Ultimate Wisdom

 

I continually chose to know I was going to be enough. I could have chosen that pressure, and I chose not to have it.

Carrie-Anne Moss on the ‘Matrix’ Movies and Playing an Action Hero in Her 50s 

Sister, Outsider

"I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living. 

The women who sustained me through that period were Black and white, old and young, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual, and we all shared a war against the tyrannies of silence. They all gave me a strength and concern without which I could not have survived intact. Within those weeks of acute fear came the knowledge - within the war we are all waging with the forces of death, subtle and otherwise. conscious or not - I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself - a Black woman warrior poet doing my work – come to ask you, are you doing yours?"

Sister, Outsider -- Audrey Lourde

The Power of Logic

Remember that time when a Philosopher defeated the heavyweight champion and saved the girl?

From 1959 to his retirement in 1978, Sir Alfred held the Wykeham Chair, Professor of Logic at Oxford. He was knighted in 1970. After his retirement, Ayer taught or lectured several times in the United States, including serving as a visiting professor at Bard College in the fall of 1987. At a party that same year held by fashion designer Fernando Sanchez, Ayer, then 77, confronted Mike Tyson who was forcing himself upon the (then) little-known model Naomi Campbell. When Ayer demanded that Tyson stop, the boxer reportedly asked, "Do you know who the fuck I am? I'm the heavyweight champion of the world;" to which Ayer replied, "And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic. We are both pre-eminent in our field. I suggest that we talk about this like rational men". Ayer and Tyson then began to talk, allowing Campbell to slip out. [14]

Publishing. It's like that.

I submitted an abstract for publication.
Fingers crossed.

Real men

Just so we understand each other, the attitudes below reflect a perspective that is shallow and shows a person who is now less of a man for his actions, a person who is cowardly and angry in equal measure, stomping his foot like a two year old in a temper tantrum. He has taken nothing from anyone, but sacrificed dignity and self-respect in the process. It's sad, really.

And heads-up to all mayors out there, but especially to Mayor Bowers of my fair city: take heed. The world needs more everyday heroes like Mayor Adler who have the sophistication to turn discrimination into an active statement of inclusion and radical tolerance.

99 percent of all the screenings in Austin are dude-friendly. It's almost like the whole world is set up for us. I think the real shocking thing is it took this long to get a lady superhero movie.

On May 26, 2017, the Mayor of Austin received this email:

I hope every man will boycott Austin and do what he can to diminish Austin and to cause damage to the city’s image. The theater that pandered to the sexism typical of women will, I hope, regret it’s decision. The notion of a woman hero is a fine example of women’s eagerness to accept the appearance of achievement without actual achievement. Women learn from an early age to value make-up, that it’s OK to pretend that you are greater than you actually are. Women pretend they do not know that only men serve in combat because they are content to have an easier ride. Women gladly accept gold medals at the Olympics for coming in 10th and competing only against the second class of athletes. Name something invented by a woman! Achievements by the second rate gender pale in comparison to virtually everything great in human history was accomplished by men, not women. If Austin does not host a men only counter event, I will never visit Austin and will welcome it’s deteriorati on. And I will not forget that Austin is best known for Charles Whitman. Does Austin stand for gender equality or for kissing up to women? Don’t bother to respond. I already know the answer. I do not hate women. I hate their rampant hypocrisy and the hypocrisy of the “women’s movement.” Women do not want gender equality; they want more for women. Don’t bother to respond because I am sure your cowardice will generate nothing worth reading.

Richard A. Ameduri

Tough Guise in Paris

I loved the movie La Haine, though I admit a bit of trepidation after reading that it was intense. The last movie that I watched that I described as “intense but completely worth it” was American History X -- also an investigation into violence, race relations and their utter breakdown, scapegoating, and the cost we pay as a society for not doing better. I completely loved that film too, but I wasn’t certain i was up for another viewing.

La Haine shows us a completely different view of Paris than the one we see in film, on postcards, in travel brochures, in depictions of and aspirations to sidewalk markets and cafes. The Paris we explore with Said and his pals is gritty, dirty, depserate and desolate, one with ample idle time from unemployment and little in the way of possible meaningful engagement. My favorite character by far is Hubert, the foil on all the pull-yourself-up talk that we hear in any Western country -- save up, do well, work hard, be your own man. Hubert did that, getting out of a life of crime just in time to avoid a prison sentence, saving two years for a gym that is burned down just before the film opens. Hubert is shown as placidly boxing with his punching bag, acceptance and resignation his tools for handling devastation of his life’s purpose.

His companions, especially Vinz, seem completely opposed to this way of living and looking at the world and their section of society. By contrast, they seem hell bent on respect, convinced that it can be won at the end of a gun, through the right haircut, and to the beat of a tough guise that comes complete with fashion and haircuts as well as swagger.

The misogyny is so pervasive it almost fades into the background. Talk of your sister, your mother, that girl peppers every conversation and even the graffiti to the point that it seems ludicrous that Said takes it seriously enough to be offended. And yet we all are, of course. Women appear to be the only ones who have jobs or homes to share -- the grandmother sits at her dining table while Said and Hubert and Vinz make disrespectful remarks, take food without manners, and shove off to activities unknown.

I loved that the film was black and white, an homage to art films while also nodding to the stark divide amongst those who belong and those who don’t in Paris. There is a subtle moment when the primacy of the Real Parisian shows up during the scuffle on the rooftop between police and the assembled youth. A young man, clearly a True Parisian, is talking with the decorated officer when another officer interrupts. With all the arrogance and authority that only the French seem to have, but have in buckets more than any other country ever, the youth turns to the interrupter, puts his hand up, and tells the non-Parisian not to talk to him, saying “I don’t know you.” There is a moment of tense silence where everyone gets on board, and then the Parisian youth resumes talking with the uniformed officer as though the interruption never happened. There are no consequences for the group, given that the Parisian smoothed things over, but it’s clear that this gathering isn’t wanted, isn’t warranted in the dominant view, and is highly suspicious, despite being guilty of nothing more than indolence, unemployment, and a penchant for hot dogs (which should be a culinary crime in my opinion). The message is clear: No matter what activity is going on, status reigns in Paris.

The film goes on to show us that American machismo culture’s promise of respect through violence and aggression holds sway in Paris no less than in Chicago. The contagion of toxic masculinity continues to spread as we see disenfranchised young men scramble from drugs to guns to find the love and belonging they clearly crave.

Scapegoating is a huge part of this toxicity, on both sides of the fence. Events such as the Charlie Hebdo shooting, the nightclub attacks, and the Champ Elysees incident of last week only heighten the sense of insecurity and widen the fear-driven social divide. The disenfranchised citizens scapegoat the police, while the ruling class tightens its control on definitions of power, authority and identity, leaving less and less latitude and legitimacy for those who don’t make the cut.

Defining the attacks as acts of terrorism blinds us to the chasm of inequality that drives the young men to violence, leaves an extreme arm of an otherwise peaceful religion the most attractive choice for droves of young men who feel left out, cut out and left behind. One is reminded of the IRA in the 1980s, a desperate use of violence for legitimacy and a future that included them by men who had little to do with the tenets of Christianity. The European man today, no less than the northern Ireland man of forty years ago, is struggling against a narrative of nonexistence, one in which he must shout to be heard, where he owns nothing but his tough posture and a gun. We can all agree with Ben Ahmed: “C’est catastrophique.”

Climate Change and Your Health

There's a new study going around, analyzing how climate change will affect health issues. Please note that every sector of the country has the icon indicating an impact to the mental health and well being of residents. Every single American is going to face increased pressure to their mental health and well being as a direct result of climate change. It's too late to do anything about the Boomer impact on the environment, but it's a great time to start developing your mental health tool kit. The good news is that a lot of what we can do to become more resilient is absolutely free and easy:

• Meditate
• Practice Mindfulness
• Start a gratitude journal
• Simplify

You'll be happy you did.

Means to Better Ends

Susan Fainstein wants us to rethink how we think about how we think about urban planning. When she looks at the body of work from its inception in this country, she finds a focus on economic development dominates the conversation, even in the most liberal of circles, and she wants to set that aside altogether to begin from a different point of view: that of justice. What, she asks, would a city plan look like that took justice as its first factor?

I confess that, as a student of justice, I got a little hung up on her use of the term -- she doesn’t see fit to let us in on what would comprise justice for a little too long for my tastes -- and when she does get around to sharing that she is measuring justice in terms of economic equality and racial inclusion, I had to set aside my need to take other factors into account. For city planning, we could do worse than focusing on these two elements of social justice.

Her investigation into three cities shows how these concerns can be implemented in the forefront in meaningful ways. New York seems do well with the social integration of its immigrant population, even while falling down on racial issues or issues of grave disparity of income. Conversely, she finds Amsterdam a bastion of economic equality, with its land held by the public, with the public receiving the benefits of the development of the land, and with the developers taking for granted their participation in public housing development (down to fifty percent from ninety percent is still a huge amount to contribute to public housing). Likewise, public housing benefits don’t expire in Europe as they do in the United States. Even in London, where Fainstein finds a more moderate success on both racial and economic fronts, these benefits are taken as a given, a permanent feature of what it means to be a city.

Social justice has never been a consideration in the halls of urban planning in the United States. In our fair Star City, the governing document talks of economic development and beautification and design aims, with a nodding passing at language to include economic and social justice, as though making a beautiful and well-ordered city will automatically generate social justice as a by-product, as if equality were a buy-product of capitalism.

I like that Fainstein takes capitalist motives to task. It’s easy to forget that the capitalist system values one thing -- profit -- above and beyond everything else. I’m less inclined to apologize for my anti-capitalist sentiments and conclusions than Fainstein is, but we both find the economic focus one that is destructive and at cross purposes with social justice efforts. For my part, I find economic ends, when taken without an analysis of consequence, to be the very definition of evil, “harm that is (1) reasonably foreseeable (or appreciable) and (2) culpably inflicted (or tolerated, aggravated, or maintained), and that (3) deprives, or seriously risks depriving, others of the basics that are necessary to make a life possible and tolerable or decent (or to make a death decent)” (Claudia Card, The Atrocity Paradigm, p. 16). Capitalism actively promotes the callous disregard for any harm inflicted on others in the quest for increased profit margins, and, as an economic policy, it does so without apology. To take stance as the basis for our social construction is, to my mind, an evil exacerbated.

We are all of us utilitarians when it comes to social policy, or we ought to be. When we look at crafting a policy, we are looking at the manner by which we can achieve the greatest amount of a desired outcome for the greatest number of people. When Fainstein asks us to look at the outcomes of economic equality and social inclusion, she is applying a utilitarian analysis through the curtain of Rawl’s veil of ignorance, measuring the outcomes first and foremost for the least among the populations these policies would affect, especially low-income and disenfranchised residents.

Fainstein lays out clear, practical and eminently practicable recommendations for principles governing public policy. I find the real value in these guidelines to be the way in which they can be deployed by any group, simply by deciding to, at whatever level the group operates. Making a commitment to health care, education and the availability of public space doesn’t require formal or federal programs, though partnerships certainly make things easier.

Her aim is not that we should take up the Marxist sickle and tear down all the private buildings, to take over the factories by force. It is that we can, as urban planners, make a moral commitment to the populations we serve. She finds that, by making this commitment, we can make a material difference in the daily lives of the population. Fainstein doesn’t come out and say so, but the conclusion is on every page: because we can enrich lives before we enrich wallets, we should.

I agree.

If Roanoke took Fainstein’s recommendations, it would hold the land in public trust for public use and public gain; we would see housing developers being held to standards of participation and commitment to public housing solutions as a given, taken as the responsibility required for permission to develop the land. More than anything, I think the fair and equitable distribution of educational resources would have a dramatic effect in Roanoke, as would a meaningful transit system. These together would have the effect of disrupting the clustering of class around “good” schools, a practice that creates a positive-feedback loop of exclusion, as the wealthy move to better schools and the schools in wealthy neighborhoods have more funding through an increased residential tax base.

Being able to get anywhere equally, being able to have a good education at any school in the district, being able to get quality healthcare regardless of income level or employment status or address would make a world of difference for Roanoke. These things are far more important, morally, to us as city planners than a third or fourth craft brewery in the city. We need to start looking at how we, as planners, have created the difference between the neighborhoods and how and why we promote these differences.

I look forward to a time when the city has gotten over its need to separate and segregate, when we choose our neighborhoods through voluntary associations, and that living in one neighborhood versus another has no impact on our health and well being, allowing us to congregate through interests instead of economy, class and status. It’s a Roanoke I would encourage my children to live in.

New Urbanism and Our Need for Utopian Outcomes

I was reading Emily Talen’s Sense of Community and Neighborhood Form: An Assessment of the Social Doctrine of New Urbanism and got hung up on two things: first, that there is a social doctrine of new urbanism, and second that this social doctrine is somehow separate and distinct from the American history of urbanization.

New urbanism as a concept and the philosophy behind it has always rung a bit false for me when talking about place-making efforts and initiatives: I simply don’t believe that there is this underlying Field of Dreams utopia of it all, that “if you build it, they will come,” some magic formula of sidewalks and cafes that will suddenly yield up a sense of community amongst and between the residents. Also, the idea of urbanism -- old, new or continuous -- as a social doctrine kind of weirds me out. I associate social doctrines with more secular arms of religious organizations, especially calling to mind such doctrines as social darwinism from the turn of the twentieth century, a time when we replaced god with gold once again and turned to science to cement our god-given right to do so. Now that we are all more enlightened in the twenty-first century and are all spiritual-but-not-religious, it probably is appropriate that we should be remaking our cities, once centered around the cathedral, into places of secular-spiritual importance.

In the nineteenth century, upon the dramatic expansion of this country with the purchase of Louisiana from Napoleon, our egalitarian founders undertook this same formulaic approach to community and place, with court, school, church and other civic buildings in the center of a square town, and residents afforded regular acreage surrounding the center in a grid.[1]

Planned communities enjoyed traction in the twentieth century as well, from skyscraper city centers at the turn of the century to 1950s housing developments touting themselves as the neighborhood of tomorrow (frequently able to be purchased and furnished completely through Sears & Roebuck) to the counter-culture communes of the late 1960s and the back-to-the-earth intentional communities of the 1970s. National conservative backlash in the 1980s combined with postwar economic pressures that were largely ignored by Reaganomic economic policies -- golf course communities and shopping malls were the core around which American life orbited, all with a schedule dictated by network television, the socializing force that would burst into the minds of a young generation and eclipse the teachings of everything else -- church, school or state. The sidewalk city, centered around parks and cafes, is not new -- in fact it is a recycled and romanticized version of a Parisian idyll, one that likely cannot be found to exist today if in fact it ever did.

It seems to me that civic engagement is fostered through activities, not through purchases and promenades, and I agree with our authors that gated communities and suburbs often create exclusion through price points, voluntary associations, and at times through less benign, more nefarious motivation. We all know about white flight and bright flight that propelled the suburbs in the 80s and 90s and the private schools associated with them and is now fueling the return to the cities as urban planning gurus again cry the utopian ideal of clean, upscale living where everyone likes each other and everyone is like each other.

We must beware our presets -- even good motives can go awry if we are not aware of the unintended consequences of social programming on any scale. While I love Kushner for pointing out the obvious consideration of transit as a central, unifying and democratizing element in urban planning[2], I can’t help but sigh a bit in resignation as he, too falls victim to a belief in the utopian outcome.

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1. Credit (or blame, depending upon one's view) for the squaring of the Midwest is often given to Thomas Hutchins, the first Geographer of the United States.  Due partially to his influence, Congress, in 1785, two years before the Northwest Ordinance opened the Midwest to settlement, passed a law that stipulated the new lands would be surveyed in a grid pattern of six-mile squares, each square (or township) to be further subdivided into 36 one-mile squares (sections) of 640 acres each.  Surveying the first tract for the Ohio Company of Massachusetts, Hutchins struck his Jacob's staff on the north bank of the Ohio, square on the Pennsylvania border, and ran a line due west 42 miles to mark off the first seven ranges of townships from the Pennsylvania border.  Thus began the pattern of land survey that was to persist throughout the rest of the country except for West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Maine, Vermont, and Texas (and of course the 13 original states, which were mostly already surveyed).  In the years immediately following there would be some experimentation with five-mile squares and in one case, no squares or system at all, but by the time surveying had been completed in the Delaware Tract, wherein sits my catawampus house with its lopsided pictures, the six-mile square township of 36 sections, the 16th always reserved to finance a school, had become a permanent feature. http://www.surveyhistory.org/why_the_midwest_is_square1.htm

2. And, let’s face it, I love that he gives voice to the pre-Towers cynicism that we of GenX have ground into our cells, the perspective of a generation that looks askance at the hip, connected, vibrant and gosh-darn-it-all so clean and carefree Millennials. We love them, but we suspect they are misguidedly heading toward the cliffs. We, as a generation, crave being wrong, but have been proven to be right once too often.

The Fall

The third and (I'm assuming) final season of The Fall just finished rocking my world. Granted, with my schedule these days it took me three separate watchings to finish a single episode, but it’s totally worth it, and I confess that I binged the last three episodes. If you haven’t see Anderson’s performance in this series yet, then you’re in for a real treat; Allan Cubitt showcases the power of Anderson's understated elegance and makes the whisper the loudest voice in the room.

There were so many wonderful presentations of power, and explorations of how power is cultivated and kept are the glue that holds the police procedural together and make it rise far above usual offerings of the genre. Enjoy it for the wonderful presentation of narrative force that it is, but don't be surprised to see it listed on the latest syllabus for a Feminism in Film class.

Along with Sens8 and Jessica Jones,  could craft together a semester's worth of great viewing, great writing, and wonderful explorations  society, power and the power of society.

Feminism Doesn't Need Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris Needs Feminism

When we think of men’s health issues, we frequently put mental health issues as an afterthought or overlook them altogether. We think of prostate health, gym and muscle issues, track-and-field issues, and, predominantly, American football injuries. We are more likely to associate concussions with men’s health than therapy.

The modern American myth of masculinity doesn’t allow for the kind of soft, fungible weakness that mental health conveys, and to say that one’s feelings are hurt or that one’s sense of belonging is damaged is tantamount to emasculation. In America, men aren’t supposed to have tender feelings or belongingness needs. I’m reminded of the Chuck Norris NRA ad that reads, “Chuck Norris doesn’t join associations; associations join Chuck Norris.” I have even joined in the fun, making up my own Chuck Norris joke and playing along.[1] It’s lighthearted and amusing until we unpack it just the tiniest bit and see that all these Chuck Norris jokes [2] are one of the many ways in which we bring out the cult and code of masculinity.

Think of any of the Chuck Norris memes you have heard. One of my favorites in this vein is Chuck Norris’ tears cure cancer; it’s a pity he never cries, but there’s also the tried-and-true statement that Superman wears Chuck Norris pajamas, and that the universe is expanding because everything is trying to get away from Chuck Norris. The code of masculinity appears at the core of these ideas: No Sissy Stuff,  Be a Big Wheel, Be a Sturdy Oak, Give ‘em Hell: [3]none of these elements includes asking for help because all of these elements deny that a real man would ever need help.

But how isolating and sad is that?

All of us, as humans, are built as social creatures. We have belongingness needs at the core of who and what we are, and to act contrary to those is to inflict harm on ourselves and on others. We are all complicit in this, not only the men who deny themselves help or the needs that they are ignoring, but also the women who uphold this strong-but-silent-oak measure of masculinity, who impart it to their sons and brothers, their husbands and friends.

This is everyone’s problem to fix. Thankfully we don’t have to fix it alone, because it simply cannot be done in isolation. We need to fix this at the community level, with therapy and men’s resource groups, with voices and essays and posters. We need to have every man woman and child be aware of the problem, and it needs to be highlighted in every profession.

And we need to do it now, because there isn’t a moment to waste. Every day 117 Americans die by suicide; the overwhelming number are white men (seventy percent), with the largest group being middle aged white men (45-64). And for every successful suicide, there are twenty-five attempts. Silence about this matter is active violence for everyone, especially the men who are too ashamed and afraid to ask for help, or, worse, who think they don’t deserve it or that help is something for women and children, but never for them. We must bring mental health access to those who deny the need the most. Chuck Norris is counting on us.

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1. Chuck Norris knows who John Gault is.

2. Both of them. Only two are jokes; all the other sayings are simply fact.

3. Robert Brannon & Deborah S. David, The Forty Nine Percent Majority: The Male Sex Role, (Random House: 1976).

Voice Male Marked Important

I love Mubarak Dahir’s essay “Nobody Likes a Nelly Homo.” As I started reading it, several things hit me at once, not the least of which was “what the heck does nelly mean?” But by the end I was convinced, yet again that I had discovered another ally in this tumultuous sea of society, the one we are all struggling in, just trying to keep our heads above the emotional tides that often threaten to swamp us, treading against the undertow that lurks silent and invisible beneath us, ready and willing to suck us under and do us in.

Apparently, nelly  refers to a very feminine homosexual man, and the term came into popular use by season three of "Arrested Development," where George Senior and Lucille Bluth refer to the seemingly homosexual Tobias as a "nelly." Can be used as either a noun or adjective, but it is almost always pejorative.

And then something beautiful happened: Dahir reveled in the outsider. He said how beautiful it was to watch someone knowingly step over the line and do it with style, with joy, with verve. After spending several paragraphs showing us that pointing and laughing seems to be hard-wired into human DNA as a means to bolster our positions of group inclusion, Dahir holds the gold lame wearing nelly queen in reverence but without the distance that is created with awe.

He finds value outside his own expression and relationship with the world. Ultimately, it is the variety of experience that he comes to value the most, the true diversity of it all. And isn’t that really the measure of our dedication to freedom: our willingness to appreciate and even defend that which offends us, or that we disagree with, but that ultimately causes no harm? Well done, Dahir. And thanks.

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I found many definitions, but my favorite one was at urban dictionary: Nelly Sweet, beautiful girl, very intelligent and creative. Though very stubb[o]urn and often pessimistic. More of a leader th[a]n follower. Often not one of the most popular girls around, but does have a group of friends. You would be very lucky to have a Nelly in your life. W[h]ether a friend or lover. Nelly's often switch back and forth from the dark and light side. They will get evil if pushed to it, but will be an angel if treated right. And often act before thinking.

Men included

“Healthy masculinity is  a collective journey.” “Men are human first.” We need to foster an environment wherein we all hold society and the people who create it accountable for a narrative in which men are “secure enough to make a mistake, courageous enough to be compassionate, fiercely egalitarian, powerful enough to empower others, strong enough to acknowledge that real strength comes from holding others up rather than pushing them down and that real freedom is not to be found in the loneliness of the log cabin but in the daily compromises of life in a community.”

We need to do this, not only because it is the right thing to do. It absolutely is the right thing to do -- we cannot leave such a huge portion of the population outside the scope of feminism. But there is a reason that is even more important, more compelling, than mere justice that mandates the inclusion of men within the mantle of feminism: humanity. Men are human, and if we don’t include their needs along the collective road to crafting a society that has love and compassion for all, then we aren’t really creating a loving supportive society for all, but only for most, or some, or those who have suffered enough, those who we deem worthy of being included. And that’s just not what feminism is about. Gender equality is about equality. And it’s available to everyone, all the time. It doesn’t have to be earned, and can’t be lost. That is the message, and we need to send it out into the universe with all the power we can muster, every day and in every action, in every room we inhabit, in every interaction from the laundry to the lunch counter. Men included.

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Steven Botkin, “ Healthy Masculinity is a Collective Journey,” in Okun, Robert, ed. Voice Male, (Northampton: Interlink Books), 2014, p. 371, emphasis added.

Robert Jensen, “ Men Are Human First,” in Okun, Robert, ed. Voice Male, (Northampton: Interlink Books), 2014, p. 365, emphasis added.

Michael Kimmel, “ Democratic Manhood,” in Okun, Robert, ed. Voice Male, (Northampton: Interlink Books), 2014, p. 365.

From Inmates to Democratic Sweethearts of the World

In order to break down the distinctions between home and the world and women’s place as of the home and decidedly not of the world, Floyd Dell finds “it will be necessary to break down all the codes and restrictions and prejudices that keep women out of the great world.” Notice that Dell writes all. Not some, not even most will suffice to accomplish our goals. All. This is not merely a suggestion or even an action plan; it is an indictment. Every single scrap and iota of the previously held dichotomy must go. It must be eradicated so that women can cease to be inmates of the home and be transformed, liberated to be the democratic sweethearts of the world with whom men initially fell in love and with whom they will craft lives of partnership and promise.

But as much as men might say they want it, Dell warns, they have to face that underneath it all they really fear women’s liberation from the home. They prefer to keep masculinity a mystery, a space outside mundane concerns, to make a haven of all things male and, by extension, to relegate all things not delightful to the realm of pedestrian household concerns.

In the end, feminism assures us, we will revel in having sweetheart partners, but yes, they will come at the cost of making profane everything masculine. We all deserve this, but men stand to lose much in it all. There are those among us who would make this transition as easy as possible, and I count myself among them. But I will not, nor do I think any among us should, allow men’s discomfort at shrinking privilege allow anyone to be an inmate.

If we are all free, then we will likely disagree more, and more loudly, and life might be messier and less comfortable overall. I am reasonably certain that all this will be our future. We will all of us see the mundane as more personally ours as well as the whole of the world’s stage. This is the price for being a fully inducted member of society, for being a citizen, for being an adult.

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Floyd Dell, “ Feminism for Men . . . in 1914,” in Okun, Rob, Voice Male, (Northampton: Interlink Books), 2014, p. 215.

Green Monkeys, All

“Men’s acceptance of the cultural association of manhood with control makes them complicit in its consequences, including the use of violence. Acceptance need not be conscious or intentional. Individual men need not be violent themselves. Mere silence -- the voice of complicity -- is enough to accomplish the effect and to connect them to the violence that other men do.”

This needs to be said over and over and over again. Rephrase it, repeat it, reprint it, restate it until we all know it in our cells. Because the patriarchy has only one tool, only one punishment for failure: Men won’t like you if you don’t conform. Yep, that’s it. People won’t like you, specifically middle class white men, the standard to whom all beings are held, the measure by which we are all found to fall short. We are willing to beat each other into submission, to kill each other, to cage each other, to hurt each other, to use tools ranging from violence to shame, to avoid being ostracized.

The code begins in the school yard if we didn’t get the message at home: point and laugh at anything different; set the new kid apart and be actively cruel; define your inclusion to the group by standing together against the outsider; show your position of strength by how forcefully you can act in to perpetuate the idea of the norm.

Back in the Seventies, before there were rules governing such experimentation, a bunch of social scientists studying group inclusion and identity behavior had a collective of monkeys in an observation area. One day they decided to take a middling member of the community and dye his fur green, reintroduce him to the collective, and see what sorts of behavior was used to assimilate or address this surface change. The researchers expected actual behaviors by the collective, elements that they could study and from which they could draw conclusions and possibly write papers for the coming decades about skin color and its effect on the collective subconscious.

They certainly were not expecting what they got: The whole group came together as one body to shred the green monkey. Nothing was left of it other than small bits of fur. It was not merely killed; it was annihilated, evaporated, removed, violently and with one explosive, collective act.

In their confusion, these researchers concluded that there was nothing of value to be learned from the experiment.

Instead of dismissing the unexpected results, we should see what is really before us, presented in undeniable context and and written in blood: xenophobia is a survival issue. Love and belonging are the real currency of the group, and no health and wellness program, from gym memberships to soup kitchens, can hope to be effective if these elements are met as well.

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Allan Johnson, “Fatal Distraction: Manhood, Guns, and Violence,” in Okun, Rob, ed. Voice Male, (Northampton: Interlink Books), 2014, p.377, emphasis added.

Men & Feminism

Salon recently ran an article on Sam Polk, a noted insider of Wall Street, who is decrying the greed as wealth addiction and laying a fair chunk of the cause at toxic masculinity. This intrigues me. I can completely see how toxic masculinity would express itself through extreme wealth, and especially on Wall Street. What if other highly competitive, high-powered positions? I'm thinking of attorneys in particular, who make a high-dollar sporting arena of people's legal issues. For a fine example of a woman playing this role, see Annalise Keating's (played masterfully by Viola Davis) character in How to Get Away With Murder, or Patty Hews (gloriously brought to the small screen by Glenn Close) character in Damages. Attorneys, like the  stock broker Polk paints, are high octane power dealers, making the rules conform to them, leveraging the playing field at every turn in the pursuit of more.

Does feminism have a role in looking at the types of career paths we consider as individuals and that we value as a society? I think it absolutely does. Careers are the vehicles for success in our society, and we cannot begin to change society until we recraft the ideas of success and the tools by which such success is achieved.

For the past century, we have been defined as what we do, to the point that we are seen as human doings as opposed to human beings. This in itself is toxic, and since it is part of the dominant culture, it is part of toxic masculinity. We need to look at the definitions our culture gives men and realize that these are the standards for us all, men, women, children, black, white, rich, poor, educated or drop-outs. We need to change the definition of success if we are to change the toxicity level of humanity as well as masculinity, femininity or any other overarching group identifier. Perhaps we want to change the success matrix to one of how much we gave away during our lives, or how much success and empowerment we fostered in others. This philanthropic narrative can go far in helping reprogram the narrative while still honoring our needs to feel connected, helpful, and worthwhile.

Death Addiction

Oh, for fuck’s sake, can I get through typing a single essay without another alert from CNN coming across my desktop that there is a shooting going on, being contained, finally over? This is ridiculously coincidental; if I wrote this into a script, it would be considered too contrived to be allowed.

This whole month has been nothing but one piece of breaking news after another of shootings, violence, protests, wrong-doings on a horrible scale, injustice in the extreme playing out on screens and phones all around the world.

I have known since my teens that the rule of news is that “If it bleeds, it leads.” But this is going much further than mere sensationalism and human interest. This is the obsession with the ultimate expression of toxic masculinity. It’s as though we are craving seeing the violence, addicted to nodding our heads and saying, “Yes, it really is bad out there.” We have gotten to the point where tragedy and death are out entertainment of choice, and we need more and more of it, in ever-increasingly violent and dramatic forms, to satiate our itch.

We are death addicts. Trauma drama is our currency, and we trade it through the social media channels like money lenders in front of a temple, only in this story there is no outraged teenage messiah to pull down the pillars and run the offenders off, all while delivering an impassioned shaming about how we ought to behave.

On one matter I can agree with the moral majority and the Reaganites: We seem to have lost our core values. When in the world did we decide that death and destruction were entertaining? When did we decide that matters of fashion trumped matters of family, that there is no societal responsibility, that greed is its own reward?

A Farewell to Arms: Hemingway

Let’s start this rant with a reminder that Hemingway, a man’s man in the expat days at the freewheeling turn of the twentieth century, was a mosaic of the masculinity narrative: a hard-drinking, heavy-smoking, gun-wielding, suit-wearing, elephant-killing, womanizing force on safari and rolling through the salons of Paris, casting his personality into all the nooks and crannies around him, filling the space and sucking out the air. But for all his seeming success, prowess and power, he was a deeply unsatisfied man, one who would eventually face a firing squad of his own making as he shot himself, ending a life that had become too painful to continue.

If not even white men with enough privilege to leave home, live off the income of their families while carousing in foreign lands can stand the message we are all of us supposed to live and uphold, what chance does anyone of the rest of us ever have?

The contemporary art and literature are rife with discontent and disgust at the modern, pre-crash era, from Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to any number of works decrying corporate man, to the newly crafted voice of fear and uncertainty that is science fiction and all the mistrust of the dehumanizing elements and aspects of technology that the genre allows us to explore. The twenties wasn’t just fast and loose in the dance hall or on Wall Street; in Chicago and New York, the Italian mob was fighting tooth and nail for power over turf and transit and taxes, the usual purview of governments from time immemorial.

After the crash, those in power, most notably the FDR’s brain trust, the advisors who helped craft the New Deal, saw that traditional American adherence to the hands-off capitalist model, more narrative and rhetoric than actual policy or procedure, had taken the whole of the country from bad beginnings to worse ends by leaving too many holes and not providing any safety nets. The frontier was closed by the department of the interior in 1890 and the era of Industrialization was officially king, but within a generation, policies that favored the factory and its owner were decried as downright un-American, a callous framework for abuse and neglect that were actively sought to be ferreted out by the New Deal.

Today, we have again been seduced by the narrative and rhetoric of self-sufficiency and every man for himself, only now our society provides even less support for the corporate man or the manufacturing Joe. If we do not quickly reverse our course, it will again take us from bad beginnings to disastrous endings, and the writing is on the wall in the blood of black men, police officers and elementary school children of how destructive a path this is.

“Healthy masculinity means hope for the world in places where we have long felt only hopelessness.” One wonders if Hemingway would have liked more options. For all that he succeeded in a society where Wilde was condemned and imprisoned, it seems that Hemingway was the least happy and satisfied of his gang, the most interesting people in the world, while Wilde was vaguely bemused by everyone else’s confusion. While he may well have lost sleep and worried privately, Wilde certainly managed to hold the public veneer of one who was far removed and likely above the fray of common concerns such as adherence to the social code that others crafted long before he was born and to which he had never subscribed.

Oliver Wilde’s weapons remained, as ever, his words and his kind, unflappable demeanor in the face of hostility, confusion, fear, accusation and incarceration. Ernest Hemingway, steeped in the masculinity narrative that expressed itself through guns, wars, knives, domination had little in his toolbox to deal with his life off the page. Failed marriages, lost friends, rejection of family and country doesn’t disappear with a pulitzer, and he ultimately turned to the only tool that made any sense to him.

We absolutely must stop shooting. Ourselves, as well as each other. We need to stop the war on men, the war on women, the war on the poor, the war on the weak, the war on the old, the war on children. We need to stop. One century is long enough.

#StopShooting.