On a warm Tuesday evening, a dozen men gathered on couches at a Lululemon location in Toronto called The Local. Since last year, as an experiment to reach more male customers, the store has been home to The Huddle, a male bonding group which meets Tuesday nights after closing to work out, run, or meditate.

But once a month, the men circle up to talk about, well, their feelings.

Downtempo jazz and cartons of maple sap water greeted me as I plunked myself down next to a young man who recently quit his job to become a freelance cinematographer. The evening’s facilitator, Alex Cameron, a man with hulking, tattoo-plastered arms and slicked-back salt-and-pepper hair, told us the theme for this session: emotional literacy. Cameron, who is 40, runs a psychotherapy practice nearby.

To start off, Joe, a slight man in a hoodie, volunteered a story about how he came to realize that vulnerability was a strength rather than weakness.

“I’ve never shared this in front of a group before,” said Joe, 34, who told us the story of his mother passing away when he was three; how his dad became hardened and distant; and how, at the age of 27, he found himself in deep depression.

“I was single, in a job I hated, with very few friends I could count on. I felt like we are all going to die anyways, so what’s the purpose of trying?”

Uncovering blocked emotions, Joe told us, saved his life.

“I realized if I wasn’t going to take my life, I had to go back in time and work through my feelings. I was a 27-year-old living in a little boy’s trauma. I needed to prove to myself that it was safe to feel again.”

'Conversations with other men are usually very superficial. Most men suffer alone' Marvin, at the Huddle

We went around the circle sharing whatever came to mind about manhood, emotions, relationships, Donald Trump, Justin Trudeau, Jordan Peterson, the fact that most mass shootings are committed by socially isolated white men.

“Conversations with other men are usually very superficial,” said Marvin, a transplant from Germany who works at an ad agency.

“It’s always about sex and money,” the man next to him added. (Some of the participants declined to be named for this story.) “Like, ‘Oh, I got laid last night’. It gets boring.”

“It’s not only fucking boring, it’s unhealthy,” said Marvin. “Most men suffer alone.”

The discussion shifted to the meaning of anger.

“I played football growing up and I learned that, as a man, you kept things inside so you could use them as a weapon. But emotions are energy and they have to move, they have to be released,” said Chris, who recently returned from a chakra retreat in Belize. Many men never learn “how to release that energy without using force”.

“Anger is like an iceberg,” Alex Cameron, the therapist leading the session, told us. “Anger is what you see, but it comes from everything else below the surface – shame, fear, guilt. For most men, it feels safer to get angry than express sadness or vulnerability.”

He wrapped up on a more personal note. “When I feel vulnerable, I cry. It looks like sadness on the outside, but it feels powerful.”

Liberation from boys being boys

I’ve dropped in on The Huddle several times over the past six months. One meeting focused on mental health and substance abuse; a former drug addict shared the story of his attempted suicide and recent recovery. Another served as a #MeToo confessional. “I bet every man in here has a story about how they’ve mistreated a woman,” the facilitator prodded. After a deafening silence, one man threw up his hands. “I know I’ve done some foul shit.”

I met a Reiki healer, a construction worker, a former professional soccer player, a gym owner, a bartender, and several social workers. The group appeared to attract mainly straight, unmarried men in their thirties who share interest in fashion, athletics, and wellness trends; the tattoo quotient of the participants was high. In a nation, and a neighborhood, that is predominantly white, The Huddle crowd skews about 50% black.

Lululemon’s dive into the murk of modern masculinity is a hipster-approved strand in a longer lineage of male reckoning.

Alongside the din of women’s lib in the late 1960s was the lesser known men’s liberation movement. “Male liberation calls for men to free themselves from the sex role stereotypes that limit their ability to be human,” wrote psychologist Jack Sawyer, an early proponent, in a 1970 issue of Liberation magazine. “The battle of women to be free need not be a battle against men as oppressors. The choice about whether men are the enemy is up to men themselves.”

As a man, you kept things inside so you could use them as a weapon. But emotions are energy and they have to move Chris, at The Huddle

Today the pro-feminist men’s movement champions causes ranging from reducing violence against women to raising awareness about male suicide and prostate cancer. Adherents dwell in gender studies programs, social justice groups, and mental health organizations—and in small groups of men who gather in coffee shops and living rooms for heartfelt talk.

Pro-feminist masculinity has remained relatively obscure, though #MeToo may be changing that.

“It’s allowed male feminists like myself to come out of the shadows,” Michael Kehler, a University of Calgary masculinities studies professor, told me by phone. His career, after two decades of “quiet, diligent work to move this agenda forward,” has flowered with media requests and speaking engagements. In January, Kehler became North America’s first masculinities studies research chair.

“Until recently, there was an allowance, or even an expectation, for men to behave badly, like it was a natural way of being,” Kehler said. “[I]t was written off as ‘boys being boys’ or ‘that’s just locker room talk’. If you didn’t talk about sports or engage in sexualizing banter, other men might question the adequacy of your masculinity.”

Kehler believes this older breed of masculinity is dying. Some evidence, however, suggests otherwise.

Pro-feminist men feel that by modulating hypermasculinity, and ceding a wider wedge of societal power to women, they can clear a path to male enlightenment – something good for men and women.

But a countermovement has gained steam.

Known as the men’s rights movement, these ad-hoc, mainly internet-based activists are resistant to policies promoting women’s equality and to the men-as-oppressors narrative generally. Oddly enough, the movement’s ideological godfather, Warren Farrell, was a well-known male feminist in the seventies who marched alongside Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. By the time Farrell’s 1993 book The Myth of Male Power arrived on shelves, his metamorphosis was complete: “What we, as feminists, did is put men into the oppressor class and called it patriarchy,” he once said of his previous self.

While some strands of the men’s rights movement tout their efforts to provide men’s shelters, male-centric mental health services, and legal support in paternity cases, others are openly misogynist.

“Pussy is the only real empowerment women will ever know,” wrote Paul Elam, the founder of AVoiceForMen.com, to promote the website’s “slap-a-violent-bitch month” in 2017. “Put all the hopelessly wishful thinking of feminist ideology aside and what remains is the fact that it is men and pretty much men only who draw power from accomplishment, who invent technology, build nations, cure disease, create empires and generally advance civilization.”

Elam’s online community has been deemed a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

ReturnOfKings.com, a blog for “pickup artists” (men focused on manipulating women into sex), has also earned this distinction. The website’s founder, Daryush Valizadeh, even suggested rape should be legal “if done on private property”.

Also in the constellation of men’s rights groups are “incels” – men who blame women for their inability to attract a mate. (The word is a contraction of “involuntary celibate”.) The online subculture reached notoriety in April when 25-year-old Alek Minassian drove into two dozen pedestrians in Toronto. Eight of the 10 killed were women. “The Incel Rebellion has already begun,” Minassian posted on Facebook moments before he rammed his rental van into a Yonge Street sidewalk.

‘Black kids can’t afford therapy - we have to fix ourselves’

Jahmal Padmore, one of the organizers of The Huddle, believes that blaming women, or anyone, does not dissolve one’s woes so much as harden them.

The bespectacled, well-muscled 34-year-old gently badgers his male friends to show up for The Huddle because he knows firsthand how difficult it is to reach out for support.



“Black kids can’t afford therapy – if we’re going to get fixed, we have to do it ourselves,” Padmore, the son of Antiguan immigrants, told me. “So I just went on YouTube and watched a lot of personal development videos.”

Padmore’s craving for self-discovery accelerated as he approached his 30th birthday. He was drinking heavily and had some brushes with mental illness. One day he came across a series of videos by the University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson, focused on men’s pain. Padmore was hooked – briefly.

Jordan Peterson, the University of Toronto psychology professor. Photograph: Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star via Getty Images

“Peterson talked about finding your personal capacity within. I love that, that’s real, that’s what a lot of young men are looking for. When guys are maturing and coming to terms with the fact that they’re not going to be an NBA star, or whatever dreams or expectations they had aren’t being fulfilled, it can be painful. And because we’re men, we’re socialized to not express those feelings of frustration in a healthy way.”

In the early 2010s, the eccentric professor was known for TedX talks with innocuous, New Age titles like “Potential” and “Redefining Reality”. But Peterson also had a reputation for blistering attacks on male laziness – “Clean up your room!” he often barks at his young followers – and criticizing political correctness.

The problem I have with Jordan Peterson is that finding your personal [capabilities] comes at the expense of others Jahmal Padmore

In 2016 Peterson’s viral popularity exploded after he protested Bill C-16, legislation adding gender identity to the characteristics protected by Canadian anti-discrimination law. The publication of his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos in January this year vaulted Peterson into international stardom.

While Peterson maintains the persona of a self-help guru styled as a stern but loving father figure – “To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life,” he writes – the threads of intolerance in his work, and the rhetoric of some of his followers, teeter toward hate.

In a recent New York Times profile, Peterson surmised that the Toronto van attacker “was angry at God because women were rejecting him”. He suggested “enforced monogamy” as a societal cure for incels and other disgruntled young men. Peterson has never hidden his view that women should submit to conventional gender roles, but in May he published a chummy 90-minute interview with Warren Farrell, cementing his affinity with the men’s rights movement.

Padmore sensed these threads years before they were making headlines. “The problem I have with Jordan Peterson and his ilk is that, for them, finding your personal [capabilities] comes at the expense of others. I have a huge issue with the tendency to blame women and trans people and anyone that doesn’t conform. Go deep, try to find out more about yourself – of course – but don’t drag other people down.”

Another reason he quickly fell from the orbit of Peterson’s charisma: “I’m black.”

Peterson’s fan base, which is 84 % male according to the data analytics firm Zoomph, is well-steeped in racist alt-right culture. He does not endorse the extreme right-wing movement, but it’s no coincidence that it has largely endorsed him, while the pro-feminist men’s movement has not.

But can Lululemon make it cool?

Jeff Perera, a figure in Toronto’s pro-feminist men’s community. Photograph: Gary William Ogle/The Guardian

Doing pro-feminist men’s work under corporate auspices comes with certain pitfalls. The Huddle is free of charge, but when Padmore shouts “Hit me up if you want a discount on some stretchy pants,” one can’t but feel like the target of a sophisticated marketing scheme.

The corporation in question also has some skeletons in its closet.

“You know, feminists really hate Lululemon,” my wife said when I mentioned The Huddle. She referred me to an article urging women to “drop [their] Lululemon obsession”.

Lululemon’s founder, Chip Wilson, once suggested that breast cancer rates rose in the nineties because of “cigarette-smoking Power Women who were on the pill…and taking on the stress previously left to men in the working world”. He said that Lululemon clothing was not for plus-sized or even average-sized women. In 2015, after being forced to recall a number of yoga pants with a conspicuous defect – they became see-through in the crotch after a short period of use – Wilson resigned.

In 2016, a supervisor at a Lululemon in California was accused of raping a female co-worker. The victim’s lawsuit painted the company as a haven for sexual predators – a place, BuzzFeed wrote, “where women are encouraged to wear tight clothes to work, lewd comments go unchecked, and hookups between bosses and subordinates are accepted as par for the course after a wild night of drinking”.



This February, Wilson’s replacement as CEO, Laurent Potdevin, was also forced out for misconduct, possibly because of a relationship with a subordinate. (Further details have not yet emerged.)

When I contacted Lululemon headquarters to ask how the company reconciled its brand identity as a beacon of yogic enlightenment with its reputation as a bastion of toxic masculinity, a PR rep supplied me with a statement attributed to Ben Stubbington, senior vice president of men’s design:

“At Lululemon we ‘live in practice’. This is translated literally on the yoga mat and also in all ways we walk in life. […] As the definitions of masculinity constantly evolve in society, we embrace deconstructing its traditional confines, working to the principle that addressing vulnerability is a strength and has immense power to give back.”

Padmore, unwilling to defend the company, took a more prosaic stance. “I’m not particularly concerned with Lululemon’s past, present, or future image; I’m concerned with showing up and doing things that impact people’s lives in a positive way.” He said he hasn’t seen any signs of a culture of toxic masculinity at the company since being hired a year ago.

The righteous aren’t immune to hypocrisy, he added. “I think a lot of liberal white folks get caught up in perfection. You’re going to make mistakes, you’re going to fuck up. But I think you have to be okay with that and keep pushing forward.”

If the various men’s movement subcultures are in competition for followers, the pro-feminist folks are losing badly. Jordan Peterson has 1.2 million followers on YouTube and more than 700,000 on Twitter. Prominent pro-feminist male personalities count four or five digits at most.

Jeff Perera, a figure in Toronto’s pro-feminist men’s community, told me he hasn’t won any converts from the Peterson camp, but has occasionally lost friends who “converted to the other side”.

“We put out a lot of statistics about the unfortunate realities women go through, which are important for men to hear,” Perera said. “The problem is a lot of men don’t want to hear some expert telling them what a shitty person they are. They’re like, ‘Yeah, I wasn’t planning on raping anyone today, so peace out’.”

Around the time Trump was elected, Perera, 42, worked part-time for Next Gen Men, a non-profit that works with teenage boys to get them thinking outside the gender box. During one afterschool program at an elite prep school outside Toronto, the conversation, Perera recalled, turned to the new US president.

“I described him as the ‘televangelist of toxic masculinity’. I said to the guys, ‘He’s like Cobra Commander from GI Joe – he has to have his supervillain logo on everything from his helicopter to his evil headquarters at Trump Tower’. One of the boys looked at me with kind of a deadpan stare, and was like, ‘That’s actually kind of cool’. It was this moment where I had a crisis of faith. I realized that the movement is failing.”

The coolness quotient of the pro-feminist men’s world, at least in the eyes of the average adolescent male, is rather low. Attendees of the annual conference put on by the National Organization of Men Against Sexism are likely to be treated to rousing renditions of songs like “Let the Woman In You Come Through” or “Womb Envy”. One can imagine howls of laughter from 16-year-olds forced to sing along to “It’s Only A Wee-Wee, So What’s the Big Deal?”

Which is why it may not be a bad thing for a trendy, globally recognized brand, however imperfect, to take up the torch.

Jian Pablico, who originated The Huddle at Lululemon’s Vancouver headquarters, told me his role as a “mindful performance manager” is to “curate” non-traditional masculinity for “men who may not be part of that culture yet”. That’s why the touchy-feely talks are held only one day a month.

“We wanted to find a way to bring people together who might be hesitant about showing up for a conversation on vulnerability,” Pablico said. “Sweating together first helps it come naturally. Once you suffer together in a workout, you begin to bond and a layer of the mask comes off. It’s then a little easier to chat afterwards over a beer. Or a kombucha.”

***

Jordan Peterson views feminism as an emasculating force. He believes men ought to be allowed to be unapologetically tough, ambitious, competitive, and forceful.

But no one in the pro-feminist camp has really suggested that men can’t be tough, ambitious, competitive, or forceful – only that it is unhealthy to suppress other ways of being.

After his Huddle session on emotional literacy, Alex Cameron, the therapist, showed me his tattoos. I’d assumed they were a relic from some previous life as a bouncer or lumberjack. It turns out he got them on graduating his master’s in social work. One arm depicts a dragon, symbol of virility; the other, a phoenix, which in Chinese mythology signifies feminine grace.“We have opposing sides within us,” Cameron said. Harmony, he believes, must come from “embracing our entire self”.