This TEDx talk is from earlier this summer - it's short but it makes some good points. Varieur uses fairy tales to illustrate the traditional processes by which boys become men.
Have you ever considered where fairy tales come from and what their real meanings are? In this talk, John uses a well known children's fairy tale to explain the process of how boys become men. John Varieur is an in-home therapist for Arbour-Fuller Hospital in Attleboro, Massachusetts. He is also a member of Lead Now, a locally based leadership company. A jack of all trades, John has been a high school teacher, a roofer, a bartender, and a banker. Between bartending and psychology, John has heard more fairy tales then all of us combined.
When he was 20 years old, Shaun McCoy became one of the rare people who acquired cat scratch disease (CSD) and ended up in a coma. Appalled by his physical condition afterward, he began to train and found himself interested in cage fighting.
His experience in the cage taught him a lot about taking risks, competition, and his ideas of what danger entails.
A writer at an early age, Shaun penciled out his first full-length novel in middle school. At age 20, Shaun was struck with CSD, which put him in a coma and hospitalized him for two weeks.
This is a nice, though TED-style brief talk on one of my favorite gender-related topics - gender fluidity. Burton explores the notion that gender is
fluid, revealing insight into a culture that makes us question social
roles and assumptions we may not even be aware we are promoting.
At one point a few years ago, Gabrielle’s worlds of being a filmmaker, conscious observer and parent collided. Fueled by her upbringing by thoughtful, feminist, and creative parents and being in business with her four sisters, her current project has put her ‘out there’ in ways she’d never imagined. By challenging presumptions and misunderstandings, Gabrielle will explore the notion that gender is fluid, revealing insight into a culture that makes us question social roles and assumptions we may not even be aware we are promoting.
Gabrielle Burton
Filmmaker. Writer. Activist.
Gabrielle’s Website Facebook Twitter Email About Gabrielle: Gabrielle is a writer/director/actor whose current project is as director of Kings, Queens, and In- Betweens, a documentary about the fluidity of gender identity as seen through the window of drag queens and kings in Columbus, Ohio. Her feature and short film credits include: Manna from Heaven (MGM/Sony), Temps (Netflix), Just Friends (AMC/We Channel), The Happiest Day of His Life (MTV/Logo), Letting Go of God (Showtime), as well as nationally released commercials and PSAs. As a director, Gabrielle got her training in film school at the Ecole Superieure d’Audio-Visuel in Toulouse, France, where she received a DEUP degree with High Honors. Gabrielle worked on the television program Law and Order in their director training program. After an Isobel Briggs scholarship to study music at Berklee College of Music, she won a Rotary Scholarship to study film in France. Her short, Sage and Time, was selected for the La Corrida International Film Festival in France, and Gabrielle was invited as the opening night speaker to show Manna from Heaven at La Corrida’s 10th film festival. A graduate of Harvard/Radcliffe, Gabrielle is a published poet, and also wrote and directed the full length plays Sage and Time and Club Venus at the ART’s Loeb Ex theater. She was featured on the Voice Of America program and in the Harvard CRIMSON. She just received the Thomas A. Milhelmus Editor’s Award for an essay she wrote on the giant turtles in Malaysia, which will be published this fall by the Southern Indiana Review.
Kings, Queens, and In-Betweens (to be completed this year) is a documentary on the fluidity of gender identity as seen through the window of drag queens, kings, and transgender performers in Columbus, Ohio. Perhaps surprisingly, Columbus has one of the most imaginative, diverse drag scenes in the country, set in the middle of Ohio as a complex, politically important swing state. Drawing on interviews and performances by entertainers (from those who only do drag as a form of show business to those who use drag for personal exploration), KQIB challenges common assumptions about drag and gender.
KQIB will be the first film to include the whole gender performance spectrum — queens, kings, and transgender performers.
Twenty years since the groundbreaking film “Paris is Burning” was shot, this is a chance to move the conversation forward, showing how drag both entertains and pushes the envelope — making us question binary categories of male/female, gay/straight, butch/femme. KQIB captures how these terrific performers tackle the complexities and pathos of gender expression, personal identity, and human rights — all with humor, great music, big hair, and duct tape.
From TEDxIsfeld in April 2011, Bill Pozzobon is an actor, director, and inspirational speaker - and he is also Director of the SafeTeen Boys Program. In this TEDx talk he explicates the "man code," the largely unspoken rules about what a man is and how to be a man in this culture. As the image above makes clear, these "rules" are also known as the "man box."
Bill has worked on gender and violence issues with youth and educators for over a decade. In his role as Director of the SafeTeen Boy's Program, he trains the new SafeTeen Agents for Change and co-leads Educator Trainings locally, nationally and internationally. With humor and skill Bill invites the boys and men he works with to step into their full humanity with dignity and courage. "I am a strong believer in the power of personal choice and heart centered action. My own personal journey and the undeniable impact on the thousands of young men I have worked with, give me an enduring passion for this work." Bill is also an actor, director, acting teacher and inspirational public speaker who brings powerful personal narrative and a vision for a better world to his work. Find out more about his work at http://safeteen.ca
From the Good Men Project, this is a TED Talk I had missed, but is worth the 20 minutes or so to watch or listen. Al Vernacchio looks at how the language we use to talk about sex - our metaphors - shape our experience of sex. Language has power.
[Note: I edited this a little bit for clarity - there were typos and such that made it a rough read.]
How the baseball metaphor for sex is toxic to our understanding of sexuality and why pizza might be a better metaphor.
“I only got to second base,” is a common lament from young men but they aren’t always referring to America’s past time, baseball, often they are referring to a sexual experience. Yes, baseball has become the dominate American metaphor to talk about sex but this metaphor, as Al Vernacchio points out, is toxic to our understanding of sexuality. Its competitive, there are winners and losers, two “teams” (genders) pitted against each other. There are set times when its expected—you can’t tell the coach you just don’t feel like playing today. There are set roles—you're a catcher, not a pitcher—which means there is little discussion. Vernacchio suggests we change our metaphor to pizza. Wanting pizza is an urge for which there is no set time, no season. Ordering pizza with another requires communication. Even if you’ve been ordering pizza with that person for a long time you ask, “do we want the usual.” Finally, pizza is a common experience, where everyone gains some pleasure, and if someone didn’t like the pizza, you take that into consideration the next time you order out.
Esther Perel is the author of Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence, a book that "invites us to explore the paradoxical union of domesticity and sexual desire, and explains what it takes to bring lust home." Sounds good to me.
In long-term relationships, we often expect our beloved to be both best friend and erotic partner. But as Esther Perel argues, good and committed sex draws on two conflicting needs: our need for security and our need for surprise. So how do you sustain desire? With wit and eloquence, Perel lets us in on the mystery of erotic intelligence.
Why you should listen to her:
Psychotherapist Esther Perel is changing the conversation on what it means to be in love and have a fulfilling sex life. For the first time in human history, couples aren't having sex just to have kids; there's room for sustained desire, for couples to cultivate long-term sexual relationships. But how? Perel, a licensed marriage and family therapist, travels the world to help people answer this question.
For her research Perel works across cultures and is herself fluent in nine languages. She coaches and consults organizations and families, holds a private psychotherapy practice in New York, and speaks regularly on erotic intelligence, trauma, conflict resolution, and infidelity. She is the author of Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence.
This is a nice TEDx talk from Dr. Judith Orloff on the incredible upside to being able to surrender. This is a tough sell for men - traditional masculinity views surrender as "giving up," or as weakness, fear, being beaten. Reframing the notion of surrender into an act of strength takes some time and effort, but the benefits of surrender, as Dr. Orloff outlines here, are worth the effort.
Published on Dec 26, 2012 You can sabotage success by pushing too hard. Surrender is the antidote to stress in a world that relentlessly conspires to interrupt creative thought. Surrender boosts your brain's endorphins--euphoric, opiate-like pain killers--and serotonin, a natural antidepressant that allows you to relax, have more fun, and succeed more wildly than ever before. Life becomes easier and more blissful when you can let go.
Here are a few quotes on surrender (spiritual and psychological concept embodied by The Hanged Man Tarot card at the top):
The idea of surrender usually means to give in, to passively submit to the control of someone or something stronger. To surrender to the Dharma, however, requires the active and continuously renewed commitment of our energy. Surrendering to the teaching is the giving up of our self-images, fears, thoughts, and desires into the hands of deeper self-knowledge. It is submitting to the control of our true nature, which is healthier and stronger than our surface experience can ever be. ― Tarthang Tulku: Hidden Mind of Freedom
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“Always say “yes” to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to what already is? what could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say “yes” to life — and see how life suddenly starts working for you rather than against you.” ― Eckhart Tolle
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“Something amazing happens when we surrender and just love. We melt into another world, a realm of power already within us. The world changes when we change. the world softens when we soften. The world loves us when we choose to love the world.” ― Marianne Williamson
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“Surrender your own poverty and acknowledge your nothingness to the Lord. Whether you understand it or not, God loves you, is present in you, lives in you, dwells in you, calls you, saves you and offers you an understanding and compassion which are like nothing you have ever found in a book or heard in a sermon.” ― Thomas Merton, The Hidden Ground Of Love: The Letters Of Thomas Merton On Religious Experience And Social Concerns
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“Those who are truly enlightened, those whose souls are illuminated by love, have been able to overcome all of the inhibitions and preconceptions of their era. They have been able to sing, to laugh, and to pray out loud; they have danced and shared what Saint Paul called 'the madness of saintliness'. They have been joyful - because those who love conquer the world and have no fear of loss. True love is an act of total surrender.” ― Paulo Coelho, By the River Piedra I Sat Down and Wept
Cindy Gallop dates younger men, mostly in their twenties - she has found that a disturbing number of these young men, who have grown up believing pornography is the norm of human sexuality, have no idea what women really desire in a sexual partner, let alone how to have emotionally intimate sex (i.e., making love). She launched MakeLoveNotPorn in a 2009 TED Talk, and it has expanded from there.
MakeLoveNotPorn is a Cindy Gallop production. I date younger men, usually in their 20s, and came up with the idea for MakeLoveNotPorn based on direct personal experience. I launched MakeLoveNotPorn at TED 2009: TED 2009: Make Love not Porn followed by an interview with me on the TEDBlog Here is a talk I gave recently at the L2 GenerationNext Forum that expands on how this is the single biggest impact that technology is having on human behavior today. I would like to stress the following:
MakeLoveNotPorn is not about judgement, or what is good vs what is bad. Sex is the area of human experience that embraces the widest possible range of tastes. Everyone should be free to make up their own mind about what they do and don't like.
MakeLoveNotPorn is not anti-porn. I like porn and watch it regularly myself.
MakeLoveNotPorn is simply intended to help inspire and stimulate open, healthy conversations about sex and pornography, in order to help inspire and stimulate more open, healthy and thoroughly enjoyable sexual relationships.
If you support what MakeLoveNotPorn is all about, if you want to understand in more detail why this is an issue, if you'd like to learn more about my sex life than you ever wanted to know :) or if you'd just like an interesting, entertaining read - please click here to buy my e-book 'MakeLoveNotPorn: Technology's Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior' for just $2.99 on Amazon, and please do rate and review it after you've read it. It also makes a great gift for anybody you think would enjoy or learn from it. Many thanks for your support!
I think she has a good idea - but the new feature announced below about uploading videos of normal people having sex will turn it into a porn site, exactly what she doesn't want. So many of the sex addicts I know totally dig "amateur" porn - it's probably the 2nd most watched genre after the seriously degrading stuff.
“I date younger men,” Cindy Gallop boldly proclaimed at TED2009. “When I have sex with younger men, I encounter very directly and personally the real ramifications of the creeping ubiquity of hardcore pornography in our culture. … There is an entire generation growing up that believes that what you see in hardcore pornography is the way that you have sex.” When she spoke at TED2009, Gallop unveiled her website MakeLoveNotPorn.com, a forum for discussion on the topic of real sex. (Read a Q&A with Gallop on the TED Blog from shortly after the launch.) Now, Gallop has launched the next evolution of — MakeLoveNotPorn.tv, a YouTube for real, unperformed sex. Contributors pay $5 to post a video of themselves having sex, and get paid as users shell out $5 a piece to watch their videos. Currently, there are 13 videos on the site and, as The New York Times describes them, “Compared with the harsh lens of mainstream pornography, the videos come across as sweet, earnest, languid, playful and deeply human.” So far, more than 19,000 people have signed up for the site. To celebrate the launch of MakeLoveNotPorn.tv, Gallop is offering her brilliant TED Book for free through the TED Books app all day today. Head to the iTunes store to download the app or, if you already have it on your iPhone or iPad, pick Gallop’s book off the app shelf to enjoy the free gift, packed with extra photos and videos.
As long-time readers know, I have had issues with the MKP organization but have found many of their members to be good men of heart and strength. Eivind is one of those men - this post originally appeared at his blog.
I am pretty sure I posted this at IOC back when it first was posted by the TED folks - but it's worth seeing more than once. She gets to the important insights about men at the 7:15 point in the talk - she really gets it (text at the bottom, but please listen to the whole talk).
I was very inspired by this incredible TED talk by Jacqueline Novogratz. Not only is she a wonderful, heart-open and humble woman deeply in tune with humanity’s challenges, but she has the visionary insight that male depression is related to female suffering. For some women, it’s very common today to think and say that men make women suffer because we are evil and uncontrollably violent, little else but walking testosterone bombs who need to be feminized to heal us from our inherent evils.*
Jacqueline understands that a young man who has not been loved, blessed or nourished by an elder man will turn into bitter, disempowered, depressed men who lash out from a place of pain and who are easy prey for tyrant demagogues. She also seems to understand how masculinity is a wonderful thing that the world needs more of, empowering men to serve as stewards of our future.
One story she told impacted me a great deal. Ingrid Washinawatok, a Native American woman, told Jacqueline how elders of her Native American tribe would visualize children from seven generations into the future watching them from above, seeing them as stewards for the time that was once going to be theirs. This concept is so powerful it strikes me right in the heart. All we think of in the midst of consumerist hysteria is “I need more”. Selfish, ignorant and altogether miserable are so many modern lives.
Have a look. Trust me, it’s worth your time.
* “All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman.” – Catherine MacKinnon * “The media treat male assaults on women like rape, beating, and murder of wives and female lovers, or male incest with children, as individual aberrations…obscuring the fact that all male violence toward women is part of a concerted campaign.” – Marilyn French
Here is the piece of the transcript that I find most moving for men, although the whole thing is excellent.
I also have been touched by the dark side of power and leadership. And I have learned that power, particularly in its absolute form, is an equal opportunity provider. In 1986, I moved to Rwanda, and I worked with a very small group of Rwandan women to start that country's first microfinance bank. And one of the women was Agnes -- there on your extreme left -- she was one of the first three women parliamentarians in Rwanda, and her legacy should have been to be one of the mothers of Rwanda. We built this institution based on social justice, gender equity, this idea of empowering women.
But Agnes cared more about the trappings of power than she did principle at the end. And though she had been part of building a liberal party, a political party that was focused on diversity and tolerance, about three months before the genocide, she switched parties and joined the extremist party, Hutu Power, and she became the Minister of Justice under the genocide regime and was known for inciting men to kill faster and stop behaving like women. She was convicted of category one crimes of genocide. And I would visit her in the prisons, sitting side-by-side, knees touching, and I would have to admit to myself that monsters exist in all of us, but that maybe it's not monsters so much, but the broken parts of ourselves, sadnesses, secret shame, and that ultimately it's easy for demagogues to prey on those parts, those fragments, if you will, and to make us look at other beings, human beings, as lesser than ourselves -- and in the extreme, to do terrible things.
And there is no group more vulnerable to those kinds of manipulations than young men. I've heard it said that the most dangerous animal on the planet is the adolescent male. And so in a gathering where we're focused on women, while it is so critical that we invest in our girls and we even the playing field and we find ways to honor them, we have to remember that the girls and the women are most isolated and violated and victimized and made invisible in those very societies where our men and our boys feel disempowered, unable to provide. And that, when they sit on those street corners and all they can think of in the future is no job, no education, no possibility, well then it's easy to understand how the greatest source of status can come from a uniform and a gun.
Sometimes very small investments can release enormous, infinite potential that exists in all of us. One of the Acumen Fund fellows at my organization, Suraj Sudhakar, has what we call moral imagination -- the ability to put yourself in another person's shoes and lead from that perspective. And he's been working with this young group of men who come from the largest slum in the world, Kibera. And they're incredible guys. And together they started a book club for a hundred people in the slums, and they're reading many TED authors and liking it. And then they created a business plan competition. Then they decided that they would do TEDx's.
And I have learned so much from Chris and Kevin and Alex and Herbert and all of these young men. Alex, in some ways, said it best. He said, "We used to feel like nobodies, but now we feel like somebodies." And I think we have it all wrong when we think that income is the link. What we really yearn for as human beings is to be visible to each other. And the reason these young guys told me that they're doing these TEDx's is because they were sick and tired of the only workshops coming to the slums being those workshops focused on HIV, or at best, microfinance. And they wanted to celebrate what's beautiful about Kibera and Mathare -- the photojournalists and the creatives, the graffiti artists, the teachers and the entrepreneurs. And they're doing it. And my hat's off to you in Kibera.
to buy my e-book 'MakeLoveNotPorn: Technology's Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior' for just $2.99 on Amazon, and please do rate and review it after you've read it. It also makes a great gift for anybody you think would enjoy or learn from it. Many thanks for your support!
