Liz Plank on the

One of the first things I did when I started writing my book was a social experiment in Washington Square. I asked guys, "What's hard about being a man?" It's a very simple question. If you want to know what's hard about being a woman, it's like, "How much time do you have?" But they just froze. And you could tell that not only did they not necessarily feel that it was safe to share that, they'd also never thought about it.

Women have been encouraged to ask themselves these questions about how they were raised and how it affected them. I think men have to do the same thing. I know it doesn't feel like an action item, but really pausing and thinking about things like "Where did you learn what it means to be a man? And who taught you and how?"-even thinking about that is huge for men. When I started talking to men for my book, it became clear to me that so much of manhood is automatic. A lot of the attitudes aren't conscious behaviors. They've been learned, and men don't even know where they learned them. In the book, I compare it to the Macarena.

So much of the conversation around men is negative, especially in the wake of the #MeToo movement, and there are a million reasons for that. Women have been hurt by men, and women have been traumatized; I've been traumatized by men myself. But I wanted to approach this conversation differently, because the way we've been approaching it so far doesn't work. I wanted to come up with a term that was positive, one that signaled a decluttering of masculinity, like a conscious spring cleaning. "Mindful masculinity" is the Marie Kondo approach to gender: "Does this spark joy for me? What kind of behaviors do I like? What kind of attitudes do I like, and what don't I like?" I think women have been taught how to do that. They've been encouraged to take on behaviors that are more quote-unquote traditionally masculine: to be more assertive, to communicate in a way that's more in line with the way that men communicate, to unlearn their passivity and other quote-unquote feminine behaviors of making yourself smaller. I wanted to give men the opportunity to do the same thing.- As told to Nora Caplan-Bricker