On today’s call, we talk about why the discussion of ‘good men’ leads us down the path of some very provocative topics.
Thanks agin for the great call. Mark Greene, Mark Sherman, Bruce Tretter, Shawn Maxam, Kyle Osier, Brandon Fedig, Thaddeous Howe, our Good Feed Blogger Jamie Reidy and our editors Joanna Schroeder, Justin Cascio and Noah Brand, EIC.
I started with a super-quick story about the name The Good Men Project and how every one of those words is gets its own form of outrage (even harmless-sounding “The”!). And why, even the name itself has led us down the path of having some of the most provocative names around. As Sean Maxam astutely pointed out, conversations about identity and morality will always be provocative, and we’ve got both right in the name (we’re about men! we’re about goodness!). And our most provocative topics — Pornography, Gender, Race, Sexual Identity — even being a Good Dad — have combinations of both of those. This brought us into discussions of everything from boys and how they are seen as “falling behind” for just acting like boys, to anger and the use of anger to create social movements — or even how the ability to express anger is stratified not only by gender but by race. And stereotypes in the media, and whether those are “good” or bad” — and how we as a community can (and have) helped change those stereotypes.
We even discussed the fascinating concept of The Overton Window, which is a means of visualizing how acceptable ideas are by where they fall of spectrum of political discourse — ranging from Unthinkable, to Radical, to Acceptable, to Sensible, to Popular, to Policy.
You can listen to the entire call here.
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photo: soukup / flickr
That picture is pretty awesome. great call today.
Thanks for all your great ideas Shawn. Really great community we have.