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 almost 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.
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Lisa Hickey: I’d like to start by talking about what makes this call different from the other calls we have during the week. As most of you know — we hold calls with the good men project community every weekday. And each one is different topics — but each one also approaches those topics differently.
So on Monday, for example, Kat Starr talks about relationships. And her calls are very personal, intimate, They are often based on sharing personal stories, and talking about what has worked for individuals when solving relationship problems. You don’t hear Kat saying “and this week, in relationship news!” The strength of those calls is created from the stories people tell.
On Tuesdays, Ashok Selvam runs #StopRacism. But he starts from a different perspective — he looks at what is happening in the news and uses those news events to explain and explore how racism permeates and is perpetuated in our society. Often personal stories creep in — stories of what it is like to be a black person today, for example, or stories of how white people learned to understand racism. But those calls start from a broader context.
One Wednesdays, Amanda Vining hosts the #GMP Playlist. She takes one article on the Good Men Project — one very specific subject — and then tries to go deeper into that. Often people who come to that call start out by saying ‘wait, why are we talking about this”. But then, as the call progresses, those same people often gain insights that allow them to see the connectedness of ALL the topics we talk about on GMP.
And Thursdays, Thaddeus Howze and Carol Bluestein talk about Climate Change by the Elements. A specific topic, structured in an interesting way. “By the elements” means that they break down climate change into actual elements — Air, Water, Earth and Fire. And they give a mega-ton of info — both problems and solutions each week. It’s a bit of a “good cop bad cop” dynamic — Thaddeus often delivers the bad news and Carol the good. But the net result is a show that takes a huge existential threat and gives people an understanding of how to approach it.
And I do something different than all of those. I’m the Publisher of The Good Men Project. And so I at least glance at all 45 stories that we publish every day. But I’m also constantly looking at the Zeitgeist. What are individuals talking about — and what are other media company’s talking about. So I tried to give a perspective each week which intersects all of that — what’s happening in the world, what is happening at The Good Men Project, and what individual people are finding important enough to talk about.
Not a lot of huge news events this week — which is probably good because the biggest news events are often catastrophes. It doesn’t mean nothing is happening — there are still lots of wildfires, lots of COVID, lots of racism. There are the Olympics. And there is a lot of talk about Mental Health issues — which is a good thing. Often, people with Mental Health issues do everything they can to hide their problems, for fear of consequences. Men are repeatedly told to ‘man up’ if they are suffering from depression.
For years now I’ve been getting emails from the Partnership for Male Youth run by Dennis Barbour.
And Dennis does a “news roundup” where he talks about issues related to men and gender. One of those was an article from the Financial Express.
And this article talks about the work of Dr. Deepa Narayan–a social science researcher, author, and host of the podcast What’s A Man? Masculinity in India. What she finds is years of indoctrination– both subliminal and explicit–forces boys, adolescents, and then men to repress their emotions, deny their fears, and embody a strength characterised by dispassionate self-sufficiency. We talk about a lot of these issues on The Good Men Project, but I hadn’t heard that term “dispassionate self-sufficiency” used before.
The article goes on to say “Men are taught to be protectors and providers. “There is so much pressure on men to be masculine all the time that they just compete with each other constantly. So, it takes a lot for men to share their doubts, to share what’s not working,” Dr Narayan says. “These insecurities, ranging from anxiety regarding their bodies and confusion over their sexual impulses to struggles with depression and unfulfilled longings for displays of fatherly affection, are never far from the surface.” And therein, she asserts, lies the rub. “Men just don’t have permission to cry, to be depressed and unsure, all of which comes out in violence.” Sometimes that violence is directed inward and comes out in actions like suicide, and sometimes outwards to others.
And when I scan headlines to see what major media is talking about, there were two stories about suicides today in the NYTimes. Both men, one a police officer from the Capitol Riot and one a teenager at a building in NY City where there have been multiple suicides.
So what is interesting to me is that if gender and mental health combine to create this big societal problem — we can approach, then we can approach solutions to these problems in at least two different ways. We can talk more about mental health issues and start with changes there — or we can start with gender and try to create change to our rigid gender roles.
In fact, the article above talks about “Queering the endgame. Queering the very notion of gender.” And I would ask everyone to think about — if that idea of “making the world more queer” makes you uncomfortable—ask yourself why. And then think about what young people are doing and if the trends in youth might be part of that.
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A second article I want to discuss is Can Men Ever Really Belong? by Pieter Van Winkle. In this article, the author discusses how “Privilege creates a void of belonging.”
To quote from the article:
Cross men with whiteness and you’ve got the most privileged sect of the population on earth. One therefore might assume men would feel empowered and fulfilled by this fact, but the number one thing I hear from white men is that they long for purpose, meaning, joy and connection — key components of a fulfilling life. So, why is it that white men have the highest suicide rates? The highest depression, anxiety, and alcoholism? We’ve got the population with the highest privilege and cultural influence asking “What’s my purpose? Meaning? Where’s my joy and fulfillment?” As white men, our privilege can often alienate us from a sense of duty. This doesn’t mean that all white men are equally privileged, or that being a white male means you don’t experience hardship. It does mean that there are certain privileges that go along with being both a man and having white skin that are often invisible, hard to be aware of. Consider this definition: Privilege is the right to not take on certain burdens—be it emotional, financial, or energetic. So by accumulating and enjoying so much privilege, we don’t have to show up in certain ways for our community. We have the right to skip all of these tough tasks so that we can continue to be powerful and influential. Examples: We can avoid the meetings on police reform because we know it doesn’t really affect us. We can avoid volunteering for a difficult issue involving social reform because we know, at the end of the day, we will be OK. We can avoid taking more responsibility for exploring and expressing our emotions because we can hide behind the expectation that men are strong and silent.
As we have discussed on some other calls — if you want a sense of belonging, consider fighting racism, or learning about relationships, advocating for men and mental health or fighting for climate change. Use your privilege as a lever.
The final article I want to highlight tells a really poignant look at why stories of gay people coming out is so important. This article is also from The Good Men Project, it’s called “Why Coming Out Stories Matter. Still.” by Michael Rowe.
Michael tells, how, for a time in his career he was a sports journalist. He was sometimes called the “jock whisperer” for his ability to get athletes to open up about their feelings and fears. And in one story Michael was writing about an athlete, they let slip that they were gay. And about 5 minutes later “the terror started to set in—the terror of having made a terrible mistake, of having handed a journalist a secret that they’d been keeping from their fellow athletes, their family, and the public.”
No promises Micheal made could console this athlete. Then, as Michael tells it:
Finally, I took off my wedding ring and pressed it into their hand, and told them to hold onto it until the story came out; they would keep my most precious possession, and I would keep their most precious secret. If I betrayed them, I said, they could throw my wedding ring into the nearest gutter and tell everyone about my lack of integrity, even kill my nascent journalism career by branding me as untrustworthy and dishonest to sports editors, publicists, coaches, and the athlete’s own peers.
Sharing his own vulnerability was a gamble that worked.
Four months later, the article was published, the ring was back on my finger, and the athlete in question still had their secret. They could choose to share it or not, and when. I hope they eventually did share it, and that they went on to have a long, happy life of peace and acceptance, and, most of all, love.
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Hopefully you can see some of the patterns and themes that work together as The Good Men Project continues to try to create a more open, more inclusive world.
I’d like to open it up to the community now.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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