Manipulating numbers: in faculty ratios, and in entry requirements to university...needs reversing

I had the opportunity to discuss the issues faced by male adolescents in Ontario secondary schools this weekend with a retired teacher from an Ottawa high school.
He made two significant points:

1. When the Ontario Ministry of education began the initiative to level the ratio of faculty numbers between males and females, they instructed the Human Resources departments of the boards of education to comb the personnel files of prospective women, those who were already qualified and those who were working on their qualifications to positions of leadership and responsibility, and phone those likely prospects with a "nudge" of encouragement to inspire their application both to the studies and to the application for such positions. However, as with most government programs, once started, rarely stopped, and when the 50-50 ratio of male and female instructors was achieved, the program continued, until now the ratio is more like 80-20, female to male. As a former Guidance Counsellor, he had observed the spectre of a grade nine boy, attempting to separate from his mother, under the 80-20 ratio, and facing 7 female instructors of his 8 subject teachers.
2. The second point he made concerned the admission requirements for engineering students in such universities as Queen's. In another attempt to encourage female applicants, the entry requirements were lowered, for example, to a 75% average at graduation for females, while for males the entry requirements remained at 85%. It did not take long for the male students, naturally, to catch on to what they were facing and withdraw from the competition, leaving the classroom spaces to the women, and consequently also the professional graduates.

If such entry requirements were skewed in other faculties like medicine, law, psychology, social work...it is little wonder that the graduate schools are now dominated, in numerical form, by women in all of those faculties.
With respect to #1 above, it is long overdue  that the male-female ratio among secondary school instructors and administrators be re-calibrated, to achieve a ratio much closer to the 50-50 balance that could be considered optimum.
With respect to #2 above, the universities would do everyone, themselves, the culture and the professions a large favour if they were to return to a standard entry requirement for male and female students, in all faculties. Otherwise, we will experience more situations similar to the North York General Hospital who searched for more than two years for a teaching practitioner in family medicine who was male, without success. Many veterinarian clinics are now staffed by women who refuse to make "house calls" to sick large farm animals. That is another professional gap that will likely grow.
In both instances, what may have been an appropriate idea at its inception has now served its purpose, and needs, in both cases, to be rectified. And where is the public push-back to come from?

Canadian Boys lag behind girls in literacy,reading and now science: PCAP Report

By Kat Hammar, Globe and Mail, November 28, 2011
Canada’s report card on schools will be handed out to the provinces Monday, revealing mixed marks for Quebec and growing struggles in science and reading for boys across the country.

Once every three years, the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program, or PCAP, measures the reading, math and science proficiency of Grade 8 students in every province and the Yukon. Though the latest results are strong overall, when pulled apart, they identify weak spots for Canadian schools.

The results, taken from a random sampling of 32,000 students in 2010, also show that boys, who have lagged behind their female classmates on literacy tests for decades, are now also behind in reading and, for the first time, science. Math scores between the sexes were tied.

“We’re used to seeing boys having a disadvantage in reading but not necessarily in the other domains,” said Andrew Parkin, Director General of the Council of Ministers of Education. “The report is good for sending up little flares for the provinces. I think that boys in science can be seen as one of those flares.”
The reason for the achievement gap between the sexes is the subject of debate, but academics and educators have blamed video games, attention deficit disorder and the feminization of the education sector.
School districts in Toronto and Edmonton are looking to single-sex education to help close the gap, aiming to tailor the classroom to boys by making it more active, choosing reading materials that align with boys’ interest, and including more male role models in the curriculum.
Boys behind girls in literacy, now reading and for the first time in science...and reasons cited include:

• video games
• attention deficit disorder
• feminization of the education sector

Single gender classes might help some. However, there is a growing argument to be made that the culture of North American education is counter-intuitive, in many ways, to the education of boys and young men. And, reports, like this one, merely underline the "turning-off" of boys, not merely the failing grades.
Let's add to the list above of possible contributing factors to this slide: the role played by money and the greed of many of the best and brightest male minds over the last generation at least. Remember, it was Lee Iacocca while president of Chrysler, in 1986, who could not recruit male graduates for the auto industry, and who received a letter from the presidents of Yale and Harvard. In effect these letters were "mea culpa" letters by those university presidents for "teaching the wrong values to their students" meaning that the pursuit of wealth for its own sake had replaced "making a contribution to society" while earning an income.
This problem of falling male grades did not start in the last year or two. It goes back a long way and unless and until the politically correct imposed silence on the issue of feminization of education is lifited, the education establishment will not aggressively approach the issue.
It is not a slam on women teachers, principals or even board members to say that men are different, wired differently, learn differently, have different ambitions, different cultural attitudes, different cultural language and differenty cultural archetypes through which they see the world. And to say all of that is not to excuse inappropriate or violent or crude or offensive behaviour, attitudes or socialization.
The ratio of male to female teachers has fallen disproportionately.
The culture of schools generatlly has tipped in favour of women both in leadership roles and in mentoring and in cultural acceptance of selective behaviours.
And "making nice" about these issues, will not permit nor initiate substantive change.
Parents of male students need to consider membership on school councils. Parents of male students need to ask for reports on the culture of the school, documenting the rates of detentions, suspensions, withdrawals and drop-outs between male and female students. They need to ask about hiring practices, and the need to hire more male teachers, more male principals, and more male superintendents.
They need to petition the Colleges of Education and their provincial members of the various parliaments to examine the issue of male student performance and its implications. The provinces and the federal government need to put some research money into graduate studies in education, around the world, to determine the best practices for male student success and by incorpotating those "best practices" set goals for reversing the trends documented in these latest set of testing instruments.

Roots of "mancession," --narcissism and alienation among young men

By Margaret Wente, Globe and Mail, November 10, 2011

There’s a young man I know called Ben, whose story has become familiar. Ben is 24. He finished high school, but university was not for him. He’s bounced through a lot of low-paid jobs in retail and fast food, with spells of unemployment in between. Nothing has quite caught on, and he has no plan for his life. Like many twentysomethings, he can’t afford to live on his own, so he’s moved back in with his mother. It’s not clear – least of all to him – how he’ll establish himself as an independent adult.
The recession has been particularly hard on guys like Ben. Even so, he’s luckier than many. In Canada, the jobless rate for young adults is a relatively low 14 per cent. Across the European Union, the jobless rate is more than 20 per cent. In the U.S., the jobless rate for high-school-educated men between 20 and 24 – Ben’s generation – has reached 22.4 per cent. That’s more than double what it was four years ago. The situation of young American blacks is much worse. In Illinois, for example, only about 25 per cent of young black male adults have a job. And this time, nobody, anywhere, expects the job market to pick up any time soon.
Despite what the Occupy movement says, the biggest economic challenge we face today is not income inequality, greedy corporations, Wall Street corruption or the concentration of wealth among the top 1 per cent. It’s the increasing failure of young men with high-school degrees or less to latch on to the world of work.
Young men without work aren’t just an economic problem. They’re a huge social problem. “We’re at risk of having a generation of young males who aren’t well-connected to the labour market and who don’t feel strong ownership of community or society because they haven’t benefited from it,” Ralph Catalano, a professor of public health at the University of California at Berkeley, told The Wall Street Journal.
Young men without work are trapped in a twilight world of failure to achieve adulthood. They don’t move out and they don’t get married (although they’re increasingly likely to have kids). In the U.S., four out of 10 men between 18 and 30 are living with their parents. In Britain, it’s five out of 10. In Italy, it’s eight out of 10 (although that also reflects the extraordinary attachment of Italian parents to their grown-up kids).
But young men who live at home also have less incentive to find work. The longer they go without work, the dimmer their prospects become. And the more likely they are to drink, do drugs and develop other habits that will make them even less employable.
There’s a reason this downturn has been called the “mancession.” Jobs in manufacturing and construction have dried up, while employment in female-friendly fields such as health care has stayed steady or even grown. But something else is going wrong. A lot of young men seem to have given up. In an age when having a university degree matters more than ever, large numbers have gone AWOL from higher education. Even the ones who have degrees face higher unemployment than women do, a British study found. Bahram Bekhradnia, the director of a British think tank on higher education, blamed the men’s underachievement on complacency and “general hopelessness.”
Psychology professor Jean Twenge, the author of Generation Me, also thinks behavioural factors are holding young people back. She argues that an epidemic of narcissism has created millions of young adults who think they don’t have to work or study hard because they’re already smart. “It’s delusional thinking,” she told a conference of psychologists in Australia.
Joblessness is not the same as poverty. It’s worse. There’s lots of evidence to show that the scars of joblessness can last a lifetime. And fixing the problem will be very hard, because the problem is not simply economic. It’s also structural and social. We’ll need more than an economic upturn to reconnect a lot of our young men to work. But it matters more than we think – because without work, there’s no path to manhood.
A mancession?
General hopelessness?
An epidemic of narcissism?
Complacency?
AWOL from higher education?
There is simply no doubting the statistical data. Men are in profound difficulty, and as a result, the society itself faces an increasing and potentially insurmoutable problem.
But the story does not start with the useful data to which Ms Wente refers.
It goes farther back to young boys looking for mentors, models and supportive coaches. Of course, we make much of the honourable few who serve in that capacity. But there are so few, compared to the need.
There is a culture, at home and in the elementary schools, for starters, that favours female children and students. The last fifty years have seen a triumph of feminism, and a resulting demographic swing in professions like teaching toward women practitioners. Schools have become the domain of women, both in the front of the classroom and in the principal's office. Male students are "necessary evil" making disturbances when they should be quiet; rough-housing when they are supposed to be solving problems, doing math, learning history, or even playing organized games.
Male students far too often replace "school" and the many potential opportunities for socializing, learning and growth with some high-tech gaming device, preferring a virtual reality to one with people many of whom find his "gender" second class, to put it mildly. Too many boys are put on ritalin because they are diagnosed with ADHD, and need "more control." Too many boys are sent to the office for discipline because they are bored, alienated from the compliant-dependent school culture which is much more suited to compliant female students.
Reading and writing, both involving skills in which girls develop earlier and more easily, and it would seem naturally, are relegated, in the boys vernacular to "girl" subjects. Math and science, formerly an arena in which boys could hold their own, with interest, motivation, curiosity and some inherent skill, are now less attractive because, for one reason, the "game-boy" is more complex than most school science experiments.
If the early signs of what a boy considers "the establishment" are more supportive and encouraging of female students, and if his home life lacks a male figure, where does he go for male fraternity, collegiality and even just hanging out.
He has no trouble finding other males his age who are equally "turned off", tuned-out, seeking the comfort of their own "victim" (without ever condescnding to that word) and school work is the last thing he thinks about when the school day ends.
So while we are diagnosing the societal symptoms of what is now called a "mancession": a recession based almost exclusively on males without work, the fork in the road was taken many years before the unemployment numbers were gathered.
Our faculties of education, and our school boards and our principals associations and our colleges of teachers and our teachers' unions have to step up to the plate, and they will only do so if and when the epidemic of men withdrawing from the society reaches proportions where the public demands an affirmative action recruiting program to recruit male teachers for elementary schools, and for secondary schools and when teachers federations demand gender equality for men when hiring for positions of responsibility, and when curriculum designers ask boys what and how they would commit to learn, in order to qualify for seats in universities and colleges now either unfilled or filled by women, and thereby take their place as willing participants in a society that so trashes the current stereotypes of masculinity that almost every television ad contains another dumb, sexually driven, and socially inept male figure, not to mention the billions of dollars being generated by programs like The Big Bang Theory, in which highly educated males demonstrate their almost total estrangement from society and the female gender, with whom they are constantly trying to connect.
To overcome the potential tragedy of the impending mancession, we will need a commitment from all sectors in the society to recognize the blind spots in our vision of equality, in our modelling of respect and tolerance for both genders and a receptive culture for masculine and feminine qualities in all humans, celebrating the androyny bestowed on all of us by nature.
That will take generations....and we really don't have that long!

To all Canadian males 16-25: challenge yourself to achieve your potential

By Kate Bolick, The Atlantic, November 6, 2011
Over the past half century, women have steadily gained on—and are in some ways surpassing—men in education and employment. From 1970 (seven years after the Equal Pay Act was passed) to 2007, women’s earnings grew by 44 percent, compared with 6 percent for men. In 2008, women still earned just 77 cents to the male dollar—but that figure doesn’t account for the difference in hours worked, or the fact that women tend to choose lower-paying fields like nursing or education. A 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30 found that the women actually earned 8 percent more than the men. Women are also more likely than men to go to college: in 2010, 55 percent of all college graduates ages 25 to 29 were female.

By themselves, the cultural and technological advances that have made my stance on childbearing plausible would be enough to reshape our understanding of the modern family—but, unfortunately, they happen to be dovetailing with another set of developments that can be summed up as: the deterioration of the male condition. As Hanna Rosin laid out in these pages last year (“The End of Men,” July/August 2010), men have been rapidly declining—in income, in educational attainment, and in future employment prospects—relative to women. As of last year, women held 51.4 percent of all managerial and professional positions, up from 26 percent in 1980. Today women outnumber men not only in college but in graduate school; they earned 60 percent of all bachelor’s and master’s degrees awarded in 2010, and men are now more likely than women to hold only a high-school diploma. ...
But while the rise of women has been good for everyone, the decline of males has obviously been bad news for men—and bad news for marriage. For all the changes the institution has undergone, American women as a whole have never been confronted with such a radically shrinking pool of what are traditionally considered to be “marriageable” men—those who are better educated and earn more than they do. So women are now contending with what we might call the new scarcity. Even as women have seen their range of options broaden in recent years—for instance, expanding the kind of men it’s culturally acceptable to be with, and making it okay not to marry at all—the new scarcity disrupts what economists call the “marriage market” in a way that in fact narrows the available choices, making a good man harder to find than ever. At the rate things are going, the next generation’s pool of good men will be significantly smaller....
(T)ake 1940s Russia, which lost some 20 million men and 7 million women to World War II. In order to replenish the population, the state instituted an aggressive pro-natalist policy to support single mothers. Mie Nakachi, a historian at Hokkaido University, in Japan, has outlined its components: mothers were given generous subsidies and often put up in special sanatoria during pregnancy and childbirth; the state day-care system expanded to cover most children from infancy; and penalties were brandished for anyone who perpetuated the stigma against conceiving out of wedlock. In 1944, a new Family Law was passed, which essentially freed men from responsibility for illegitimate children; in effect, the state took on the role of “husband.” As a result of this policy—and of the general dearth of males—men moved at will from house to house, where they were expected to do nothing and were treated like kings; a generation of children were raised without reliable fathers, and women became the “responsible” gender. This family pattern was felt for decades after the war.

Indeed, Siberia today is suffering such an acute “man shortage” (due in part to massive rates of alcoholism) that both men and women have lobbied the Russian parliament to legalize polygamy. In 2009, The Guardian cited Russian politicians’ claims that polygamy would provide husbands for “10 million lonely women.” In endorsing polygamy, these women, particularly those in remote rural areas without running water, may be less concerned with loneliness than with something more pragmatic: help with the chores. Caroline Humphrey, a Cambridge University anthropologist who has studied the region, said women supporters believed the legalization of polygamy would be a “godsend,” giving them “rights to a man’s financial and physical support, legitimacy for their children, and rights to state benefits.”
While the Bolick piece focuses on the future of marriage and coupling, there are serious implications for men in the numbers. And those implications apply to Canadian males between 16 and 25...We cannot afford a lost generation!
Why, for example, are men not attending university in greater numbers, to acquire what most people, including the academic researchers, agree is one of the best ways to, if not guarantee then certainly to access, healthy and rewarding employment, access to health care, and not incidentally enhanced access to the most qualified and most interesting women in your town or city?
Rather than withdrawing into a cocoon of resentment about the economy and job losses especially among men, and rather than acceding to the stereotype of males as "dead beats" or "playboys", neither of which are attractive to healthy women looking for a mate, why not hit the books, or the desktop, depending on where and how you do your homework in grade and secondary school, aim for the best marks you can achieve, seek the support and coaching from your favourite teacher and crack the vault by opening the scholarship and bursary money available to see that your education does not stop prematurely.
If senior males suffer from Erectile Dysfunction (sometimes known as premature ejaculation) why should younger men suffer from premature elimination from the brain development pool?
That may sound like a flippant question but the implications are very serious.
Getting a quality education, in a field in which you as a male are interested, may be the most significant decision of your first quarter century. By taking such a decision, you rebuild the reputation of men on the North American continent, a reputation badly in need of shoring up. By taking such a decision, you also invest, not only in your own intellectual, social and cultural development, (and income-earning potential) but in the enhanced potential for your children, and your family. A university or college grad is far more likely to witness his children enrol in post-secondary school, and also to graduate from those schools. And that is no small accomplishment.
It may be true that high school culture is not "your cup of tea" especially with all the rules and regulations imposed without much logic other than the need of the system to keep control. It may also be true that your gameboy and/or your I-Pad, are far more interesting and more fun and more attractive than your algebra equation, or your chemistry experiment, and it may seem difficult, if not nigh on impossible, for you to make the connections between macy of the shards of information and light and the larger picture of your professional career, and the development of your highest potential.
However, we need each of you, each male in the 16-22 age range, to climb on the seemingly horseless wagon that bears the address (University/College of X) without the kind of cynicism and resentful withdrawal that accompanies what looks like alienation from the system, and separation from the public culture of corporate greed and job losses, and female empowerment, and broken marriages and families...and jump into the challenge that is obtaining first an undergraduate and then a graduate degree in your choice of discipline.
If playing a sport is your best expression, then go at it with vigour, including both finding an outstanding coach and a team mate whose mentorship you can share. Search all the best schools where your sport is being played. Search the best coaches and the best lecturers in the academic discipline of your interest.
Say "YES" to your commitment to your self, and forget about the late nights, and the term tests and the essays and exams that will accompany your decision. Keep your eye fixed on completing that degree, and the admittedly only potential (not guaranteed) access it will give you to a job in your field and demonstrate to your friends and family that your goal is worth pursuing.
You do not have to be a "type A" personality nor do you have to be a "nerd" nor do you have to be a "genius" to enter the most challenging academic stream of your capacity to learn....you just have to believe that your fullest development is more important that a million oilsands for the recovery of the energy within.
If Canada is not a nation of "intellectual, cultural and social" developers, and merely a developers of technology for the extraction of heavy oil, and soft and hard lumber, and expensive minerals, then we will have sacrificed our most precious resource, our human resource on the altar of profit, greed and reductionism.
And, while young women are, or seem to be, committed to their own full development, and men are loath to compete with the same women they may seek to date (wisely) it is time to reverse the image of attempting to compete with the female cohorts of your graduating class.
Your competition is not the narrow one of "besting" the women in your class; your competiton is to "best" the best of the young men and women from every major country in the world, where your next generations peers and intellectual mentors will come from. Whether they speak Mandarin, or Hindi, or Farsi, or German, or Norwegian...we need a huge cadre of well-education Canadian male brains connected to their bodies and their imaginations and their highest ideals and best angels and so do your children and your grandchildren.
And, while, as Red Green says, "We are all in this together, we are also counting on you!"





No one has been hurt more by the arrival of the post-industrial economy than the stubbornly large pool of men without higher education. An analysis by Michael Greenstone, an economist at MIT, reveals that, after accounting for inflation, male median wages have fallen by 32 percent since their peak in 1973, once you account for the men who have stopped working altogether. The Great Recession accelerated this imbalance. Nearly three-quarters of the 7.5 million jobs lost in the depths of the recession were lost by men, making 2010 the first time in American history that women made up the majority of the workforce. Men have since then regained a small portion of the positions they’d lost—but they remain in a deep hole, and most of the jobs that are least likely ever to come back are in traditionally male-dominated sectors, like manufacturing and construction.

"Sometimes I need God to be male!" Hugo Schwyzer

By Hugo Schwyzer, from Good Men Project website, October 12, 2011

Hugo Schwyzer has taught history and gender studies at Pasadena City College since 1993, where he developed the college's first courses on Men and Masculinity and Beauty and Body Image. He serves as co-director of the Perfectly Unperfected Project, a campaign to transform young people's attitudes around body image and fashion. Hugo lives with his wife, daughter, and six chinchillas in Los Angeles. Hugo blogs at his eponymous website and at Healthy Is the New Skinny.

In one of the first religious studies courses I took in college, the professor made a point that the God of the Bible is neither male nor female. We learned that to call the Lord, “He” misrepresented the original intent of the Torah, and that we’d be better off not using pronouns at all. If anything, my professor said, citing Genesis 5:1-2, God was both male and female—and more as well. After all, how could both men and women be made in God’s image if God didn’t have a feminine aspect?

A few years later, when I was auditing courses at the Graduate Theological Union and exploring a possible vocation to the priesthood (an idea that didn’t last long), I encountered feminist theology. I learned about God’s feminine aspect. For example, Hosea 13:8 describes God as a mother bear robbed of her cubs, while Jesus compares himself to a mother hen in Luke 13:34. I remember one of my classmates, a woman studying for ordination as an Episcopal priest, remarking that the more she studied Scripture, the more she realized that God was more female than male. “God is a nurturer,” she noted, “more like a mother than a father.”
While considering that career as a Catholic priest, I saw how the refusal to acknowledge the feminine aspect of God led to an intense devotion to Mary. The Virgin, I was told, was the tender intercessor who could plead for humanity to a more judgmental (or at the very least, less gentle) masculine God. The implication was clear: not only was God male, God’s masculinity was a barrier to empathy—hence the need for a woman to intercede to remind Him to go easy, like a mother pleading with her husband to lighten up on the discipline.
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What I found frustrating was that the feminist theologians arguing for the primarily feminine aspect of God and the conservative Catholics wrapped in Marian devotion were essentially saying the same thing: maleness can’t be nurturing. My friend, the liberal Episcopalian, believed God was tender—and therefore female. My traditionalist Catholic buddies believed that a thoroughly masculine God had largely outsourced His compassion to Mary. Both ignored the obvious other possibility.
Of course, many people have excellent reasons to be put off by masculine language and imagery for God. For men and women who’ve had strained or abusive relationships with their own fathers, calling God, “Father,”doesn’t happen easily. For many straight Christian men, the romantic vocabulary of evangelical culture can also be off-putting. (One of the standard critiques of contemporary praise music is the ubiquitous “Jesus is my Boyfriend” theme in so many worship songs.) For people who have been wounded by father figures, or who struggle to imagine intimacy with a man, using exclusively male language for God can be a real barrier to spiritual connection.
But at the same time, we need to acknowledge the radical and simple truth that men can be as tender as women. A father can nurture his children with every bit as much love and devotion as their mother. A fully adult man doesn’t need women to intercede to remind him of his responsibility to be compassionate. But when our only vocabulary for gentleness is feminine, we don’t acknowledge men’s capacity to be gentle. And when we label every loving action of God as evidence of God’s femaleness, we miss the point that God’s male aspect is every bit as kind.
From both a spiritual and historical-grammatical standpoint, God is neither male nor female—and at the same time, both male and female. It’s vital that we listen to what feminist Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Wiccan theologians are saying about the feminine aspect of the divine. Yes, God is a mother figure. But that’s only half the story. The paradox is that God is also a father figure—just a very different kind of father than the one celebrated in Western culture.
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We need to see that from a biblical perspective, God isn’t “being male” when he gets angry and “being female” when he weeps over human suffering. God is both when he does both. In that light, perhaps the rigid gender roles we prescribe in our culture aren’t God’s plan, but instead a man-made consequence of our inability to discern God’s intent for our lives. By embodying what are stereotypically male and female characteristics simultaneously, God just may be reminding us that we too are called to break out of the gender straitjacket.
In a world where so many men do abandon their responsibilities and where violence (almost) always wears a male face, there’s something revolutionary about acknowledging that a father figure can be forgiving, empathetic, gentle, and reliable. There’s also something equally significant about acknowledging that a mother figure can be a passionate, bold, relentless—even angry—advocate for justice. Anything less not only robs God of God’s full divinity, but robs us of our full potential as human beings.
I don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the gender of God. But I do know that following God means moving beyond the confines of traditional, limiting roles. As a dad, I appreciate the reminder that papas can and should be every bit as tender and loving as mamas. And so sometimes, this professor of gender studies calls God “father.” Not because that’s all God is, but because those of us who are also daddies need a reminder of just how loving, passionate, and tender we are called to be.


In a world where so many men do abandon their responsibilities and where violence (almost) always wears a male face, there’s something revolutionary about acknowledging that a father figure can be forgiving, empathetic, gentle, and reliable.
I lifted this quote from the Schwyzer piece, because it jumped out at me, and I recall my own classes in seminary where God was championed as female, by all the feminists in the class, and those of us of the "other gender" were quite happy to remain compliant. I even recall attempting to get the attention of a rural parish meeting when someone near the end of the meeting opined, "May God Bless our little church and the people in it"...to which I interjected, "I am confident She will!" to the amazement of those present.
Androgyny is not part of the normal discourse in contemporary society; not the androgyny of the female population, nor that of the male population, and certainly not the qualities attributed to God.
Needing God to be male is a completely normal and expected reaction to the tsunami of talk about the feminized God.
Another observation on the piece above is the "mother" does not constitute the total female character, nor father the whole male character, of either humans or God. And such a reduction, as is the case with almost all reductions, perpetuates the "parent" God, as opposed to the "male" or the "female" God.
One of the most heinous aspects of Christian ministry is the rendering of parishoners as children before a parent God...as if such a metaphor appropriated the normal, accepted and expected relationship between God and humans.
The church has, for far too long, abrogated the parent role, as its way of cozying up to power and control, premised on an out-of-control, savage, even undisciplined race called homo sapiens. Telling its parishoners what to do, when to do it, how to pray, and when to do that, how to "love" and when to do that, how to donate and when to do that, the meaning and purpose of sexuality including when and with whom to engage in that activity...these are all controlling interventions in order to demonstrate the utility of the church's role in one's life...as a regulator.
Whereas, there is considerable evidence that the regulator role is based on the fear of the church hierarchy that those in its "charge" will bring dishonour and disrepute upon the organization, if left free to make autonomous choices. There is also considerable evidence that the regulator role simply does not work, but certainly creates an virtually insurmountable wall between those "inside" and those "outside" who do have, have not, or will not fully comply with whatever rules the church sets out.
I always thought/believed/felt/intuited...that God wanted me to be "alive" in all aspects of my existence, not regulated by some permanent parent whose regulations were more important than my own rebellion. Perhaps if the church were to begin from the premise that humans are innately "good" and "seek to do good" although can also be deceived by self and others, then the premise of "sin" as a starting place for the definition of human beings would rightly atrophy, and perhaps then we could proceed to experience the awesome nature of God's gifts of life and grace in our lives, regardless of the specific "umbrella" or membership we chose, or not.
So long as we are still struggling with our definition of a deity, we will continue to struggle with our definition of our own gender, given the intimate link between our identity and our picture and relationship to God.

Manlands at IKEA, perpetuating the baby-man meme

By Katrina Onstad, Globe and Mail, Occtober 8, 2011

Last month, in a ham-fisted effort to minimize spousal unit tension, an IKEA in Sydney, Australia temporarily installed Manland. Much like Smaland, IKEA’s bubble room and crafts centre for children, Manland is filled with stimulating diversions (foosball, hot dogs) for men unable to shop without a meltdown. “Some men may pretend to enjoy the shopping experience,” a reporter enthused in a news clip on Australian TV. “We all know they’d prefer to be playing an Xbox or watching the footy than pushing a trolley!” Word! High five!
The set of assumptions behind Manland doesn’t flatter either sex. Once again, here comes the baby-man meme, wherein men are unable and unwilling to participate in the rote side of domestic life. These are the same guys who steal breakfast cereal from their kids in ads or are played by Jim Belushi on sitcoms.
Upholding the clichés of masculinity – real men hate shopping and love Space Invaders – doesn’t make men manlier; it makes them seem a little pathetic. To be a man – or any kind of adult – is to participate fully in your relationship and muster up a civil opinion on a bath mat from time to time. Manland is a country populated by the lowest form of manhood: the whiner who can’t even put aside his own (adolescent) proclivities for an hour to help his wife carry a Shrömpfken – one that he’s probably going to enjoy sleeping on himself.
I’m not sure what’s less appealing: a man who wants to go to Manland or a woman who wants to “drop off” her husband there. Every baby-man in pop culture has his counterpart in the eye-rolling/arms-across-the- chest bemused female killjoy. Manland perpetuates the myth that ladies love shopping only slightly more than they love demoralizing their husbands.
The baby-man meme...where the undeveloped, immature, withdrawn and self-indulgent narcissistic male of the species is 'dropped-off' by his more mature, gregarious, interdependent and integrated female partner in order to reduce the potential for a "melt-down" usually associated with two-year-old temper tantrums...hmmmmmm!
This is not a good picture for any "Y" chromosome-bearing "homo sapiens". In fact, it is so regressive, so insulting and so pathetic as to be another sign of the tragedy that is 21st century masculinity, or at least its portrayal and even its widely held stereotype in the minds, eyes and hearts of many women.And apparently, in the boardroom of IKEA.
There is a pattern to much of what is perceived as "reality" in current vernacular, and thereby current perceptions. Just as the definition of depression in the DSM IV is derived from the descriptions of female patients/clients from practicing psychiatrists, so too is the definition of healthy masculinity derived, we suspect, from the cynical, victimized and too-frequent female conversation in all workplaces, coffee shops, docctors' offices, and soccer practices. Women talk about their men to other women. Men, on the other hand, are sworn to silence, as if it were a code of honour, both to other men and to women.
Fifteen years after I left a marriage of twenty-three years, a marriage that included three daughters, I met a former colleague with whom I had worked and commuted for well nigh twenty years. His first comment, not having spoken with me in the interim, was, "I never heard you say anything negative about your former spouse!"
To which I responded, "Well, no one else did either! Those are private matters left better in that private file."
On the other hand, at this very moment, in hospitals, police stations, ambulance stations, banks, professional offices of every genre, schools, universities and even corporations, women are, among other things, "drubbing out their men" for irresponsibility, for negligence, for passive aggressive attitudes and behaviour, for missing an important date on the calendar, for "going out to play" when the family, or the leaky faucet needed serious attention. Women seem to be fed by such conversations, perhaps because it reinforces the victim archetype in which many have been stuck for many decades.
It was Carol Pearson (The Hero Within) who pointed out barely a decade or two ago that North American society was/is (?) dominated by two archetypes, the victim (women) and the warrior (men). In the public media, in advertising, in film and television, such archetypes (morphed into stereotypes) set the "norm" and billions of dollars of television programming in both revenues and expenditures circulate around the depiction of these two archetypes, sometimes in exclusively male conversation (Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory) or in exclusively female conversation (Desperate Housewives)...Of course, the women's liberation movement was originally designed to point out the legitimate stengths, capabilities and leadership qualities of all women, in the hope that most, if not all, would rise to the top of the corporate, professional and even political ladder in their field, thereby levelling the playing field in status, in pay and in role modelling with men.
The men of my acquaintance, who have done the work of acknowledging our single-minded pursuit of power/money/status to the neglect of our families and our emotional development for the first half century of our lives and have followed that 'confession' with a new, less stressful and less ambitious path to a greater degree of both inner peace and relationship accord, without having in any way abandoned our masculinity, are clearly not the majority. In fact, we threaten other mostly younger men who, so far, have not hit their wall, or seen the light, depending on the "fish-in-the-face" that has struck them in a painful epiphany.
So there is not only a macro division between women and men, but a slightly less macro, but still not micro separation among different groups of men. And this division, including how "macho" men react to gay men in such a frightened and alienating manner, is at least as problematic to the evolution of masculinity, as is the continuing sandpaper roughness that comprises many male-female partnerships.
There is a significant need for straight men to embrace (not in the physical, but in the political sense) gay men. Men like Brian Burke, hardly a male insecure about his masculinity, attending and putting a public face on the Gay Pride Parade in Toronto, in honour of his deceased gay son make a significant contribution to the integration of gay and straight men. Of course, the current Mayor of Toronto's refusal to attend that same parade, preferring the "cottage" for the weekend, tip the scales back into the predictable, proverbial separation between the two groups.
Similarly, the issue of fighting in pro hockey is an example of the divide between the "macho" defenders and the "evolved" agents of change. Don Cherry fills his bank account selling video of hockey violence, some of it acceptable, much of it potential career and/or life threatening, all of dedicated to preserving a "rough" and "natural" form of masculinity, to the denigration of a more sophisticated, intellectual and creative pursuit of the same rubber disc. While public opinion polls demonstrate that 74% of those asked would prefer to see fighting removed from the game, leaving only 24% supporting its being retained, fights are replayed on the television screens inside and outside the arenas, as a last gasp of air for the museum pieces they ought to have become decades ago.
Fighting about fighting is really analogous to the debates that have occurred for the last twenty years about the dnagers of cigarette smoke, both primary and secondary. Everyone knows about the dangers and the risks, and yet the ardevaarks prevail, because change will hurt the game, or (upspoken) change will reduce the opportunity for men to be real men.
In many ways, this is a clinging to a fossil of the past, for the sake of denying the present and the future. Men can be diligent, competive, resourceful and disciplined, and uphold their (and our) masculinity while playing any game, including professional hockey, without once raising their fist, or taking a deliberate shot at the head of an opponent. Fast-paced skills, anticipation, creativity, imagination, intuition including open-ice body checks do not, and will not downgrade the game. In fact, they will always enhance the game, and the spectators' appreciation for it.
It is a desperate clinging to a long-worn-out stereotype that infuses too much of North American life that must be put to rest. A story from a pulp and paper mill, relayed through a safety officer may illustrate my point. A new recruit was using a metal pole to roll a large roll of paper (several tons in weight) along the floor, when a veteran of the plant noticed. "That's not how we do it here!" he shouted, putting his shoulder into the roll to accomplish the procedure in his "manly" manner. When the young recruit attempted to regain his masculinity in front of the critic, he dislocated his shoulder, requiring medical attention, incurring significant costs for the health care system and failing to help the older generation evolve to a more safe, less "physical" in the body sense way of doing things in that plant.
It is the division between the "effete" males (words chosen by the stereotype of masculinity) and the "real men" (again words chosen by the same group) that is at issue here. And to paint this as a male-female conflict is to miss the essential ingredient of the conflcit. It is, essentially, an internal conflict within each man that has no, or very little. public expression in a conciliatory and collegial manner to guide men into full acceptance of their own complex reality.
Only if and when men, all men, both straight and gay, become comfortable in our own reality, and with each other will this chasm be bridged. When we come to acknowledge that 10% of all men are gay, including those in the NHL, the NFL, the NBA, the IFFA, and the World Cup of Football, and openly agree that they too are legitimate members of the "Y" chromosome fraternity, without fear, without rancour, without bigotry and without sepregation will there be some opening of the door and window of opportunity to bringing about healing of this age-old separation between and among men.

"Men moving backward while women move forward" (Mark Kelly, CBC)

Finally, the words were spoken last night on CBC's Connect with Mark Kelly. It was not an official announcement. It was not part of the script for a news story. It was, ironically, the "disconnect" for the September 19, 2011 show.

As he reviewed the progress made by women over the last few decades, using the interview with a Hugh Hefner Playboy Bunnie as his springboard, he closed with this thought...
As women have beeen making all this progress toward equality, men it seems have been moving backward. With the "dumb men" jokes and ads, men have become the idiots in the room....
Not only is it true, it is one of the tragedies of the last quarter century.
Men have, indeed, become the idiots in the room. We are being laughed at in many of the television shows currently playing in prime time. We are the butt of many of the "jokes" that wander through daily water cooler conversations. Listen to the staff of any department populated primarily by women and you will hear too much talk about the "dumb" or "insensitive" or "lazy" or "irresponsible" or...pick your own adjective husband, partner, back home.
And it is a regular subject for a circle of female bonding....and to put it mildly and bluntly, it sucks.
If men were to talk about their female partners in the same way, we would be accused of gender bias, in polite terms, and sexism in less polite terms, and reinforcing the "gossip" in ugly terms.
What has happened to the male "character" in our North American society?
Have we simply surrendered our spines and our needs and our aspirations to the closet or the basement or the garage where those things on their way to Value Village are stored?
Have we refused to step up in the face of "women's liberation" to provide the kind of counter-balance to healthy, self-respecting, assertive women who wish to attend school, get good grades, get good jobs and produce a good family?
Have we considered the "competition" not worthy of our best efforts, in support of those healthy, assertive, self-respecting women we call our daughters, our wives, our mothers, and even our grandmothers?
Having been raised by a mother born three years prior to the start of World War I, whose brand of assertiveness, and courage and self-respect was forged in the bush of Algonquin Park where she lived in a boxcar with her parents for the years from three to nine, while her father was shop foreman at the CNR roundhouse, I am too familiar with her references to Charlotte Whitten, the former mayor of Ottawa. It was Whitten who publicly uttered words that rang in our house for decades:
Unfortunately, in order to be considered equal to men, women have to work twice as hard;
fortunately, men have not made that achievement all that difficult.
Following her life in the bush, she attended nursing school, at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, where she was "educated" by the nuns of the Roman Catholic church, not exactly a 'liberal' education in nursing. Upon graduation, she was hired by those same nuns for work in the maternity ward, before returning to her home town to marry.
Even prior to her marriage, she attempted to convince her then fiance, later my father, to attend university to study dentistry in the early 1930's, with her working to cover the costs. His confidence, not having completed high school, was insufficient for the challenge, something she held over his head for the sixty-plus years of their marriage.
She took a back-seat to no one ever. She took on the task of being President of the North Bay Canadian Club in her 80's, travelled on planned excursions throughout her retirement, engaged her granddaughters in conversations about their developing plans and interesting lives, and drove her car until three days before she died, following hip surgery after a fall on the front steps of her house in North Bay. She was then in her ninety-first year.
She competed with her two sisters-in-law, both nurses, for fifty years, sometime innocuously, sometimes overtly, to their disappointment. They never felt the need to compete, given their firmly established positions in the administration of two Toronto hospitals, The Hospital for Sick Children, and Mount Sinai Hospital, both teaching hospitals attached to the University of Toronto, and the various community colleges that sprang up in the 1970's under then Premier William Davis.
I watched my mother's unquestioned dominance in her marriage for many decades, wondering what had happened to my father's spine. There certainly were times when his firm, but unyielding hand on the tiller would have steadied their marriage and reduced our family's trauma, without in any way denigrating her significant contribution. She lacked a vigorous and assertive and self-respecting partner for those sixty-plyus years, and I have come to the realization of that "missing component" in my family of origin, and in my own first marriage, given the modelling I saw as a young man.
Working in both schools and churches, and in several corporations, I have witnessed various forms of male-female interractions, some of them downright viscious, others more compatible, and others a sheer delight to experience.
My three daughters owe much to their grandmother whose modelling gave them confidence and self-acceptance that has resulted in their many achievments in athletics, academics and later in professional life.
Nevertheless, I remain convinced that men, individually and collectively, have permitted the erosion of the "brand" called masculinity through a combination of indifference, some arrogance (mostly a mask) and some fear. We have not provided, in too many cases, the kind of self-confident, assertive and healthy modelling for our sons, and our grandsons over the last half century.
Were we tired folllowing the two world wars?
Were we too busy making a living to have any energy left over for polishing the male brand?
Did we leave the field to the Dubya's, of which there are far too many, who have put on the stereotype of Marlboro Man, and sacrificed their poetic, and their feminine qualities, as both embarrassing and irrelevant.
It was Carl Jung who taught us about the unconscious in all men; he called it the anima. And through a process, still somewhat ill-defined, of claiming the Shadow, we could find the "gold" in that effort.
There is a model of androgyny, that combines both masculine and feminine qualities in both men and women, and the model is far more acceptable to most women than it is too most men.
And the sooner men "get over" our fear of being gay, and our fear of those who are gay and we find our feminine sides, we might begin to fill the gaping hole that exists in too many families, organizations and even nations' schools, hospitals, churches and corporations and provide mentoring to our sons who wish to become artists, musicians, dancers and creative community organizers...and not have to funnel them into only the hard sciences, accounting, law and medicine.

In Canada 10 suicides every day, 8 are men!

By Andre Picard, Globe and Mail, September 6, 2011

Take a close look at the statistics and a trend becomes clear: The No. 1 risk factor for suicide is being male.
Of the 10 people who die by suicide daily in this country, about eight are men and two are women.
There are libraries full of research examining this phenomenon, which is not unique to Canada. There are many possible explanations but few easy answers.
We know that suicide is a vast societal problem that affects all age groups – in Canada, suicides have been recorded in children as young as 8 and in seniors over the age of 90 – and all socioeconomic groups....
The vast majority of suicides result from underlying mental illness coupled with profound emotional pain, and they are often triggered by some external event, such as a job loss, failing an exam, the breakup of a relationship or the death of a loved one. In other words, stress is the big trigger.
Yet, only a tiny proportion of those who suffer from depression die by suicide. (On the other hand, close to half of people with untreated schizophrenia will take their own lives.) There are also factors that increase the risk of depression and suicide, including a history of head injuries and alcohol/drug abuse.
Women are about twice as likely as men to suffer from depression. They are also far more likely to attempt suicide but tend to be less “successful” (and, yes, that is a horrific notion of “success.”) Still, the stats tell us that, in women, there are 20 attempts for every completed suicide while, in men, the ratio is 4:1.
One reason is that men use far more violent means to kill themselves, principally hanging and firearms, while women generally use poisoning (drug overdoses). Death though is just the tip of the iceberg: Another 48 people daily are hospitalized with self-inflicted injuries, most of them women.
The principal reason more men than women die by suicide is that men do not seek help and spiral into despair, hopelessness and self-harm.
Men also self-medicate, largely with alcohol, which tends to make their symptoms worse. When they are depressed, they don’t retreat into a shell, but act out, often violently. (Perhaps we should consider that the depressed are drawn to being hockey enforcers rather than the reverse?) Women, on the other hand, tend to self-medicate with food and sleep; they also cry out for help – literally and figuratively. They talk to friends, they talk to counsellors and they talk to physicians about their depression and suicidal thoughts.
One of the main enduring stigmas about mental illness, particularly for men, is that it is a sign of weakness. From an early age, boys are taught – or socialized – to be tough, to not cry. They internalize their pain. They repress their feelings and their fears.
This silence can be fatal. Yet the continuing carnage that results – more men die by suicide than in motor vehicle collisions – is largely hidden away and invisible.
When we have a rare glimpse of this grim reality, as we have had with the death of Mr.(Wade) Belak (formerly of the Toronto Maple Leafs of the NHL), we owe it to ourselves to not be distracted by peripheral concerns like fighting in hockey and zero in on big issues like how to treat depression and prevent suicide in males. Obviously our current approach is not working.
When the black dogs of depression come growling, when the suicidal thoughts become overwhelming, boys need not be boys and men need not be men.
They need to learn – from an early age and regardless of how macho their profession – that they can seek help, they can be vulnerable, they can be sick and get better.
The hoary myths we cling to about toughness and manhood too often leave us with young men dangling by a rope.
Sadly, I recall the names of several males who took their own lives when I was a young boy growing up in a small Ontario town. A pharmacist, a wholesale, a men's clothing retailer, a retired gentleman, all come to mind, and all of them I knew personally, without even suspecting their outcome. Guns and a hose attached to the exhaust of the car in an enclosed garage were the methods I recall. I also recall, when I was twelve, one night being wakened around 3:00 a.m. by my mother and told to to the basement "right away!" I had no idea why, and did not bother to inquire.
When I arrived in the basement, I found my own father behind the charcoal-fired jacket heater used to generate hot water, holding a .22 calibre rifle to his head.
"Give me the gun!" I recall saying as calmly as I could.
He handed it to me and I took it upstairs, although I have no recollection where I placed it, or even whether or not it was loaded. I never checked. That was in 1954; he died in 1996, some forty-two years later, and in that time I never heard a word uttered about the incident from either my mother or my father.
What I did hear about many times, however, were allegations that my father's father, my grandfather, in my mother's words, "was crazy" because he attempted to take his own life, a story recounted by one of his adult daughters in a letter to me in the mid 1990's, yet when I attempted to confirm its veracity through my own father, he denied it ever happened.
While studying theology, I took a course entitled, "Death and Dying" from an outstanding pastoral counsellor. During that course, I inquired from the partner of another male suicide what follow-up support seemed to work for her. She confirmed that her deceased partner had returned to excessive alcohol consumption about which she had no idea. I also wrote a thesis on the liturgical suicide of a priest who was clearly depressed and wounded by many pains in his life a most recent rejection for a professional position to which he aspired.
Clearly, the culture of masculinity, not only the expectations of being male (including silence and resilience in the midst of pain, refusal to "talk" about pain to anyone, medicating the pain with whatever the choice of medicine: alcohol, work, drugs both prescription and non-prescription, sex, gambling etc. is more conducive to male suicide, especially to the much lower ratio of attempts to completions (4:1 as compared with women, 20:1)
Some men and women organized a conference on reasons why men do not seek professional help, in Kingston, ON. When I met one of the key-note speakers, I was moved to respond that men are men, are must not apologize for being men, just as a rose need not apologize for being a rose, and not a Lily.
A clinical, psychological approach to men, in my view, is not the answer to depression, nor is it the answer to mental illness, exclusively. Clinical approaches frequently involve one-on-one interactions although group interactions are also part of the available menu.
The clinical approach is to employ the medical model of treatment, as if there were a disease that needs to be made well, less toxic and less influential in a man's life. If he is too aggressive, he must be made to act out less, to repress his emotions and in order to achieve this result, both "talk therapy" and medications are prescribed. If he is too withdrawn, a similar chemical-talk duality is often prescribed.
Our society has become dependent on the medical model of treating most aberrant conditions.
I question the quality of "aberrant" that is allegedly found in many men. Have we not erred much too far in the direction of the "disease" model of defining what is wrong with a person whose attitudes, actions, speech and general demeanour do not conform to our "definition" of what is appropriate.
Using the DSM-IV, for example, the definition of "depression" in that "psychiatric bible" is derived from female patients, not from a cross section of both male and female patients. Consequently, the treatment modalities are also based on their relative success among women patients.
There is considerable evidence that North American society has made men the "scape-goats" for many of our social ills.
Men commit far more acts of violence that do women.
Men drop out of school at higher rates than women.
Men suffer from learning difficulties at a rate higher than women.
Men are considered "dummies," and/or "stupid" and/or "socially maladjusted" much more often than women.
Men do not adapt to a school curriculum that points them toward reading, writing and emotional identification nearly as effectively as do female students.
Men "hide" their shyness in their "tech" gadgets, and in their macho mask, and in their physical prowess whereas women seek out other women who are also shy and find comfort and solace with a comparable peer.
Men do not have a vocabulary for their emotions nearly as early nor as completely as do women, in fact many men consider such a vocabulary to be "effeminate" and therefore to be avoided at all costs.
Men are not taught, either formally or informally, the complexities of human relationships, especially with the opposite gender, when the need is measured in the number of divorces, reaching at least 40% by some studies and as high as 50% in other studies.
The male model of gathering and writing the daily news reports easily trumps the perspective of women: for example, it is the "horse race" of all political competitions that trumps the nuances of policy and their underpinning thought or philosophy. Consequently, a good idea will be far less likely to reach a headline than the score of the most recent poll.
The male model of measuring success in most organizations is seen in the inordinately high use of numbers, size, increased production and profits and dividends, not the drop in absenteeism, nor the rise in philanthropy by the company, nor the decline in frequency of personal conflict. This includes, tragically, the christian church, where, in my experience, a bishop's vision has been touted in corporate vernacular: 10% more people and 15% more money in the coffers. This example, a true story, demonstrates the abandonment of the principles of the gospel, and any attempt at removing gender from the calculations. It also engenders the opposite behaviours from clergy to those needed to grow integrated, and effective community circles when both men and women could and would learn from each other to talk about their spiritual lives, without fearing the embarrassment that often accompanies such a discourse involving both genders.
As our society moves to less and less authentic human contact, and more and more hiding our deepest feelings, including our deepest fears, anxieties and disappointments, men will "fit" into the model being created by both men and women, unconsciously, that not only permits, but actually encourages the cover-up of real pain, and real discomfort. It is as if we are addicted to the "story with the happy ending" as the one we are all pursuing....and look at the death-denying culture we have on our hands, our minds and our spirits.
A small sliver of hope might be seen peeking through the cracks around these three male suicides, as they stories prompt both more stories and more talk around the water cooler.
With profound thanks and encouragement for his insightful piece, to Andre Picard.

Jack Layton's legacy: "He talked to men about men's issues" (Party President)

On this day that marks the death of the leader of the Official Opposition in the House of Commons in Ottawa, the CBC has dedicated several hours to commemorating his life, political contribution and personal legacy.
It is the comment of Brian Topp, President of the New Democratic Party that struck me. When asked what he will take away from the experience of working with Jack Layton, Mr. Topp commented:
"Jack always talked to men and he left that image in my mind, and I will try to learn to do that, as I pay respect to his legacy."
Imagine a political leader talking to men about violence committed by men, about the need to respect women, about the importance of being a male member of the human race....it is almost inconceivable!
And, in that moment, we saw, perhaps for the very first time in Canadian public life, a demonstration of the importance Jack Layton placed on the definition of masculinity in a world gone mad with hard power.
Jack's departure letter, composed on Saturday afternoon, a mere two days prior to his untimely death, with a few of his closest associates including his wife Olivia Chow, also herself a Member of Parliament for the NDP, closes with these words:
My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.
Here is a national political leader unafraid to acknowledge his optimism, his hope and his love...as important qualities in any attempt to "change the world"....
Sounds almost triumphal, certainly spiritually uplifting and undoubtedly unexpected coming from a male, in the current cultural climate in North America.
And there is not a person alive who knows Jack Layton who would permit his being dubbed a "wimp"...
He was a partisan, a fighter for justice and equality and fairness in the Canadian political debate, a champion of individual rights of gays and lesbians, of the underclass, of First Nations people and of those who needed a helping hand to make their way out of dependence.
For all of his many gifts, talents and indomitable spirit, Jack Layton undertook one of the most challenging and important tasks for any political leader in the twenty-first century...challenging and mentoring other men into their highest ideals and their best in all relationships.
And he not only used these words; he lived their importance in being able to bring people of different ideologies and points of view together to accomplish practical goals in the larger public interest.
Would that more men than the NDP President can and do hear and accept the challenge that Jack Layton posed for men in Canada and in North America.
Such a level of acceptance of that challenge will change our schools, our families, our corporations and our political discourse...and all of that change will be for the higher good of both men and women.

Can we educate boys when "men are society's scapegoats"?

By Vicki Larson, Good Men Project website, July 12, 2011

Gabriel Aubry is being a bad dad. Well, we don’t know that for a fact; all we know is that actress Halle Berry, with whom the model had a daughter, now 3, is claiming that he’s been neglectful. She may be right, she may be wrong, but in the eyes of much of the world, Aubry’s already guilty.
People can — and do — say anything they want in a nasty custody or divorce battle. And as a society, we often tend to assume the worst about men. But what if we’re wrong?
We’re used to men being violent. Literature, movies and video games are full of heroes and antiheroes who kill and maim their way into our hearts and nightmares. At the same time, we tell boys to “suck it up” instead of expressing pain, leaving them few emotions but anger. Then we chastise them when they actually get angry — or live in fear of their anger. And sometimes we use the one emotion we’ve allowed them to our advantage.
Men, of course, aren’t the only ones who can do damage; statistics show that women can be just as violent as men. But while the Violence Against Women Act provides millions of dollars for shelters for abused women, you don’t see too many shelters — any, actually — for abused men. “It’s often been taken for granted that women can’t really do that much damage, so it’s OK to maybe slap your boyfriend or do something of that nature,” says Kellie Palazzolo, an assistant professor at Arizona State University’s Hugh Downs School of Human Communication who is overseeing research on how college students perceive female and male perpetrators.
That may be why so many women applauded Elin Nordegren’s alleged golf club attack on then-hubby Tiger Woods – we just don’t like to think of women being violent except in self-defense. He cheated on her; he made her do that!
And in the “he said-she said” of so many marital breakups, like that of Hulk and Linda Hogan, where she claims he was violent and abusive and he says she’s “delusional,” or of actress Meredith Baxter, who claims in her memoir, “Untitled”, that she was physically and psychologically abused by ex David Birney, while he says her book’s “an appalling abuse of the truth,” whom do we believe?
Same when it comes to sexual violence. In the “he said-she said” of former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, who was released from house arrest last week, and the 32-year-old hotel maid he allegedly raped, the maid has a history of lying and Strauss-Kahn has a history of sexual predation. Whom do we believe?
Hélène Périvier, co-director of the gender program at Paris’ Institut d’Etudes Politiques, worries the fallout of the DSK case may hurt women; while false reports of rape and sexual violence are statistically rare, she says, “it suffices to cement doubts and discredit the word of women going to the police in the future.”
But women, like men, lie, and the results can be devastating. And false reports of rape and sexual violence are not as statistically rare as Périvier and others may believe, according to many experts, including Dr. Warren Farrell, chair of the Commission to Create a White House Council on Boys to Men, who details the results of numerous studies in his books “Father and Child Reunion” and “The Myth of Male Power.” In fact, they occur often during divorce.
As Farrell writes:
“Men are about 19 more times more likely than women to say they have been falsely accused of sexual abuse. About 85 percent of these abuse allegations are made by women during battles over parent time, during the throes of divorce, or when a live-in situation is failing. … “(A) sex-abuse charge — even if false — often costs the father his job, his health, his friends, his reputation, and his relationship with his child.”
Like the hotel maid who allegedly discussed the possible benefits of pursuing charges against Strauss-Kahn, we’re all — men and women — able to exploit each other. When it comes to custody cases, however, the odds are often stacked against dads. “Some women are coached to make false allegations of domestic violence, rape and child abuse,” says Dr. Tara Palmatier, the no-nonsense founder of A Shrink 4 Men, in an email exchange with me. “Their attorneys may file baseless restraining orders to raise the stakes on men in the divorce or custody cases. These tactics don’t just hurt men: they create widespread cynicism about the family court and the efficacy of the justice system.”
Oregon took a bold step to address that last week when Gov. John Kitzhaber signed into law HB2183, which comes down hard on anyone knowingly making a false case of child abuse. The key is “knowing,” says the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Wayne Krieger, who acknowledged that false accusations often arise between divorcing couples.
But, how often is that? The U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s Administration for Children & Families says of the percentage of the 3.3 million referrals for child abuse and neglect in 2009 it investigated, “Two-thirds of reports found all allegations to be unsubstantiated or intentionally false (64.3% and 0.1%, respectively).” But child abuse or neglect is just a small part of false claims in custody battles.
Many high-conflict custody cases don’t start out that way, Farrell says, because most about-to-be divorced moms recognize that kids need their dads, too. But divorce offers a chance to start over — maybe move closer to one’s parents or to a new love, or relocate for a new job. If a savvy lawyer informs a woman that her ex could get equal custody, thus putting the kabosh on her plans, and then asks if she ever feared him, whether he ever cursed at her, called her names, raised his voice or screamed in a fit of rage, “I’m so angry at you, I could kill you” — and what marriage doesn’t have some sort of anger, yelling or threats? — well, there’s a false case of abuse in the making, he says. Divorces can become high conflict if a dad, realizing that his ex’s plans may cause him to lose his kids and he doesn’t want to lose them, cries, “No way!”
In the custody battle between champion fighter Chuck “The Iceman” Liddell and his ex, Lori Geyer, over their 12-year-old son, accusations are flying on both sides. Who knows who’s telling the truth? But one thing Geyer may have on her side is fear; she says Liddell tried to intimidate her by “pacing back and forth and staring her down.” And fear is enough to raise the shadow of a doubt, Farrell says. Most judges would rather take the safe route — after all, who wants to make a mistake and put a child or woman back in an abuser’s control?
And so men walk around somewhat guilty until proven innocent. And sometimes, no one’s too interested in proving them innocent.
Farrell is. He gets weekly calls from men who say they’re being falsely accused. So is Palmatier. The clinical psychologist has worked with numerous men in abusive relationships who feel unheard. Men, she tells me, are often default scapegoats. A woman hits a man and we assume he did something to her to justify it. A father doesn’t see his kids so he must be a deadbeat dad, even if the truth is that his ex has done everything in her power to keep him from them. A woman screams and neighbors call the cops who arrest the husband when it was the wife who assaulted him.
“As a society, we don’t typically think of men in the role of a victim. We can’t even recognize it when we’re confronted by physical evidence,” Palmatier writes. “On the other hand, we’re inclined to believe accusations about men.”
Not only is it unfair and dishonest, she says, but it’s “damaging to boys and young men, gender relations, relationships, families and ‘the best interests of the children.’ And it gives the women who are predators a free pass.”
Automatically assuming the worst of men is a form of discrimination, she, Farrell and others say. And they’re right.
Halle Berry says Gabriel Aubry is being a bad dad, just as many women say about their exes. Whom do you believe?
This article first appeared on the Huffington Post, where Vicki Larson is a regular columnist.
Vicki Larson is the lifestyles editor at the Marin Independent Journal, and writes for Mommy Tracked, Huffington Post, The Working Chronicles, a national project that explores what Americans think about work, as well as other places. You can follow her on Twitter at @OMGchronicles or visit her blog at OMGchronicles.vickilarson.com

American males educated in sex through porn: Researcher

Dr. Gail Dines is a professor of sociology and women’s studies at Wheelock College in Boston, an internationally acclaimed speaker and author, and a feminist activist. Her writing and lectures focus on the hypersexualization of the culture and the ways that porn images filter down into mainstream pop culture.

Gail’s work on media and pornography has appeared in academic journals, magazines such as Time and Newsweek, and newspapers across the country. She is a frequent guest on radio and television and is a recipient of the Myers Center Award for the Study of Human Rights.
Gail is a founding member of Stop Porn Culture – an educational and activist group made up of academics, anti-violence experts, community organizers and anyone who is concerned about the increasing pornification of the culture.( http://stoppornculture.org/) (from Dr.Gail Dines website)
Dr. Dines appeared on a recent edition of On Point with Tom Ashbrook, from NPR in Boston. The program focused on the increasing numbers of aggressive sexual incidents including rape, on American college campuses where the evidence suggests that one in five women have been victims of sexual assault or rape. According to Dr. Dines, boys are being educated in sexuality almost exclusively through pornography, and they begin at around 11 years of age in both their education and their first sexual experience.
Also according to Dr. Dines, the American culture teaches young girls to dress in an extremely provocative manner, in order to be noticed.Her research also suggests that in common rooms on many if not all U.S. campuses, male students are using the internet to access porn websites and that dating as a form of respectful relationship development has been replaced by "hook-up's" or what another generation called "one-night-stands".
Naturally, in any "hook-up" neither party assumes the other wants a more premanent relationship.
So from the perspective of this scribe, it appears that, at least from this researcher, the American culture has been extremely successful in commodifying both male and female genders, at a very early age, in a reduction to "bare essentials" of the encounter between male and female when the biology of both is exploding.
When the society exists for the profit of those generating the business models, and
when that same society depends, for 70% of its economic activity, on the purchases made by consumers
and when the engine drving those consumer sales of both products and services is sexuality (blatant and somewhat less so)
and when the offspring of that society find themselves alone with their laptops and blackberries, I-pads and Ipods, surfing the porn sites that excite them
and when those same offspring "party" with excessive binge drinking, to the point where students are dying from alcohol poisoning
and those same students, both male and female now intoxicated, fall into some form of "bed" together,
on the "morning after" there are bound to be deep and profound regrets...
and the officials, administration, dorm proctors who are charged with the responsibility of "protecting" students from such tragedies are in a quandry about their appropriate and fair rulings (who wouldn't be?)...
This is another pot of a perfect storm boiling without adequate control measures, guidelines and punishments.
As the other guest on the On Point program pointed out, however, if one in five laptop computers were being stolen on every campus, the President of the University and the Chief of Police of the city or town where the university is located would be holding a press conference to announce stern measures to stop the theft and to return the computers to their rightful owners and to punish the offenders. Also the parents would be demanding action.
Unfortunately, a young woman's chastity and virginity are not as easily or as clearly "recoverable"...and her life may be dramatically and negatively impacted for the rest of her life.
However, the universities themselves, have permitted their own programs to suffer a reduction from the original template of liberal arts courses for those seeking to explore new and challenging and challengeable ideas to a virtual technical school for the training of job-fillers. This is another of the many reductionisms that education has undergone, as another of the many ways by which the commercial, corporate, consumer culture has conquered the landscape, including the university campuses.
So long as the only thing that matters is the "brand" of the university education our sons and daughters are receiving (obviously only available from the "best" names like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, etc.) so that the corporations who are hiring their graduates can boast of the pedigree in their staff stable, so that they can generate the most dividends for their investors, all participants will be pawns to the Kings and Queens of corporate design and control.
We need to take back not only the curricula in our universities, but also the flow of cash, and the idolatry of cash and profit that reduces human beings to serfs in a master-slave relationship to money, power and the idolatry of those with the biggest bank accounts, as the end goal of the university education....and then, perhaps both men and women will be able to see more than sex and orgasms and conquest and notches on a belt as the purpose and the gift and the blessing and grace of the relationships to which we all aspire.
And then, perhaps, both men and women will re-occupy the appropriate terrain of healthy respectful and mutually committed relationship(s), with the support of their mentors, their universities and the culture in which those institutions reclaim their original role and purpose.
And that will take a radical renovation of the existing landscape by all of us!

A sign of the TImes: Scholarships for White MALES (TEXAS)

Texas-based Group Offers Scholarships Only to White  MALE Students

Former Majority Association for Equality claims to "fill in the gap"
Written by Ryan Leclaire, from STUDY magazine website, March 9, 2011
A new group is awarding scholarships of $500 to five students who meet some controversial qualifications.
The Former Majority Association for Equality is offering their grants to male Caucasian students, as their group feels that demographic is underrepresented.
To qualify you must:
■Be male
■Be no less than 25% Caucasian
■Be currently enrolled in college, university or high school
■Hold a GAP of at least 3.0
Despite the organization’s aggressive name, they reject the idea of being a hateful or racist group. In their mission statement, they state “We do not advocate white supremacy, nor do we enable any individual that does. We do not accept donations from organizations affiliated with any sort of white supremacy or hate group.”
The group currently has 491 friends on Facebook, as they try to rally support via social media. Their Facebook wall contains supportive posts, such as “bill gates gave 1,000,000,000 dollors to minority schlorships, that white people are not eligable for. i say boycott microsoft,” from Jeff Thompson of Bluffton College
It also contains chatter, such as Hellen Allegras’ wall posting that reads: “Prejudice is always a problem in every civilization in every age, and our job as rational humans is to help those who are downtrodden. And right now, in this country, that means helping white males who are sneered at almost incessantly.”

Seeds of Relationship-building curriculum (#4)..Ashes Time

Mircea Eliade (1907-1986) 
Eliade was educated as a philosopher. He published extensively in the history of religions and acted as editor-in-chief of Macmillan's Encyclopedia of Religion. The influence of his thought, through these works and through thirty years as director of History of Religions department at the University of Chicago, is considerable.
Eliade's analysis of religion assumes the existence of "the sacred" as the object of worship of religious humanity. It appears as the source of power, significance, and value. Humanity apprehends "hierophanies"--physical manifestations or revelations of the sacred--often, but not only, in the form of symbols, myths, and ritual. Any phenomenal entity is a potential hierophany and can give access to non-historical time: what Eliade calls illud tempus (Latin for 'that time,' I tend to think of it as 'yon time'). The apprehension of this sacred time is a constitutive feature of the religious aspect of humanity. www.westminster.edu/staff/brennie/eliade/mebio.htm

Mircea Eliade recounts in his books the brilliant use of ashes made by old men initiators in Australia, Africa, the Near East, South America, the Pacific. Initiation says that before a boy can become a man, some infantile being in him must die. Ashes Time is a time set aside for the death of that ego-bound boy. The boy between eight and twelve years of age, having been taken away from the mother, passes into the hands of the old men guides who cover his face and sometimes his whole body with ashes to make him the color of dead people and to remind him of the inner death about to come. He may be put into the dark for hours or maybe days, introduced to spirits of dead ancestors. Then he may crawl through a tunnel-or vagina- made of brush and branches. The old men are waiting for him at the other end, only now he has a new name. The mothers in some cultures feel so strongly about the importance of the ritual that when reunited to their sons, they pretend not to recognize them and have to be reintroduced. The mothers participate joyfully in this initiation.
The gold-obsessed man, whether a New Age man or a Dow Jones man, can be said to be the man who hasn't yet handled ashes.
The word ashes contains in it a dark feeling for death; ashes when put on the face whiten it as death does. Job covered himself with ashes to say that the earlier omfortable Job was dead; and that the living Hob mourned the dead Job. But for us, how can we get a look at the cinders side of things when the society is determinded to create a world of shopping malls and entertainment complexes in which we are made to believe that there is no death, disfigurement, illness, insanity, poverty, lethargy or misery? Disneyland means "no ashes."
Despite our Disneyland culture, some men around thrity five or forty will begin to experience ashes privately, without ritual, even without old men. They begin to notice how many of ther dreams have turned to ashes. A young man in high school dreams that he will be a race driver, a mountain climber, he will marry Miss America, he will be a millionaire by thirty, he will get a Nobel Prize in physics by thirty-five, he will be an architect and build the tallest building ever. He will get out of his hick town and live in Paris. He will have fabulous friends...and by thirty five, all these dreams are ashes.
At thirty -five his inner stove begins to produce ashes as well. All through his twenties, his stove burned with such a good draft that he threw in whole nights until dawn, drinking parties, sexual extravagance, enthusiasm, madness, excitement. Then one day he notices that his stove doesn't take such big chunks anymore. He opens the stove door and ashes fall out on the floor. It's time for him to buy a small black shovel at the hardware store and get down on his knees. The ashes fall off the shovel and onto the floor, and he can see the print of his bootsoles in the ashes.
Robert Frost said of the "Oven Bird":
The question that he frames in all but words
is what to make of a diminshed thing
Some habitual error we keep making in our relationships produces more ash than heat. A number of men around thirty-five have told me that they are afraid to go into a new relationship for fear it will end as the last ten or twelve have ended, in "ashes." But young men can't get enough ashes. Enlightenment addicts think they want ecstacy from their association with their guru, but they may really want the ashes. Having no kitchen fire to sit beside and no Wild Man to send us there, the young man smears soot on his face and hopes that his own mother will not recognize him.

Pablo Neruda says:
Out of everything I've done, everything I've lost
everything I've gotten unexpectedly,
I can give you a little in leaves, in sour iron...
here I am with the thing that loses stars, like a vegetable, alone. (from "Brussels, Trans. by Robert Bly)

Ashes present a great diminishment away from the living tree with its huge crown and its abundant shade. The recognition of this dminishment is a proper experience for men who are over thirty. If the man doesn't experience that diminishment sharply, he will retain his inflation, and continue to identify himself with all in him that can fly: his sexual drive, his minds, his refusal to commit himself, his addiction, his transcendence, his coolness. The coolness of some American men means that they have skipped ashes.
Franklin Roosevelt found his ashes in his polio; Anwar Sadat in his prison; Solzhenitsyn in the gulag. Some of our liveliest writers--John Steinbeck, William Faulker, Thomas McGrath, Tillie Olson, David Ignatow, Kenneth Rexroth--found their ashes in the poverty of the Depression.
Katabasis and ashes are a little different. We could say that a man finds katabasis only through dropping, poverty, abrupt change in social class; and prison is a traditional place to experience both katabasis and ashes. But a man may keep his job and famly and still experience ashes if he knowns what he is doing. From Robert Bly, Iron John, Vintage Books, New York, 1992, p. 80ff(To be continued)

"Dirtier" Boys have healthier immune systems (Researcher)

By Whitney Blair Wyckoff, on SHOTS, NPR's Health Blog, February 3, 2011

There's a growing body of research showing that children exposed to lots of germs early in life are less likely to develop allergies, asthma or autoimmune disorders as they grow up.
But now there's a new twist on the theory, known as the hygiene hypothesis in scientific circles, and it's about little girls in cute little dresses.
In an article in the peer-reviewed journal Social Science and Medicine, Sharyn Clough, a philosopher of science at Oregon State University who studies research bias, says young girls are held to a higher standard of cleanliness than young boys, a discrepancy that could help explain later health differences.
Girls are expected to stay squeaky clean while boys are encouraged to play outside, Clough argues. And that might explain why women have higher rates of certain illnesses.
Women have a higher rate of asthma than men — 8.5 percent compared to 7.1 percent, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. They're also more likely than men to have allergies. And the American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association says autoimmune disorders affect women three times more often than men.
Now there are lots of differences that could account for those discrepancies. But Shots was intrigued by Clough's research and talked about it with her.Our conversation, edited a little for clarity and length, follows.
What makes you think there's a link between cleanliness and rates of chronic illness and autoimmune diseases in women?
I read about a study that was linking these large environmental patterns of hygiene and sanitation with autoimmune disorders. [The researchers] suggested the lack of exposure to parasites may be related to the increased rate of Crohn's disease in industrialized Western nations — and then they generalized to other autoimmune disorders. I happen to know among those who've got these diseases, women are overrepresented. So, it struck me as odd that gender was missing from the analysis.
Why don't girls get exposed to the same germs as boys?
In large populations, you can make generalizations about the differences in the ways we socialize little boys and little girls. We still dress little girls in clothes that are restrictive and not supposed to get dirty. Little girls are still way less likely to play outdoors than little boys. And little girls are supervised more often by their parents during their play, which is likely to keep them from getting dirty.
What exactly is in the dirt?
There are a variety of bacteria even just in soil. A gram of uncontaminated soil contains 10 billion microbial cells. Playing in dirt is a reliable way to ingest dirt. Playing in the dirt is highly correlated with eating it. And when you eat it, you know you're exposed to bacteria — all kinds and in high numbers
So that exposure to dirt makes it less likely to have allergies or asthma later on?
Young boys actually have higher rates of asthma than do girls. So my thinking is that [at a very young age], boys are exposed to more of the allergens and things that inflame their immune systems more often than do girls. So boys will have higher rates of asthma early on. But then after puberty, girls have higher rates of asthma and then for the rest of their lives.
What about the fact that it's becoming more socially acceptable for girls to behave stereotypically like boys? More girls are playing sports, and fewer girls are wearing dresses to go out to play.
You'd think that this is changing but you'd be surprised. In a study from 1998 of American children in preschool, one-third of the 5-year-old girls came to school in dresses each day. Title IX and getting more girls into sports — that's clearly a phenomenon that's changing things. But I think for little girls, things aren't changing much.
Allergies, asthma and autoimmune disorders are increasing for everyone — both men and women in our populations in the North and West. So what that means — if the hygiene hypothesis folks are right — is that we're decreasing our exposure to germs all the time even though we have more girls playing sports. There are competing trends that affect boys and girls, men and women.
What should policy makers and parents take from your research?
I think if you've got a teeny kid — like an infant or a toddler — I think it doesn't hurt to get them dirty. But the jury is still out. We're only beginning to understand the relationship between bacteria and other kinds of organisms in our bodies. And the higher rates of diseases are unintended consequences of policies that are, for the most part, pretty good. It's actually pretty good that we have higher sanitation rates than we used to. But it turns out, we just weren't aware of how complex the ecologies of germs are.