The Best of: For the Love of Men

Creating an editorial section in which women celebrate men proved to be harder than expected, and incredibly rewarding.

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I told my friend over coffee that since starting to edit the For the Love of Men section this year, one of my challenges had been to find articles from women praising men. Really, you think there would be a lot, wouldn’t you? My friend is a writer and he spends a lot of time interviewing people. He smiled a little as I told him this. He told me that whenever he interviews a man, he finds that they always credit their wives for their successes. Whenever he interviews a woman, she rarely mentions her husband at all.

Now there may be many reasons for this, and I think we’ve covered a few this year. One of them is that often women grow up believing, or are straight up told that men don’t really have feelings. Women have also had a lot off success that has been attributed (sometimes wrongly) to men, so there might be some sensitivity–a fear that acknowledging that a man helped you will mean the people around believe  that they did it for you. What a conundrum.

Actually, this is a part of what I like working at GMP we explore that conundrum. Our best work at the Good Men Project challenges popular thinking. We ask what happily ever after actually looks like. We don’t say things like “behind every man is a good woman”,  not because that’s never true, but because there is always so much more to people’s stories than that. We know that the thrill isn’t always in the chase, because committed sex is the best sex. While some magazines parrot age old gender tropes we explore what it is to be a man in a world that has shifting expectations for everyone. The work that touches people the most isn’t the repetition of what it is to be a real man or a real woman–it’s pieces that subvert these tropes and remind us that we are all real.

This past year we went further in to the exploration of masculinity. We listened as Shasta Townsend told us that Her Father Sucked, But I Love Men Anyway, she deconstructed the old ideas that a girl without a father, or with an abusive stepfather will grow up with a poor attitude around men. She reminds us that it can be easy for a woman to write off all men as assholes after a bad experience like she has had, but we can also remember that a lot of this negativity is from the dis-empowered masculine. Those men who have been hurt and so seek to hurt others.

Masculinity has a bad rap. A part of that is because we have such a small definition about what it means to be a man. This definition rarely includes gay or transmen either. Transmen, after all challenge our ideas of masculinity and gender by their very existence. It was fun then, to feature the very manly Buck Angel during our Movember series. And, Alyssa Royse just wrote one of my favorite pieces of the year–a really personal piece celebrating her gay father.

Our section was brand new this year, and we hope you’ve enjoyed exploring the reasons For the Love of Men as much as we have. We’re looking forward to continuing the conversation in 2014.

Cheers.

Photo: PixaBay