest of that my father gave me. And it's one of the things that I always felt luckiest for because my father was there. Things got hard, my life was a mess, our family was a mess, but he was often there for me. And I'm so glad for that. So that's the first question and the first answer. What is a time that pursuing your gender identity hurt you? So there's always going to be this time in adolescence where everyone is exploring their gender. There's this light that comes on and all of a sudden everything gets mixed up, hair popping out in places. Hormones start popping off. And all of a sudden things get a little complicated, right? And while teenagers sort that out, there's usually these kind of misinformed ideas, different things they try on that don't work. And some of those tend to stick. What stuck for me was a unhealthy relationship with the pursuit of women. So, I wasn't a particularly physically capable guy as a kid. Like, I played sports, but I was never the guy. I wasn't particularly violently capable, and particularly when I was young, I wouldn't fight. And so that kind of masculine status wasn't going to be there for me. I wasn't the brightest guy. I got through school okay. I took some talented and gifted classes back then, but I was never the smartest guy in the room. And so I couldn't trade on that. But what I could do was talk to women. From a very early age, I was comfortable talking with women. And the minute that adolescence hit, all of a sudden, I realized looking around that I was more willing to engage with women than the men around me. And I also very quickly realized that If I engaged with the right women and got that attention publicly, that was a masculine status I could trade on. That if I was some kind of ladies man, which I'd be very surprised if many people saw me as in high school, but these are the stories we tell ourselves, right? What that did to me was it made my personality very thin. my view of myself and social groups was very narrow and because it was the pursuit of women and women's attention, it denied a lot of relationships with women. It was always about that physicality of getting that girl to be physically interested in you. And then once people had seen you with her or she started to like drift in interest or things started to get emotionally complicated, I would just leave and find the next girl. And that really. It got bad for me in college. I didn't have girlfriends. I had girls I partied with, I had friends that I would spend time with, women that I would hook up with. And I was lucky enough to have the women in my life. Most of them were incredibly lovely, incredibly intelligent. And I am incredibly gifted to have them in my life in any capacity, but especially that capacity. However, I never dated, I never figured out how to have an emotional relationship or an emotional connection with a woman. And that really didn't start to hit me and realize anything until I was about 25 years old. Then, finished up college, kicked around for a little while, and joined the Air Force. And when I was in the Air Force, I was traveling constantly. I moved between college and the Air Force over a dozen times in ten years. So by the time I realized that I was deficient in knowing how to date or how to hold a relationship, I was moving around so much that I couldn't really do anything about it. And so, That ideal of chasing masculine status through the attention of women put me behind and gave me this very awkward sense of self that wasn't going to work. So that's the bit that didn't work. The other side of that question is the next one I'm going to ask. What's a time when your gender and your pursuit of it empowered you? For me, it was joining the Air Force is kind of the most pivotal one. I finished up college during an economic crash. I got a mediocre degree with a mediocre GPA and I moved back to a city that had more college degrees per capita at that time than any other city in the country. I was struggling. I was in my mid to late 20s and I had all these friends that were very successful. I'd been president of the student government, I'd been engaged in all these things, so I was around doers. But when I got out of college, I fell flat. And I found myself, couch surfing, finally found a room to rent out and a house working temporary jobs that had no meaning. And I was just listless, had no direction, no purpose. And And the first question that most men in this country get is, what do you do for a living? I didn't do anything. I worked temp jobs. I wasn't making any money. And that just led to some depression, right? Some sadness of not understanding what I was supposed to do or where I was supposed to go. And joining the Air Force late in life saved my life. There's a lot of people that their military service hurts them. There's a lot of people that it helps. And most of us have a fairly complex relationship with a bit of both. For me, the Air Force saved me. When I joined up, I was 28 years old and I was so broke that the only pairs of shoes I had had a hole in them. Couldn't afford new clothes. And it was really at the end of my rope on a lot of things. By going into the military, it gave me some masculine status that no one's ever going to be able to take away from me. No one can take away my service. I can be proud of it. I did good things. I made my Air Force family. I served my country. And that really ended up being the basis. For what I do now, the credibility of having served the intrinsic understanding of service so I can serve the heroes of our country in a better way has been endlessly impactful for me. And so that pursuit of masculine status by putting on that uniform for me worked incredibly well. So now you know a little bit more about me, my history, and why you might care about my opinions on the topic of American Masculinity. I really hope that you find this useful. Let me know if you do take a moment to comment, take a moment to let me know what kind of topics you want to see, what information you're interested in, what tools you're looking for. So I can make the best content I can to be of most use to you. So that's the end of our first episode. I'm really excited to have shared this with you. I'm so excited that you're here and happy that you're taking part in these conversations. Take care.