Vanessa Fisher - Men and the Future of the Integral Movement--with R. Michael Fisher

 

Over at her blog, Poetic Justice, Vanessa D. Fisher has posted the final interview in a series she conducted in promotion for the book she co-edited with Sarah Nicholson, Integral Voices on Sex, Gender, and Sexuality: Critical Inquiries, part of the SUNY series on Integral Theory.

This interview is a little more special than the previous three - she is interviewing her father, R. Michael Fisher, author, philosopher, teacher, and a whole lot more. Here is the bio material that was posted at Beams and Struts:

R. Michael Fisher

Michael Fisher, a philosopher at-heart, who has studied and applied the work of Ken Wilber and other integral theorists to the general area of curriculum theory and instruction, healing and spiritual development, and specifically to social emancipatory praxis, since the early 1980s. His philosophy is liberational and grounded not so much in the human potential or new age movements of which he's often critical, but ground more in a path beginning with the theory and practice of Re-evaluation Co-counseling, Integral Studies, Sacred Warriorship Studies, Critical Theory and the Fearlessness Tradition.

A self-proclaimed fearologist and cultural critic, therapeutic counselor, artist and educator, with a BSc in Environmental Biology, a BEd in Science Secondary Education, an M.A. in Adult Education and a Ph.D. in Curriculum & Instruction, his transdisciplinary research as a scholar and public intellectual has led to many published exhibitions, monographs and articles--while he continues to lecture, coach and counsel in private practice, facilitate workshops, and engage in trans(per)formative artistic practices and collaborations. He is former founder/teacher of the School of Sacred Warriorship (1993-96), co-founder and Director of the In Search of Fearlessness Research Institute (1989-) (http://www.feareducation.com), and founder Director of the Center for Spiritual Inquiry & Integral Education (http://csiie.org). His personal website can be found at http://loveandfearsolutions.com/

A prolific writer with over two hundred publications since 1974, his latest book, The World's Fearlessness Teachings: A Critical Integral Approach to Fear Management/Education for the 21st Century was published in the late fall of 2010 by University Press of America (Rowman & Littlefield). Michael is a certified school teacher and a Level-2 Spiral Dynamics Integral Technology facilitator. Born and raised in Western Canada, he has recently moved to Carbondale, IL, USA with his wife/partner, Barbara Bickel. Michael (pronounced my-ky-el), formerly Robert M. Fisher. He lives in conscious abstinence, as spiritual practice, without a motor vehicle, ownership of house or land, TV set, and the titillation of Facebook and Twitter.

It's a good interview featuring two REALLY smart people - check it out!

Men and the Future of the Integral Movement--with R. Michael Fisher

Jul 22, 2014

As the third and last of my special dialogues devoted to giving people a taste for the contents of our book, yesterday I interviewed Dr. R. Michael Fisher (who is also my father) on his chapter in our anthology entitled "Are Men Tragically Hopeless? A Critical Integralists' Perspective". A chapter which situates men at a significant point of crisis in evolutionary history and presents the case for a radical shift in how we think about men's liberation. Responding critically to both integral and postmodern theory, and drawing from his personal experience, Fisher's chapter follows the developments and struggles of men in conscious community and advocates for the liberation of both genders by working from the ruins of hopelessness.

In this, dialogue we explore Fisher's unique approach to men's liberation work as a practice of social identity development which includes political, economic, cultural, and social systems perspectives. We also chart and personally reflect on the history of the integral movement, and discuss important critiques of integral theory and leadership, while exploring our own relationship to the questions of gender as father and daughter.

Download this Dialogue as an MP3

This was a provocative dialogue that touches on many topical issues. At times theoretical, at times deeply personal, and at times controversial in our discussion of men, women and the integral movement.

This is the third of a series of three dialogues I conducted in preparation for the launch of my book this month, in order to give a taste of some of the topics that will be covered in the anthology. Click here to see and listen to all three free interviews I hosted for this series, with Diane Musho Hamilton, Dr. Elizabeth Debold, and Dr. Warren Farrell.

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My book, Integral Voices on Sex, Gender and Sexuality: Critical Inquiries, co-edited with Sarah E. Nicholson, is now available on Kindle through amazon! Paperback and hardcovers will be available August 1st.

I also put together a short video trailer for our book this weekend on imovie, I'm not a professional, but I liked how it turned out, and it was a lot of fun! Check it out:

There's also seven days left to enter our draw for a free copy of our book before it is published, through Goodreads. 

If you'd like to receive automatic updates when a new dialogue is posted, you can subscribe to my new Poetic Justice iTunes podcast page, which I've recently created and uploaded all my dialogues to. This will give you free access and automatic updates on all my Poetic Justice Dialogues in future.

Sarah Nicholson, my co-editor for this anthology, and I have also created a group Facebook page, where many of these dialogues and topics related to sex, gender, and sexuality are being discussed in more depth. If you'd like to join the group conversation, please click this highlighted link and request to be added.

Enjoy....

The Missing Myth: A New Vision of Same-Sex Love - An Interview with Gilles Herrada

In this interview from last summer, Vanessa Fisher (co-editor of Integral Voices on Sex, Gender, and Spirituality, scheduled for release in July, 2014) interviews one of the contributors, Gilles Herrada, about his book, The Missing Myth: A New Vision of Same-Sex Love. Here is the publisher's ad copy for the book:

If homosexual behavior is an aberration from the standpoint of reproduction, why is it widespread among humans, primates, and a myriad of other animal species, and why has it been favored by evolution? And if homosexuality is considered a moral problem based on religious beliefs, why were more homosexuals exterminated under the brief reigns of such secular regimes as the Communists and the Nazis than during the entire Christian Inquisition. Why is everything about homosexuality always a paradox? In The Missing Myth, Gilles Herrada tackles the many questions about the role and meaning of homosexuality in the evolution of our species and the development of civilization: what evolutionary edge same-sex relationships have provided to the human species; what biological mechanisms generate the sexual diversity that we observe; why homosexual behavior ended up being prohibited worldwide; why homophobia has persisted throughout history; why the homosexual community resurfaced after World War II; and others.

I've had the good fortune of reading Gilles book and I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to understand the depth and complexities of same-sex love - including its rejection and the still persistent homophobia many people express.

The interview is excellent - enjoy.

The Missing Myth: A New Vision of Same-Sex Love

An Interview with Gilles Herrada by Vanessa D. Fisher


Download this Dialogue as an MP3


Gilles Herrada, Ph.D., is a research scientist, a writer, and life coach at LifeAsACreation. He has worked at the universities of Nice, Paris, Columbia, and Harvard, and is published internationally.
In this Dialogue, I interview Gilles about his recently published book, The Missing Myth: A New Vision of Same-Sex Love.

Below is a short quote from the book, which offers a taste of the new and expansive context Gilles opens in his book for re-visioning same-sex love...

After having been stigmatized as a sin or a perversion by two millenniums of homophobic culture, a mere half-century of well-intentioned pro-homosexual discourse has left homosexuality impoverished, truncated, disjointed, and ripped apart. Why is this? Modern homosexual identity only started to emerge in the nineteenth century and really grounded itself no earlier than the second half of the twentieth century. In this respect, this identity is extremely young, and because of the historical cultural context in which it was born, modern homosexuality has essentially been conceived and theorized within a biological, psychoanalytic, and sociological, and hence profoundly materialistic context.

As a result, modern homosexuality exists in body and mind, but has no soul.

Modern homosexuality has been analyzed and rationalized by modernists, contextualized and even deconstructed by postmodernists, but not many have dared to give it meaning…. As a consequence, the sacred dimension of modern homosexuality—symbolic and spiritual, inevitably—has remained largely ignored by the homosexual discourse, leaving its brutal rejection by traditional religions still unanswered.

In this sense, the original and somewhat humble premise of The Missing Myth is that homosexuality has yet to discover itself..."

While at Harvard, Gilles discovered a large family of genes involved in the detection of pheromones, those “secret” odors that trigger animal sexual and social behaviors. Gilles also attended and facilitated programs in what is commonly labeled as “personal development.” These workshops gave him the rare opportunity to discuss with homophobic men in an open and intimate setup. This offered him a unique chance to inquire into the mechanisms of homophobia empathically, that is from a homophobic standpoint.

Part of his research work regarding homosexuality’s history was presented at the First Integral Theory Conference in 2008 and will soon be published in the anthology titled Integral Voices on Sex, Gender, and Spirituality, co-edited by Sarah Nicholson and Vanessa D. Fisher, to be published by SUNY Press.

Gilles currently lives in New York City.
This Dialogue was recorded July 11, 2013

Elana Millman - Interviews with Men on Sex and Sexuality

Interesting . . . this comes from the Good Men Project.

Elana Millman - Interviews with Men on Sex and Sexuality

What would the average man on the street when asked “Where did you learn about sex?” or “Do you think porn has changed men’s relationship to sex?” 

Elana Millman took to the streets to interview real guys to find out what they really think about sex in our society. 

Do you agree? Disagree? 

What would you tell Elana if she stopped you?

Ms Interview: Rewriting Masculinity with “The Good Men Project”

In a strange sort of inversion, Kyle Bachan (a man), writing for Ms. Magazine's blog, interviewed Lisa Hickey (a woman) who is CEO of the Good Men Project. Perhaps it's a sign that things really are changing when a man can write for a women's magazine that supports feminism, and that a woman can be CEO of an organization devoted to conversations about being a good man.

This interview is from February of 2011, but it's still interesting. At 2.5 years of age, how do you think the Good Men Project has done in promoting the cultural dialogue about being a good man?

INTERVIEW: Rewriting Masculinity with “The Good Men Project”

February 7, 2011 By Kyle Bachan

Last June marked the beginning of The Good Men Project–an online magazine that this very website described as “what enlightened masculinity might look like in the 21st century.” Now that they’ve had several months to settle into the blogosphere, I caught up with Good Men Media’s CEO, Lisa Hickey, to talk about their first half-year and the future of Good Men:

Ms. Blog: What were your initial goals for this project and how have they changed or evolved over time?

Lisa Hickey: Our initial goal for the project was very simple: It was simply to start a conversation about what it means to be a good man. The original way that we did that was through a book that Tom Matlack had put together—the defining moments in men’s lives. They were stories about these really interesting moments, whether it was the time that a husband got kicked out on the street for being a cheat and a drunk, or the time that a man discovers that his son has autism, or someone who goes off to war and then finds out he can’t live life as a civilian. Those moments where they really have to make these choices and think about what is good, what does this mean to me as both a man and a good man. That was the very simple idea that drove everything forward.

Were there other magazines that influenced you?

Mostly magazines that we didn’t want to aspire to (laughs). Part of the secondary goal was we felt that the way men are portrayed in the media these days is often not very positive. Men are depicted as cheaters, villains or couch potatoes, or dumb idiots who only want to talk about sex and sports. I don’t mean to overgeneralize it, but I think that that’s a common perception of the way the media portrays men. Part of our mission was to change that and say, ‘Hey, men are much more multidimensional than they’re portrayed.’ In the same way that feminism took the idea of women being only one-dimensional and seen as sex objects or housewives and opened up the door to have people view them as very complex, multi-dimensional people, we wanted to do the same thing with men.

What would you consider to be the defining features of a good men’s magazine?

One that talks about the often provocative subjects that people don’t normally talk about in public, gives insights to the way that decisions are made around moral or ethical issues and is not afraid of polarizing topics. That’s one thing we have learned as we’ve gone along: We are hated by both feminists and men’s rights groups a lot of times because they don’t think that we’re doing enough for either group. We embrace that. We say, ‘Great. Disagree with us, come join the conversation, write for us, let’s hear your voice.’ because we want to understand what the issues are and not judge them.

What have these groups been criticizing in particular?

We’ve been accused of misandry by the men’s rights groups. We’ve been accused of using shameful language around men. We’ve been accused of not understanding the issues that men face in divorce courts and how they are screwed out of getting custody for their children so often. On the other side of the spectrum, we’ve been accused of using language that is pro-male and anti-woman, to have outdated views of feminism, to be part of this patriarchy, to be creating a network around men when it should be a network around humans. So we definitely get very specific things from both sides.

What have you learned then, in the first several months of operation?

That the conversation is even more important than we originally thought, in part because of these polarizing groups and the fact that we are able to bring them together. I like nothing better than when we put an article out there and we get the opposing sides arguing amongst themselves in the blog comments.

Going to your site’s mission statement, you wrote, ‘We suppose we are a difficult magazine to categorize and that’s exactly how we like it.’ Do you think that your site can be categorized now? Or can you more properly identify the site’s allies?

I think that it’s difficult to categorize for two reasons. One is that we do have these polarizing topics and because we allow people to talk about both sides of the issue it is hard to tell which side we’re on sometimes. So some of our most controversial topics … when people have made comments that are against that topic we say, ‘Come write a post for us,’ and then we publish that post.

Do you have a favorite article?

I can’t say that I have a favorite. I think that in general, my favorite ones are the articles that are about individual men confronting something in their personal life and working through how they arrived at an insight about that. And telling that story in a very personal, narrative way. For instance, we had Gregory Sherl who writes about his struggles with OCD and we had Matt Salesses who has a column called “Love Recorded” where his first post was about the courtship of this woman who he then later married—it’s a written reality TV show.

What are the future plans for the Good Men Project?

We’d like to continue expanding it into a true media platform and not just a magazine. Right now we have everything from another film that we might make, to a play that we’re writing and hoping to produce on Broadway in the near future. So to really expand the discussion into different media channels and engage people in this discussion of what it means to be a good man in whatever interesting way is possible.

From Men's Journal, an interview with one of my favorite writer/directors, Aaron Sorkin. He was writer and creator of The West Wing and Sports Night, writer of The American President (which is where the idea for The West Wing came from), and writer of The Social Network, among many other credits.

The Last Word: Aaron Sorkin

By Sean Woods  Aug 2012

The 'Newsroom' creator on writing, regret, and the one thing that lives up to the hype. 

Getty Images

What advice would you give to younger you?
 

To try to enjoy things a little more and not be so nervous about everything. I would give a lot of advice because I've made a lot of mistakes. Certainly I'd tell myself not to try drugs. Once you do that, you're going to change the trajectory of your life in a terrible way.

Don't drugs help the creative process, at least for a time?
 

Yeah. If we're going to have a really honest conversation about this, drugs haven't hurt my record collection any. My big fear when I quit drugs was that I wouldn't be able to write anymore. Because if you're a writer and you're on a roll – and I was on a roll when I was high – you don't want to change anything about the way you work. But I'm 11 years clean now, and I've been much more productive in those 11 years than I was in the 11 years prior. But even if I hadn't been, it wouldn't have been worth it.

What motivates you?
 

My biggest motivation is that I love writing. And I love putting on a show. Also, fear of failure is a huge motivation. About a year and a half ago, I won the Oscar, and I walked off stage and was taken through a labyrinth of press rooms, and I don't think five minutes had gone by before I thought to myself, "Oh, shit...I have to do this every time now, or it's a failure."

What's the best way to end a relationship?
 

I've had to end a few. I have a fantastic divorce. Julia, my ex-wife, and I split up when our daughter Roxy was only five months old, so her parents living apart is the only life she's ever known. We don't pass her back and forth, there's no schedule. We often do things as a family. We take vacations together, we go out to dinner together. We hang out together. I consider myself extremely lucky that I have this kind of divorce. So whatever we did is the way to do it.

How has being a dad changed you?
 

Being a father is the only thing that lives up to the hype. When I'm with my daughter – when we're doing homework together or hanging out watching a movie or kicking a soccer ball around or doing any of the things that we do – that's the only time that I feel like I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing. When I'm with Roxy, it's a great relief to no longer be the most important thing in my life.

How does a man know when someone is bullshitting him?
 

Here's the problem: When someone's bullshitting you, they're usually telling you something you want to hear, so you don't want it to be bullshit, and so you haven't turned on your bullshit detector. Which is why, when you can find people who are honest with you, you should stay close to them.

What's the one thing every man should experience before he dies?

Well, love, for sure, and a steak at Peter Luger's.

How should a man grow old?

The trick is that it's pretty easy to get angry at youth because you're so envious of it. They've got so much more of their life left. They've got more energy than you do, the world is kind of calibrated toward them. Skip that. It's not going to do any good.

What do Americans not understand about Hollywood?

You know, it always kind of cracks me up when the Right feels that Hollywood is anti-America. No industry has come closer to creating the illusion of that America than Hollywood has. We're the ones who created the idea of pioneering the West with John Wayne. We're the ones who created the image of a nuclear American family where everybody's happy. We did all that. You have the image of America that you have because we invented it and put it on a screen.

How should a man handle regret?

Oh, gosh, regret is the worst. There's a lot of things in my life that I regret, but if I could find a way to draw a line from that thing to my daughter, and say, "If it hadn't been for that stupid thing, I never would've done this stupid thing, which led me to this good thing, which led me to Roxy." Then I feel great. Then I don't care.