Voice Male Winter 2011

FROM THE EDITOR

By Rob Okun

Finding Light in the Heart of Darkness

Voice Male

Rob Okun

L

ast fall I spent close to a week at Auschwitz, the death camp. It’s a place where hearts ache and break, where the shadow side of human nature sought to overwhelm the light by eclipsing every bit of what’s good and whole and radiant in our lives.

What I found, though, was even that place—at the heart of darkness—couldn’t extinguish the light. I felt enlivened being there, in no small part because I was in a community of more than 80 people from a dozen countries who had come to bear witness to what happened seven decades ago.

Each morning we would walk from the Center for Dialogue and Prayer to Birkenau, the neighboring camp—22 times larger than Auschwitz—less than two miles away. We would sit in silence beside the railroad tracks where cattle cars bearing men, women, and children screeched to a stop at the “selection” site where the healthy and young were forced into barracks to become slave laborers and everyone else was herded to the “showers”— the gas chambers—to be fatally poisoned.

We meditated on violence, on cruelty, on inhumanity. We meditated on peace, on kindness, on compassion. Away from our dayto-day lives, we meditated, too, on the contradictions of being human—from our murderous rage to our heroic selflessness. Is it really our nature to swing so wildly on the pendulum of human behavior? Certainly the politics and psychology of fascism lay at the root of what happened in Nazi Germany: The few had invaded the hearts and minds of the many, poisoning them, sending their frozen hearts into spiritual and political hibernation.

In our group of 80 were a Palestinian imam, an Israeli rabbi, pastors, priests (Catholic and Zen), therapists, actors, writers, lawyers, doctors, meditation teachers, business people, filmmakers, and students. I felt enriched by the voices and spirit of the young, 16 in all, high school and college age, brimming with open hearts and exercising quick, keen minds.

Twice each day, some moments after we began another round of sitting in silence, four people would stand at the four points of our circle. Each held a typed sheet of paper covered with single-spaced names of those who had been murdered. Often the same surname was intoned, person after person, age 47, or 36, or 23. (Among the several thousand names we read that week none was younger than 16 or older than their 50s; the Nazis kept no records of the

old and the young who they immediately gassed at the camps.)

Beneath a gray November sky some would chant the names—they were praying. Others seemed to be working hard just to maintain control, just to be able to get through the recitation. It was the hardest part of each day for me.

I found myself rocking back and forth, choking back a moan, picking up pebbles and flicking them down as if I was adding exclamation points proclaiming each of these people’s lives mattered. Goldberg, Avram! Goldberg, Sara!

In the afternoons, we would walk into the dank, dark barracks—virtually untouched since the Nazis left in January 1945—and light candles before reciting the Kaddish (the Jewish prayer for the dead) in Polish, English, Dutch, Hebrew and German. Often we would sing.

Rabbi Ohad played guitar, leading us in songs of hope and healing. Whatever notion anyone had that singing at Auschwitz-Birkenau was disrespectful dissipated as our voices rose inside the barracks of death, and drifted skyward, a balm to those whose spirits still hover above that place.

At dusk on the last day of the retreat, we gathered at the pond where the ashes of the dead were dumped, delivered there from the crematorium in whose shadow we stood. At the edge of the pond a stand of tall trees, many

dating back to those dark days, still bore silent witness to the atrocities. We ringed the pond with candles and, standing behind the tapers, some stood silent, some cried, and some sang: “We are rising, like a phoenix from the ashes, brothers and sisters spread your wings and fly high,” we chanted through our tears. “We are ri-i-sing, we are ri-i-sing.”

A few days after I returned home I was a guest speaker in a first-year high school class that had just finished reading Eli Wiesel’s memoir, Night, about his horrific imprisonment at Auschwitz. Before we started talking, I wanted the students to have as a reference point this simple truth: understanding history is key to understanding current events. So I wrote on the blackboard these words from the Czech writer turned political figure Václav Havel: “The struggle against oppression,” he said, “is the struggle of remembering against forgetting.”

As I shared these words—and utter them to myself still—I am left with the questions of how to remember and how to best face the world I live in now.

Voice Male editor Rob Okun can be reached at rob@voicemalemagazine.org.

Winter 2011

Volume 14 No. 52

Changing Men in Changing Times www.voicemalemagazine.org

8

Features 8 John Lennon on Manhood, Fatherhood and Feminism

By Jackson Katz

12 Flying My Freak Flag at Half-mast

By Michael A. Messner

14 10 Things Men & Boys Can Do to Stop Human Trafficking

By Jewel Woods

16 Women Can Say No…and Yes

16

By Michael Kimmel

19 ­Real Men Know How to Take Paternity Leave

By Allison Stevens

22 It’s Not Just a Game An interview with filmmaker Jeremy Earp by Jackson Katz

28 Coming Home to Pinsk

By Rob Okun

Columns & Opinion 2 4 5 7 10 20 21

From the Editor

25 27 32

19

Letters Men @ Work Men & Nonviolence OutLines

Finding the Peacemaker Within By Jan Passion Gay Bashing Is About Masculinity By Michael Kimmel

Poem

Tucson Lament

Men Overcoming Violence

Where Men Stand in Overcoming Violence Against Women

Men & Sports

In the NFL, Violence Comes to a Head By Dave Zirin

ColorLines

Erotic Revolutionaries An Interview with Shayne Lee By Ebony Utley

By Michael Flood

27

Resources

ON THE COVER: Pete Saloutos Photography

male positive • pro-feminist • open-minded Winter 2011

Mail Bonding

Rob A. Okun Editor

Lahri Bond

Art Director

Michael Burke Copy Editor

Read Predmore

Circulation Coordinator

Azad Abbasi, Zach Bernard, Michael Wei Interns

National Advisory Board Juan Carlos Areán

Family Violence Prevention Fund

John Badalament The Modern Dad

Eve Ensler V-Day

Byron Hurt

God Bless the Child Productions

Robert Jensen

Prof. of Journalism Univ. of Texas

Sut Jhally

Media Education Foundation

Bill T. Jones

Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Co.

Jackson Katz

Mentors in Violence Prevention Strategies

Michael Kaufman

White Ribbon Campaign

Joe Kelly

The Dad Man

Michael Kimmel

Prof. of Sociology SUNY Stony Brook

Charles Knight

Other & Beyond Real Men

Initiating Our Boys

Men Help Honor Friedan

Thank you for bringing to light the possibility of modern day initiation for teenage boys (Philip Snyder’s “How Can Boys Come of Age in Today’s World?”

Voice Male, Fall 2010).

I believe Initiation is a missing link in the health of our society.

The West African saying goes “If we don’t initiate our boys, they will burn down the village.”

G a n g s , vandalism, violence, alcohol and drug addiction, disrespect and abuse of women, despair and suicide are all fires we need to put out. As men, knowing who we are and where we fit are keys to a positive and fulfilling life. Initiations begin this process. I believe we men have an obligation to our boys and to future generations. Mature men and elders are in our communities willing and ready to serve this process. They just don’t know where to start. We need to build a societal structure to initiate and mentor all our boys. Our society needs it, our boys deserve it.

Sam Rodgers Boys to Men Mentoring Network Western Mass. & Southern Vermont Leverett, Mass.

Voice Male readers may be interested to know that NOMAS, (the National Organization for Men Against Sexism), has helped to fund a historical marker to honor Betty Friedan and the ground-breaking influence of her book, The Feminine Mystique, which helped to create massive support among women for the women’s movement in the 1960s.

In response to Veteran Feminists of America, which is seeking support to place a plaque at Friedan’s birthplace in Nyack, N.Y., NOMAS donated about 60 percent of the cost of this endeavor. I find it impressive and noteworthy that an organization of primarily men helped to make this happen, and I share this to let you know of the ethics, service and commitment of NOMAS. We have a good ally and partner in this organization.

Please consider checking out the NOMAS web page—www.nomas.org— where you can learn about a conference they are sponsoring in Tallahassee in April.

Rose Garrity Owego, N.Y. Letters may be sent via email to www.voicemalemagazine.org or mailed to Editors: Voice Male, 33 Gray Street, Amherst, MA 01002.

Don McPherson

Mentors in Violence Prevention

Mike Messner

Prof. of Sociology Univ. of So. California

Craig Norberg-Bohm

Men’s Initiative for Jane Doe

Chris Rabb

Afro-Netizen

Haji Shearer

Massachusetts Children’s Trust Fund

Shira Tarrant

Prof. of Gender Studies, California State Long Beach

Voice Male

VOICE MALE is published quarterly by the Alliance for Changing Men, an affiliate of Family Diversity Projects, 33 Gray St., Amherst, MA 01002. It is mailed to subscribers in the U.S., Canada, and overseas and is distributed at select locations around the country and to conferences, universities, colleges and secondary schools, and among non-profit and non-governmental organizations. The opinions expressed in Voice Male are those of its writers and do not necessarily reflect the views of the advisors or staff of the magazine, or its sponsor, Family Diversity Projects. Copyright © 2011 Alliance for Changing Men/Voice Male magazine.

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Submissions: The editors welcome letters, articles, news items, reviews, story ideas and queries, and information about events of interest. Unsolicited manuscripts are welcomed but the editors cannot be responsible for their loss or return. Manuscripts and queries may be sent via email to www.voicemalemagazine.org or mailed to Editors: Voice Male, 33 Gray St., Amherst, MA 01002.

Men @ Work Gender and Climate

Concerned about the persistent exclusion of women’s rights and gender issues in climate debates, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO) created an NGO-United Nations alliance in 2005 as a unified front to address gender and climate change. It is a project of the Global Gender and Climate Alliance (GGCA), a unique network of 13 UN agencies and

more than two dozen civil society organizations working together to ensure that climate change decisionmaking, policies and initiatives, at all levels, are gender responsive.

Since its founding, WEDO has played a leadership role in facilitating global and national policy advocacy, capacity building and knowledge generation, in partnership and collaboration with various members under the GGCA umbrella.

The project was successful in seeing that eight strong references to women and gender, and new gender language was included in the December 2010 Cancun Agreements. Key partners in advocacy work include ENERGIA – the International Network on Gender and Sustainable Energy, Abantu for Development in Ghana, Oxfam International, CARE,

ActionAid, UNIFEM (now part of UNWOMEN), among others.

WEDO works with members of the alliance to lobby governments and build GGCA’s membership of organizations working toward gender-sensitive international climate change agreements and plans. For more information, visit the GGCA website, www.genderclimate.org/.

[Men @ Work continued on page 6]

A Call to Take on The Gender Byline Gap

know why. As only a child with a fierce, idealistic sense of right and wrong can be, I tried to resist these messages without knowing what n 2011, male writers still dominate the public discourse and have was really going on. But not very successfully. What I knew in my heart a much higher percentage of bylines in most corporate magazines then was that my cousin was a better student than I, and much more online and off, even in progressive media. In January Ms. Magazine talented as an artist, a dancer, and in other ways. But to people around (msmagazine.com) started a campaign against the New Yorker after the us, my development—as the boy—seemed to be more important. This magazine went two issues with only two or three contributions by female pattern continued through high school and after. My uncle would give writers, that in a close to 150-page magazine. It’s not just the New Yorker. my father cigars when I scored touchdowns January’s issue of Harpers had only three during high school football games, while my out of 21 stories by women. The Nation’s cousin would cheerlead in semi-obscurity. In latest print issue has four and a half female student government, I was the president and bylines out of 17 articles. The Atlantic did a she the secretary. . . little better, featuring five and a half female “Over the years it finally dawned on me bylines, of 18 total stories. why I was frustrated. I was being unfairly “Publications as prominent as the New deprived—deprived of the talents, the ideas, Yorker need to know they can’t get away the perspective of half of society. Often it was with gender inequity in bylines,” said a point of view I very much wanted. Women’s Jessica Stite, online editor at Ms. “This voices and writing provided a balance to isn’t one of those examples of insidious, the macho orientation most successful boy difficult-to-measure sexism. They will get A meeting of concerned women writers at AlterNet. students and athletes received when I was caught by anyone who can count!” Ms. growing up in America. senior editor Michele Kort told the progressive media website AlterNet “When I came of age in the early seventies I discovered amazing (www.alternet.org) that although the New Yorker has showcased many women writers—authors of sprawling, multi-layered novels like Marge talented female writers over the years, it needs to do way better to ensure Piercy and Sara Davidson. I was introduced to the work of brilliant equal representation on a regular basis. “The New Yorker can only offer a thinkers like Dorothy Dinnerstein, Germaine Greer, and Shulamuth richer perspective on the world if it includes more women’s voices.”

Firestone, whose ideas and social critiques made infinite sense to me, Meanwhile, The Harnisch Foundation offered a $15,000 challenge more so than many of the male thinkers did at that point.” grant to AlterNet for its Gender Byline Project if it matches that amount Hazen said women writers’ ideas helped to “shape me. They’ve from its readers, especially those on Facebook. All of the money in this been fundamental to who I am and what I value. So that is why I think project would pay for content written by women, said executive editor battling the gender byline gap—and it still is severe, we have tons of Don Hazen in an appeal to readers. data to support it—is a key part of every issue we care about, and Why is gender byline fairness important to Hazen? “I became a a linchpin to our future success in creating the society we want. It’s ‘feminist,’ or let’s say I had my ‘consciousness raised,’ as a young child, important for men to get on board, because currently we are being although I didn’t quite know what that was at the time. I think I was deprived.” seven. My female cousin was the same age as I, and almost a sibling To learn more, in addition to AlterNet and Ms., visit the OpEd since our families spent a lot of time together. As we grew, I started Project (www.opedproject.org), an initiative to expand public debate, getting messages about how I was supposed to act around her: protect emphasizing enlarging the pool of women experts who are accessing her, open the door for her, walk on the outside closer to the street. And (and accessible to) key print and online forums. there were other, more subtle messages that made me angry, but I didn’t www.alternet.org

I

Winter 2011

Men @ Work Men Sitting on New Energy Source?

Could men be literally sitting on a renewable energy source to ease the nation’s dependence on oil? Researchers at the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases say the average man passes gas 14 to 23 times a day, producing up to a quart of untapped energy. “Many people think their own output is excessive,” according to William Chey, M.D., in a recent Men’s Health. A professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan, Dr. Chey says, “it’s normal for men to produce between a pint and four pints of gas a day.” Such “backfires” are the body’s way of regulating the amount of air in your stomach and the gas levels in your intestines. What if you try to stifle the urge to let it rip? You run the risk of abdominal cramping or stomach rumbling, technically called borbo-

rygmi. Excess gassiness can result from a poor ability to process certain sugars, such as fructose and lactose, or starchy carbs, including corn and wheat. With veggie oil-fueled cars on the rise, there soon may be an answer to the burning question: Will there finally be a good use for men’s hot air?

Father Knows Best Among the oppressive patriarchal holdovers still in force in Saudi Arabia is a requirement that females obtain their father’s (or guardian’s) permission to marry— no exceptions. Consider: Despite being 42, and a surgeon licensed to practice in Canada and the U.K. as well as her native country, a female Saudi physician is viewed as subordinate to her father. It is estimated that more than three quarters of a million Saudi women are in the same position. Women

New Documentary: Boys Becoming Men

F

rom the co-maker of the Academy Awardnominated Hoop Dreams will soon come Boys Become Men, a new two-hour documentary by filmmaker Frederick Marx. The documentary aims to dramatically demonstrate the urgent need “to resurrect conscious initiation of teens in our times,” Marx says. Featuring families and rites of passage from different traditions—Native American, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and secular—the film makes the point that “all traditions, old and new, have valuable, much needed initiations to offer young people.

Having seen real-life teenage boys slay their personal dragons, having seen their adult mentors tested but unfailing and true,” Marx believes both teen and adult audiences will witness the film’s closing celebrations “with a profound sense of hope that we can—and will—change our society through myriad forms of teen initiation and mentorship.

Most documentaries only present social problems,” Marx says.

“Boys Become Men will present

Voice Male

“can’t even buy a phone without a guardian’s permission,” explained a women’s rights activist. As for the surgeon? She sued her father in court but no results had been reported at press time.

Film director Frederick Marx solutions.” The film complete a trilogy on urban teenage boys that, in addition to Hoop Dreams, included the earlier work, Boys to Men. All express deep concerns about teen boys realizing a healthy and mature masculinity.

Marx has worked in film and television for 35 years and his latest film, Journey from Zanskar, features the Dalai Lama with narration by Richard Gere. A successful online fundraising campaign raised $25,000 to help produce the film. To contribute, or to learn more, go to www. warriorfilms.org.

Ultimately, the manual seeks to bolster men’s participation in the struggle against gender violence and helps to change gender relations which lead to that violence. For those engaged in faith-based communities drawing on the Christian tradition, the manual is an important addition to a social arena in need of more resources. To order a copy ($15) contact WCRC at wcrc.ch.

Brother Keepers

A Manual on Masculinity A new manual Created in God’s Image: From Hegemony to Partnership, aimed at creating a positive masculinity, has been published by The World Communion of Reformed Churches. The manual seeks to break down images of masculinity that encourage men to be dominant by providing positive examples of what masculinity can be. It includes studies of the Bible in the context of gender and sexuality, passages suggesting a liberation theology for men, and a series of modules meant to provide direction for Christian men and men’s groups seeking to embrace positive masculinity.

“There is violence too within the church—in parishes and in church members’ homes,” said Setri Nyomi, general secretary of the World Communion of Reformed Churches (WCRC). “Yet too often we turn a blind eye or are silent…”

One activity in the manual asks men to make an inventory of their lives using the metaphor of a tree: the roots are one’s foundation (i.e. religious beliefs or family experiences); the trunk is the social structure within which one lives; the leaves are sources of strength and motivation.

Brother Keepers: New Perspectives on Jewish Masculinity is an international book of new essays on Jewish men. A wide-ranging collection—from sociological surveys to confessional poetry—Brother Keepers offers a variety of perspectives on the journey from Abraham’s knives to the flight of men from American Jewish life. It was edited by noted Jewish men and masculinity author Harry Brod, and Rabbi Shawn Zevit, who combines spiritual leadership with teaching and performing.

“Like any good Jewish book,” says Jay Michaelson, executive director of Nehirim, GLBT Jewish Culture and Spirituality, Brother Keepers “answers the questions it raises with more questions.”

Essays address personal experience, gendered bodies, poetry and prayer, literature and film, illuminating how masculinities and Judaisms engage each other in gendered Jewishness. To order Brother Keepers ($25 paperback; $55 cloth; and $20 e-book), go to Men’s Studies Press at www. mensstudies.com.

Men & Nonviolence

Finding the Peacemaker Within

By Jan Passion

I

was three years old when I they apologized for their violent watched the cops take my outburst. The incident reminded me how tempting it is to write people father. Before they arrived, I watched my parents fight over a off who commit violence. But if we have the courage to hold their gun. Their own guns drawn, the cops forced my dad into a waiting humanity in our hearts even as we witness or are harmed by their squad car. I sat beside him in the police car, while my mother and acts, we can prepare the ground for nonviolent action and thus prepare brother rode in our car behind us. I think Dad was bleeding from a the way to peace. bullet that grazed him during the I was to learn another lesson in courage from a 15-year-old child fight. Somehow, in all the trauma and chaos, it struck me — at the soldier. I never found out at what age of three — that this wasn’t age she had been abducted. She came to us seeking help after she right: More violence wasn’t the escaped her captors and discovered answer.

Seven years later my father that she was not safe at home in her killed himself, and that wasn’t the own village with her family. This was in part because she had short answer, either. The legacy he left me is that violence is never the hair, which marked her as a female “The work of Nonviolent Peaceforce is a larger-scale version of my work fighter. Though she wanted more answer. But how else to protect in domestic violence.” oneself against violence, if not by than anything to stay with her family, she knew she risked re-abduction and would face a severe penalty for violence?

Thanks to my father, I set a course early in life to figure out an answer desertion if retaken. to that question. My searching would eventually lead me to Nonviolent We spent a day accompanying her to another part of the country where Peaceforce (www.nonviolentpeaceforce.org). she would be safe, could escape the daily trauma of the life of a child Before arriving at Nonviolent Peaceforce, I spent a decade working soldier, and be able to grow her hair out. It was only one day out of the with perpetrators of domestic violence and their victims. I learned a lot lives of the three of us accompanying her, but it made all the difference about my father, working with men who acted just like him. I learned in her getting to keep hers. She was very quiet on the 10-hour journey, to more deeply understand the humanity of these men, who caused so which involved passing through many military checkpoints. She had the much pain to their loved ones. I learned I could hate their actions without stillness of terror about her. She did not make eye contact and answered our questions through the translator in monosyllables. But once we hating them.

I learned that by listening to them, and by showing them that acting arrived at the safe place, her expression seemed to soften, and in her eyes out violently was a choice, that by giving them a safe place to speak of I read the message, “I’m going to make it. I am safe.” their own injuries, and that by not taking sides against them, these men This young woman is still in her teens today, and when I think of her, began to change. They changed not by force but of their own accord. I am reminded why the unarmed civilian peacekeepers of Nonviolent They began to see the power of choosing nonviolence over violence. Peaceforce do what we do. We do our work for young girls taken as Slowly the seed of nonviolence began to grow, and the wall of violence child soldiers. We do our work for young boys who hold grenades to they’d erected to protect themselves began to erode. As they stepped people’s faces. We do this work for ourselves. And some of us do it for from the rubble of their violent pasts, just like me, these men began to our fathers. see solutions other than violence to protect their lives.

The work of Nonviolent Peaceforce is a larger-scale version of my work in domestic violence. Both put mending lives and mending relaJan Passion, a lifelong peace activist, spent 10 years as a tionships first. Civilian protection is the number one mandate carried psychotherapist working with perpetrators out by unarmed civilian peacekeepers, and we are rigorously trained to and victims of various forms of violence respond nonviolently even when under extreme threat. and trauma. Jan has been a peacebuilding I remember when one of our vehicles carrying three peacekeepers trainer with The Conflict Transformation was surrounded by a group of violent young men. They smashed all Across Cultures Program (CONTACT)—a the windows, hit the driver in the head and flashed a grenade under member organization of Nonviolent his face.

Peaceforce—and worked at the Karuna Because this driver, a Kenyan peacekeeper, was able to respond Center for Peacebuilding and as a guest nonviolently and was backed by his colleagues’ courage to remain calm, faculty with Lesley University in Israel. He the situation de-escalated and the result was a meeting the next day. can be reached at JPassion@NVPF.org.

Once a dialogue opened, the attackers began to understand the mission of Nonviolent Peaceforce, and once they saw that we do not take sides, Winter 2011

Three decades after his murder in New York City, John Lennon’s hold on our cultural imagination is still strong. The subject of countless biographies, magazine articles, and documentaries, including a BBC special exploring his final days with the Beatles and the independent film Nowhere Boy delving into his childhood and adolescence, this rock icon has been one of the most chronicled people of our times. So it was a surprise when Rolling Stone magazine uncovered several hours of a taped interview by Jonathon Cott with Lennon just three days before his murder on December 8, 1980. While brief excerpts were published soon after his death, after Cott unearthed the original tapes a few months ago Rolling Stone published the entire interview in its December 23, 2010 issue. While the interview revealed Lennon’s plans for a musical comeback just before his untimely death, longtime antiviolence activist, author, speaker and Voice Male contributing editor Jackson Katz was intrigued by something else. “Throughout the interview,” Katz writes, Lennon offered “a wealth of commentary related to his evolving ideas about manhood.” Katz believes that when Lennon was gunned down in front of his apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the world lost not only one of the greatest musical talents of the 20th century, “it also lost an artist whose sense of himself as a man reflected the cultural shifts in gender norms that had been catalyzed by multicultural women’s movements; someone whose fame and example helped pioneer a new kind of masculinity for his and subsequent generations of men.”

What follows are Katz’s thoughts on Lennon’s evolving ideas about masculinity, fatherhood and feminism.

J John Lennon

on Manhood, Fatherhood and Feminism

By Jackson Katz

Voice Male

ohn Lennon is revered by many peace activists as an artist who used his public platform to oppose the U.S. war in Vietnam. His anthems “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” “Give Peace a Chance” and “Imagine” are revered by millions worldwide. But Lennon was perhaps the most well-known male artist of his era to embrace feminism—and to incorporate feminist insights about masculinity and relationships into his art.

After a brief period of high-profile anti-Vietnam war activism in the early 1970s, the former Beatle turned to subjects in his music and personal life that spoke to some of the changes faced by men of his generation: growing up and assuming adult responsibilities, nurturing more egalitarian relationships with women and being emotionally present for their children. One of his songs that decried sexism, “Woman Is The Nigger of the World” (1972), earned Lennon a spot in Michael Kimmel and Tom Mosmiller’s 1992 anthology Against the Tide: Pro-Feminist Men in the United States 1776-1990, a documentary history.

Lennon was a complicated person who struggled (often quite publicly) with his shortcomings as a father, a partner and a friend. He could be difficult and emotionally abusive. Many writers have noted that his audacious ambition and stunning musical achievements as a young man were propelled, in part, by his efforts to produce art through which he could communicate—and perhaps transcend—the pain he experienced as a young boy, when his parents effectively abandoned him. It is no small irony—and it is indefensible—that Lennon similarly neglected his first son, Julian.

But despite the shortcomings of the man behind the myth, as a Beatle and as a solo act John Lennon produced some of the most popular and memorable music in history. His songs have become a part of our cultural fabric and collective psyche; the enduring popularity of his artistic contributions is testament to the fact that he connected—emotionally and intellectually—with hundreds of millions (billions?) of people. In light of that connection and Lennon’s continuing appeal, consider some of the things he said in his last interview on a range of topics related to the major gender transformations of his—and our— time: fatherhood, tough guy posturing, feminism, and women. Three decades later his thoughts on these critical subjects are just as relevant and enduring as his music.

On fatherhood:

On learning from women:

The thing about the child is... it’s still hard. I’m not the greatest dad on earth, I’m doing me best. But I’m a very irritable guy, and I get depressed. I’m up and down, up and down, and he’s (then-five-year-old son Sean) had to deal with that too— withdrawing from him and then giving, and withdrawing and giving. I don’t know how much it will affect him in later life, but I’ve been physically there.

I have to keep remembering that I never really was (a tough guy). That’s what Yoko has taught me. I couldn’t have done it alone—it had to be a female to teach me. That’s it. Yoko has been telling me all the time, “It’s all right, it’s all right.” I look at early pictures of meself, and I was torn between being Marlon Brando and being the sensitive poet—the Oscar Wilde part of me with the velvet, feminine side. I was always torn between the two, mainly opting for the macho side, because if you showed the other side, you were dead.

On tough guy posturing:

I’m often afraid, but I’m not afraid On his song “Woman” to be afraid, otherwise it’s all scary. But (1972): it’s more painful to try not to be yourself.

“Woman” came about because, one People spend a lot of time trying to be sunny afternoon in Bermuda, it suddenly somebody else, and I think it leads to hit me what women do for us. Not just terrible diseases. Maybe you get cancer what my Yoko does for me, although I or something. A lot of tough guys get was thinking in those personal terms... cancer, have you noticed? John Wayne, but any truth is universal. What dawned Steve McQueen. I think it has something on me was everything I was taking for to do—I don’t know, I’m no expert—with granted.

Women really are the other half constantly living or getting trapped in of the sky, as I whisper at the beginning of an image or an illusion of themselves, the song.

It’s a “we” or it ain’t anything. suppressing some part of themselves, The song reminds me of a Beatles track, whether it’s the feminine side or the though I wasn’t trying to make it sound “I wanted to be this fearful side. like a Beatles track. I did it as I did “Girl” tough James Dean all I’m well aware of that because I come many years ago -- it just sort of hit me like from the macho school of pretense. I was the time. It took a lot of a flood, and it came out like that. “Woman” never really a street kid or a tough guy. I wrestling to stop doing is the grown-up version of “Girl.” used to dress like a Teddy boy and identify that, even though I still This interview—and many others over with Marlon Brando and Elvis Presley, fall into it when I get the years—makes clear that John Lennon but I never really was in real street fights insecure and nervous.” was strong enough both to acknowledge or real down-home gangs. I was just a his own vulnerability and fear, and also suburban kid, imitating the rockers. But it was a big part of one’s life to look tough. I spent the whole of my to embrace women’s leadership, both personally and politically. childhood with shoulders up around the top of me head and me For a man who would have turned 70 last year, he was way glasses off because glasses were sissy, and walking in complete ahead of the curve. It is one of the defining tragedies of our fear, but with the toughest-looking face you’ve ever seen... I cultural moment that a non-violent man—the leader of the wanted to be this tough James Dean all the time. It took a lot of Beatles!—who possessed the rare gift of translating his genderwrestling to stop doing that, even though I still fall into it when I bending introspection into brilliant, accessible art was ultimately silenced by another man’s violence. get insecure and nervous.

On love, race and feminism: ...we hear from all kinds of people. One kid living up in Yorkshire wrote this heartfelt letter about being both Oriental and English and identifying with John and Yoko. The odd kid in the class. There are a lot of those kids who identify with us—as a couple, a biracial couple, who stand for love, peace, feminism and the positive things of the world.

John Lennon’s final Rolling Stone interview can be found at:www.rollingstone.com/music/news/john-lennons-finalinterview-20101207.

Voice Male contributing editor Jackson Katz is author of The Macho Paradox and writer-producer, with the Media Education Foundation, of Tough Guise: Violence, Media and the Crisis in Masculinity (www. jacksonkatz.com).

Winter 2011

OutLines

Gay Bashing Is About

Masculinity

By Michael Kimmel

T

he tragic suicide of Rutgers University first-year student Tyler Clementi last fall led to a wave of national hand-wringing anguish about the daily torture and humiliations suffered by young gays and lesbians. An article in The New York Times expanded the conversation to include the stories of several other gay teens who recently committed suicide, such as Seth Walsh of Fresno, Calif., who endured a “relentless barrage of taunting, bullying and other abuse at the hands of his peers.” Walsh hanged himself in September at age 13.

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Yet, in our collective search for explanations and solutions we’ve missed one salient fact. Here are the names of the teenagers in The Times article: Tyler Clementi, Seth Walsh, Billy Lucas, Asher Brown. Notice anything?

They’re all boys.

Writing that gay “teens” suffer such relentless abuse or bullying obscures as much as it reveals. It’s not “teens.” It’s boys.

Yes, lesbian teens can be relentlessly tormented, harassed and bullied in school.

They can be mercilessly taunted in cyberspace, and shunned in real space.

But the amount of rage they inspire rarely compares to that experienced by boys.

And that’s not because of the current fad of faux-lesbianism among teenage girls. Sure, it’s true that many teen girls have “kissed a girl” and “liked it,” as Katy Perry proclaims. But there is something fundamental about male homosexuality that elicits what psychologists call “homosexual panic,” and a near-hysterical effort to circle the wagons and get rid of the perceived threat.

For my book Guyland I interviewed nearly 400 young people all across the country. I found that many of America’s high schools have become gauntlets through which students must pass every day. Bullies roam the halls, targeting the most vulnerable or isolated, beating them up, destroying their homework, shoving them into lockers, dunking their heads in toilets or just relentlessly mocking them.

It’s all done in public—on playgrounds, bathrooms, hallways, even in class. And the other kids either laugh and encourage it or scurry to the walls, hoping to remain invisible so that they won’t become the next target. For many, just being noticed for being “uncool” or “weird” is a great fear.

Why are some students targeted?

Because they’re gay or even “seem” gay— which may be just as disastrous for a teenage boy. After all, the most common put-down in American high schools today is “that’s so gay,” or calling someone a “fag.” It refers to anything and everything: what kind of sneakers you have on, what you’re eating for lunch, some comment you made in class, who your friends are or what sports team you like. The average high school student in Des Moines hears an anti-gay comment every seven minutes, and teachers intervene only about 3 percent of the time. After spending a year in a California high school, one sociologist titled her ethnographic account Dude, You’re a Fag. It’s true that gays and lesbians are far more often the target of hostility than their straight peers. But it’s often true that antigay sentiments are only partly related to sexual orientation. Calling someone gay or a fag has become so universal that it’s become synonymous with dumb, stupid or wrong.

And it’s “dumb” or “wrong” because it isn’t masculine enough. To the “that’sso-gay” chorus, homosexuality is about

gender nonconformity, not being a “real man,” and so anti-gay sentiments become a shorthand method of gender policing.

One survey found that most American boys would rather be punched in the face than called gay. Tell a guy that what he is doing or wearing is “gay,” and the gender police have just written him a ticket. If he persists, they might have to lock him up.

Many guys think being gay means not being a guy. That’s the choice: gay or guy. In a study by Human Rights Watch, heterosexual students consistently reported that the targets were simply boys who were un-athletic, dressed nicely, or were bookish and shy.

Take the case of Jesse Montgomery, who filed a Title IX suit in the Minnesota courts after suffering 11 years of verbal and physical abuse. Jesse was treated to a daily verbal barrage of “faggot,” “queer,” “homo,” “gay,” “girl,” “princess,” “fairy,” “freak,” “bitch,” “pansy” and more. He was regularly punched, kicked, tripped. Some of the torment was directly sexual: One of the students grabbed his own genitals while squeezing Jesse’s buttocks and on other occasions would stand behind him and grind his penis in Jesse’s backside.

By the way, Jesse Montgomery is

straight. So, too, was Dylan Theno, an 18year-old former student at Tonganoxie High School in Kansas. Beginning in the seventh grade, he was consistently taunted as “flamer,” “faggot” and “masturbator boy,” harassed daily in the lunchroom and on the playground. Teachers looked the other way or laughed along with the harassers. Why? Dylan explained: “Because I was a different kid, you know, I wasn’t the alpha male. …

I had different hair than everybody else; I wore earrings … I wasn’t a big time sports guy at school.”

Of course, if you actually are gay, the harassment is relentless—and often dismissed entirely by the adults in charge or, worse, considered appropriate. Take the case of Jamie Nabozny in the mid1990s. Beginning in middle school, he was harassed, spit on, urinated on, called a “fag” by a teacher and mock-raped while at least 20 other students looked on and laughed. Each time the school principals and teachers shrugged off his complaints, telling Jamie that he should “expect” this sort of treatment if he’s gay and that, well, “Boys will be boys.”

Nabozny successfully sued the school district and the principals of both his middle school and high school, who paid out close

to $1 million in damages. His lawsuit opened a door for those who are the targets of bullying and harassment in school, because school districts and administrators may be held liable if they do not intervene effectively to stop the abuse.

But gender non-conforming boys still need protection—not just from the bullies but from the teachers, parents, administrators and community members who look the other way, at best, or collude with it.

Most Americans find explicit racist and anti-Semitic behavior unacceptable, an affront to their moral sensibilities. Racism and anti-Semitism are out of bounds even when they don’t become physical, and most of us believe that those who openly express those sentiments should be severely punished.

Why is the same not true of gay bashing?

Michael Kimmel, a Voice Male contributing editor, is author or editor of more than 20 books on masculinity and teaches in the Sociology Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Winter 2011

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Flying My Freak Flag at Half-mast photo: Diana Davies

By Michael A. Messner 1971 drew the line in the sand between the violent lies of Nixon and the truth of our Nutopian vision: I’ve had enough of reading things by neurotic, psychotic, pig-headed politicians, all I want is the truth, just give me some truth, no shorthaired, yellow-bellied son of Tricky Dicky is gonna mother hubbard soft soap me with just a pocketful of hope

Viet Nam War protest, 1971

During the 1968 elections, Senator Eugene McCarthy’s peace campaign for the presidency inspired some from my generation to go “Clean for Gene.” Four years later, many young people rallied similarly behind Senator George McGovern, hoping he would reverse Nixon’s terrible war. I resisted the drift toward conventional attire and the pull of liberal politics. Already, the lyrics of David Crosby’s 1970 anthem to the deeper meanings of long hair looped inside my head:

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ot long ago I pulled the plug on my four-decade flirtation with the John Lennon Look. A few years back, I had already quit with the round granny glasses. But now, at age 57, I’ve truly done it: I cut my hair. I really had little choice, having observed with growing horror the death throes of the thinning diaphanous do above my rapidly growing forehead. Oh, there’s still enough hair to run a comb through. But when I gaze into the mirror while standing under the unforgiving fluorescent lights in a public restroom, the truth is revealed—I am crowning like a newborn, the oval top of my increasingly shiny skull transparent through the graying wisps. What I see is a shock—not of hair, but of cranium.

My hair is not entirely gone: it’s still ample on the sides, and on top a sparse tuft survives, still substantial enough that I’ve not yet begun to take daily inventory of the individual hairs—or to name them (as in, “Oh, honey, as we slept last night, I lost Walter!”). But rather than resembling as they once did a neatly unified congregation flowing uni-directionally in some shared faith, the follicles atop my head are now akin to a shrinking gathering of nonbelievers, upright but akimbo in surprise during a cruel moment of final judgment.

Like so many mid-1960s American boys, in the wake of the British Invasion I abandoned my crew-cut, and urged my straight brown hair to creep over my ears and forehead, as far as would be allowed by parents and coaches. My dad, it turned out, was both my parent and my coach (a particular breed of post-World War II man passionately committed to the idea that long hair on their sons erased their own ability to make the crucial distinction between boys and girls). Later, off to college, I was freed up to cultivate a semi-sloppy “hippie look.” Long hair became more than a style: it was a political statement, a sign of my opposition to war, patriarchy, and “the establishment.” The equation was simple: Short hair = Nixon; long hair = a New Man, peaceful and egalitarian. As usual, John Lennon in 12

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Almost cut my hair It happened just the other day It’s gettin’ kind of long I coulda’ said it was in my way But I didn’t, and I wonder why I feel like letting my freak flag fly Yes I feel like I owe it to someone.

Did others besides me buy this illogic? In retrospect, it’s amusing that Crosby’s nebulous “explanation” for keeping his hair long resonated with anybody. Maybe we were all ingesting the same mindmuddling substances at the time; I don’t know. But I do recall that, with some degree of self-righteousness, I continued to sport long hair as a statement of my anti-establishment identity.

Long hair on guys didn’t retain its radical political meanings for long. In the 1980s, I should have gotten my first motley clue from the mullet, a truly unfortunate look that likely inspired many men’s return to the barbershop. And by the 1990s, it seemed that the only longhaired male musicians were twanging Country or shredding Heavy Metal, two genres I could not stomach. Most of the rockers I admired—Eric Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Neil Young—had gone to a shorter look. Even Paul McCartney was keeping his mop neatly trimmed (and presumably dyed). By the turn of the millennium, some middle-aged men faced up to imminent hair loss with a suddenly-fashionable Bruce-Willis-pre-emptive depilation. When my brother-in-law Willy (who in his shaggy youth was frequently mistaken for Jerry Garcia or Karl Marx) went shiny billiard-ball, I should have noticed that the fashion shift had penetrated the grassroots of society. But I remained stubborn in my longhairishness, still figuring, I suppose, I owed it to someone.

For a time, I fought to preserve my gray, thinning mane. Three or four years ago, I considered using Rogaine. But simply reading the instructions on the box turned me off. Slather slimy goop on my head every day? And leave it there? Yeccch! Ever since the midsixties, when I’d joined the generational rejection of Brylcreem and other “greasy kids’ stuff,” I had sailed proudly under the banner that the wet-head is dead.

But then my doctor introduced me to a little blue pill called Propecia. Before taking it, I looked it up online and learned that most men who take the drug daily for a three-month period of time experience noticeable “hair re-growth” that reverses hair loss. Eureka, yes! Let a thousand follicles bloom! And oh, yes: Clinical studies also showed that “A small number of men had sexual side effects, occurring in less than 2% of men. These include less desire for sex, difficulty in achieving an erection, and a decrease in the amount of semen.” Seeking a second opinion, I found another website that reported even better odds: only 1.8 percent of men who take Propecia experience decreased libido, a mere 0.8 percent a decreased volume of ejaculate, and incidence of impotence is “less than one percent.”

Lucky me to learn that I am so rare as to be included in an epidemiologically singular group of less than 1 percent! To be concrete, after three weeks of swallowing the magical blue pill, I began to wither where it most mattered. In the manhood department below the belt, I had always already been painfully average in size—oh, a bit below average in size, okay? But this had never been a problem.

My wife, Pierrette, is petite, standing a full foot shorter than I, and weighing eighty pounds less. Once in the early 1980s, as a younger couple strolling in a neighborhood of Mexico City, Pierrette and I walked by a group of snickering men. One of them made a comment, and they all burst into laughter. After we had passed the men, Pierrette translated: “He said, ‘How does he reach her?’” Now, gentle reader, you can intuit the answer to this question.

But now, after three weeks of Propecia, I had to make a choice: accept a self-imposed flaccidity (albeit potentially topped off with a full noggin of hair), or capitulate to a balding crown (but with

continued virile tumescence). If forced to choose thusly, which freak flag would you elect to fly?

It was not that hard to decide. Now, with my hair cut shorter, I have found that I’ve not yet been ejected from any clubs—political, professional or musical. My friends and family still love me, and my students still take notes when I speak. It turns out apparently that nobody felt I owed it to them to keep my hair long. And maybe, I have to admit, I look less bad as a shorthair. A 20-year-old mophead in 1972 may have shined with sexy, youthful rebellion. A mophead pushing 60 comes across more like, well, an inverted worn-out mop, with gravity tugging the lifeless gray threads down on the sides.

Life transitions, however unwelcome, can bring small and surprising benefits. With my hair now more closely cropped, I have discovered older women on occasion bat their eyes and say that I look just like Clint Eastwood. To be sure, this is not the look I was going for. After all, Eastwood is what?—20, 25 years older than me?

(He’s no John Lennon, either, I should add.) Overriding my objections, a woman friend recently advised my wife, “I wouldn’t take it as an insult; Clint is hot.” So I have decided to take this unexpected comparison as a compliment. Or perhaps, at least, as the only sort of compliment I can expect to get from here on in.

Voice Male contributing editor Michael Messner is professor of sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California. His memoir, King of the Wild Suburb: A Memoir of Fathers, Sons and Guns, will be published this spring by Plain View Press.

Winter 2011

13

10 Things Men and Boys Can Do to Stop Human Trafficking

By Jewel Woods

H

uman trafficking is modern-day slavery. It is the use of force, fraud, or coercion to compel another person to provide labor or commercial sex against their will, and it is one of the fastest growing criminal enterprises in the world.

The Renaissance Male Project believes that men are complicit in this crime when they purchase sex because they create the demand by allowing others to exploit women and children for profit. Men must play a role in ending this form of slavery, a vicious industry that exploits and perpetuates the suffering of hundreds of thousands of women and children in the United States and around the world.

Based on a list of statistics that the Polaris Project compiled: ▪ A total of 27 million are enslaved globally.

▪ Between 14,500 and 17,500 individuals are brought into the U.S. as human trafficking victims each year.

▪ One million children enter the global commercial sex trade every year.

There are specific actions that men and boys can take to end these atrocities: 14

Voice Male

1. Challenge the glamorization of pimps in our culture Mainstream culture has popularized the image of a pimp to the point that some men and boys look up to them as if they represent legitimate male role models, and they view “pimping” as a normal expression of masculinity. As Carrie Baker reflects in “Jailing Girls for Men’s Crimes” in the Summer 2010 Ms. issue, the glorification of prostitution is often rewarded, not punished, in pop culture: Reebok awarded a multi-million-dollar contract for two shoe lines to rapper 50 Cent, whose album Get Rich or Die Tryin (with the hit single “P.I.M.P.”) went platinum. Rapper Snoop Dogg, who showed up at the 2003 MTV Video Music Awards with two women on dog leashes and who was described in the December 2006 cover of Rolling Stone as “America’s Most Lovable Pimp,” has received endorsement deals from Orbit gum and Chrysler.

In reality, pimps play a central role in human trafficking and routinely rape, beat and terrorize women and girls to keep them locked in prostitution. Men can take a stand against pimps and pimping by renouncing the pimp culture and the music that glorifies it.

2. Confront the belief that prostitution is a “victimless crime” Many men view prostitution as a “victimless crime.” But it is not. For example, American women who are involved in prostitution are at a greater risk to be murdered than women in the general population. Research also shows that women involved in prostitution suffer tremendous physical and mental trauma associated with their work. Viewing prostitution as a victimless crime or something that women “choose” allows men to ignore the fact that the average age of entry into prostitution in the U.S. is 12 to 14 and that the vast majority of women engaged in prostitution would like to get out but feel trapped. Men should stop viewing prostitution as a victimless crime and acknowledge the tremendous harm and suffering their participation in prostitution causes.

3. Stop patronizing strip clubs When men think of human trafficking, they often think of brothels in countries outside of the U.S. However, strip clubs in this country as well as abroad may be a place where human traf-

human trafficking is to support anti-trafficking legislation at the local, state or federal level.

Sculptures by Gustav Vigeland (1869 – 1943), The Vigeland Park, Oslo, Norway

ficking victims go unnoticed or unidentified. Strip clubs are also places of manufactured pleasure where strippers are routinely sexually harassed and assaulted by owners, patrons and security personnel. Men rarely consider whether women working in strip clubs are coerced into that line of work, because to do so would conflict with the pleasure of participating in commercialized sex venues. Men can combat human trafficking by no longer patronizing strip clubs and by encouraging their friends and coworkers to do the same.

9. Support creation of “John Schools”

There would be no human trafficking if there was no demand for it. Strategies aimed at ending human trafficking must focus on eliminating the demand.

“John Schools” are education programs designed to educate customers apprehended by law enforcement who attempted to purchase sex. By teaching the legal and health effects of buying sex and the realities of prostitu4. Don’t consume tion, such schools impart knowlpornography edge that can reduce demand, Pornography has the power making men conscious of how There would be no human trafficking if there was no demand for it. to manipulate male sexuality, their actions can spur on human with women in developing countries. When popularize unhealthy attitudes trafficking. Learn whether or toward sex and sexuality and eroticize violence men engage in these practices, they do not not your local community has a John School. against women. Pornography leads men and acknowledge the fact that many trafficked If not, encourage your local prosecutor’s office boys to believe that certain sexual acts are women and children come from developing or city council to start one. normal, when in fact sexual acts that are non- countries—even in countries where prostituconsensual, offensive and coupled with violent tion is “legal.” Traveling overseas grants men 10. Raise sons and mentor boys intent result in the pain, suffering and humili- a great deal of anonymity. As men, we have a to challenge oppression ation of women and children. In addition, responsibility to confront the men who go overNo boy is destined to be a “john,” a pimp, a disproportionate amount of mainstream seas and participate in sex tourism. or a human trafficker. Raising young men in pornography sexualizes younger women with circles of accountability to be respectful and such titles as “teens,” “barely 18,” “cheer- 7. Talk to men and boys about protective of all women and children is one men’s issues in male spaces leaders,” etc. Targeting younger women socialof the most important things men can do to izes men to develop appetites for younger and The only way to change men is by engaging stop human trafficking. Talk about human younger women and creates a pedophiliac spaces where men and boys talk and develop trafficking as a modern form of slavery to help culture among men. Victims of human traf- their ideas and attitudes toward sex and sexu- convince men and boys to become allies in the ficking have also been forced into pornography. ality. Male spaces such as barbershops, locker fight to end this form of oppression.

Men can stop the voyeurism of sex and sex rooms, fraternities and union halls are the real acts that fuel human trafficking by refusing to classrooms where boys learn to become men consume pornography and encouraging others and where men develop most of their ideas to do the same. about how to interact with women. If men do Jewel Woods is not feel comfortable talking about these issues an author and a 5. Tackle male chauvinism and in male spaces, they can drop off informational gender analyst sexism online brochures and make themselves available to whose views on Contrary to the myth that men do not talk with other men and boys when they have men and boys in gossip, men spend a significant amount of time questions or concerns. As men, we need to American society online discussing their sexual exploits. The turn male spaces into circles of accountability have been featured Internet provides many men with the ability to where men learn about non-violence, social on television, radio, mask their identities while indulging in racist, justice and ending violence against women. and publications sexist and violent diatribes against women and including Essence girls. Choosing to be a critical voice online is 8. Support anti-humanand Ebony, and on trafficking policies an extremely important way to educate and websites including In 2010 President Obama proclaimed inform men and boys about their choices. Men The Root, The Black Commentator, can change this culture by starting threads in January National Slavery and Human TrafAlternet, and Huffington Post. He is the online forums that cause men to talk about ficking Prevention Month. However, more author of The Black Male Privileges their attitudes toward women and how these substantive legislation is required to end human Checklist and Don’t Blame It on Rio: attitudes and behaviors are linked to human trafficking. Men can educate themselves about The Real Deal Behind Why Men Travel the issues by visiting anti-trafficking organitrafficking. to Brazil for Sex. He is the founder and zations and by asking their elected officials executive director of The Renaissance what they have done to support or sponsor 6. End sex tourism Male Project, Inc. (www.renaissanceMen in the U.S. and other “first world” anti-human, trafficking legislation. One of maleproject.com). nations routinely travel overseas and have sex the most important acts men can do to stop Winter 2011

15

Women Can Say No…and Yes

Courtesy of Yale Daily News

By Michael Kimmel

Posing in front of the Yale Women’s Center, a fraternity pledge class held signs proclaiming “We love Yale sluts.”

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early 30 years ago, in a column in the New York Times The immediate and universal outcry focused, rightly, on the first half Magazine, conservative firebrand William F. Buckley waxed of the chant—the explicit support and encouragement of sexual assault. nostalgic about his college days at Yale. He imagined a young Legal questions were raised: Is this hate speech? Does it promote a Yalie today, at the now-coed, gender-integrated university, longing for hostile environment in which actual sexual assaults (Yale reported 92 “the fraternity that wouldn’t end.” last year) are ignored, downplayed or explained away?

Someday, damn it, we’ll have a treehouse of our own. We’ll build At first, the fraternity issued a cover-your-ass smirking apology for it out in the woods where Mother can’t find us. offending people’s feelings (read: you feminists And we’ll eat when we want, what we want. can’t take a joke). Their next apology, a day or We’ll bring our friends. Have a secret club. And What does it mean to target so later, was far more abject, and showed they’d no girls. the one place where women put some serious thought into how their actions Not bad for a guy whose first book title might have been experienced by others. It seemed might actually feel safe? included only God and man. sincere enough.

It’s a reminder that men still Defensive and wistful, Buckley experiences But it lacked historical perspective. In 2006, rule, that bro’s will always increasing gender equality as an invasion into fraternity guys marched in a sort of picket line come before “ho’s.” That those pure homosocial refuges, coupled with outside the Women’s Center on campus—chanting even the Women’s Center constant policing by angry Mommies. It’s as if those same phrases. In 2008, members of another can’t protect you.

Buckley was Spanky, on the Little Rascals, putting fraternity celebrated their love of “Yale sluts” by up the sign “He-Man Woman Haters Club. No screaming about it outside that same Women’s Gurls Allowed.”

Center on campus.

I was reminded of this little dream of homosocial purity as I learned What does it mean to chant “No Means Yes” outside the campus of the now-viral video of a fall pledge party at Yale’s Delta Kappa Women’s Center, the place that offers services to women who have been Epsilon fraternity marching around and shouting “No Means Yes! Yes assaulted or abused? What does it mean to target the one place where Means Anal!” and other slogans. women might actually feel safe enough to find their own voice, to feel (For the historically minded, DKE was mentioned in the Times in strong enough to succeed in a world still marred by gender inequality?

November, 1967 in a scandal over branding their pledges with red-hot It’s a reminder that men still rule, that bro’s will always come before coat hangers. The newspaper called the practice “sadistic and obscene.” “ho’s.” That even the Women’s Center can’t protect you. That is, it’s a The chapter president, one George W. Bush, defended it as akin to way to make the safe unsafe. a cigarette burn. That was the first time Bush was mentioned in that We could leave it there, and let the campus judiciary and the blogonewspaper.) sphere continue to debate about free speech and hostile environments 16

Voice Male

As part of their outreach efforts, the Women’s Center sponsored a roundtable discussion at Toad’s nightclub in New Haven.

and hate speech. But I think it would miss another, equally important element—the second half of the chant, “Yes Means Anal.”

This chant assumes that anal sex is not pleasurable for women; that if she says yes to intercourse, you have to go further to an activity that you experience as degrading to her, dominating to her, not pleasurable to her. This second chant is a necessary corollary to the first.

Thanks to feminism, women have claimed the ability to say both “no” and “yes.” Not only have women come to believe that “no means no,” that they have a right to not be assaulted and raped, but they also have a right to say “yes,” to their own desires, their own sexual agency.

Feminism enabled women to find their own sexual voice.

Sometimes, as in the case of the now-famous Karen Owen at Duke, they can be as explicitly raunchy as men, and evaluate men’s bodies in exactly the way that men evaluate women’s bodies. (I agree with Ariel Levy that imitating men’s drinking and sexual predation is a rather impoverished view of liberation.)

This is confusing to many men, who see sex not as mutual pleasuring, but about the “girl hunt,” a chase, a conquest. She says no, he breaks down her resistance. Sex is a zero-sum game. He wins, if she puts out; she loses.

That women can like sex—and especially like good sex—and are capable of evaluating their partners changes the landscape. If women say “yes,” where’s the conquest, where’s the chase, where’s the pleasure?

And where’s the feeling that your victory is her defeat? What if she is doing the scoring, not you?

Thus, the “Yes Means Anal” part of the chant. Sex has become unsafe for men—women are agentic, go for it, and evaluate our performances. So if “No Means Yes” attempts to make what is safe for women unsafe, then “Yes Means Anal” makes what is experienced as unsafe for men again safe—back in that comfort zone of conquest and victory.

Back to something that is assumed could not possibly be pleasurable for her. It makes the unsafe safe—for men.

In this way, we can see the men of DKE at Yale not as a bunch of angry predators, asserting their dominance, but as a more pathetic bunch of guys who see themselves as powerless losers, trying to re-establish a sexual landscape which they feel has been thrown terribly off its axis.

This is especially ironic, of course, because these straight, white, upper class Yalie DKEs are among the most privileged 20-year-olds on the planet. And yet now they feel one-down, defensive, reduced to impotent screaming about entitlement—and all because of women’s equality.

Man up, guys. Women can say no—and they can say yes. And in 2011, real men can learn to hear both.

Voice Male contributing editor Michael Kimmel is the author of Guyland and Manhood in America, among his many books on men and masculinity.

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The Prison Birth Project

working to provide support, education and advocacy to women and girls at the intersection of the criminal justice system and motherhood.

www.theprisonbirthproject.org Winter 2011

17

“I celebrate you for standing with women in the struggle to end violence against women and girls. Your brave magazine is bringing forward the new vision and voices of manhood which will inevitably shift this paradigm and create a world where we are all safe and free.”

“This vital publication is an important tool in our struggle to re-imagine ourselves in the world.”

—Bill T. Jones, artistic director Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company

—Eve Ensler, activist-playwright (The Vagina Monologues)

What’s happening with men and masculinity?

That’s the question Voice Male tries to answer each issue as it chronicles manhood in transition.

The changes men have undergone the past 30 years, our efforts following women in challenging men’s violence, and our ongoing exploration of our interior lives, are central to our vision.

The magazine’s roots are deep in the male positive, profeminist, anti-violence men’s movement.

We draw inspiration from the world-changing acts of social transformation women have long advanced and the growing legion of men agitating and advocating for a new expression of masculinity.

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Voice Male

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­­­ Real Men Know How to Take Paternity Leave

By Allison Stevens

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hat does it mean to be a real man at the office? It means being a workaholic, says Joan Williams, and that has devastating consequences for women, men and families.

Men prove their masculinity in the workplace by putting in long hours, Williams said last week at a panel discussion at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C. She was discussing her new book Reshaping the WorkFamily Debate: Why Men and Class Matter. I know just what she means.

This man is my father, an attorney who spent most weekends at the office when I was a little girl. He is also my husband, who works 10- or 12hour days even though he has two young children at home.

He’s even my sister, a lawyer in a male-dominated firm who always asks me to call her back at work, even if it’s 10 p.m. on a Saturday.

These workers sacrifice their waking lives on the altar of modern-day machismo.

According to many studies, professional men’s working hours rose in the 1990s, Williams said. “They just went bananas,” she said. At the same time, men’s household contributions leveled off in the 1990s and haven’t risen since.

A third—and likely related phenomenon also occurred.

“When men’s household contributions leveled off, guess what? So did women’s labor force participation,” Williams said.

Those women who continue to work are still responsible for more than their share of child care and household responsibilities. Not surprisingly, we have become the driving force behind the growing movement for better work-life balance.

Work Benefits Enjoyed Elsewhere We want one of the big benefits that our peers enjoy in many other countries: paid leave to care for ourselves or a family member who falls ill or to bond with a new child. We also want more control over our work schedules so we can fit a doctor appointment or a meeting with our child’s teacher into our busy workdays.

Yet despite the obvious and desperate need for these kinds of benefits, bills that would provide them to millions of employees around the country are going nowhere.

That’s because men aren’t involved in the discussion, Williams argued. (Right, of course! They’re too busy putting in long hours at the office proving their manhood.)

“We have to open up a national conversation about the gender pressures on men that are making them feel so unable to change,” Williams said. “Women will continue to lose in kitchen-table bargaining over child care and housework until we open up successfully that conversation about men and masculinity.”

This conversation has taken place in our house and it has had huge payoffs.

Last year while pregnant with our second child, I learned that my husband had accrued six weeks of vacation leave and a stunning eight months of paid sick leave. I suggested (and was prepared to insist) that he use it after the birth of our son and he enthusiastically agreed—and actually made it happen. I was pleasantly surprised—or should I say downright stunned—since he works in an office comprised mostly of military officers.

He certainly has gotten his fair share of ribbing from his colleagues for taking such an extended leave (some of his Winter 2011

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colleagues in the military are just happy to be in the same time zone when their children are born). But I must say, he’s also gotten some surprising and welcome chest-bumps from envious colleagues.

One Complaint One lingering complaint, however: He couldn’t use his deep well of sick leave during this period (which was when our son was six months old) because of his gender. As a father, and not a mother, he was apparently not entitled to use sick benefits to care for our child because a certain limited amount of time had passed.

But he did exhaust his vacation leave—and then some—to care for our children after I went back to work, and I cannot overstate how fabulous it was for our family.

During these two months I was married to the equivalent of a traditional wife and mother, with all the benefits that bestows on any bread earner. What a gift!

But my husband was the greater beneficiary. He has often said since that those two months (he tacked on a couple weeks of unpaid leave) were the best of his life. He lost two weeks pay, and ignored warnings about the risk to his career, but he came out ahead, way ahead.

Sporting a beard, a baby carrier, and his version of a gender-neutral diaper bag (a black backpack) spilling over with diapers, wipes, my pumped breast milk and all manner of other infant accoutrements, John headed out—often with the dog in tow, too—every morning to the park, the museum, the playground, wherever, to spend some quality time with his kids.

Loving Every Last Minute He loved every last minute of it. When I asked him how he felt about going back to work, his eyes began to water.

Now, my husband is no crier. He didn’t cry when he proposed to me.

He didn’t cry during our wedding ceremony. He didn’t cry during the birth of our first and second sons.Like most men, John expresses neither joy nor sorrow through tears.

To be sure, my husband loves his job. But the mere thought of returning to the long days and late nights of his working world—and missing out on uninterrupted weekdays with his children—brought him to an emotional precipice.

John and I are now talking about ways he can spend more time with the kids, from job-sharing to flex-time and all the other options women often wind up considering after we become mothers.

It’s the kind of discussion we all need to have, not just us women.

Men may be seen as less macho in the workforce if they alter their schedule for their children, and perhaps they’ll pay a price in the same way that women do if they attempt to find that precarious balance between work and family.

But the discussion alone can yield incalculable rewards.

Talking about ways fathers can spend more time with their children could open up more options for dads and will push the work-family movement forward—and it may just make a few more overworked fathers well up with tears of joy.

Allison Stevens is a writer in Washington, D.C. A version of this article originally appeared in Women’s eNews (www.womensenews.org).

A Tucson Lament And when the shots ring out and the dead and the wounded lie in a Safeway parking lot like pieces from a discarded board game And when a 79 year-old husband puts his body in front of the barrage of bullets aimed at his wife and dies saving her And when a gentle Buddha nestles his boss against his ample chest so she doesn’t choke on her own blood And when the glint of a Southwestern sun reflects off of the hood of the hearse bearing the casket of the federal judge And when those who preach separateness from a place of fear inside themselves hear at dawn’s early light a quiet voice chipping away at the pillars of their certainty And when the parents of a nine-year old donate their daughter’s organs to a little girl in Boston who one day may run for student council 20

Voice Male

Only then, two thousand miles away, with the rat-a-tat-tat from another Tucson gun show piercing my heart do I hear the gunshots for what they are a 31-bullet salute to a broken-hearted nation desperate to begin again —Rob Okun

Men Overcoming Violence

Where Men Stand in Ending Violence Against Women

By Michael Flood tions of domestic violence, although sometimes, their interventions may not be very helpful. The fact is, a silent majority of men disapproves of violence, but does little to prevent it, while significant numbers of men excuse or justify violence against women. The silence, and encouragement, of male bystanders allows other men’s violence against women to continue.

Men’s involvement in preventing violence against women

Finally, Where Men Stand looks at what role men can and do play in reducing and preventing this violence. Men’s involvement in efforts to end violence against women is increasing. There are several elements to this uptick in men’s involvement: • A growing number of men are being public advocates for violence prevention, particularly through the White Ribbon Campaign.

• Men and boys are increasingly the targets of education and other forms of intervention, particularly in schools.

• Men’s involvement in violence prevention is more on state and federal government agendas than in the past.

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new report from Australia, Where Men Stand: Men’s Roles in Ending Violence Against Women, was released on the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, November 25th of last year. The report, edited by profeminist scholar Michael Flood, a contributor to Voice Male and a longtime researcher on issues related to men and masculinity, is in his words “a taking stock, a reckoning, of where men are at when it comes to violence against women.”

The report, summarized by Flood below, focuses on four key dimensions of men’s relations to violence against women.

Men’s use of violence

Where Men Stand starts with the use of violence itself. We know most men do not practice violence against women, at least in its bluntest forms.

But we don’t really know how many men have used a range of forms of violence against a woman. More widely, we don’t know how many men use non-physical behaviors that can harm a partner or ex-partner: routine insults and psychological abuse, monitoring and controlling a partner’s movements, or dominating everyday decision-making. Similarly, we do not know what proportions of men routinely treat their wives and partners with respect, offer intimacy and support, and behave fairly and accountably.

Men’s attitudes toward violence

Next, Where Men Stand looks at men’s attitudes toward violence. Most men believe that violence against women is unacceptable. Most men reject common myths about domestic violence. However, a substantial minority, over a third, believe foolish ideas like rape results from men not being able to control a need for sex. And men are still too willing to believe that women lie and make up false accusations of violence. There’s a powerful link between violence against women and sexism. The research shows that men with the worst attitudes, the most violence-supportive attitudes, are those with the most conservative or sexist attitudes toward gender and gender roles.

Men’s responses when violence occurs

Additionally, the report examines men’s immediate responses when violence occurs. Most men say that they are willing to intervene in situa-

• Finally, violence prevention efforts among men do work—if they’re done well. There is a growing evidence base, suggesting that well-designed interventions can shift violence-related attitudes and behaviors.

That said, the report noted, it is important not to view such efforts through rose-colored glasses. There are other aspects to men’s efforts that are more sobering. Only small numbers of men are involved in violence prevention in active and ongoing ways. Some efforts are ineffective or tokenistic. And there’s an energetic backlash to efforts to address violence against women, being pushed by anti-feminist men’s groups.

The report looks at what’s inspired men to get involved in violence prevention advocacy, but it also looks at the challenges and barriers to everyday men taking steps to help reduce and prevent violence against women.

Raise the bar

We must raise the bar for what it means to be a “decent bloke,” a “nice guy.” To stop violence against women, well-meaning men must do more than merely avoid perpetrating the grossest forms of physical or sexual violence themselves. Men must strive for equitable and respectful relationships. They must challenge the violence of other men. And they must work to undermine the social and cultural supports for violence against women which are a part of communities throughout Australia—and the world—sexist and violence-supportive norms, callous behaviors, and gender inequalities which feed violence against women.

It is time for men to join with women in building a world of nonviolence and gender justice.

For the full report, in PDF, go to: www.xyonline.net/content/wheremen-stand-men’s-roles-ending-violence-against-women/.

Dr. Michael Flood is a research fellow at Autralia’s La Trobe University, funded by the Victorian Health Promotion Foundation (VicHealth). He has published research on best practices in primary prevention, how to engage men in violence prevention, factors shaping violence-supportive attitudes, young people’s experiences of violence in their relationships and families, and other issues. Dr. Flood also is a trainer and community educator with a long involvement in community advocacy and education work focused on men’s violence against women.

Winter 2011

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Power, Politics and American Sports

It’s Not Just a Game An interview with film director Jeremy Earp by Jackson Katz

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eople who follow sports have long been told that they don’t mix well with politics. But the way sportswriter Dave Zirin sees it this is just wishful thinking. In Not Just a Game: Power, Politics and American Sports, a new film from the Media Education Foundation (www. mediaed.org), Zirin, sports editor of The Nation and author of A People’s History of Sports in the United States, takes viewers on a fascinating and uncompromising tour of the good, the bad, and the ugly of America’s sports culture. Along the way he reveals how throughout history sports have helped to both stabilize and disrupt the status quo. The film examines how American sports have long reinforced repressive political ideas and institutions, at the same time glamorizing militarism, racism, sexism, and homophobia, excavating a largely forgotten—and ultimately exhilarating—history of rebel athletes who dared to fight for social justice beyond the field of play. In this exclusive interview for Voice Male, contributing editor Jackson Katz spoke with the film’s director, Jeremy Earp of the Media Education Foundation, who cowrote the film with Zirin.

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Voice Male

Jackson Katz: The title of the film, Not Just a Game, suggests some people think sports are simply games—recreation, or entertainment.

How do you respond to people who say that examining the politics of sports undermines enjoyment of the athletic competition?

Jean King, John Carlos and Tommie Smith were willing to risk losing sponsors and money and pop-cultural prestige to stand up for what they believed in. We have all this amazing archival footage of them explicitly saying it’s not about money or commercial deals to them, that they see their fame first and foremost as a platform for political activism. And they backed up their words. It’s like they’re calling out today’s superstars with their words and their actions, exhorting them not to forget history, to follow their lead and make a difference in the world.

Jeremy Earp: I’d say they’re off base. For a long time we’ve had this artificial separation between sports and politics—this belief among a lot of sports fans that we should keep politics out of sports (by which they usually mean politics they don’t agree with), and among a lot of JK: In the film you feature several contemporary athletes who have political activists and intellectuals that sports is a waste of time—a huge commercial behemoth that glorifies a lot of bad stuff in the culture while taken a stand on controversial social and political issues. Can you creating a mass diversion from real issues. Dave Zirin’s work explodes name some of them? this division.

JE: Dave Zirin calls them rebel athletes. They include NFL star Pat We also wanted to encourage people who’ve turned away from Tillman, who enlisted in the U.S. military after 9/11 and turned against sports to take another look: to take the power of sports culture seri- the war once he got there, saw what was going on and had the guts to ously, to actively engage and push back say so, only to be misrepresented by both the against its often reactionary political influU.S. military and NFL football as a gung-ho ence while also recognizing what’s best about warrior after he was killed by friendly fire The film aims to inspire sports: how, at their best, athletes model forms in Afghanistan. Then there’s NFL star Scott sports fans to cut against Fujita, who’s been a vocal supporter of gay of courage and commitment and sacrifice—on and off the field—that are truly inspiring. The the anti-intellectual grain rights despite the rampant homophobia that bottom line is that taking a hard, analytical permeates so much of NFL culture. Baseball that runs through so look at sports culture doesn’t mean you can’t great Jackie Robinson, who broke the color enjoy sports and athletic competition. It’s true much of sports culture, to barrier on the field, became an ardent and it may ruin your enjoyment of all the ridicuoutspoken advocate of civil rights off the encourage them to think lous things in sports culture that exploit and field in the 1960s. Billie Jean King, the tennis pervert what’s best about athletic competition, about why sports matter great whose activism helped bring the fight but that’s probably a good thing—because too for women’s equality into the mainstream in culturally and politically. often that enjoyment comes at the expense of the 1970s. Muhammad Ali, who contrary to other people. the benign image we have of him today, was JK: Speaking of ruined enjoyment, some men associate sports—especially organized team sports like football—with very negative memories from their childhood or adolescence.

These memories often include bullying by peers who were “jocks,” or by verbally abusive coaches. As a result of these experiences, some men are turned off by the entire world of organized men’s team sports.

JE: I get this. And that’s one of the reasons I think Dave Zirin’s work—and this film—are so important. It points to the difference between sports and sports culture. What we’re trying to provide is an analysis of sports culture —which, despite the things we love about sports, has become this larger force that too often works to reproduce ideas and attitudes that alienate a lot of people in just the ways you describe. The fact that jock culture enjoys a position of privilege in our schools to the detriment of a lot of kids who aren’t into sports is just one, very important, example of how sports culture reinforces our sense of what’s cool and what isn’t, what’s normal and what isn’t—and this can do a job on boys, especially, given how intimately sports culture is mixed up with our ideals of manhood. I think one of the things that makes this film so powerful is that it uncovers a largely forgotten history of athletes who challenged power and spoke up, against great odds, for the underdogs of our culture.

JK: In the film Dave Zirin contrasts Muhammad Ali, who uses his sports accomplishments and celebrity to effect social change, with Michael Jordan, who is an unapologetic corporate pitchman. Is it fair to say that for today’s professional athletes, commercial opportunities and pressures trump all other considerations?

JE: Sadly, yes. One of the baseline points we make in the film is that commercial pressure, more than any kind of overt political or ideological pressure, is probably the biggest reason so few athletes speak up politically today. Their greatest fear seems to be alienating sponsors, or the corporations that pay their salaries. And while it’s true that these commercial pressures have grown more intense over time, the fact is that they’re not new. These pressures were always there. In fact, in the film we go to great lengths to show how athletes like Muhammad Ali, Billie

an absolutely fierce, and radical, fighter for black equality and social justice in the 1960s—not to mention risking everything by resisting and speaking out against the war in Vietnam, way before a lot of people dared to. And, finally, 1968 Olympians Tommie Smith and John Carlos, in many ways the inspirational anchors of this film, who sacrificed everything—glamour, money, everything—to remind the world that despite their amazing individual achievements as athletes, the United States was still engaged in a bloody struggle for the most basic forms of racial equality.

JK: Can you talk about homophobia in male sports? “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” has been repealed, and acceptance of gay marriage appears to be growing, at least in the polling data. Do you think you’ll live to see the day when gay male athletes will, in significant numbers, come out during their playing career?

JE: I think it’s likely. And in fact, we see a lot of signs we’re heading in that direction. But we’re not there yet, and I don’t think it’s going to be easy. Any time we see our culture opening up to progressive change, we tend to see an equally forceful backlash against that opening. And I think that’s especially likely to be the case when gay male athletes start coming out of the closet, especially if they’re high-profile athletes in any of the Big Three sports. Homophobia not only pervades sports culture; it also seems to haunt our very ideals of American manhood. Because so much of our mythology of what it means to be a real man is defined explicitly against being gay, and because so much of our sports culture is about proving manhood, openly gay athletes in many ways pose a tremendous threat to the whole fragile, frequently paranoid edifice of traditional American manliness. And I think, ultimately, as with so many other issues that cut to the core of male identity in a culture like ours—a culture that’s so in love with sports and militarism that it often mixes the two up—change is going to require courage not only from gay athletes who come out, but from straight guys who have the guts to support them and call out homophobia for the bullying and bigotry it is.

JK: You were a competitive varsity athlete in high school, and you continue to follow professional football and baseball. Can you talk Winter 2011

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JE: I agree with you that the discussion about violence and injuries in sports can’t be separated from a larger discussion about how our ideals of manhood are wrapped up in these games. For too many guys, athletes JE: It just so happens that a lot of us who worked on this film are not and fans alike—but probably more the case with fans who aren’t actually only sports fans, but played sports ourselves—Dave Zirin included—and in the arena getting their heads smacked around—there’s this attitude I think more than anything else this helped us keep our criticisms of that refs and leagues should stop being so aggressive and over-protective sports culture separate from what we love about sports. My sense is with their whistles and penalties and just “let ’em council play.” You hear that there are a lot of sports fans out there who love sports, but are this all the time from self-styled tough guys hollering from the safety embarrassed by a lot of things in sports culture: the ridiculous levels of the stands: “C’mon, ref, let ’em play!” But I think this has less to do of commercialism; the sentimentalizing of militarism and war; all the with keeping the game moving than it does with these guys getting off cartoonish macho posturing that confuses acting tough with actually on violence. How else do you explain the absurdity of hockey fights? being tough; the sexism and homophobia that pervade virtually every These same hockey “fans” who think that whistles designed to protect aspect of sports culture, from the bantering of sports commentators to the players get in the way of the flow of the game seem to have no problem at all when a fight breaks out and interrupts the juvenile beer commercials that run ad nauseam action. They cheer that. And along the same during football games—all that sort of stuff has lines, how are we supposed to believe the NHL nothing to do with sports, but everything to do is concerned about head injuries when fighting with sports culture, and we just think there are is still allowed in the first place—when refs a ton of sports fans out there who love sports stand back virtually every game and let two enough to want to see them liberated from all guys viciously beat on each other’s heads until this garbage. And one of the reasons we feel blood streams down their faces while boys and confident in this assertion is that the main men cheer wildly from the stands? This has people who worked on this film feel exactly nothing to do with keeping the game moving; this way: we love sports, are rabid sports it’s about keeping our traditional ideas and fans, but are sick of feeling like it’s a guilty ideals of manhood intact. The ability not only pleasure. With the film, we wanted to show to inflict—but to endure—pain is absolutely why it doesn’t need to be this way. fundamental to how a lot of guys measure and JK: Considering all of the conservative define manhood. And outside of war, the world aspects of U.S. football culture—from the of sports is the most visible place we measure jingoism and militarism to the blatant sexism of manhood in our culture. So when we talk scantily clad cheerleaders—how is it possible about protecting athletes, it shouldn’t come as to be politically progressive and remain a footany surprise that the reflexive response from a ball fan? I’ve personally wrestled with this one lot of guys is that this would feminize sports, Sports violence can’t be separated from our ideals of manhood. (pardon the mixed metaphor) for a long time. make our athletes softer. I don’t think we’re likely to see that attitude change until more guys JE: There’s the game of football. And then there’s all the external stuff—the silly, but also destructive and embrace a definition of manhood that equates toughness with things dangerous, ways the game is put to use by other people. The film takes other than ridiculous temper tantrums, hysterical outbursts of violence, American football culture apart, shows how it works to reactionary and the ability to survive or inflict a beating—cooler and in many ways ends politically, and ends up hurting a lot of guys in the process. This quieter things like courage, perseverance, mental discipline, focus, includes things like the NFL’s lackluster and irresponsible approach to teamwork, self-awareness and self-control. protecting players from head injuries, something that can’t be separated JK: Not Just a Game is a great video for college and high school from the league’s tendency to pander to the lowest common denominator courses. It’s also something I think every athlete and sports fan should if it means maintaining market share—in this case, allowing the ratings- see—as well as parents of student-athletes. I’d love to see it screened boosting bloodlust for crushing hits to trump player safety. But as far and discussed in all kinds of places where men (and women) gather—like as the sport itself goes, the actual game underneath all this media stuff, Rotary Clubs, Knights of Columbus, Lions Clubs—not to mention local, there’s a world of contradiction there: football is incredibly physical, but state and national political organizations. It sparks just the kinds of it also requires players to execute highly complex and cerebral strategy; conversations we need to be having in our sports-crazed society. In a it demands unbelievable individual skill, but it also requires individuals better world, the Media Education Foundation would be able to mount to work first and foremost in service to the team; it’s violent, but it’s also the kind of enormous promotional campaign that Hollywood films typifull of finesse, a showcase of both brute force and of the most refined cally receive. But you have to be more resourceful and creative. What athleticism. Does any of this mean that football is “progressive,” or are your plans for distributing the film? “good,” or that it’s a force for good in the world? I would never argue JE: Right now we’re focusing on getting the film into the library that. But I would never argue the opposite either. What I would say is collections of as many colleges and highs schools as possible. That’s our that I wouldn’t want to expose myself only to what other people say is primary mission at the Media Education Foundation: to make our films a good for me. Contradiction is good for you too. So I guess I’d say I enjoy part of the educational experience of young people. We also hope it will football just about as much as I enjoy trying to figure out why I enjoy be picked up by activists, community leaders, sports programs, so that football—in other words, a lot. they can organize their own screenings and events and discussions about JK: The issue of concussions in football and hockey has received a the issues the film raises. We think the time is right for what Dave Zirin growing amount of attention in media, and in Congress. (Editor’s note: is talking about in this film, especially with all the increased awareness See Dave Zirin column on facing page). It seems to me that the subtext we’re seeing around bullying, violence, and intolerance in our schools of the discussions about how much violence is acceptable in these sports and beyond. Not Just a Game not only gives crucial insight into some of is all about how we define “manhood.” One of the highlights for me of the big cultural and societal dynamics that reinforce the worst aspects of Not Just a Game is how richly you illustrate the role of sports in playing our culture; it also inspires us to try to change them. out cultural changes and tensions about what it means to be a man.

To learn more about Not Just a Game, go to www.mediaed.org. about your own experiences in sports, and how they did or did not affect your thoughts about the importance of Zirin’s work, or your work on this film?

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Voice Male

Men and Sports

In the NFL, Violence Comes to a Head

By Dave Zirin

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ith each passing week, I hear from football fans saying that it’s getting harder to like the game they love.

They’ve spent years reveling in the intense competition and violent collisions so central to the sport, but this is the first time these NFL diehards feel conscious about what happens to players when they become unconscious.

In August, to much fanfare, NFL owners finally acknowledged that football-related concussions cause depression, dementia, memory loss and the early onset of Alzheimer’s disease. Now that they’ve opened the door, this concussion discussion is starting to shape how we understand what were previously seen as the NFL’s typical helping of off-field controversy and tragedy. When Denver Bronco wide receiver Kenny McKinley committed suicide, the first questions were about whether football-related head injuries led to the depression that took his life. When the recently retired Junior Seau drove his car off of a cliff the day after being arrested for spousal abuse, questions about whether head injuries sustained during a 20year career affected his actions soon followed.

Such conjecture is not only legitimate; it’s necessary and urgent.

This season a typical NFL game is starting to look like a triage center. On concussions alone, a reader at deadspin.com compiled the following list of players who have borne the brunt of a brain bruise in 2010: Pre-Season: Ryan Grant, Hunter Hillenmeyer, Joseph Addai, Mark Clayton, Nick Sorensen, Aaron Curry, DJ Ware, Louis Murphy, Scott Sicko, Mike Furrey, Darnell Bing, Freddy Keiaho Week 1: Kevin Kolb, Stewart Bradley, Matt Moore, Kevin Boss, Charly Martin Week 2: Clifton Ryan, Jason Witten, Randall Gay, Craig Dahl, Zack Follett, Evan Moore Week 3: Anthony Bryant, Cory Redding, Jason Trusnik Week 4: Jordan Shipley, Willis McGahee, Jay Cutler, Asante Samuel, Riley Cooper, Sherrod Martin Week 5: Aaron Rodgers, Darcy Johnson, Jacob Bell, Landon Johnson, Demaryius Thomas, Rocky McIntosh Week 6: Josh Cribbs, Desean Jackson, Mohamed Massaquoi, Zack Follett, Chris Cooley In assessing the list, the most striking aspect is its randomness.

There is a mix of star quarterbacks, shifty running backs, burly tight ends and anonymous linemen. All play different roles in the game, and all wear different kinds of equipment. Sports Illustrated writer Peter King, after a weekend where he says he saw “six or eight shots where you wondered, ‘Is that guy getting up,’ ” proposed some solutions: “It’s time to start ejecting and suspending players for flagrant hits…. Don’t tell me this is the culture we want. It might be the culture kids are used to in video games, but the NFL has to draw a line in the sand right here, right now, and insist that the forearm shivers and leading with the helmet and launching into unprotected receivers will be dealt with severely. Six-figure fines. Suspensions. Ejections.”

King’s suggestions are not unlike those who told 1950s children to hide under their desks in case of nuclear attack. The hits that cause concussions aren’t just the kind of helmet-to-helmet collisions that make King shudder but often come from routine tackles. Frequently, brain bruises aren’t even diagnosed until the game has ended. In other words the most devastating hits are often the most pedestrian. This was seen in utterly tragic fashion during the college contest between Rutgers University and Army. Rutgers linebacker Eric LeGrand was paralyzed from the waist down on a play described as a “violent collision.” But if you look at the replay, the only thing “violent” about the play is its horrific outcome.

It’s also not, as King writes, “the culture” that celebrates this violence. It’s the NFL itself. The video games that the NFL promotes and sponsors deliriously dramatize brutal tackles. Highlight shows on the NFL Network relish the moments when players get “jacked up.” Anyone who saw HBO’s Hard Knocks, their behind-the-scenes look at the New York Jets preseason, heard it loud and clear.

Whenever a player would “jack-up” the opposition, Coach Rex Ryan would whoop and yell, “That’s a guy who wants to make this team!”

Here’s the reality check to Peter King and all who want their violence safely commoditized for Sunday: there is no making football safer. There is no amount of suspensions, fines or ejections that will change the fundamental nature of a sport built on violent collisions. It doesn’t matter if players have better mouth guards, better helmets or better pads. Anytime you have a sport that turns the poor into millionaires and dangles violence as an incentive, well, you reap what you sow. It is what it is. I think it’s a waste of time to feel “guilty” about being a football fan. If people are disgusted by the violence visited on these players, they should vote with their feet and stop watching.

If people are at peace with the fact that they are enjoying something that wrecks people’s bodies, then that’s their business as well. But for goodness sakes: if you are to remain a football fan, at least support the players in their upcoming negotiations with ownership. Reject the idea of an eighteen-game season as “good for the game.” Reject the idea that players need to have their pay cut for the league’s “financial health.” Reject the idea that owners shouldn’t have to contribute to the medical well-being of players after they retire. Recognize the humanity of the carnage on the field so you can do something to support the humanity of players when the pads come off. That’s what I pledge to do… for now. But in the interests of full disclosure: I might be a Desean Jackson-Dunta Robinson moment away from ditching the game for good.

Author of five books and featured in the film Not Just a Game: Power, Politics & American Sports, which he cowrote, Dave Zirin hosts the popular Sirius XM satellite weekly program Edge of Sports Radio. He is sports editor of The Nation magazine and in 2009 was named one of the Utne Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World.” A version of this column appeared on his blog, edgeofsports.com.

Winter 2011

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Voice Male

ColorLines Black Women, Sexuality and Popular Culture

Erotic Revolutionaries

Because of these erotic revolutionaries, we have all this pro-sex talk that we’ve never really had before in these public spaces and yet no talks about safe sex and STD prevention. What’s up with that?

An Interview with Professor Shayne Lee

by Ebony Utley

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rotic Revolutionaries: Black Women, Sexuality and Popular Culture by Prof.

Shayne Lee (Hamilton Books, 2010) revolutionizes the politics of black female respectability. Instead of writing about how hypersexualized representations hurt black women, Lee celebrates black female pop culture icons who purposefully hype uninhibited sexual agency. He defends Karinne Steffans, Tyra Banks, Alexyss Tylor and other women who have been publicly accused of promiscuity. He argues that their attention to masturbation, vagina power, multiple sex partners and reverse objectification will help black women reclaim their sexuality. Lee, who teaches at Tulane University, asserts that prosex black women are the new sexy. Professor Lee was interviewed for Ms. Magazine online

by Ebony Utley, an author and editor with expertise in hip hop, relationships, and race.

What follows are excerpts.

How does your male privilege help or hinder your erotic revolutionary endeavors?

I’ve been told by people that I shouldn’t have written Erotic Revolutionaries because I’m a man. But I don’t think any one [person] can represent the female voice. Gender is fractured by class, by beauty standards, by social positioning in ways that I don’t think one voice can represent other women. So in that way, I feel safe as a man to objectively, or at least the best I can, look at black women in pop culture for the ways in which these women transcend the politics of respectability.

How did you became interested in “erotic revolutionaries”?

it by saying these erotic revolutionaries are just trying to be hos. That kind of disappointed me, but at the same time that’s one of the themes of my introduction—he ways in which there is more pressure on black women because of the hypersexualization of black female bodies, the legacy of slavery and segregation, and television having this horrible record with black female bodies. I do think there is more pressure on black women to maintain a certain kind of dignity.

I became intrigued by the ways in which thirdwave feminists fought for their right to be both empowered and sexy. I thought that message was missing within black academic feminist thought. Then I realized that pop culture was full of these individuals who weren’t really career feminists but who embodied the kind of energy that I thought was powerful from third wave feminism. So that’s when I came up with the idea for Erotic Revolutionaries.

In your Tyra Banks chapter, you argue that she flips the gaze and is able to objectify men. How would you characterize that gaze reversal?

You have these binaries: male/female; male on top/female on bottom; male has agency, power; female is passive and victim. As long as these binaries exist in society, to make them even you have to reverse them for a while. Since men have enjoyed so much agency in objectifying women, there’s gotta be some point where women really go overboard and enjoy those spaces, first of all to show men how it feels to be constantly objectified and second of all to feel the power of subjecting men to the female gaze. Once that’s done enough, maybe we could get to a more equitable form of society where men and women are objectifying each other equally.

What is it like talking about black erotic revolutionaries with college-age white women?

The really hard theoretical conversations and the comments that blew my mind were generally made by the white gender studies students who had already been exposed to a broader range of feminist ideas, whereas many of the black students just kind of [generally] rejected

The people in pop culture that I’m focusing on, their job is not to be sexual teachers. Their job is to express themselves and how they feel at particular moments. I do think there’s a place in the feminist movement, and I do think there’s a strategic way that you can inform the public in ways that protect from sexually transmitted diseases … but I’m very nervous about requiring or holding artists to the fire for not doing that because that’s what activists and advocates are supposed to do.

What writings inspired Erotic Revolutionaries?

Rebecca Walker’s To Be Real. Joan Morgan’s When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost.

Really catch the energy and spirit of what they’re saying. Read Mark Anthony Neal—all of his books. Angela Davis and Hazel Carby’s work on blues women.

In ten years, where will black sexual politics be and what role will your work have played?

I think it will be in a completely different state.

Lisa Thompson’s Beyond the Black Lady and Erotic Revolutionaries will force the academy to grapple with a radically pro-sex, radically sexually empowering message for women within black sexual politics. Our books represent a turning of the page. I’m very excited to see the next ten years make that turn full.

Ebony Utley, Ph.D., is the author of the forthcoming book The Gangsta’s God: The Politics of Respectability in Hip Hop (Praeger 2012) as well as the coeditor of Hip Hop’s Languages of Love (2009).

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A Son’s Search for His Father’s Early Life

Pinsk photos: Rob Okun

Coming Home to Pinsk

By Rob Okun The author as a boy with his father, Joseph Okun, superimposed over the river in Pinsk where he played growing up.

For as far back as I can remember I have thought about my life in relationship to my father: who he was as a boy in Eastern Europe, who he became as a man in America.

Until I was a father myself, I didn’t realize I was measuring my life by the yardstick of his. And now, at 60—in the sixth inning of my life as the poet and writer E. Ethelbert Miller puts it—I hunger to understand him even more, so I can better understand me.

He was ethical and kind; am I as ethical and as kind? He was patient and loving; how do I stack up? He was generous and forgiving; what about me? If it seems I am living my life in his shadow it is not a burden; it feels more like a compassionate confrontation with myself.

Joe Okun was very old school—someone born in the Old Country who nine decades ago carried with him across the ocean to America the best of that world’s sensibility.

Over the years I have often written about him: from a newspaper column to the pages of Voice Male.

“When the terrible hurricane and flood of 1938 destroyed scores of area homes, [my father] was the first furniture man to open his 28

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store to the needy,” I wrote in a Sunday newspaper appreciation when he retired in 1985.

“He let people take away new furnishings without asking for a dime down…Friendships grew out of such an act, the bills were eventually paid, and the children of those he helped grew up to become customers…” And this: “I remember sitting in his office as a boy of 12 listening to him on the telephone and realizing for the first time he was the person who arranged for burying of the dead at our synagogue’s cemetery…[H]e passed on the values he learned in the old country to me growing up in the new one. What are those values? Study. Help others. Be charitable. Be fair. Contribute to your community…Most of all, fill your home with love and tolerance and understanding.” How consistent am I in living up to those values?

Despite all the words I’ve written about him, all the conversations we had, and feelings of love expressed, I didn’t really know where he came from. At the end of October last year I traveled several thousand miles to find out. Today, more than a century after his birth and nearly 25 years after his death, he remains my guiding light. I feel his presence in my life, stronger than ever.

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oseph Okun was born in Pinsk in 1907, fifth of sixth children. Where is Pinsk?

Good question. In the beginning of the 20th century Pinsk was a part of Russia; for most of its history, though, it was part of Poland. Today, however, Pinsk is a city in Belarus, 200 miles east of Poland’s capital city, Warsaw. Hardscrabble Belarusian city today, Pinsk was a Yiddish-speaking town until the Holocaust cut short the lives of most of the 27,000 Jews still living there in 1942 when the Nazis came.

There were no family photos of what Pinsk looked like; I had never breathed its air, walked its streets, eaten its food. I didn’t know if I would see peddlers rolling out barrels of onions and potatoes and pickles on street corners (I didn’t); or if there would be a street market with people hawking wares from Ukraine, Russia, and other parts of Belarus (there was). What images I had I carried in my heart: decades-old memories, and rich, evocative pictures my father painted of his boyhood.

It is hard for me to imagine my children not knowing where I came from. By the

One of the current residents of the Okun home in Pinsk, 95 years after the family left for the United States.

time they’d begun kindergarten I had driven them past my childhood home in a small New England town so many times they were rolling their eyes before they even knew what rolling their eyes was meant to convey.

Pinsk was—in my childhood memory—a magical place where children sold matches and hand-rolled cigarettes to villagers (as my Uncle Morris did); where you could put a potato on the woodstove in your cheder (Yiddish for school) when you arrived in the morning and eat it, fully baked, for lunch (as my father and his siblings did). It was a place where the strong currents of the Priyat and Pina rivers met, a waterway of mysteries for boys like my father, Yosel, who played along the riverbank, simultaneously excited and frightened by its torrential power.

Long before I ever conceived of actually going to Pinsk, the stories had been braided, like a Sabbath challah, into the fabric of my life. If my wife’s description of me is accurate—someone who lived in the contemporary world but carried within him an old country sensibility—it was because of my childhood. That childhood had at its center a grandson visiting his Bubbe and Zayde every Sunday where a mosaic of Eastern European Jewish life thrived in a triple-decker on Hebron Street in the North End of Springfield, Massachusetts.

Mingling with the oil-drenched fragrance of Bubbe’s latkes frying on dark December afternoons—and the laughter following

another story told mostly in Yiddish so the kinder wouldn’t understand (I didn’t let on how much I took in)—I was in heaven. I loved it—the food (Q: What eight yearold is really into herring? A: Me!), the smells—didn’t everybody’s grandmother make their own wine? And the décor. Okay, what did I know from décor back then? Not much, but I loved the doilies, covering so many surfaces like snowflakes. I loved the wind-up Victrola, its cabinet—heavy with 78 rpm records—as tall as me; the darkstained breakfront, shelves crowded with treasures brought across the ocean. Bubbe always had a bowl of walnuts in the shell in the middle of the dining room table with a nutcracker on top.

Over the years I would share with my wife my dream of going to Pinsk, to see where my father had been born, to learn where I had come from. But someday never came. Children, work, friends, aging mothers—there were plenty of reasons to stay put in the New World instead of going back to the old one. The closest I’d ever gotten to Pinsk was as a college student, traveling with a Jew’s heavy heart through Germany and Austria two decades after the war. Back then going to Eastern Europe seemed as far away as going to Asia or Africa does today. Farther even. A variety of curtains obscured the region then and not all of them were made of iron.

But the itch to go to Pinsk was always there, surprising me sometimes, like a mosquito in November. Several months

Warsaw native, noted therapist-trainer Anya Dodziyuk, traveled with the author to a memorial created from pieces of a destroyed cemetery near the Okun home.

ago, when I turned 60, I told myself it was time; I had to go! If not now, when? And, if not me, who? No one in our family had ever gone back.

Our branch of the Okun family—Okoon in Russian; it means perch, the fish—settled in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1920. Well, most of the family did. Actually, my grandfather, Nussan (Nathan), a skilled carpenter, had arrived in the U.S. a decade earlier— advance scout in search of streets paved with

The Okun family home: “I circumambulated the house as if it was a holy shrine and I was on a spiritual pilgrimage.”

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Chaya Leah with her children in Pinsk, circa 1911. Joseph Okun is the little boy on the right.

gold. The closest he got to the pot at the end of the American rainbow was supervising a crew laying the floor of the U.S. Treasury building in the nation’s capital.

Zayde saved his money to send for his wife, Chaya Leah, and their six children, ranging from tots to teens, but World War I foiled their plan. With the mail cut off and no reliable alternative to get money to the family, my grandfather followed a relative who’d settled in Springfield. My grandmother—working as a seamstress—cared for the brood in Pinsk. It would be a decade before they reunited.

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elarus is not an easy place to get to.

It’s not impossible, but it sure isn’t like traveling to, say, London. The former Soviet state proudly maintains a pre-1992 Soviet Union-influenced approach to governance and some English-speaking visitors can expect to receive a chilly reception. Since I didn’t speak Russian, I knew I’d be at a significant disadvantage navigating my way. Nevertheless, once I’d made up my mind to go I was not about to take nyet for an answer.

A friend who coordinates retreats in Poland introduced me to Anya Dodziyuk, a Jewish native of Warsaw who had been to Pinsk. Through email correspondence, I learned that she had gone in 2007 in search of her grandfather’s house. She found the site, I learned, but in place of her family’s home was a four-story Soviet-era apartment 30

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building. For my part I wasn’t expecting— nearly a century after they’d left—to find any trace of where my father and his family had lived. It would be enough for me, I told myself, to walk along the banks of the river, to meander the streets of whatever remained of the old city, to eat a bowl or two of borscht (another staple of my diet growing up).

A Pinsk historian whom Anya had met on her earlier trip had told her he thought there might be documents about her grandfather and father among the records at the city hall.

So she decided to go with me. A lucky break.

Maybe, she speculated, the historian might be able to find something out about the Okun family, too.

A psychotherapist and trainer well respected across Poland for her work addressing addictions and sexual dysfunction, Anya is one of only some 10,000 Jews living in Poland 65 years after the Holocaust.

(Before the Nazis began carrying out Hitler’s “Final Solution” aimed at eradicating European Jewry, there had been three million Jews in Poland, a half million in Anya’s native city of Warsaw alone. Poland once had the largest Jewish population in the world.)

Leaving from Boston, I thought that traveling first to Zurich and a day later to Warsaw would give me a little time to reflect on the journey—what I hoped to learn about myself by going back to my father’s birthplace. How his boyhood in Pinsk—and Wyskow, the town the family later moved to when World

War I broke out—had shaped him. The father I grew up with was patient; he rarely raised his voice. He spoke so lovingly and respectfully about my mother that he implicitly modeled for my older brother and me both how to act toward women and how, in part, to become men. Sitting on the early morning flight to Warsaw, even now, at 60, I still looked to him to learn more about myself.

Anya and I took an early morning train from Warsaw to Teraspol, the last town in eastern Poland. But before being allowed to cross into Belarus the border patrol made quite a show of inspecting the passport of a visiting Amerikanski. Looking around, I thought about how much had changed.

Neither Polish nor Yiddish was spoken anymore—the Jews who hadn’t left had been killed, and the Poles had been pushed out. I wondered what it might have been like to return to Pinsk when I was, say, 35 or 40, with my father as my traveling companion.

What might I have learned about my father’s life then —and mine?

Arriving in Pinsk at the end of a long day, we walked the city streets. I felt I was navigating between 21st century reality and early 1900s childhood fantasy. There was the Pina River at the confluence of the Priyat. There was the riverbank where nearly a century ago my father and his younger brother, Abe, were playing with two neighbor kids, also brothers, when their handmade ball bounced into the water. Although none of the four— probably between six and nine—could swim, one of the other boys went in after the ball and soon was flailing his arms in the fastmoving water. His brother immediately went in to help and soon he, too, was being dragged down. Little Abe started in after the others but my father pulled him back. “No! We’ll drown,” he yelled in Yiddish, “I’ll go for help.” Racing full-speed onto a side street, my father yanked open the first door he came to, a bakery. He locked eyes with the baker’s assistant and, before beginning to breathlessly explain what was happening, remembered with horror that the man was deaf. By the time help arrived the boys had drowned. Whenever my father told the story he always got wistful, wondering what would have happened to the boys if the first adult he had encountered hadn’t been deaf.

I was thinking about that story that first night in Pinsk, anticipating exploring the riverside with Anya and Edik Drobin, the historian who served as our guide. Edik, who wasn’t Jewish, had made it his mission to

learn as much as he could about the Jewish history of Pinsk. It was he who shared that although one of the first prime ministers of Israel, Golda Meir—as well as the country’s first president, Chaim Weizmamn—had lived in Pinsk, most Pinskers today were unaware of that history. There were no monuments or historical markers at the site of either home.

Over supper that first evening—I can still taste that bowl of borscht!—Edik asked what else I knew about where my family had lived.

“They lived across from a match factory,” I told him, pulling out a copy of handwritten notes my father’s older brother, Uncle Morris, had written. I had already told Edik the street, Bresta Gasse, the main road from Pinsk to Brest, today the first city on the Belarus side of the border.

In the morning after a breakfast of blintzes and strong tea, we walked along the river. Fishing boats drifted in calm water; mist rose from the surface. I felt a warmth spread across my chest and I started to smile.

It felt like it did when I was seven or eight, with the old-timers kibbitzing in the basement of the synagogue on Congress Street in Springfield in the late 1950s. Mr. Newman,

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wearing his plumber’s snapbrim cap, would slip me a shot glass of whiskey while the other men, my father among them, ate herring and debated the rabbi.

But that day in Pinsk, besides Anya and me, there were no other Jews in sight as we wended our way along the river, letting the place inhabit me, unconsciously inviting the spirits of my ancestors to instant message me—from wherever they were. No doubt a lot of spirits still inhabit Pinsk, especially of those who were still there in 1942 when the Nazis rounded them up, crowding them into a ghetto as a prelude to forcing them into rail cars en route to the death camps at AuschwitzBirkenau. Among the unanswered questions I still carry is this one: How do I understand the good fortune my family experienced—leaving Poland by 1920—nearly two decades before the Nazis began their murderous reign?

uch of modern-day Pinsk features utilitarian Soviet-style architecture, a prominent component of the cityscape. Still, old one-story wood frame houses lined some streets. Anya, Edik, and I had been walking for more than an hour, making our way from the riverside to the older part of the city. Edik kept up a running commentary in Russian with Anya interpreting. “Look, there, across the street,” Anya translated, pointing. It was a threestory building. Edik was smiling.

“It’s the match factory!” Anya exclaimed, realizing before I did the implications of this news. I was jolted again: The match factory, Edik announced, “is still open. It still produces matches.” Excited, I started photographing the building. It was then that a heretofore unthinkable thought arose: If that was the match factory, what about the family house across the street?

I didn’t have to wait long for an answer.

Beaming, Edik pointed: “There’s your father’s house.”

I was stunned, light-headed. I gaped at the plain building, painted red, overcome by a wave of emotion. Walking up to the house,

an unplanned inner conversation began: I found myself saying hello to my father, to Bubbe and Zayde, to my aunts and uncles.

But it was my father whose spirit guided me as I circumambulated the house as if it was a holy shrine on a spiritual pilgrimage.

In the backyard an apple tree still bore fruit.

Clothes hung on the line. My breathing slowed and I wished then that my father and my grandparents, my aunts and uncles were alive—that someone was alive to talk to me, to share with me, to help me connect the dots of my life.

I had no desire to go inside. What would I see nearly 100 years after the family had left on their long journey to America? Someone else’s life? No, thank you. Just then, standing in bright October sunshine, a door opened and an old woman appeared—a timeless crone spanning then and now. The art director for Soviet Life magazine searching for a cover portrait of someone whose face conveyed 10,000 joys and 10,000 sorrows could have done no better than this woman. She stood in silence. I gestured with my camera and she nodded yes, I could photograph her. But why was I? After all, she wasn’t a long-lost cousin. No, but she had walked out of the house where my father lived, where he had played with his siblings; where he had slept each night on a pile of blankets atop a trunk; where he had begun his life. Because she now inhabited my father’s house, I needed to hang on to a bit of her.

Long after they had immigrated to America the life my father had known in Pinsk was annihilated by the Nazis. The people who had breathed life into Pinsk were no longer there: the language, the culture, the neighborhoods, the schools, the synagogues, the cemeteries—gone, wiped out. On my last day in Pinsk, drawn back to the river, I found myself simultaneously welling up and smiling through my tears. A chorus of voices came through then, clear and insistent.

“We’re still here. We’re still here.” Jolted, I blinked, warm tears glistening on my cheeks.

What did that mean? Of course, I realized, my father, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles had brought as much of their lives to America as they could to share with those of us who followed. And, they are still with me. My father, especially. Because he had sketched the portrait of his early life in Pinsk vividly enough to capture my imagination, his son felt compelled to come home, to try and bring the picture to life. And I had. I had come home. Finally, I had come home.

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Resources for Changing Men Family Violence Prevention Fund Working to end violence against women globally; programs for boys, men and fathers www.endabuse.org Healthy Dating, Sexual Assault Prevention http://www.canikissyou.com International Society for Men’s Health Prevention campaigns and health initiatives promoting men’s health www.ismh.org Paul Kivel Violence prevention educator http://www.paulkivel.com A wide-ranging (but by no means exhaustive) listing of organizations engaged in profeminist men’s work.

Know of an organization that should be listed here? E-mail relevant information to us at info@voicemalemagazine.org 100 Black Men of America, Inc. Chapters around the U.S. working on youth development and economic empowerment in the African American community www.100blackmen.org A Call to Men Trainings and conferences on ending violence against women www.acalltomen.org American Men’s Studies Association Advancing the critical study of men and masculinities www.mensstudies.org Boys to Men International Initation weekends and follow-up mentoring for boys 12-17 www.boystomen.org Boys to Men New England www.boystomennewengland.org Dad Man Consulting, training, speaking about fathers and father figures as a vital family resource www.thedadman.com EMERGE Counseling and education to stop domestic violence. Comprehensive batterers’ services www.emergedv.com European Men Pro-feminist Network Promoting equal opportunities between men and women www.europrofem.org

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Lake Champlain Men’s Resource Center Burlington, Vt., center with groups and services challenging men’s violence on both individual and societal levels www.lcmrc.org Males Advocating Change Worcester, Mass., center with groups and services supporting men and challenging men’s violence www.centralmassmrc.org ManKind Project New Warrior training weekends www.mkp.org MANSCENTRUM Swedish men’s centers addressing men in crisis www.manscentrum.se Masculinity Project The Masculinity Project addresses the complexities of masculinity in the African American community www.masculinityproject.com MASV—Men Against Sexual Violence Men working in the struggle to end sexual violence www.menagainstsexualviolence.org Men Against Violence UNESCO program believing education, social and natural science, culture and communication are the means toward building peace www.unesco.org/cpp/uk/projects/ wcpmenaga.htm

Men Can Stop Rape Washington, D.C.-based national advocacy and training organization mobilizing male youth to prevent violence against women. www. mencanstoprape.org MenEngage Alliance An international alliance promoting boys’ and men’s support for gender equality www.menengage.org Men for HAWC Gloucester, Mass., volunteer advocacy group of men’s voices against domestic abuse and sexual assault www.strongmendontbully.com Men’s Health Network National organization promoting men‘s health www.menshealthnetwork.org Men’s Initiative for Jane Doe, Inc. Statewide Massachusetts effort coordinating men’s anti-violence activities www.mijd.org Men’s Nonviolence Project, Texas Council on Family Violence http://www.tcfv.org/education/mnp. html Men’s Resource Center for Change Model men’s center offering support groups for all men www.mrcforchange.org Men’s Resource Center of West Michigan Consultations and Trainings in helping men develop their full humanity, create respectful and loving relationships, and caring and safe communities. www.menscenter.org Men’s Resource Center of South Texas Based on Massachusetts MRC model, support groups and services for men mrcofsouthtexas@yahoo.com Men’s Resources International Trainings and consulting on positive masculinity on the African continent www.mensresourcesinternational.org

Men Against Violence (Yahoo e-mail list) http://groups.yahoo.com/group/menagainstviolence/

Men Stopping Violence Atlanta-based organization working to end violence against women, focusing on stopping battering, and ending rape and incest www.menstoppingviolence.org

Men Against Violence Against Women (Trinidad) Caribbean island anti-violence campaign www.mavaw.com.

The Men’s Story Project Resources for creating public dialogue about masculinities through local storytelling and arts. www.mensstoryproject.org

Men’s Violence Prevention http://www.olywa.net/tdenny/ Mentors in Violence Prevention—MVP Trainings and workshops in raising awareness about men’s violence against women www.sportsinsociety.org/vpd/mvp./php Monadnock Men’s Resource Center Southern New Hampshire men’s center supporting men and challenging men’s violence mmrconline.org MVP Strategies Gender violence prevention education and training www.jacksonkatz.com National Association for Children of Domestic Violence Provides education and public awareness of the effects of domestic violence, especially on children. www. nafcodv.org National Coalition Against Domestic Violence Provides a coordinated community www.ncadv.org National Men’s Resource Center National clearinghouse of information and resources for men www.menstuff.org National Organization for Men Against Sexism Annual conference, newsletter, profeminist activities www.nomas.org Boston chapter: www.nomasboston. org One in Four An all-male sexual assault peer education group dedicated to preventing rape www.oneinfourusa.org Promundo NGO working in Brazil and other developing countries with youth and children to promote equality between men and women and the prevention of interpersonal violence www.promundo.org RAINN—Rape Abuse and Incest National Network A national anti-sexual assault organization www.rainn.org Renaissance Male Project A midwest, multicultural and multiissue men‘s organization www.renaissancemaleproject

Resources for Changing Men The Men’s Bibliography Comprehensive bibliography of writing on men, masculinities, gender, and sexualities listing 14,000 works www.mensbiblio.xyonline.net/ UNIFEM United Nations Development Fund for Women www.unifem.org VDay Global movement to end violence against women and girls, including Vmen, male activists in the movement www.newsite.vday.org Voices of Men An Educational Comedy by Ben Atherton-Zeman http://www.voicesofmen.org Walk a Mile in Her Shoes Men’s March to Stop Rape, Sexual Assault & Gender Violence http:// www.walkamileinhershoes.org White Ribbon Campaign International men’s campaign decrying violence against women www.whiteribbon.ca XY Magazine www.xyonline.net Profeminist men’s web links (over 500 links) www.xyonline.net/links.shtml Profeminist men’s politics, frequently asked questions www.xyonline.net/misc/ pffaq.html Profeminist e-mail list (1997–) www.xyonline.net/misc/profem.html Homophobia and masculinities among young men www.xyonline.net/misc/ homophobia.html

Fathering Fatherhood Initiative Massachusetts Children’s Trust Fund Supporting fathers, their families and theprofessionals who work with them www.mctf.org Fathers and Daughters Alliance (FADA) Helping girls in targeted countries to return to and complete primary school fatheranddaughter.org Fathers with Divorce and Custody Concerns Looking for a lawyer?

Call your state bar association lawyer referral agency.

Useful websites include: www.dadsrights.org (not www.dadsrights.com)

www.directlex.com/main/law/divorce/ www.divorce.com www.divorcecentral.com www.divorcehq.com www.divorcenet.com www.divorce-resource-center.com www.divorcesupport.com Collaborative Divorce www.collaborativealternatives.com www.collaborativedivorce.com www.collaborativepractice.com www.nocourtdivorce.com The Fathers Resource Center Online resource, reference, and network for stay-at-home dads www.slowlane.com National Center for Fathering Strategies and programs for positive fathering. www.fathers.com National Fatherhood Initiative Organization to improve the well-being of children through the promotion of responsible, engaged fatherhood www.fatherhood.org

Gay Rights Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation Works to combat homophobia and discrimination in television, film, music and all media outlets www.glaad.org Human Rights Campaign Largest GLBT political group in the country. www.hrc.org Interpride Clearing-house for information on pride events worldwide www.interpride.net LGBT Health Channel Provides medically accurate information to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and allied communities.

Safer sex, STDs, insemination, transgender health, cancer, and more www.lgbthealthchannel.com.

National Gay and Lesbian Task Force National progressive political and advocacy group www.ngltf.org Outproud - Website for GLBT and questioning youth www.outproud.org Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays www.pflag.org

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General Support Groups: Open to any man who wants to experience a men’s group. Topics of discussion reflect the needs and interests of the participants. Groups are held in these Western Massachusetts communities: Hadley, at North Star, 135 Russell Street, 2nd Floor: Tuesday evenings (7:00 – 9:00 PM). Entrance on Route 47 opposite the Hadley Town Hall.

Greenfield, at Network Chiropractic, 21 Mohawk Trail: Wednesday evenings (7:00 – 9:00 PM).

Group for Men Who Have Experienced Childhood Neglect, Abuse, or Trauma: Open to men who were subjected to neglect and/or abuse growing up, this group is designed specifically to ensure a sense of safety for participants. It is a facilitated peer support group and is not a therapy group. Group meetings are held on Fridays (7:00 – 9:00 PM) at the Synthesis Center in Amherst, 274 N. Pleasant Street (just a few doors north of the former MRC building).

Group for Gay, Bisexual, and Questioning Men: Specifically for men who identify as gay or bisexual, or who are questioning their sexual orientation, this group is designed to provide a safe and supportive setting to share experiences and concerns. Gay or bi-identified transgendered men are welcome! In addition to providing personal support, the group offers an opportunity for creating and strengthening local networks. Group meetings are held on Mondays (7:00 – 9:00 PM) at the Synthesis Center in Amherst, 274 N. Pleasant Street (just a few doors north of the former MRC building).