Infertility.
There are many kinds of infertility, affecting both men and women. More often than not, though, it is experienced as a couple, not as an individual. If you’ve ever coped with it, or gone through fertility treatments to try to become a parent, you may have noticed that even though it affects both men and women, the people who give and receive the most support about it are overwhelmingly female. Why?
On April 2, The Good Men Project will be running a feature series about men and infertility. If you or a man you’re close to has a man’s perspective on coping with infertility, we’d like to see it. Original ideas are welcome, but we’re interested in things like:
- Why do men seem to seek out or receive so much less support than women when it comes to infertility?
- How has male infertility affected your self-image, your “manliness”?
- If your partner is infertile, what kind of support have you offered?
- If you’ve ever had to consider using donors (sperm or eggs), what factors weighed in your decision, and how did you decide?
- If you tried fertility treatments, what role did you take, and did you feel like an active part of it or a bystander?
- For people who have no experience with infertility, do you have any advice or words of wisdom for relating to a man or couple who does?
- What is a “real father” to a man who can’t father a child with his own sperm?
- How are childless (or childfree) men regarded differently than fathers?
- How has infertility affected your sex life?
Women are welcome to submit articles, but please keep the brand in mind (Good Men Project) and write accordingly. Women’s perspectives about infertility are important, but are fairly abundant elsewhere, and not the focus of this series.
Please direct inquiries or submissions to Marcus Williams ([email protected]), by April 1.
Here are some additional guidelines that apply to GMP submissions in general:
- There is no strict word count limit, but most feature articles land in the 750-1500 word range. Don’t go longer than you need, but if you do go long, it shouldn’t feel long. We may edit for length.
- If possible, submit your article in plain text, or with minimal formatting (e.g. bold, italics, and hyperlinks). We must re-enter and format all articles in WordPress, so heavily formatted text pasted from Word or other word processors creates a lot of extra work. Although not required, the ideal format would be pasted from an article composed in a TinyMCE Editor, such as the one linked. (Replace the default text with your article text, format it, hit the submit button, then paste the output as your submission.)
- We like to break up text with section breaks (♦◊♦) or pullquotes, roughly once a page, to avoid “wall of text” syndrome. If you want more control over the flow of your article, write with a mind toward where those breaks would go or lines that could be used as pullquotes every few paragraphs.
- Editors have final say over title and subhead. However, you are more than welcome to suggest both, and doing so increases the chances that you’ll like the name and subhead your article ends up with. See other GMP articles for examples, and try to keep it catchy. Work your name into the subhead.
- Late submissions are sometimes accepted. However, submissions that beat the deadline by several days are much appreciated, and improve the editorial process both for the editors (who have more time) and for the authors, who are more likely to receive feedback or be consulted on any changes that have been made. When editors run out of time, authors are less likely to be included in the editorial process.
—Photo hang_in_there/Flickr