An 8-Step Path to Reducing Suffering

"Each step along the Buddha’s path to happiness requires practicing mindfulness until it becomes part of your daily life. Mindfulness is a way of training yourself to become aware of things as they really are. With mindfulness as your watchword, you progress through the eight steps laid down by the Buddha more than twenty-five hundred years ago—a gentle, gradual training in how to end dissatisfaction."

- Bhante Henepola Gunaratana, “Getting Started” (Tricycle, Fall 2001)

Buddhism begins with the Four Noble Truths, as revealed to the Buddha in his moment of enlightenment, the first of which is that life is infused with suffering.

1. The Noble Truth of the reality of Dukkha as part of conditioned existence. Dukkha is a multi-faceted word. Its literal meaning is "that which is difficult to bear". It can mean suffering, stress, pain, anguish, affliction or unsatisfactoriness. Each of the English words is either too strong or too weak in their meaning to be a universally successful translation. 

2. The Noble Truth that Dukkha has a causal arising. This cause is defined as grasping and clinging or aversion. On one hand it is trying to control anything and everything by grabbing onto or trying to pin them down, On the other hand it is control by pushing away or pushing down and running away or flinching away from things. It is the process of identification through which we try to make internal and external things and experiences into "me and mine" or wholly '"other" than Me. 

3. The Noble Truth of the end of Dukkha, which is Nirvana or Nibbana. Beyond grasping and control and conditional existence is Nirvana. "The mind like fire unbound." The realisation of Nirvana is supreme Bodhi or Awakening. It is waking up to the true nature of reality. It is waking up to our true nature. Buddha Nature. The Pali Canon of Theravada, the foundational Buddhist teachings, says little about Nirvana, using terms like the Unconditioned the Deathless, and the Unborn. Mahayana teachings speak more about the qualities of Nirvana and use terms like, True Nature, Original Mind, Infinite light and Infinite life. Beyond space and time. Nirvana defies definition.

4. The Noble Truth of the Path that leads to Awakening. The path is a paradox. It is a conditioned thing that is said to help you to the unconditioned. Awakening is not "made" by anything: it is not a product of anything including the Buddha's teachings. Awakening, your true nature is already always present. We are just not awake to this reality. Clinging to limitation, and attempts to control the ceaseless flow of phenomena and process obscures our true nature.

This fourth truth, the path of awakening, is known as the Noble Eightfold Path. In my 20+ years as a Buddhist, I have found that simply trying to live according to these eight basic ideas is more than enough practice to increase happiness, decrease suffering, and make me more compassionate.

Here is one version of the 8-Step Path, organized into three basic categories of living - wisdom, moral discipline, and concentration.

Wisdom

1. right view
2. right intention

Moral discipline

3. right speech
4. right action
5. right livelihood

Concentration

6. right effort
7. right mindfulness
8. right concentration

One need not be a Buddhist to benefit from these 8 Steps. Anyone can make an effort to change their perspective, purify their intention, develop right (skillful, as opposed to unskillful) speech, action, and livelihood, and increase skillful effort, mindfulness, and concentration. None of these foci require that someone give up the faith of their family or culture.

If you would like to learn more about these ideas, the links above offer a lot of information. One can also read The Noble Eightfold Path: The Way to the End of Suffering by Bhikkhu Bodhi, which is available for free online.

Men Enjoy Shopping, but Many Don't Like Strip Clubs - Who Knew?

Esquire asked 1,032 men a series of questions about topics related to masculinity - everything from going to strip clubs to watching sports on tv to the number of close friends they have. The answers defy stereotypes - for example, most men do not enjoy going to strip clubs, don't mind shopping for new clothes (although shopping for cars, not so much), and nearly half the men do not drink any night of the week, on average.

In general, this survey reveals that old school masculine gender codes are falling to the wayside.

Full results from Esquire are below the Reuters summary.

Who knew? Men enjoy shopping, but many don't like strip clubs: poll

By Patricia Reaney January 21, 2014



Shoppers ride the escalator at Macy's Herald Square in New York
NEW YORK (Reuters) - About half of men in the United States enjoy shopping for clothes, many don't like going to strip clubs and it is typical for males under the age of 44 to have sexted someone, according to a poll released on Tuesday.

Esquire magazine surveyed more than 1,000 men in an online survey that looked at male behavior. It showed it is normal for men to say "I love you" frequently and to have cried sometime during the past month.

And while there is nothing unusual about men using cologne, it is more uncommon for males to get a spray tan or color their hair.

"A lot of men have sneaking suspicions that what they say or do is not normal by traditional definitions of manhood, from how much they care about sports and cars to their taste in music and movies," Richard Dorment, senior editor at Esquire, said in an interview.

The concept of masculinity has become more expansive and elastic, he added, while the need to conform and fit in seems to lessen with age.

For the survey, Esquire asked 1,032 men on topics ranging from cooking dinner for family and friends, strip clubs and going to concerts to sexting - sending sexually explicit messages by text - and how often they have sex.

It found that the men believed it is normal to say "I love you" frequently and that they have cried in the past month.

"There are some things about manhood as it existed in previous generations that are still more or less the same, particularly the interest and emphasis on sports and the excitement that men get from watching and playing sports," said Dorment.

But other behaviors have been become mainstream in a way that Dorment believes expands on the long-held definition of normal.

Shedding tears is normal, as is using moisturizer, hair products and sexting, depending on a man's age.

"If you are under 45, it is not really weird to have sexted someone at some point in your life," said Dorment, "If you are over 45, it is atypical."

Having sex more than twice a week over the age of 45 is not normal, the poll showed, as is not having sex at all for males under that age.

Twenty-six percent of African American men said they had a manicure in the last six months or longer, compared to 7 percent of Caucasians and 10 percent of the general male population.

Men over 60 also were twice as likely to think of themselves as normal as men under 30.

The results of the survey can be found here.

"The thing that deeply surprised us, that we have the statistical data for, is how the definition of conventional, masculine behavior has expanded to include all the things that up until a few years ago were considered totally alien," said Dorment.

The online poll has a margin of error of +/- three percentage points.

(Editing by Eric Kelsey and Amanda Kwan)

Cardio Is Not Enough, Men Need Resistance Training, Too

This comes from a site called WODMasters, which I assume is a CrossFit site (especially with the CrossFit reference at the end of the article). Be that as it may, this research review is useful.

Contrary to the article's assertion, there is considerable evidence that resistance training, done correctly, has very powerful benefits to the cardiovascular system. Ideally, one takes shorter rest periods (under a minute between sets/exercises) and uses supersets (pairing exercises for opposing muscle groups, such as chest/back, upper body/lower body).

Even bodyweight exercises done with very little rest can provide both resistance training and an aerobic workout. There is really no need for the old fashioned, slow, steady-state cardio - we know more and have better options.

Resistance and Aerobic Training: New research says both together is better for heart health

Jan 28
By: Andrea Kirk

Heart disease is the most common cause of death in older adults. Heart disease kills about 600,000 Americans annually. Heart disease is the most common cause of death for women. It is more common than breast cancer, which tends to get more attention. Many women who suffer heart attacks do not have previous signs of symptoms (approximately 2/3rds will have a sudden heart attack). Major risk factors for heart disease are:

• High blood pressure
• Obesity
• Poor blood lipid profile (dyslipidemia)
• Inactivity

CrossFit Masters Athletes combine aerobic and resistance training all the time.

An obese individual can expect to lose 6-7 years of life. This can matter a lot to the individual, but also to his or her family, who may lose that person’s love, support and companionship. Exercise reduces all four of the major risk factors for heart disease. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC), The American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association all recommend 20-30 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise every day for adults.

Resistance training is also recommended, but with an eye to improving functional fitness into old age. Little research has been done on the benefits of resistance training as a means of improving cardiovascular health.

Exercise: resistance training and aerobic training reduced risk of heart disease

A new study from the Research Center in Sports Science, Health Sciences and Human Development and the Research Center in Physical Activity, Health and Leisure, Faculty of Sport and the University Porto, in Porto, Portugal examined the effects of aerobic training alone vs. aerobic and resistance training together and got some interesting results. Here are some of the study details:

• Subjects were 59 older men
• Men were divided into three groups: Aerobic training, aerobic and resistance training or no training.
• None of the men had cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure or was severely overweight
• Men had no previous history of exercise training or recreational sports 

The Training Programs lasted 32 weeks:

• Aerobic Training Group: ran or did brisk walks two days a week and swimming training 1 day a week at levels that were perceived by participants as “moderate intensity”. Each training session included a 10 minute warm up, 3 sets of 15-20 rep body weight exercises and a five minute cool down with stretching. Subjects did agility exercises in the pool for 10 minutes each session. Agility exercises included water volley-ball and water polo. Sounds like a fun program.
• Resistance and Aerobic Training Group: did the same exercises as the Aerobic Training group except that one of the dry-land aerobic sessions was replaced with resistance training. Resistance training consisted of 65% of one rep max with three sets of 8-10 reps of bench press, leg press, lateral pull-down, leg exension, military press, leg curl and arm curl. Subjects also worked on their abs and backs.
• Control Group: carried on with normal life

Results:

No improvements in hypertension , obesity or dyslipidemia were seen in the Aerobic Training Group. Disappointing. Maybe a longer training period was needed. Hard to say. Improvements were observed in the Resistance and Aerobic Training Group. Improvements were seen in:

• Hypertension
• Dyslipidemia

Discussion: 

Eye Pood Kettlebell Shirt by WODMASTERS

Why didn’t the aerobic training group show improvements? Perhaps the exercise program wasn’t intense enough. Maybe improvements would have been seen if the exercise program had lasted longer. Maybe it is important to increase the intensity beyond moderate, especially over time. Perhaps the resistance training program provided more aerobic training. 8-10 reps may be like short sprints for the cardio-vascular system. Short bouts of intense exercise can be very effective (See High Intensity Impact Training). More research is needed, but for what we have so far it looks like combining both is better than just aerobic training alone. If you do crossfit you are doing this already.


Full Citation:
Sousa N, Mendes R, Abrantes C, Sampaio J, & Oliveira J (2013). Long-term effects of aerobic training versus combined aerobic and resistance training in modifying cardiovascular disease risk factors in healthy elderly men. Geriatrics & gerontology international, 13 (4), 928-35 PMID: 23441809

Christopher Bergland - Can Meditation Make Us More Compassionate?

From Christopher Bergland's The Athlete's Way blog at Psychology Today, this is a nice post on how meditation can help us become more compassionate. If we all could be even slightly more compassionate with ourselves and the people we encounter in daily life, the world would be a much safer and kinder place.

Can Meditation Make Someone More Compassionate?

Meditation can reshape neural networks linked to compassion

Published on December 29, 2013 by Christopher Bergland in The Athlete's Way

 

Researchers have discovered more proof that meditation can reshape neural networks linked to compassion. Compassion is a step beyond empathy because it involves a deeper and more visceral connection to another person’s suffering. Researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center recently studied how doctors relate to their patients and identified three main elements of compassion:

1) Recognition of suffering.
2) Emotional resonance.
3) An effort to remedy the suffering.

Although meditation and mindfulness are often secular and do not require religious ties, the Buddha might sum up the ideas of loving-kindness meditation (LKM) by saying, “I teach one thing and one only: that is, suffering and the end of suffering.” For Buddha—as for many modern spiritual leaders and secular meditators—the ultimate goal of meditation is to foster compassion and reduce suffering.

Through meditation you gain a heightened control of mindfulness which opens your eyes to the suffering of people around you. Systematic LKM may actually blur the lines between oneself and others by dissolving the rigid differentiation of suffering between: me, you, us, them, friend, or foe at a neural level.

While doing a basic LKM you go through a checklist of directing compassion to: loved ones, people with whom there is tension, strangers, and yourself. This type of meditation allows you to grasp the interconnectedness between your own suffering and the suffering of others from all arenas of your life.

Compassionate Bedside Manner

A December 2013 study titled “In Search of Compassion: a New Taxonomy of Compassionate Physician Behaviours” was recently published by the journal Health Expectations. The Rochester researchers believe they are the first to systematically pinpoint and catalog compassionate words and actions in doctor-patient conversations. By breaking down the dialogue and studying the context, scientists hope to create a behavioral formula that will guide medical training and education.

"Good to see you. I'm sorry. It sounds like you've had a tough, tough, week." That statement was from a doctor to a patient and used as an example of compassionate behavior as observed by a University of Rochester Medical Center team.



The researchers evaluated tone of voice, body language and overall bedside manner that conveyed tenderness and understanding, and other ways in which doctors gave reassurances or psychology comfort to patients. Researchers also observed non-verbal communication, such as pauses or sighs at appropriate times, as well as speech features and voice quality (tone, pitch, loudness) and other metaphorical language that conveyed certain attitudes and meaning.

"In health care, we believe in being compassionate but the reality is that many of us have a preference for technical and biomedical issues over establishing emotional ties," said senior investigator Ronald Epstein, M.D. His team recruited 23 oncologists from a variety of private and hospital-based oncology clinics. The doctors and their stage III or stage IV cancer patients volunteered to be recorded during routine visits. Researchers then analyzed the 49 audio-recorded encounters that took place between November 2011 and June 2012, and looked for key observable markers of compassion.

Compassion unfolds over time, researchers concluded. During the process, physicians must challenge themselves to stay with a difficult discussion, which opens the door for the patient to admit uncertainty and grieve the loss of normalcy in life. "It became apparent that compassion is not a quality of a single utterance but rather is made up of presence and engagement that suffuses an entire conversation," the study concluded.

The New Pathway: Training Doctors to Be More Compassionate



In the 1980s, both of my parents (who were going through a horrible divorce at the time) worked at Harvard Medical School in very different capacities. My father was the Chief of Neurosurgery at the Beth Israel Deaconess and my mom was part of the team working to create the New Pathway (NP) Curriculum. Among other things, the New Pathway was designed to make doctors more compassionate.

The New Pathway curriculum was designed to improve fluid and emotional intelligence. The program is a problem-based approach to medical education that emphasizes small-group tutorials and self-directed learning, complemented by laboratories, conferences and lectures. The emphasis at the New Pathway is placed on the patient-doctor relationship, and takes into account the broad social context and problems of modern medicine and health care.

Although the New Pathway does not directly emphasize meditation, it is interesting that the concept was incubating at a time when many other people at Harvard and around the world were inspired by Herbert Benson. Benson pioneered the “Relaxation Response” and the Benson-Henry Institute for Mind-Body Medicine that continues to this day at Harvard’s Mass General Hospital.

Can Meditation Make You More Compassionate?

A recent study by Northeastern University's David DeSteno, published in Psychological Science, takes a look at what impacts meditation has on interpersonal harmony and compassion. In this study, a team of researchers from Northeastern University and Harvard University examined the effects meditation would have on compassion and magnanimous behavior.

This study invited participants to complete an eight-week training in two types of meditation and then tested participants in a real-life situation designed to measure compassionate responses to a stranger's suffering.

Sitting in a staged waiting room with three chairs were two actors. With one empty chair left, the participant sat down and waited to be called. Another actor using crutches and appearing to be in great physical pain, would then enter the room. As she did, the actors in the chair would ignore her by fiddling with their phones or opening a book.

The question DeSteno and Paul Condon—a graduate student in DeSteno's lab who led the study—and their team wanted to answer was whether the subjects who took part in the meditation classes would be more likely to come to the aid of a person in pain, even when everyone else was ignoring her suffering. "We know meditation improves a person's own physical and psychological wellbeing," said Condon. "We wanted to know whether it actually increases compassionate behavior."

Among the non-meditating participants, only about 15 percent of people acted to help. But among the participants who were in the meditation sessions "we were able to boost that up to 50 percent," said DeSteno. This result was true for both meditation groups thereby showing the effect to be consistent across different forms of meditation.

"The truly surprising aspect of this finding is that meditation made people willing to act virtuous—to help another who was suffering—even in the face of a norm not to do so," DeSteno said, "The fact that the other actors were ignoring the pain creates as 'bystander-effect' that normally tends to reduce helping. People often wonder 'Why should I help someone if no one else is?'"



These results appear to prove what the Buddhist theologians have long believed—meditation can lead you to more compassion, love, and committed to end suffering for oneself and others. Although the researchers don’t know exactly why meditation heightens compassion there are two likely explanations. The first is that meditation and mindfulness improves attention and ability to focus one's attention to specific things in the environment.

The other possibility is that meditation creates neural pathways that allow the meditator to see the interconnectedness of all human suffering regardless of the relationship. Regular loving-kindness meditation builds self-love, compassion and human connection on multiple levels. If you'd like to read more on this, check out my Psychology Today blog post, "Neuroscientists Confirm That Our Loved Ones Become Ourselves."

The psychologist Piercarlo Valdesolo and colleagues found that a feeling of affiliation or connection between two people, even something as subtle as tapping their hands together in synchrony, causes them to feel more compassion for each other when distressed. The increased compassion of meditators, then, might stem directly from meditation’s ability to dissolve the neural barriers that put people in different bins based on ethnicity, religion, ideology etc.

Compassion Can Be Cultivated

In a final study from May 2013 researchers at the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds at the Waisman Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that adults can be trained to be more compassionate. The report, published by Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, found that training adults in compassion can result in greater altruistic behavior and related changes in neural systems underlying compassion.



"Our fundamental question was, Can compassion be trained and learned in adults? Can we become more caring if we practice that mindset?'" says Helen Weng, lead author of the study and a graduate student in clinical psychology. Adding, "Our evidence points to yes."

In the study, the investigators trained young adults to engage in compassion meditation using a traditional Buddhist technique of meditation that includes methods designed to develop loving kindness and compassion for oneself and for others.

"People seem to become more sensitive to other people's suffering, but this is challenging emotionally. They learn to regulate their emotions so that they approach people's suffering with caring and wanting to help rather than turning away," explains Weng.

To increase caring feelings for people who are suffering the compassion meditation participants were trained to increase feelings of sympathy and altruism for people who are suffering by envisioning a time when someone has suffered and then practiced wishing that his or her suffering was relieved. They repeated phrases to help them focus on compassion such as, "May you be free from suffering. May you have joy and ease."

Participants in the study practiced focused compassion towards four different categories of people. First, they focused on sending compassionate thoughts to a loved one or someone whom they easily felt compassion for, like a friend or family member. Secondly, they practiced compassion for someone they had a conflict or tension with such as an ex-partner, in-law, a backstabbing co-worker, difficult boss... Thirdly, they focused compassion towards a random stranger or group of people who were suffering. Lastly, they practiced compassion and forgiveness towards themselves.

Conclusion: Flex Your Compassion Muscle Every Day

"It's kind of like weight training," Weng says. "Using this systematic approach, we found that people can actually build up their compassion 'muscle' and respond to others' suffering with care and a desire to help."

If you’d like to read more on this topic, check out my Psychology Today blogs:

• “Mindfulness Made Simple”
• "Meditation Has the Power to Influence Your Genes"
• “The Neuroscience of Empathy”
• “Compassion Can Be Trained”
• "Too Much Crystallized Thinking Lowers Fluid Intelligence"
• ”How Does Meditation Reduce Anxiety At a Neural Level?”
• “Can Mindfulness Backfire?”
• “The Neurobiology of Grace Under Pressure”
• “Mindfulness Training and the Compassionate Brain”
• 'Meditation May Slow Age-Related Cognitive Decline"

~ Follow me on Twitter @ckbergland for updates on The Athlete’s Way blog posts.

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

Richard Sherman Responds to Being Called a “Thug” - The Man Behind the "Rant"

I did not and do not believe Richard Sherman is a thug. He is a Stanford graduate, a young man who had straight A's in high school while insisting on taking advance placement classes, and after coming into Stanford as a wide receiver (one of the "glamor" positions in football, he ASKED to switch to defensive back. 

I did know much about the man (such as the info above) aside from his age (24) and his position as one of the best corner backs in the game, and also one of the best trash talkers in the game. I figured that his comments to Erin Andrews after the game were partly his youth, and mostly that he had just helped his team reach the Super Bowl with an outstanding defensive play against one of the best wide receivers in football.

But then the backlash started - almost immediately - so I began to look for more info about Sherman.

NPR did a piece on Sherman, as did Forbes in their 22 Brief Thoughts about that Richard Sherman Interview, including this:

4. Sherman graduated second in his class in high school and also graduated from Stanford. So not only is he not a fool, odds are he’s smarter than you and me.
5. His degree from Stanford was in communications … which might explain why, while he seemed to be hollering like a crazy person, he didn’t curse and looked into the camera the whole time.
6. In other words, he might have just been auditioning for the WWE.

CBS News offered another bit of information courtesy of NFL Films, who had Sherman miked for the game:

Wednesday night, NFL Films showed a much different Sherman, who was mic'd up during the game. With seconds left in the fourth quarter, he made the game-saving tip in the end zone on a ball intended for Crabtree that was intercepted by Malcolm Smith. Moments later, Sherman found Crabtree and said, "Hell of a game. Hell of a game," while extending his hand.

Here was Crabtree's response: 

Sherman says 'good game,' Crabtree gives him the Heisman treatment. (USATSI)

Reality squares with Sherman's account, which he wrote about Monday for TheMMQB.com:

"I ran over to Crabtree to shake his hand but he ignored me. I patted him, stuck out my hand and said, 'Good game, good game.' That's when he shoved my face, and that's when I went off," Sherman said.

Perhaps Will Leitch at USA Today offered the best story. This is how that article begins:

Richard Sherman is everything one could want in a professional athlete. He is a walking example of the difference sports can make, of how one man can channel fierce intelligence and an almost frightening competitive fire into something productive and riveting. He is precisely the type of person you should cheer for.

Sherman graduated from Compton's Dominguez High School with straight-A grades -- better than straight-A grades, actually, thanks to all the advanced placement classes he insisted on taking. Raised by a father who works as a garbage man and a mother who teaches disabled children, Sherman chose to go to Stanford to play football because of its academic reputation. His charity, Blanket Coverage, is impressively specific: It focuses solely on providing school supplies for inner-city kids, making sure they have the most updated textbooks and materials. Unheralded by the pros after he requested, before his junior year, to be moved from the glamour position of wide receiver to cornerback, he has worked his way into one of the best corners by force of will. The man is a state of matter. He is absurdly smart. He is an inspiration. (Most of these details taken from this terrific Jon Wilner story in the San Jose Mercury News from September.)

Finally, Sociological Images takes a rather disturbing look at the Twitter storm or racist bigotry that erupted within moments of Sherman's interview.

Richard Sherman Responds to Being Called a “Thug”

by Lisa Wade, PhD, 

Immediately after the Seattle Seahawks beat the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday, Richard Sherman gave an intense, boastful post-game interview.  This triggered the always-present racism, as illustrated by many tweets that followed.  Here is just a sample from Public Shaming:

These are obviously cruel and full of hate, but the ones in which he was called a “thug” got somewhat less attention:



In interviews about the racist response, Sherman made some really nice points about what this means about the state of America and the specifically racial insults.  In a press conference, for example, asked about being called a “thug,” he argued that it’s just “the accepted way of calling someone the n-word these days.”  He points out that, in no way was what he was doing thug-like:

Maybe I’m talking loudly, and doing something… talking like I’m not supposed to, but I’m not… there’s a hockey game where they didn’t even play hockey, they just threw the puck aside and started fighting.  I saw that and I said, “Aw man, I’m the thug? What!? What’s going on here?”

In another video, he expands on this point, saying: “I’m not out there beating on people, or committing crimes, or getting arrested, or doing anything; I’m playing a football game at a high level and I got excited.”

Sherman’s making two points. First, that there was nothing thug-like about his behavior. Thugs are violent criminals. He’s just playing a game. And, second, the term is decidedly racial, applied to him largely because of the color of his skin. Meanwhile, hockey players, who are overwhelmingly white, as well as other white athletes, don’t as often get these sorts of labels even if they are physically violent in ways that exceed the demands of their sport.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

Michael Kimmel - How Can We Help Women? By Helping Men

It was nice to see this article from Michael Kimmel in the Huffington Post. This is the fundamental idea that feminism is missing in its often radical views of men and masculinity.

How Can We Help Women? By Helping Men

Michael Kimmel
Posted: 01/17/2014

In her thoughtful op-ed in the New York Times, family historian Stephanie Coontz answered the question "How can we help men?" with a ringing endorsement of gender equality: "By helping women," she answered.

I'd like to suggest the converse is equally true. How can we help women? By helping men.

Women's progress towards equality is incontestable; it seems obvious that we are, today, more gender equal than we have ever been in our history (I hasten to point out that we are not "there" yet, that we have not fully achieved gender equality, just that we are closer than we have ever been.) But progress towards greater equality has slowed: Women have pushed the glass ceiling higher on the corporate ladder, but all that leaning in has not crashed through to the board room. Girls and women compose half of all students in our law, medical and business schools, and have made enormous strides in STEM courses, yet working mothers are doing more housework and child care than they did 30 years ago. Every day, we read stories of sexual assault -- in our schools, homes, at parties and in our military.

How can we further the campaign for women's equality? How can we help women get there?

By helping men. Particularly, we need to help men decouple those aspects of masculinity that hold men -- and women -- back from living the lives they say they want.

This is crucial. A 2013 survey by the Pew Research Center found that women and men rated "being a good parent" (94% of women, 91% of men) and "having a successful marriage" (84% of women, 83% of men) equally highly -- and nearly twice as important as "being successful in a high-paying career." (Interestingly, women rated career aspirations slightly higher than men did, 51% to 49%).

So women and men want the same thing: good careers, loving relationships and happy families. Women are advised to lean in or to opt out -- as if they can do it alone. But women can't have the lives they want without some support from men. Men: We need to listen up.

Let me offer a few examples. Take education. Four decades after a concerted effort to remedy dramatic gender discrimination in education, we read today about a "boy crisis" -- gender disparities in college attendance, a gender-grade gap with girls earning better grades and taking most academic honors, while boys populate the detention room, special education classes and are diagnosed with ADHD far more often. Remedies abound, from the sensible (greater attention to individual learning styles) to the illogical and possibly unconstitutional (single-sex classes with thermostats set at different temperatures, gender-specific classroom seating arrangements and course materials, all based on outdated stereotypes).

In reality, much of the cause of the "boy crisis" in education lies with the definition of masculinity held by the boys themselves -- the notion that academic disengagement is proof of masculinity. Helping boys to engage academically requires that we recognize different learning styles along an array of measures -- which in turn leads to recognizing diverse aptitudes and competencies, enabling everyone, girls and boys, to better achieve to their potential.

Or take balancing work and family. We know that women will not be able to balance work and family until -- well, until men do.

Twenty years ago, I wrote an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled "What Do Men Want?" In it, I asked men who worked for companies that offered parental leave to men why they didn't take it when they became fathers. Each one told the same story: His colleagues wondered loudly if he was really committed to his job, his supervisor gave his permission with a promise that he'd be put on the "daddy track," a stalled track that would not end in partnership. In each case, it was other men who had created a workplace climate that thwarted these fathers from taking the opportunity they wanted to take.

This has really changed. As an article in The Atlantic makes clear, men are not being policed as arduously by other men. And, as Liza Mundy writes, "the true beneficiaries of paternity leave are women." As a result, over the past two decades men have stepped up on the home front. Well, not exactly stepped up -- more like stepped out. Men are doing marginally more housework, but significantly more childcare than they did a generation ago. This separation of housework and childcare has resulted in a new phenomenon: Dad has become the fun parent. Dad takes the kids to the park to pay soccer while mom cleans the breakfast dishes, makes the bed, does the laundry and prepares lunch. The kids come home proclaiming what a great time they had and what a great parent dad is.

If we want to help women, we need to help men find all those inner joys of housework that anti-feminists have been celebrating for decades -- or at least get us to do our share.

What about health? Yes, we know that women outlive men by about 5 years, 81 for women and 76 for men. Men are more likely to die of stress-related illness and miss work due to workplace accidents. By defining masculinity as risk-taking stoicism, men are less likely to have routine screenings, less likely to comply with workplace safety in the name of proving masculinity. Our notions of masculinity deprive our spouses and partners and families of our presence for those five years because of our adherence to these ideals of masculinity.

Finally, let's get even more intimate. Decades of research have shown that the more men subscribe to what we might call "traditional" notions of masculinity -- that manhood is defined by strength, aggression, emotional toughness and sexual prowess -- the more likely they are to believe that male-female relationships are adversarial, that control of women is central to manhood and that violence is sometimes necessary to control a female partners -- beliefs that can sometimes translate into behaviors like earlier first sex, higher rates of HIV and STDs and violence.

Conforming to these traditional ideas of masculinity may be hazardous to our health, but it is also hazardous to the health of our wives, partners and children.

What's common among these is that men often feel they must prove their masculinity -- and they must prove it to other men. One wants to be a man's man, a man among men. (Who wants to be a ladies' man?)

We need to help men reduce the power of that gender policing -- the fear that other men will see us as less than manly if we listen to the voices in our own hearts about how we want to live our lives.

If the past few decades have made anything clear it's been that we are neither Martians nor Venusians. And what's good for Earthlings -- male and female -- is good for all of us. If we want to help women achieve greater equality, we have to engage men.

Ryan Leas - Masculinity Anxiety at the Movies: Questioning Yesterday’s Tough Guys (Salon)

From Ryan Leas at Salon, an interesting article on how the Hollywood portrayal of men in the movies has changed considerably since Clint Eastwood was asking bad guys to make his day, or Charles Bronson became a nighttime vigilante in Death Wish.

Today's male leads don't do masculine very well.

In the films reviewed below,

We’re shown all sorts of classic imagery of frontier masculinity, but we’re rarely led to believe the writers, actors or directors behind these characters consider them feasible in a contemporary setting.

And . . .

As ambitious as these films are, none of them seem entirely sure what their endings should mean. And that makes complete sense. These are movies dealing with a concept and a trend as it unfolds. We don’t know where it’s going or what should replace it. Longing and wearied, “Mud” and “Out of the Furnace” and “The Place Beyond the Pines” are all stories by men about the sorts of men they might want to be, but with the knowledge that the world is leaving those sorts of men behind.

The fact that there are no easy answers in these films reflects our own current struggles to evolve a new form of masculinity is appropriate - we are still in process of shaping where we are heading as men.

Masculinity anxiety at the movies: Questioning yesterday’s tough guys

For the guys in a spate of recent movies, trying to be a tough, rugged outlaw doesn't work out very well

Ryan Leas
Monday, Jan 20, 2014


Ryan Gosling in "The Place Beyond the Pines"
A friend of a friend of mine has big plans: quit his prestigious editorial job in New York, grow his beard a bit further out, and start working on the docks. In 2014, the sentiments behind such a decision aren’t anything new, but they’re becoming more and more visible in our pop culture. You know the litany already: Gender roles in the workplace and the family are blurring, outsourcing is closing factory after factory, once-secure manufacturing jobs are disappearing. “American men don’t know how to make things anymore,” and all that. For a certain slice of American men, a romance has cropped up around working the docks, or an oil rig, or a crab boat up around Alaska. You’re getting back in touch with something, some supposedly inherent masculine energy that seems ever more ineffable as the nation adjusts its identity for a new era.

Last year saw a handful of filmmakers take on the questions of what it means to be a man in America in the 21st century, but their films don’t celebrate archetypal images of frontier manliness. Rather, they seem to suggest that looking back to these old forms is another broken urge in an age of cultural nostalgia.

After a decade of male antihero-dominated prestige TV dramas, the problem of contemporary American masculinity had its thematic apotheosis with “Breaking Bad.” Walt might have gotten a bleak version of a final Wild West showdown, but one of the most lasting images of the final season was that of him wasting away alone in a frozen cabin in New Hampshire. All the bluster of Heisenberg faded as Walt was corroded by the consequences of his actions — we saw up close the perversity of a man like him living alone in the woods. But while “Breaking Bad” did condemn old archetypes of masculinity to a degree, other stories seem to eulogize them as they slip away. Such an impulse toward eulogy has run through a handful of recent movies, most notably Jeff Nichols’ “Mud,” Derek Cianfrance’s “The Place Beyond the Pines” and Scott Cooper’s “Out of the Furnace.”

Though they may initially seem to have little in common, the settings of each film all present classic figments of Americana as if they are synonymous with the raw nature of our country’s landscape, a landscape in which listless male characters see their conceptions of life fragmenting. Each movie is shot in its own way, but each poeticizes decrepitude. The moss-covered porches and shuttered storefronts of Braddock, Pa., in “Out of the Furnace” aren’t so different from the strip malls and Piggly Wiggly in “Mud.” Luke and Romina, the ill-fated lovers of “The Place Beyond the Pines,” work as a traveling circus performer and a waitress. There’s something inescapably Springsteen-esque about their struggles, emphasized by the moment where “Dancing in the Dark” fades out as Luke walks up to the diner where Romina works.

That strain of down-on-your-luck American iconography runs through “Out of the Furnace,” as well. When Russell is released from jail, the very next scene begins with a shot of the road leading to the steel mill. Like much of “Out of the Furnace,” the symbolism isn’t overly subtle: a prison lies at one end of the road, the mill at the other. That mill appears as a darkened structure nearly indistinguishable from the earth it sits upon, either as barbaric as nature or being reclaimed by nature. Everything in Braddock is in the process of becoming a ghost.

Cooper, Cianfrance and Nichols also turn to immortal tropes of the past to address a much more contemporary preoccupation with a fading sense of rugged American masculinity. The most overt of these is the biblical influence on “Mud.” The isolated island where Mud lives is Edenic; it’s unclear for much of the movie whether Mud himself is supposed to be the snake in the garden or the First Man. It’s the battleground upon which Ellis’ loss of innocence takes place, the boy’s disillusionment boiling over into a confrontation with Mud that shatters the adventurous, paradisal escapism of the island.

Of course, linking biblical or classical ideas to American mythology is far from new. The difference here is that with each movie’s more or less contemporary setting (“The Place Beyond the Pines” begins in the ’90s, but ends in current day), it feels as if the traditional imagery — both American, and further back — is being deployed as a last-ditch attempt at inflating characters who have stopped making sense. These are broken archetypes wandering through archetypically desolate landscapes. They are men of the frontier, but also victims to it.

In each film, some character embodies a mythic vision of American masculinity. These characters are almost always shown either as out of step with the world around them, or as reflecting ways of life that are dying. They never triumph in an uncomplicated way. Just as the plots of these movies nod to biblical motifs, the characters themselves often take elements of stock fictional depictions of rugged masculinity. Mud is an island man as Rodney (or, on the darker side, Harlan) is a mountain man, as Luke is classical outlaw, a bank robber.

Of all of these, it’s Mud who’s most romanticized. He first appears as something of an apparition, the boys noticing cross-marks in the sand from his boots. They turn around and he’s standing by the tide — appearing out of nowhere, out of nature. He presents himself as an American mystic living out in the swamp, but also sounds like a rambling Beat. The crosses are nails meant to “ward off evil spirits.” As Ellis talks to both Mud and Tom Blankenship, the men mythologize one another. According to Mud, Tom is an ex-CIA assassin living a quiet, monkish second life in a houseboat; Tom claims Mud was “living in the woods when I first met him.” It’s unclear whether anything the men say about each other is actually true, but all of it paints Mud as a romantic outlaw.

In “The Place Beyond the Pines,” Jason hears that his father, Luke, is an “outlaw,” but the tone of the word is far different than when it’s applied to Mud. In “Mud,” there’s the creep of disenchantment — the fact that, far from a man bending the earth to his needs, Mud is a man on the run from the law, relying on Ellis’ groceries for sustenance. Luke, meanwhile, is a tragic outlaw. What would be mythic in a film less concerned with consequence gets refigured as something shameful. Luke thinks he’s living in a Wild West fantasy, but winds up slain by a cop and leaving his son without his biological father. Such complications are what bring each film’s ideas into the modern day. We’re shown all sorts of classic imagery of frontier masculinity, but we’re rarely led to believe the writers, actors or directors behind these characters consider them feasible in a contemporary setting.

What hangs over all of this is a tension between classic visions of manhood and a landscape that’s begun to move beyond them altogether. “Out of the Furnace” makes it explicit, and occasionally too obvious. Russell’s mill work and a hunting sequence are juxtaposed against Rodney’s refusal of a steady job in favor of fighting for money. In their way, both characters represent traditional masculinity through the physicality of their work. But Rodney’s status as an Iraq War veteran makes him, in one way, of the modern world. Russell’s factory life is a remnant of a dying lifestyle, where Rodney’s reclamation of a more visceral sense of masculinity could be seen as an extreme counterpoint to the emasculation Russell experiences through looming unemployment and his girlfriend leaving him for another man during his time in jail. “Out of the Furnace” doesn’t buy into that, though; Rodney’s brashness eventually gets him killed. The failures of the characters in “Out of the Furnace” are similar to Luke’s failures in “The Place Beyond the Pines,” all the men deal with the consequences of trying to embody an inherited vision of masculinity. Even Mud becomes — to gesture toward the Beat language he himself echoes — a holy fool, chasing after the icon of Juniper he’s built up in his head rather than realizing the truths about their relationship.

It’s worth returning to that hunting sequence in “Out of the Furnace.” Placed against Rodney’s fight in the Ramapo Mountains, together the scenes illustrate ritual displays of male control — over nature, over beasts, over themselves. The men of these movies are inevitably tied to the American landscape. They are born from it, but in their failings, they are also overcome by it. Each film centers on an interplay between these characters and their environment, between the marks of humanity and nature.

This comes out most clearly in the ways each film presents machinery and man-made items lost in nature. In “The Place Beyond the Pines,” Luke almost seems a creature of the countryside. His circus rolls through town based on the cycle of seasons; we see him riding his motorcycle rapidly through the woods as if he knows the land. True to the movie’s title, however, it’s out in nature that Luke and Avery come to terms with the more animalistic or darker corners of themselves. Luke goes into the woods and emerges a bank robber; Avery is made to face the physical result of his killing Luke. Natural settings here, as in “Mud” and “Out of the Furnace,” are where men are forced to reckon with themselves and face the futility of the structures they’ve built up, both figurative and literal. It’s there in the beginning of “Mud” in the image of the boat stuck up in the tree and littered with fallen leaves. Even though that boat’s running by the end of the movie, it’s dragging along the dark shadow of the violent gunfight that erupted at the film’s climax. As for “Out of the Furnace,” the steel mill that looms over Braddock and the film alike is on its way to becoming a shell. In the climax of the film, Russell chases Harlan among its ruined corners, through collapsing walls and rails overgrown with brush. The frontier that a character like Russell seems born out of is in the process of reclaiming the man-made symbol of what Russell is.

Even as each of these films undercuts the classic imagery it uses, none of them end without one last gesture toward dominance or transcendence. Both “Mud” and “The Place Beyond the Pines” end with a play on the classic trope of riding off into the sunset. Mud and Tom sail the boat out into open water. Jason purchases a motorcycle, inheriting more strands of his father, and rides off down roads winding through the mountainsides. Neither of these endings are clean or peaceful, and the characters in both still carry the baggage of the events that lead them to this final point. “Out of the Furnace” is more conflicted still — Russell avenges Rodney by shooting Harlan, and then there is a final shot of him sitting alone in his house, with no escape or reprieve after his actions. If these are final touches of romanticism, they are self-conscious ones.

For a moment, it may seem as if each of these films wants to uphold the mythic outlaw figures they’ve messily deconstructed along the way. As ambitious as these films are, none of them seem entirely sure what their endings should mean. And that makes complete sense. These are movies dealing with a concept and a trend as it unfolds. We don’t know where it’s going or what should replace it. Longing and wearied, “Mud” and “Out of the Furnace” and “The Place Beyond the Pines” are all stories by men about the sorts of men they might want to be, but with the knowledge that the world is leaving those sorts of men behind.


Ryan Leas (@RyanLeas) is a freelance writer based in New York. He has also written for GQ.com, Stereogum, and the Village Voice's music blog Sound of the City. More Ryan Leas.

Anna Pulley - 10 Things Porn Gets Horribly Wrong About Men

From Role/Reboot, Anna Pulley exposes 10 things about men that porn gets "horribly wrong." And my first thought was, "Only 10?"

This is a good article - with a little humor to lighten things up. The only one I really did not know was that gay male porn stars make 3x as much as straight porn guys. Good for them.

10 Things Porn Gets Horribly Wrong About Men 

By Anna Pulley
January 07, 2014


This originally appeared on Alternet.org. Republished here with permission.
Here are the biggest male myths we find hardest to swallow.

We recently told you our biggest grievances involving women in mainstream porn. Making a comparable list for men, however, proved to be harder (sorry) than it initially seemed. Partially because, in mainstream straight porn, which is produced, funded, run, and directed by men, the focus is almost entirely on the porn actresses. Rarely do we get sweeping slow pans of pectoral physiques, zoomed in facial grimaces, or the come-hither eyes that women make at the camera. While we do often glimpse extreme penetration closeups, with its accompanying, and at times mesmerizing, ball pendulums, little attention is paid to much else.

Further complicating our attempts is that very few scientific studies on porn have been done (except in the realm of addiction and why no one will think of the children). But! A peer-reviewed Porn Studies Journal is slated to come (sorry again) in 2014, so perhaps this will change soon. In the meantime, some of our stats come from self-proclaimed “idea detective” Jon Millward, who crunched numbers from the Internet Adult Film Database (like IMDB, but for smut) which boasts data on 151,946 titles and 129,831 performers/directors, but as is to be expected, much of Millward’s data focuses on the ladeez.

Despite these obstacles, when it comes to the topic of men, porn still gets a lot wrong. Here are the 10 biggest male myths we find hardest to swallow (not sorry about that one, actually).

1. Only one erogenous zone exists.

In mainstream and especially hardcore porn, men are often reduced to little more than walking, grunting penises who experience no other pleasure except from their deep-V diver. Like RoboCop, but for sexual purposes only. Again, since the onus is on the women in porn, some disregard of male bodies is to be expected. While we don’t expect to be regaled with the pleasures of their watercolors hobby or anything, a little attention could be paid to other erogenous zones, like nipples, necks, thighs, asses, and even balls, which are largely ignored, in porn as in life.

2. Size is subjective.

While no hard or even soft data exists on the average penis size of porn stars versus the average Tom’s Harry Dick, the porn-star-penis-as-huge trope is certainly prevalent and used to sell a variety of pumps, pills, and other penis-enlargement doodads, banking on men’s insecurity and Photoshop to hawk their wang wares. But just as technology can make Smurfs three-dimensional, porn cinematography can make a penis appear larger than it is, with lighting, camera angles, makeup, and even the placement of one’s penis next to, say, a diminutive porn actress. Everything looks big when you stand next to a girl who weighs 80 pounds.

3. The everlasting boner.

In typical porn scenes, men are required to bang longer than the Salvation Army drum on the Easter Day parade, i.e. for 30-60 minutes or more. Despite what you may have heard in Boyz II Men songs, non-porn intercourse typically lasts between 3-7 minutes. As Seymore Butts told Forbes: “The most difficult part about being a male porn star is the hard-on. They have to get it up and off on cue essentially and all the while in between maintain [it] for two to three hours. This must be done under the most difficult of circumstances, including not being attracted to their female co-star, having sex in the most uncomfortable settings, i.e. on hard surfaces, cold/hot weather, etc., and/or having to stop frequently for direction or shot setups.” Male porn performers also use Caverject—a drug injected directly into their penis to maintain those impossible erections, bringing new meaning to the phrase “working stiffs.”

4. Mo’ money shots, mo’ problems.

If sex acts in porn were relative, then we’d all be giving and getting a lot more facials. According to Millward’s porn study, 87 percent of porn actresses will “take a facial” at least once in their careers. For comparison, 62 percent will do anal, 31 percent swallow, and a mere 6 percent will be fisted. The money shot is the most common way to end a porn scene. As with all things, of course, there are probably some men and women who enjoy capping off their night with a little sperm in the eye, but it’s also safe to say that the vast majority do not.

5. The jackhammer.

Porn would have us believe that the only tried and true way to fuck a woman is to pound her so hard that the cervical force and momentum spontaneously cause her to travel back to the Triassic period to bring back a tooth from a Therapsid with which to conquer our reptilian overlords in 2057. Really hard, in other words. Of course, a good deep-dicking can be enjoyable (and even preferred!) from time to time, but every time? And for an hour? And no breaks to drink Gatorade laced with speed to keep up the fervent drilling to China? Also, no one ever sweats. Maybe that’s why they keep all the dry ice around.

6. Very little variety of roles for men.
While women can be a wide variety of stereotypes (the randy MILF, the randy sorority girl, the randy babysitter, etc.) the profiles of men in the International Adult Movie Database are sadly bland. They either do boy/girl scenes or they don’t. Even when they do get to play an actual role, it is often the uninspiring pizza delivery guy (“I ordered extra sausage!”), or some kind of repair man. “You know what this sink needs? Twelve inches of reinforced steel pipe. C’mere ladies.”

7. Neither here, nor hair.

Like women in porn, the standard for male porn stars is to partake in bushwhacking (as well as scrotum-shearing, chest-clipping, and rectal-region hair removal). This manscaping, and other body hair removal, is for aesthetic reasons: to make one’s penis appear larger, smoother, and cleaner. While non-porn male deforestation has certainly seen a rise (there are a bevy of articles on the topic, major razor brands have launched all-body shavers for men, salons are offering more male services, etc.), there isn’t much research on its overall prevalence. But, a 2008 study from Australia found that 82 percent of gay men and 66 percent of straight men removed their pubic hair at least once, although the largest percentage of both groups said they did it “rarely.”

8. It pays to be gay.

While there are few cultural rewards for bisexual men, except perhaps in the realm of increased hair products, in porn at least, there are definite financial benefits. Gay porn pays about three times as much as straight porn. For this reason, many straight male porn performers have done gay porn, enough to spawn the term gay-for-pay. We can’t say the same for non-porn dude experimentation, as much as we wanted Brokeback Mountain to become a phenomenon.

9. Porn stars weigh less and have more piercings.

The average male porn star weighs 167.5 lbs, 27 pounds less than the national average for men. It makes sense that porn stars would be in better shape than many, considering the physical demands of say, the Standing 69 or the Lawnmower. Aside from weight, however, attractiveness of male porn stars seems more often than not based largely on...how to put it...the quality of the wood. One time we watched a near-elderly man, who looked like a penis with eyes, nail his hot secretary and the sight was so ghastly it almost turned us off porn indefinitely. Speaking of appearances, male porn stars also are more likely to have at least one tattoo (9.5 percent more than average), and a body piercing (13 percent more than average).

10. Male porn stars really get around.

Male porn stars are far more prolific than your average dude (duh), but also considerably more than female porn stars, when it comes to number of partners. Millward again: “The 10 most prolific male performers, on average, have slept onscreen with 1,013 different women each (45 a year for an average career length of 22.4 years). Whereas the 10 most prolific women on average have slept with 148 different men (eight a year for an average career length of 17.7 years). The most prolific of them all, Tom Byron, has slept with 1,127 different women. According to the National Center for Health Statistics, non-porn men have an average of seven sex partners."

Follow @annapulley on Twitter.