This is a written version of the opening to today’s Call with the Publisher. At The Good Men Project, we have been holding LIVE phone calls with our community every week for over 10 years. Lisa Hickey, Publisher of The Good Men Project, hosts the Friday call. Become a member here. And join in the conversation! We hope to talk to you soon.
Hello everyone! Welcome to our weekly Friday Call with the Publisher. Today is Friday, Sept 3, 2021, and I am the Publisher Lisa Hickey and host of today’s show.
As always — I seem to take very different topics that are happening both out in the world and on The Good Men Project — and try to weave them together so we can try to connect the dots
We’ve been running our “Climate Change by the Elements” Convocast almost every Thursday for over 3 years now. And I distinctly remember a show a couple of years ago — where Thaddeus Howze asked the question: “What needs to happen for people to take climate change seriously? What needs to happen for the media to be talking about it all the time?” And as a group, we had talked about how maybe there needed to be more than one catastrophic climate change event happening simultaneously. And sure enough, a headline in today’s NYTimes states:
Overlapping Disasters Expose Harsh Climate Reality: The U.S. Is Not Ready The deadly flooding in the Northeast, on the heels of destruction from Louisiana to California, shows the limits of adapting to climate change. Experts say it will only get worse.
And is article is one of 12 articles on of the top stories emailed me by the NYTimes mentioned climate change somewhere in the story. Usually it has one or two — today it has 12. That answers the “what will it take question”.
So maybe instead of “experts say it will only get worse”, the NYTimes should say “Experts and The Good Men Project say…” because we’ve been saying this for years. And secondly, in the headline, it says “The US is not ready” for climate change — well MAYBE if you the NYtimes has started talking about this seriously 2 years ago like we did, the US would have been ready. Or at least more ready.
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Yesterday we did a panel as part of our “Ask an Ally” series and our larger Diversity, Equity & Inclusion programs. And the moderator, Dale Thomas Vaughn (who has been part of The Good Men Project for a great many years) asked each of us panelists to tell their “origin story” of how they became an ally and an activist.
And I told the story of how, when I was just a young child — my girlfriends staged an intervention with me. They walked into a room where I was and said “Lisa, we have to talk to you.” And one of them, the chosen spokesperson, came to the front of the group and said “Lisa, we know how you like to always sit around and talk about abortion rights and stuff. But sometimes, we just want to play with our barbie dolls.”
Decades later, cue what is happening in Texas now.
So when I got the incredible opportunity to help build The Good Men Project, what do you think we talked about? The bigger issue of the changing roles of men in the 21st century, of course. But early on — from as early as day one — we talked about the environment (and specifically why men in particular just didn’t seem to be talking about it). We talked about trans rights and racism. And oh yeah we talked about abortion.
In fact, our first big viral hit — a post that that got 100,000 pageviews in the first hours after it was posted — was a post by a dad blogger, Aaron Gouvia. Aaron wrote a post on The Good Men Project called Confronting Life. The subhead was “Aaron Gouveia and his wife were already having the worst day of their lives. Then they encountered the abortion protesters.” And it talked about how he and his wife had just discovered that their unborn baby had an extremely rare genetic disorder called mermaid syndrome, where the legs were fused together, there was no bladder and no kidneys, and the doctors told them the chances of survival were zero. And so they decided to have an abortion and had to confront abortion protesters who were protesting outside the clinic. And he confronted them.
It was a really powerful story — in part because you don’t often think of dads as being in the role of ‘abortion protesters’. And the first time it ran — over 10 years ago — it got so much traffic it crashed our server. It has gotten millions of pageviews since then.
And one of the reasons we are fighting so hard against rigid gender norms at The Good Men Project is so men CAN see themselves as climate change activists or abortion protesters.
But those rigid gender norms — as we often discuss — are ALSO harmful to boys and men. And sometimes men will cry out on these calls “but what about the boys!” And the media is also starting to understand that the reason boys are struggling is often because of rigid societal gender norms. There was an article this month in the Lancet, a publication about research in public policy. The article is titled Gender Norms and the Mental Health of Boys and Young Men. And the article talks about how gender norms around masculinity commonly confer power and status to boys and young men. We talk about this on other calls — sometimes it is because of the language we use that demeans the feminine, sometimes it is through books, tv shows, movies that have male heroes, sometimes it is through roles in the household – girls should be the ones to cook and clean. Sometimes it is through role models of adults — all our Presidents, most of our sports figures and CEOs, and surgeons and officials are men. All of those are ways to confer power and status to boys and men. “Paradoxically, these dominant masculinities carry risks for poor mental health. Globally, the rate of male suicide is two to four times that of females, and males fare poorly on indices of substance misuse, risk taking-related injury, conduct problems, violence, aggression, and by extension incarceration.”
When boys become teenagers, is when gender norms become entrenched. Being strong and always seen as in control prevents boys from asking for help. Boys are told to be tough, that it is ok to use anger as a weapon — and that they shouldn’t show or even think or talk about emotions such as anxiety, fear, sadness, and vulnerability.
A personal example comes from a post currently on The Good Men Project titled Why I Needed to Man Down.
The author, Steve Garrett, talks about how at the moment, his partner is working but he is not. Steve says: “I thought I’d managed to convince myself that, as a ‘modern man’, I wasn’t hung up on any obsolete stereotypes of being the breadwinner and earning more; that in any case it was only a temporary situation, and I was evolved enough to be happy as a househusband for a while. But who was I trying to kid? Underneath that ideal person that I liked to think I was, in fact, I felt quite insecure about the fact that I wasn’t ‘working’ and ashamed that she was being the provider. So when she asked me a simple question about emptying the washing machine, I responded with a very snappy tone to inform her that I didn’t need her to tell me what housework needed to be done and that if she loved me, she would trust me to be on top of it all. With hindsight, I can see that all this was completely out of proportion to her reminder, which was completely reasonable bearing in mind that I’d forgotten to empty it for the past couple of days and the thing was starting to stink”
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All of this is related. Getting rid of traditional gender norms and teaching men how to ask for help for themselves and then join together and help others is one way in which we can help solve so many of the social problems of our day.
I’m going to open it up to our community now.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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