Diane Abbott - The Crisis of Masculinity

From the Institute of Arts and Letters:

With rapid economic and social change leaving Britain’s men behind, Labour politician Diane Abbott imagines brave solutions to an impending social disaster.

The Crisis of Masculinity

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.

* * * * *

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....

Ray Williams - The Male Identity Crisis and the Decline of Fatherhood

This article appeared in Psychology Today's blog section a few days ago, presumably timed for Father's Day on this coming Sunday. In it, author Ray Williams laments the crisis in male identity and the decline of the nuclear family.

Williams identifies a real and serious problem - family research tends to focus on mothers and children, healthcare agencies tend to exclude fathers (unwittingly), child welfare agencies tend to exclude fathers from case planning, and the list could go on.

For their part, men are less engaged in the family because so many children are now born to single mothers. We do not have fathers, we have "baby daddies."

Perhaps this is a return to our primal background - males deposit sperm in as many women as possible to ensure their gene line continues. Meanwhile, the females are left to tend to the children. When there was a strong tribal community to raise children collectively, this may have worked. Now, however, we lack that support system (unless there is a strong family support) and women are left to raise children on their own, often in economically disadvantaged circumstance.

Clearly, there is a problem. Our society has changed exponentially since the industrial revolution.

The solution to change, however, is seldom to "return to basics," or to reclaim the "golden age." Going backward does not move us forward through change. 

If we want to deal with this problem, we need to create new structures that can include the father in the raising of the child, whether their is a nuclear family or not. And we need to move agencies toward a more inclusive model of the family, in which the father is included in health care planning, education, and child welfare.

But that isn't where Williams goes with this article. He seems to favor a return to the traditional family, which is all well and good, except that is not where we are heading as a society.

The Male Identity Crisis and the Decline of Fatherhood

Is America becoming a fatherless society?

Published on June 8, 2014 by Ray Williams in Wired for Success

America is rapidly becoming a fatherless society, or perhaps more accurately, an absentee father society. The importance and influence of fathers in families has been in significant decline since the Industrial Revolution and is now reaching critical proportions.

As Alexander Mitscherlich argues in Society Without A Father, there has been a "progressive loss of the father's authority and diminution of his power in the family and over the family."

"If present trends continue, writes David Popenoe, a professor of sociology at Rutgers University, "the percentage of American children living apart from their biological fathers will reach 50% by the next century." He argues "this massive erosion of fatherhood contributes mightily to many of the major social problems of our time...Fatherless children have a risk factor of two to three times that of fathered children for a wide range of negative outcomes, including dropping out of high school, giving birth as a teenager and becoming a juvenile delinquent."

According to David Blankenhorn, author of Fatherless America, chair of the National Fatherhood Initiative and founder/president of the Institute for American Values, organization, and research conducted by Popenoe and scores of other researchers:

• Approximately 30% of all American children are born into single-parent homes, and for the black community, that figure is 68%;
• Fatherless children are at a dramatically greater risk of drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, suicide, poor educational performance, teen pregnancy, and criminality, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Center for Health Statistics.
• Over half of all children living with a single mother are living in poverty, a rate 5 to 6 times that of kids living with both parents;
• Child abuse is significantly more likely to occur in single parent homes than in intact families;
• 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes according to the U.S. Bureau of the Census;
• 72% of adolescent murderers grew up without fathers. 60% of America's rapists grew up the same way according to a study by D. Cornell (et al.), in Behavioral Sciences and the Law;
• 63% of 1500 CEOs and human resource directors said it was not reasonable for a father to take a leave after the birth of a child;
• 71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes according to the National Principals Association Report on the State of High Schools;
• 80% of rapists motivated with displaced anger come from fatherless homes according to a report in Criminal Justice & Behavior;
• In single-mother families in the U.S. about 66% of young children live in poverty;
• 90% of all homeless and runaway children are from fatherless homes;
• Children from low-income, two-parent families outperform students from high-income, single-parent homes. Almost twice as many high achievers come from two-parent homes as one-parent homes according to a study by the Charles F. Kettering Foundation.
• 85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes according to a study by the Center for Disease Control;
• Of all violent crimes against women committed by intimates about 65% were committed by either boy-friends or ex-husbands, compared with 9 % by husbands;
• Girls living with non-natal fathers (boyfriends and stepfathers) are at higher risk for sexual abuse than girls living with natal fathers;
• Daughters of single mothers are 53% more likely to marry as teenagers, 111% more likely to have children as teenagers, 164% more likely to have a premarital birth and 92% more likely to dissolve their own marriages.
• A large survey conducted in the late 1980s found that about 20% of divorced fathers had not seen his children in the past year, and that fewer than 50% saw their children more than a few times a year.
• Juvenile crime, the majority of which is committed by males, has increased six-fold since 1992;
• In a longitudinal study of 1,197 fourth-grade students, researchers observed "greater levels of aggression in boys from mother-only households than from boys in mother-father households," according to a study published in the Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology.
• The Scholastic Aptitude Test scores have declined more than 70 points in the past two decades; children in single-parent families tend to score lower on standardized tests and to receive lower grades in school according to a Congressional Research Service Report.

Blankenhorn argues that America is facing not just the loss of fathers, but also the erosion of the ideal of fatherhood. Few people doubt the fundamental importance of mothers, Popenoe comments, but increasingly the question of whether fathers are really necessary is being raised and said by many to be a merely a social role that others - mothers, partners, stepfathers, uncles and aunts, and grandparents - can play.

"The scale of marital breakdowns in the West since 1960 has no historical precedent that I know of," says Lawrence Tone, a noted Princeton University family historian, "There has been nothing like it for the last 2,000 years, and probably longer." Consider what has happened to children. Most estimates are that only about 50% of the children born during the 1970-84 "baby bust" period will still live with their natural parents by age 17-a staggering drop from nearly 80%.

Despite current interest in father involvement in families, an extremely large proportion of family research focuses on mothers and children. Health care agencies and other organizations exclude fathers, often unwittingly. Starting with pregnancy and labor and delivery most appointments are set up for mothers and held at times when fathers work. The same is true for most pediatric visits. School records and files in family service organizations often have the child's and mother's name on the label, and not the father's. In most family agency buildings, the walls are typically pastel colors, the pictures on the wall are of mothers, flowers and babies, the magazines in the waiting room are for women and the staff is predominantly female. In most welfare offices, fathers are not invited to case planning meetings, and when a home visitor is greeted at the door by a man, she often asks to speak with the mother. Given these scenarios, fathers are likely to get the message that they are invisible or irrelevant to their children's welfare, unless it involves financial support.

Popenoe and others have examined the role of fathers in raising children and found there are significant differences than that for mothers. For example, an often-overlooked dimension of fathering is play. From their children's birth through adolescence, fathers tend to emphasize play more than caretaking. The play is both physically stimulating and exciting. It frequently resembles an apprenticeship or teaching relationships, and emphasizes often teamwork and competitive testing of abilities. The way fathers play affects everything from the management of emotions to intelligence and academic achievement. It is particularly important in promoting the essential virtue of self-control.

A committee assembled by the Board of Children and Families of the National Research Council, concluded "children learn critical lessons about how to recognize and deal with highly charged emotions in the content of playing with their fathers. Fathers, in effect, give children practice in regulating their own emotions and recognizing others' emotional clues."

At play and in other realms, fathers tend to stress competition, challenge, initiative, risk taking and independence. Mothers, as caretakers, stress emotional security and personal safety. Father's involvement seems to be linked to improved quantitative and verbal skills, improved problem-solving ability and higher academic achievement for children. Men also have a vital role to play in promoting cooperation and other "soft" virtues. Involved fathers, it turns out according to one 26 year longitudinal research study may be of special importance for the development of empathy in children.

Family life-marriage and child rearing-is a civilizing force for men. It encourages them to develop prudence, cooperativeness, honesty, trust, self-sacrifice and other habits that can lead to success as an economic provider by setting a good example.

Mark Finn and Karen Henwood, writing about the issue of masculinity and fatherhood, in the British Journal of Social Psychology, argue that the traditional view of masculinity, with its focus on power, aggression, economic security, and "maleness", and the emerging new view of fatherhood, which incorporates many aspects of motherhood is a source of struggle for many men who become fathers.

In a study of fatherhood in popular TV sitcoms, Timothy Allen Pehlke and his colleagues concluded that fathers are generally shown to be relatively immature, unhelpful and incapable of taking care of themselves in comparison with other family members. In addition, the researchers found that fathers often served as the butt of family members' jokes. All of these characterizations, while the intention may be humor, depicted fathers as being socially incompetent and objects of derision.

In a study of depictions of fathers in the best selling children's picture books, researcher Suzanne M. Flannery Quinn concluded that of the 200 books analyzed, there were only 24 books where the father appears alone, and only 35 books where mother and father appear together. The author concludes, "because fathers are not present or prominent in a large number of these books, readers are given only a narrow set of images and ideas from which they can construct an understanding of the cultural expectations of fatherhood and what I means to be a father."

It seems to me that the issue of the decline of fatherhood and the problem of the male identity crisis are inextricably intertwined.

In my Psychology Today article, Our male identity crisis: What will happen to men?, I said, "In a post-modern world lacking clear-cut borders and distinctions, it has been difficult to know what it means to be a man and even harder to feel good about being one. The many boundaries of a gendered world built around the opposition of work and family-production versus reproduction, competition versus cooperation, hard vs. soft-have been blurred, and men are groping in the dark for their identity."

Overwhelmingly, the portrayal of men and the male identity in contemporary western societies is mostly negative. Men today are extensively demonized, marginalized and objectified, in a way reminiscent of what happened to women. The issue of the male identity is of crucial importance because males are falling behind in school, committing more suicides and crimes, dying younger and being treated for conditions such as ADHD more than females. There has also been a loss of fatherhood in society as artificial insemination by anonymous donors is on the rise. Further, medical experiments have shown that male sperm can now be grown artificially in a laboratory. There has been a rise in divorce rates where in most cases, child custody is granted to mothers. Continuous negative portrayal of men in the media, along with the feminization of men and loss of fatherhood in society, has caused confusion and frustration in younger generation males, as they do not have a specific role model and are less able to define their role in society.

From once being seen as successful breadwinners, heads of families and being respected leaders, men today are the butt of jokes in the popular media. A Canadian research group, Nathanson and Young, conducted research on the changing role of men and media and concluded that widely popular TV programs such as The Simpsons present the father character, Homer, as lazy, chauvinistic, irresponsible, and stupid and his son, Bart, as mischievous, rude and cruel to his sister. By comparison, the mother and daughter are presented as thoughtful, considerate and mild-natured. The majority of TV shows and advertisements present men as stupid buffoons, or aggressive evil tyrants or insensitive and shallow "studs" for women's pleasure.

According to J.R. Macnamara, in the book, Media and the Male Identity: The Making and Remaking of Men, less than 20% of media profiles reflected positive themes for men. Violent crimes, including murder, assault, and armed robberies accounted for over 55% of all media reporting of male activities. Macnamara says that over 30% of all discussion in the media of male sexuality was in relation to pedophilia, and males' heterosexuality associated with masculinity is seen as violent, aggressive and dominating. Men are frequently shown in TV shows and movies as lacking in commitment in relationships and are shown as frequently cheating on women. And with increasing frequency, women are shown on TV shows and movies as being independent single mothers, not needing a man.

Guy Garcia, author of The Decline of Men: How The American Male is Tuning Out, Giving Up and Flipping Off His Future, argues that many men bemoan a "fragmentation of male identity," in which husbands are asked to take on unaccustomed familial roles such as child care and housework, while wives bring in the bigger paychecks. "Women really have become the dominant gender," says Garcia, "what concerns me is that guys are rapidly falling behind. Women are becoming better educated than men, earning more than men, and, generally speaking, not needing men at all. Meanwhile, as a group, men are losing their way."

"The crisis of fatherhood, then is ultimately a cultural crisis, a sharp decline in the traditional sense of communal responsibly, " contends Popenoe; "It therefore follows that to rescue the rescue the endangered institution of fatherhood, we must regain our sense of community."

So as we annually celebrate Father's Day, and reflect on it's importance to social stability, more men in our culture need to find their male identity and commit to the central importance of fatherhood.

You can follow me at Ray Williams Associates or on Twitter.

From The Conversation, this is another useful refutation of the purported crisis of masculinity. This rebuttal gets it right - the only crisis is in how limited the cultural definition of masculinity.

There’s no crisis in masculinity, only a narrow definition of men

Every generation declares some kind of crisis in masculinity. And women today aren’t shy of pronouncing a masculine emergency: Hannah Rosin did so in her book The End of Men while MP Diane Abbott warned of a disaffected “fight club” generation.

31 January 2014
Damien Ridge - Professor of Health Studies at University of Westminster 
 

 
Men needn’t be at loggerheads over their identity. Eoin Gardiner

Every generation declares some kind of crisis in masculinity. And women today aren’t shy of pronouncing a masculine emergency: Hannah Rosin did so in her book The End of Men while MP Diane Abbott warned of a disaffected “fight club” generation.

But where are the male voices? The few that are in the media like Ally Fogg and recently Channel 4 News presenter Jon Snow agree that, for whatever reason, men are not very good at talking openly about (and organising around) the deeper issues affecting them.

But by the end of 2013 the term “meninism” started trending on Twitter, with tongue-in-cheek hashtags like #MeninistTwitter. While some of it took unhelpful digs at feminism, a lot of men surprised themselves about how much they actually needed a forum to talk about being a man today.

Pain is as real for men

The hurt that men feel in life is very real, if only we dared to listen. Every one of the 3,784 male suicides in England and Wales in 2012 – an astonishing 77% of all suicides – tells a painful story, and the repercussions are heartbreaking for their loved ones. It’s often argued that men are just more likely to use effective means to suicide, but the evidence suggests that men face particular pressures, for example financial.

Some feminists are afraid to give men a voice for fear of giving them more power. But my experience as a researcher and psychotherapist is that men open up insightfully when it’s safe to do so. And reflecting on male stories is part of the solution, not the problem.

Whether or not the idea of meninism sticks, the MeninistTwitter hashtag, the declaration by men’s anti-suicide charity CALM that 2014 is the year of the male, and the upcoming Being a Man festival at London’s Southbank Centre, show something is in the air, and I would venture a few observations.

Mind the gap

I signed up to the charter for CALM’s Year of the Male because I thought it was a great idea, even though I didn’t agree with some of its definitions of male roles. Men in the men’s movement sometimes tie themselves in knots trying to relate their own experiences to the yardstick of roles society expects of them.

In research interviews I’ve carried out, men instead reveal how complex their issues are, like about the early care they received (or not) in their lives, their current social circumstances, their identities as men, and their relationships with others.

So it seems to me that everyday men, academics and those in the men’s movement don’t often communicate or understand each other. This is something that could be bridged and hopefully in 2014 we’ll will begin to do this.

Masculinity is a beautiful thing

There is a grain of truth in what feminist Camille Paglia stridently wrote: “The way gender is being taught in the universities – in a very anti-male way, it’s all about neutralisation of maleness.”

As in the media, academics too easily fall into the trap of depicting men as “damaged and damage doing”. Even if there’s acceptance of multiple ways of being masculine, dominant descriptions by academics commonly caricaturise men as emotionally constipated risk takers with no interest in their own well-being or in seeking help.

But depending on the circumstances, men can be very interested in wellness, being intimate with others and in consulting with professionals like counsellors. And the dominant ideals of masculinity are not as toxic as is so often fantasised.

All the world is a stage, and masculinity is defined by the way that men perform in public, and so what is considered masculine can change. At one extreme, in a South African prison, men who had been raped were considered by other inmates to have been de-masculinised even if the encounter was non-concensual. But in some other societies (including by heterosexual men in the west), where homosexuality was once viewed as unmasculine, its increasing acceptance shows that concepts of masculinity can be flexible.

And far from experiencing “crisis”, men and concepts of masculinity adapt to the world. Even dysfunctional “knuckleheads” (men who consciously act in ways that are harmful or risky) reveal hidden insights when given the space to open up and reveal hopes of redemption and acceptance.

It’s not always about power

It is important not to define masculinity so narrowly in terms of power, for example as acts “aimed at claiming privilege, eliciting deference, and resisting exploitation.” This loses sight of other considerations, like the aesthetics and the celebratory side of masculinity. It also risks sidelining the relative confidence and power of women to negotiate emotional relationships with men.

Let’s not forget that men are also shaped by forces not directly linked to gender. For example, unemployment and relationship breakdowns are known to hit men particularly hard, and are clearly linked to suicide.

Meninism (or whatever this emerging space becomes) may overlap with and learn from feminism, but it need not compete with it. Nor does it need to be misogynistic or emotionally constipated, or hostile to feminism. But it does need to involve the men’s movement, and develop its own voice and scholarly concepts separate to feminism.

Examining how men “do gender” while being open to the meanings of male narratives is as good a place to start as any. Research shows that boys and men know instinctively that their own banter, and the social winds that blow, can make it tricky for them to express themselves.

And despite inevitable competitiveness, masculinity can be less toxic than society thinks, and even a positive force for change. To gain momentum, meninism will need to authentically explore institutional forces, our own vulnerabilities, and mistakes as well as triumphs. It’s not about hierarchy of empathy, victimhood or deservedness: both men and women matter equally.

Disclosure Statement

Damien Ridge receives various funding grants (e.g. MRC, Nelsons) to do research related to men and masculinity. He is a Trustee of the male anti-suicide charity, CALM.

The Conversation is funded by the following universities: Aberdeen, Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol, Cardiff, City, Durham, Glasgow Caledonian, Goldsmiths, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Nottingham, The Open University, Queen's University Belfast, Salford, Sheffield, Surrey, UCL and Warwick.

It also receives funding from: Hefce, Hefcw, SAGE, SFC, RCUK, The Nuffield Foundation, The Wellcome Trust and The Alliance for Useful Evidence

Is Masculinity in Crisis? Singer Billy Bragg and Director Topher Campbell Discuss

From The Independent, this is an interesting discussion between two guys (who happen to be somewhat famous) about what is means to be a man today. They look at the supposed crisis in masculinity, how we define masculinity, and a lot of related topics.

It would be cool to see a whole series of these kinds of discussions appear in the media - between celebrities and regular blokes alike. These are important discussions not only for men, but for the culture at large as we redefine what masculinity looks like in a postmodern context.

Is masculinity in crisis? Singer Billy Bragg and director Topher Campbell have their say...

Fighting, football, feminism… The singer-songwriter Billy Bragg, 57, and the theatre director, writer and film-maker Topher Campbell, 42, discuss what it means to be a man today

Robert Epstein
Sunday 26 January 2014

Is there, as Diane Abbott claimed last year, a 'crisis of masculinity' in Britain?

BB For straight white men, we've been at a cultural apex in England. We've not run up against the barriers that women have as a gender, that people of colour have, so the need to analyse ourselves hasn't really arisen. A lot of men are acting with hostility towards the current wave of feminism because they can't tell the difference between a personal accusation of sexism and a structural critique of the way sexism is endemic in our culture.One of the issues is that there is no single place where we talk about these things, similar to the way that Mumsnet works. We have to give credit to women; coming up against various glass ceilings, they have spent a lot more time discussing how they fit into society than we have. These debates aren't going on anywhere that I can see within male groups.

TC I think that if there is a crisis of masculinity, it's a white crisis and a heterosexual crisis. I think that perhaps Diane, as a black woman with a son, was talking a little bit about the way in which the traditional behaviour of certain guys is under scrutiny. For black men, this has always been the case; and the idea of identity has always been explored in a lot of different ways for gay men because we have always been in opposition to certain ideas that perhaps would be the best-received ideas of masculinity. The idea of examining or understanding masculinity, if you're gay or gay-identified, might be something that impacts you from a very young age. So while, as a gay man, you might get involved [from youth] with organisations where people do have these conversations, a mainstream forum for lots of diverse men to get together just doesn't exist.

BB Is there a Dadsnet? Sort of, but it's only for new dads. There's no practical Blokesnet or Geezernet or whatever you'd want to call it.


MP Diane Abbott claimed last year that there was a 'crisis of masculinity' in Britain (Getty Images)
So what defines a contemporary male identity?

TC For me, it's very difficult to enter this debate from a central point of view. As a black person and as a gay person, I come from a very marginal place, away from the rut of a perceived black masculinity, which is very narrow, of a certain machismo; and away from mainstream ideas of the kind of David Furnish-Elton John kind of gay respectability. You know, I'm not respectable. I come in a very conventional framework, in the way that I look, but to be out and gay and queer is very disruptive, because what you're saying is that my place in society is equal to your place. And it's disruptive because you hear, in the tunes of my brothers who make rap or dance music, words such as "faggot" and "batty man", and that it's not right to be a batty man because it's a white thing.

Then you hear the heterosexual idea that you can only really be acceptable if you have a loving relationship in a nice kind of parameter around professional, middle-classness. Actually, some gay lives are very messy. We get chucked out of homes, we get bullied at school, we don't get promoted at work, we can't choose certain professions, we can't even travel certain places or we get beaten and killed in certain countries. The whole notion of conversation around masculinity is very interesting to me for that reason because it's that question of how we allow for difference; and if we're talking in terms of left-wing politics or feminism, the idea of "difference" can become very narrow.

BB For my generation, and for my son's, there has been no formal event that has shaped our masculinity. It's not like my father's generation – my father was 15 when the Second World War broke out, so that defined his masculinity. The same goes for my grandfather, whose life was defined by working in a factory and the First World War. For those of us who haven't been through some sort of ritual of manhood like that, our markers go right back to the playground. There, ideas of masculinity came about by identifying outsiders, and at my school that was the black kids, the Asian kids.

We actually had more in common with the black kids through music and football; the Asian kids didn't seem to be into that so much. And if you ended up at a school where there weren't any black or Asian kids, it was then ginger people. Of course queer was a big one, defining people as queer, even if they weren't, because they didn't match up to our ideals of masculinity. The problem is that as that is our primal experience in k declaring masculinity, sometimes when provoked we return to these playground impulses, we turn to the identification of outsiders. We're not just identified as men; we're identified as particular types of men that do particular things in the playground.


Bragg says: 'You need figures such as Tom Daley (pictured) to be able to come out and I think it's the same with masculinity' (Getty Images)
TC It's interesting because also tied in with that is the notion of violence, fighting your way into a status, a place. I used to fight at school and I'm sure you did a bit of fighting as well.

BB It's what bonds you; and that's unfortunate and a real problem. There's a lot of macho territorialism in negotiating how to be a grown man. We all struggle to overcome it, most of us don't think of it ourselves, but under pressure, when you're in a bar somewhere and someone starts pushing and shoving, you'd be surprised how close you get back to that place where you felt threatened at schools – or at least I would.

TC Because of my size, I've always had this issue. When I was at school, I was always a bit bigger, and everyone picked on me because I was taller and always looking down at people. Now that I'm older, if I was to go to a bar or club, people would think that I'm trouble because I'm a big guy. But then, of course, [in reality] I'm a sensitive artist, and all the different ideas people have of you dissolve when they actually get close to you. That's kind of interesting, because you're always in negotiation with your masculinity.

BB That's because we're dealing with other people's idea of masculinity, a weird standard of masculinity, a stereotype of masculinity that we either have to inhabit or push against or step back from.

TC That kind of primal playground is very different to what you then get at university. See, when I went to university, my background was quite mixed up; I lived with my mum for a bit in a very working-class community in Coventry, then I fought my way out through education, as I had some very enlightened and thought-provoking teachers. As soon as I went to university, there was a whole different series of experimentation of relationships, both sexual and friends – we call it bromance nowadays. So you had a different kind of playground of finding your way in life, and some of that was because of what people had experienced in that school playground and were trying to get away from.


Insightful: Turner Prize-winning artist Grayson Perry will be giving a talk at the Being a Man festival
What, then, does it mean to be a 'man' today?

TC As a younger guy, I was very much obsessed with how you become a man. All my older brothers were off getting married, women seemed to be the aim, but that wasn't my aim, so how do you live your life, how do you make it work? For a long time I've had this conversation with myself about relationships, and you're bombarded with conventionality. The liberation of queerness and gayness is to go and live your life how you can to be happy. I think one of the things you do is that you make a declaration of love; you say, at the end of the day I will love myself, I will love others in order to find my way forward in my life, because I may not want to be producing children and I may not want to be living the life in a semi-detached house somewhere.

BB We need role models to say that manhood is "this". The majority of men aren't out scrapping every night, beating their wives, getting drunk all the time or watching football. We can learn a lot from the debates that are going on around feminism, if only for insights. Women, people of colour, and of different sexualities, are exploring the ways they can define themselves and look at themselves and be critical of themselves. Men can learn a lot from that. Again, when you want to talk about these things, masculinity rears its ugly head. We should be examining ourselves and questioning whether the way this society is constructed is right or if it could be better structured. You need figures such as Tom Daley to be able to come out and do that, and I think it's the same with masculinity. We need people who come out and make this point, that masculinity exists in other forms, and it's not all just mainstream.

TC The more we articulate the presence and ability of differences, the better. Without making difference work, we can't find commonality.

How do you define your masculinity?

BB I've thought a lot about this: what defines my masculinity? In the end, the only thing I could really come up with were the things that were hanging on the wall in my office. There are pictures of my family, a certificate I got when I was in the Army for being the best intake in 1981 in the Royal Armoured Corps. There's a big picture of Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, and a West Ham shirt. I even have a picture of my dad from the war in his army uniform. I realised how male-oriented all these things in my office were. I looked at this shit on my wall and thought, "These are the things I've chosen to represent me." They are all bits of me but very male bits of me. I think about the three men I have the strongest experiences with – my father, my brother and my son – and I react to them in completely different ways. I'm sure my sense of masculinity has changed over time. It's not as though it's a monolithic structure.

TC The shape of masculinity is definitely changing. You look around and younger, teenage men, whether they are black, white, Asian, they are wearing skinny jeans. There's a whole shape difference in the gender representation, the way people define themselves, whether they are straight or gay. Self-determination is also an important part of my masculinity, as a black or a gay man or whatever. I feel as though I need to be able to have the courage and have that courage manifest through my life. What I don't want is someone to tell me what I can and can't do; as a man, I find that offensive and difficult to deal with. I will hit back and hit out at it, whether it's authoritative or personal. I think that's important about my masculinity because it's "my" masculinity, not a gay man's or a black man's.

Billy Bragg and Topher Campbell will be appearing at the Being a Man festival , which runs from Friday to 2 February at the Southbank Centre (southbankcentre.co.uk). Additional reporting by Zander Swinburne

 

This article comes from The Telegraph UK. There are more women - it seems - speaking up about the issues and problems facing men. This is true in the U.S. as much as it is in the UK. One could scan through the articles on this blog and make the same conclusion.

Why aren't men speaking up on gender issues?

From health and education to domestic violence, 2013 saw several individuals speak up about the problems facing men. But why were those people mostly women?

By Glen Poole
01 Jan 2014

Illustration by Jacqui Clark

Back in January 2013, the Universities Secretary, David Willetts, caused a flutter of controversy by proposing that white working class boys should be considered in the same way as ethnic minorities in university
 admissions.

The radical idea that men and boys need special treatment tends to unite people on the left and right in howls of derision as meritocratic conservatives baulk at the thought of creating “yet another minority group” and PC liberals rally to remind us that men don’t have any problems because men have all the power.

Yet as the year went by, the cries of “what about the men?” have continued to be heard in many quarters as we try to make sense of the overwhelming evidence that men and boys don’t have it all.

Mary Curnock Cook, the head of the university admissions service, Ucas, appeared to back Willetts, saying she was “very worried about the gap between males and females” and “beginning to look at men as looking more like the disadvantaged group”.

And it’s not just the world of education where men and boys are being attributed with minority status. The news that men are more likely to die from eight of the world’s top 10 most burdensome diseases was greeted by Dr Sarah Hawkes at the Institute of Global Health as more evidence that men are being ignored. According to Hawkes:

“When it comes to health, contrary to what most people would expect, men actually suffer at least equally and usually more from gender norms and gender behaviours than women do and have less access to the means to mitigate those norms.”

Meanwhile, Jane Powell, CEO of the UK’s only national male suicide prevention charity, CALM, told BBC Radio 4’s today programme that the Department for Health was failing to target suicide prevention work at men, because unlike other special interest groups, “we don’t really see men as needing help in anyway or as being vulnerable”.

Even the high-profile divorce lawyer Marilyn Stowe spoke up on behalf of men this year when she slammed the Ministry of Justice for excluding men from its legal aid guidance to victims of domestic violence.

You may have noticed by now that 80% of the voices quoted so far belong to women. When it comes to speaking out on these issues, it seems that men are suffering from “gender issue laryngitis” a term coined by the advertising giants M&C Saatchi last month, in their International Men’s Day report on modern manhood.

This “lack of voice” is a common complaint of “minority groups” and while the majority of people in positions of public power are still undeniably male, the personal concerns of the majority of men and boys, often remain unheard.

In October this year, Aftab Khan, father of four-year old Hamzah Khan who was allowed to starve to death in Bradford by his mother, complained that the police and social services ignored his warnings, saying:

“Nobody listens to the male in this country, nobody. There’ll be loads of fathers like me, all over, but nobody listens to us, nobody listens to the father and look what’s happened. I’ve got a dead son.”

One such father hit the front pages this month after being denied a relationship with his daughter for 12 years, despite having 82 court orders directing his ex to stop denying him access. While the unnamed man's story was told, the secrecy of the family courts demand that his real voice will never be heard by the public.

One area where more men’s personal stories are beginning to be heard is in popular culture. When Coronation Street ran a storyline about the character Tyrone Dobbs being abused by his wife, the charity ManKind reported that calls to its helpline trebled.

Survivors Manchester, another men’s charity, is also helping Hollyoaks develop a storyline about male rape and has already reported that more male victims of sexual abuse got help this year thanks to the publicity generated by Jimmy Savile and Operation Yewtree.

So while the personal has yet to become political for most men, more and more people are finding ways to grapple with the political challenges presented by the personal problems that men and boys face.

Personally I don’t believe defining men as a new “minority group” will help us, but claiming that we live in a meritocracy where everyone has an equal opportunity is as naïve as believing we can magically achieve equal outcomes for every man and woman.

David Willetts was right when he said our education system “seems to make it harder for boys and men to face down the obstacles in the way of learning”. Sometimes it takes collective action to ensure that every individual has an equal opportunity to thrive.

Men aren’t a minority, of course, but there are clearly areas where we don’t do as well on average as women and girls and in 2013 it became a little bit easier for people to speak out and say we could be doing a lot more to help all men and boys prosper. 


Related Articles

• Do we need International Men's Day? 19 Nov 2013
• Why do women initiate divorce more than men? 08 Oct 2013
• Face up to it: real men get depressed 21 Oct 2013

~ Glen Poole is Director at the consultancy Helping Men and author of the book Equality For Men

Jack O'Sullivan - The Masculinity Debate: No Wonder Men Stay Out of It

The masculinity debate: no wonder men stay out of it

Men who fear ridicule from women for talking about masculinity understandably clam up. Matriarchy has a lot to answer for

Jack O'Sullivan
The Guardian, Monday 20 May 2013

'A consequence of boys and men living in private matriarchies is that even the most senior male chief executive often lacks confidence in areas that might be defined as personal, private or family.'

The past week has again highlighted the inexplicable absence of an intelligent discussion conducted by men about ourselves. It's followed a familiar pattern: a leading female commentator – Diane Abbott on this occasion – diagnoses male ailments and prescribes her cures. What comes back from the patient? Silence. Can there be any group that is subject to so much debate and accusation, and is so apparently powerful – yet remains so utterly speechless?

It reminds me of a stereotypical scene: a woman challenging a man on some personal or domestic issue; him sitting before her silently, absorbing, stonewalling and eventually walking away. It's a dissatisfying experience for both. She complains to her friends. He has no one to talk to. Somewhere here are clues to this bewildering male silence on the public stage about our own condition.

Men's absence from the debate has dramatic consequences, making it overwhelmingly negative. In recent weeks the focus has been on abuse of teenage girls, porn, male unemployment and misogyny. But next month it could be "deadbeat dads", domestic violence and harassment in the workplace.

A debate about men defined by women inevitably dwells on what's wrong with men – on a continuing "crisis". That's understandable. There are many worrying issues that a male discussion of masculinity would and should confront. We are, after all, fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, lovers, colleagues and friends of women. But which man wants to join a debate loaded with negativity, littered with slogans like "all men are rapists"?

A debate with genuine male participation and leadership would include the above issues, but within a broader, aspirational and authentically male agenda. The centrepiece would be today's extraordinary transformation of masculinity. A huge transition is taking place in all our lives, as we redefine our relationships with women, with our children, with work, with our sexuality. History may judge it to be a faster and more profound change even than the developments in women's lives.

Men, like women, are belatedly escaping what we now recognise to be the confines of our gender. Many of us are enjoying a massively increased engagement with children. There is a stunning growth in male capacity to hold down successful jobs and play an integral role in our homes and personal lives. We are changing our relationships with women and with each other. Male homosexuality is widely expressed and affirmed. And men play a vital role in supporting, personally and politically, the advancement of women's rights.

But all this fails to generate male leadership or collective discussion. Each of us is operating in our personal world of change, with little sense of what it's like for the other guys. The women's movement produced articulate women to narrate their agenda. Where are the men?

An important factor is that otherwise powerful, educated men – the ones you might expect to speak up – tend to have been raised in, and live in, households where they defer to female decision-making and narrative. The reasons are complicated. Women's centrality in the private arena is a complex expression of both male power and male impotence, of patriarchy and infantilisation. But a consequence of boys and men living in private matriarchies is that even the most senior male chief executive often lacks confidence in areas that might be defined as personal, private or family.

This may always have been the case. But feminism has reinforced rather than challenged – or even acknowledged – matriarchy. It is an environment in which male spokesmen for change are unlikely to be nurtured. When they do articulate their views or concerns, they are often ridiculed or ignored by women. Misandry can be as nasty as misogyny and is as widespread (just check the internet). Smart men play safe and stay out of it. We're so conditioned, we don't even talk to each other.

However, as long as these men – who typically support the women's movement – remain passive, the only male voices we hear are those of reactionary patriarchs, who reinforce the idea that men are dinosaurs.

Why are we ridiculed when we talk about ourselves? Perhaps because men are assumed to be inherently powerful, with nothing to complain about. It's a mistake. We urgently require an updated theory of gender that acknowledges there are, and always have been, discrete areas of female power and male powerlessness, not simply female powerlessness. Patriarchy did not rule alone. There was also matriarchy – and there still is.

A revolution is taking place in masculinity, but much of it is below the radar and denied, even when well-documented. This transformation is about much more than "helping" women and addressing their complaints. If we want to hear about it, then we need democratic personal, private and domestic spaces where men feel comfortable to speak. That might generate a more open, less condemning public space. Until then, women will continue to find themselves shouting into the silence about issues that we need to confront together.

Julie Gillis - Men Deserve Real Empathy, Not Deference

Yesterday I posted an article by Christy Wampole from the New York Times on guns and the decline of young men. Over at the Good Men Project, Julie Gillis posted a response later in the day - and Gillis believes men need some real empathy and compassion, not deference, as suggested by Wampole.

Men Deserve Real Empathy, Not Deference

DECEMBER 23, 2012 BY JULIE GILLIS

Julie Gillis challenges a New York Times Op-Ed that insists that women should show deference to the men who feel they are losing privilege in a changing world. 

Recently, in light of the Connecticut shootings, Christy Wampole wrote an article for the NYT Opinionator blogs about young men, guns, their feelings of disassociation and rage.

If the soldier has largely been replaced by the video game character and the drone, if the mothers have proven that they can raise the children alone, if the corporations are less able or willing to guarantee the possibility of upward mobility and some level of respect that comes with title, if someone else can bring home the bacon, what is left for young men?

She then relates how we (women) should show more empathy in the form of deference to these young men who are suffering from losing privilege in the world, who are feeling lost and useless.

Empathy could serve many of us: those who have not yet put themselves in the position of a person who is losing their power and those who can aim a gun at someone without imagining themselves on the other end of the barrel. For those of us who belong to a demographic that is doing increasingly better, a trained empathic reflex toward those we know to be losing for our gains could lead to a more deferential attitude on our part and could constitute an invitation for them to stay with us. To delight in their losses and aim at them the question, “How does it feel?” will only trigger a cycle of resentment and plant the seeds for vengeance. It is crucial to accommodate the pain of others.

Hugo Schwyzer wrote a good takedown of the piece, though I have to admit it was a little too sarcastic for my tastes, but something hit me about what he said and hard.

Wampole doesn’t recommend that women defer to men out of respect for masculine authority, but out of empathy for those suffering from Post-Patriarchal Depression. But why should empathy require deference rather than a passing acknowledgement that yeah, life can be confusing for many young men today? 

• Originally appeared on Julie Gillis’ Blog
• Photo courtesy of Flickr/renee_mcgurk

Read the whole post.