Texas Schools send miscreants to juvenile court..for a criminal record!

Don't send your kid to school in Texas!
Don't even consider enrolling your child in any Texas school unless and until you verify that the school system is not using the court system to effect school discipline.
In a story on PBS Newshour tonight, evidence of criminal records being imposed on adolescents for causing a disturbance in class, or for missing school, or for what we used to call "saucing" a teacher was exposed.
One story documented a straight A student who, because she also holds down two part-time jobs, in order to provide extra income so  her siblings can attend college, missed a second day of school, after a warning from the court system, and then was ordered to spend overnight in a county jail cell, for her truancy.
Another story illustrated the sentence of $350 fine plus 20 hours of community service for a fourteen-year-old male, because, after he was punched by another student, punched him back. He also now has a criminal record which will follow him at least until he applies to enter college, when it will likely restrict, if not preclude his admission.
Of course, there is no evidence either that such punishments lead to improved behaviour or that such punishments help to keep kids in school. In fact, the reverse is true: such punishments drive kids towards the decision to drop out.
Not only has Texas the highest number of executions from the death penalty of all the U.S. states, we now learn that it has neither imagination nor compassion, nor insight into how to run the school system.
Dubya used to call his "swagger" a "walk" as it was known in Texas, and yet this policy of criminalizing adolescents for minor offences in school is more than a swagger; it is tantamout to torture, in the guise of school discipline.
Rather than disciplining the students, the whole system needs to be disciplined, through the most obvious and effective of measures: throwing the adults who administer the schools through the courts out on their ears, permanently, and bring in some enlightened administrators whose capacity and willingness to confront the students about their responsibilities and obligations, within the schools themselves. There are literally libraries of outstanding literature on the enlightened administration of schools.
Throw out the legislators who permit such a travesty, and are proud of their "absolutist" solutions.
We used to have a professor at the University of Ottawa, Dr. Ramunas, who frequently referred to the Russian method of solving problems, "Eliminate them!" he would shout and then guffaw in derision.
Where is he now, when the State of Texas needs his satiric insight?

My Vitamins

Received this piece a few moments ago from a male friend, read it quickly, then re-read it more slowly in amazement, thinking, "I have never heard such a message of support from a male in 70 years!"
We really are moving, seismically, tectonically, and ireversibly...as men, to acknowledge our inter-dependence on one another, the joys and meaning of our real friends, and at the same time, shedding centuries old repression of authentic feelings.
To Peter, who sent it, I say a warm, heartfelt THANKS!
To others who have been thinking of sending a thought/sentiment/thanks to someone, please feel free, and do not hesitate! There are friends waiting for this long-overdue note of thanks!

My Vitamins

Why do I have a variety of friends who are
all so different in character?
How can I get along with them all?
I think that each one helps to bring out a
"different" part of me.
With one of them I am polite. I joke with another friend.
I sit down and talk about serious matters with one.
With another I laugh a lot. I may have a coke with one.
I listen to one friend's problems.
Then I listen to another one's advice for me.
My friends are all like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
When completed, they form a treasure box.
A treasure of friends! They are my friends who
understand me better than myself, who support
me through good days and bad days.
Real Age doctors tell us that friends are good for our health.
Dr. Oz calls them Vitamins F (for Friends) and counts the benefits of friends as essential to our well being.
Research shows that people in strong social circles have less risk of depression and terminal strokes.
If you enjoy Vitamins F constantly you can be up to 30 years younger than your real age.
The warmth of friendship stops stress and even in your most intense moments it decreases the chance of a cardiac arrest or stroke by 50%.
I'm so happy that I have a stock of Vitamins F!
In summary, we should value our friends and keep in touch with them.
We should try to see the funny side of things and laugh together, and pray for each other in the tough moments.
Thank you for being one of my Vitamins

Reaching out to "touch" drop-outs brings 75% back

By Kate Hammer, Globe and Mail, May 31, 2012

Hundreds of students who nearly didn’t complete high school are being fitted for graduation caps and gowns thanks to a simple solution: reaching out and talking to them.
Each school year, thousands of Canadian students quit school between September and June. They miss a few assignments, stop coming to class and don’t register for classes for the next fall. Last school year at the Toronto District School Board, there were 1,667 Grade 11 and 12 students who met this description.
Boosting graduation rates is a priority across Canada. The Canadian Council on Learning estimates that high-school dropouts cost taxpayers $1.3-billion in social assistance and criminal justice expenses each year.
Canada’s largest school board has come up with a new approach to bringing students back to the fold. Starting in mid-August last year, a team of four retired teachers and guidance counsellors worked the phones for two weeks, dialled every phone number they could find and refused to settle for answering machines or voice-mail.
They reached all but 15 students and convinced 864 to come back. Nearly 300 will graduate by the end of June, and hundreds more are back on track towards achieving their high-school diplomas.
“We were reaching out and saying basically, ‘We miss you, come back,’” said Christopher Usih, the TDSB’s superintendent of student success, who led the project. “We’re quite pleased with the result.”
Across Canada, slightly more than 70 per cent of all 19-year-olds had completed high school in 2008, according to Statistics Canada. Graduation rates have generally climbed since then, and Ontario’s sits at 82 per cent thanks in part to student re-engagement grants from the province, like the one that paid for the TDSB telephone campaign. (The TDSB sits slightly below the provincial average, with a 79-per-cent graduation rate that has climbed from 69 per cent in 2000.)
Educators often devote time in September to reaching out to students who registered but didn't show up for class. These initiatives are usually launched at the school level and often involve e-mails or robo-calls.
That’s what happens at the Winnipeg School Division, according to Doug Edmond, director of research, planning and systems management. Mr. Edmond said the smallest schools are most likely to reach out in person, but it’s ultimately up to principals.
The TDSB sought out every student district-wide, including those who hadn't registered for classes, but it's the personal touch to their approach that made all the difference, according to Bruce Ferguson, a professor at the University of Toronto and expert on why students drop out.
“It makes the kids believe they’re worthwhile, that’s why it works,” he said.
Ashley Saunders, 18, was among the first students the TDSB reached. She has a learning disability and a hearing impairment that made high school a struggle. She became frustrated with the school system when she failed her Grade 12 anthropology course, leaving her one credit shy of her diploma.
Ms. Saunders was shocked last August when she found a personal message from a retired teacher – a real human being – on her home answering machine asking her to come back to school.
“I’d been out of school for almost two months, so it made me feel taken aback,” she said. “I was like, ‘Someone cares.’”
Hats off to the TDSB and its leaders and thinkers!
It is not rocket science to learn about how fragile some students really are, nor about how little it takes to "touch them" with a simple invitation, an indication that someone cares.
It is also a scathing criticism of how detached and disinterested most people are about others, when this kind of phone campaign can have such a dramatic impact, with this group of drop-outs-turned-graduates.
Would such an approach work in all boards across the country? It's worth a try!
And, next let's make sure those kids already in the classroom are also being "touched" by caring, passionate and creative teachers who are getting to know and getting to recommend even the most subtle, and perhaps insignificant change in a student's attitude, beliefs and actions, that might make the difference between a graduate and another drop-out.
Let's also hope that those same teachers are inspiring other teachers, and not being labelled "too close to the students" or "too soft" or "too liberal"...by their colleagues.
There is a culture in the staff room of most schools that often seems to disdain the teacher who gets to know the students, as if such personal knowledge and contact are outside the professional limits of the teachers' purview.
I recall one grade twelve student asking to speak to me after class one Spring day. When we met, I listened to a true tale of tragedy, including facts about her father literally throwing her down the basement stairs in their home, and her question, "What can I do?"
We looked at some options, including sources of support already within her circle. A few tears were shed, and she departed peacefully after only fifteen minutes or so.
I, on the other hand, sat dumbfounded at the depth of her physical and emotional pain and also at my own innocence that such stories were part of the culture of the classroom in that town at that time. How could I either forget or ignore her story, a story that shaped much of my thinking and perception for the remaining decade-plus of my teaching career?
I couldn't. And didn't. And wont still, decades later.
We can all be grateful, as well as impressed that real people are having a positive influence on the lives of students even after they have "apparently" dropped out of the system. And who knows which of those returnees might someday be operating in a local Operating Room, or an Emergency Room, or a Courtroom in a small town, having graduated from both undergraduate studies and a professional program of their choice?

Evolving Masculinity...as seen in tensions around the future of hockey

By Michael Adams, Globe and Mail, May 28, 2012

Michael Adams is president of Environics Group.
The first rule of fight club was don’t talk about fight club. The first rule of Canadian hockey seems to be never stop talking about it.
The past few years have produced a huge amount of debate about the nature and value of our national sport. Rule changes, fighting, head shots, concussions, “big hits” – fans, journalists and concerned health professionals have hashed it all out again and again.
Why so much talk? Because there is a tension between the broad trends of social change and the take-no-prisoners machismo we see on the ice. A large proportion of Canadians feel they have a stake in the game of hockey. Eighty-four per cent of us say that hockey is “a key part of what it means to be Canadian.”
That said, the millions of Canadians who feel some ownership over the game of hockey represent a range of constituencies. There are lovers of the sport who want a technically demanding, fast-paced game to watch. There are parents who want their kids to enjoy the camaraderie of a team sport while staying active during our long winters. There are Canadians who perk up around playoff time, feeling a sentimental, vaguely patriotic attachment to the game.
But the group that is understandably most important to the league and its advertisers is a set of hard-core fans, on average anglophone men aged 30 to 49 who feel quite at ease with the violence that makes some of hockey’s other constituencies cringe. Just 18 per cent of serious hockey fans describe themselves as uncomfortable with the violence in hockey, as compared to 32 per cent of occasional fans and half (49 per cent) of those who say they dislike the game.
Old-fashioned masculinity does not have many places to prove its mettle these days. Our information economy prizes creativity and networking over physical strength. Our social mores less often call on men to defend women from rogues in the street, and more often ask them to meet women as equals at work and in social life. Even the military seldom affords opportunities to fight bad guys and scumbags: Historical and cultural understanding in complex places like Afghanistan may now be more important than target practice. For those who long for a venue in which to express their raw testosterone, a rock ’em, sock ’em game – complete with all the traditional etiquette, such as punishing aggressors, defending teammates and upholding manly honour – is a welcome release.
But even as some will wish for hockey to serve as a fight club-like refuge from a culture in which machismo seems outmoded and violence grows ever less acceptable, others will insist that sport does not exist in a vacuum. On a basic level, hockey must conform to society’s ideas about acceptable behaviour. Off the ice, sneaking up behind someone and hitting them so hard they lose consciousness can get you jail time. On the ice, you risk a modest fine and a few games on the bench.
I suspect that hockey will eventually trend toward a compromise between the desire of hard-core fans for a tough, physical game and the belief of more casual fans that whatever happens on the ice should not be so brutal as to debilitate players long after the final buzzer. In short, hockey will have to find a way to remain an arena that stands a little apart from ordinary social norms while at the same time remaining basically aligned with the contemporary Canadian expectation that no job (however rich the pay) should cost you your health or your life.
Some of the off-ice discussions that have emerged around hockey recently (the breaking of the code of silence about sexual abuse by coaches, and Brian Burke’s continuation of his late son’s campaign against homophobia) have revealed that a growing number of hockey stalwarts believe manly heroism in sport does not mean stoic silence in the face of any and all abuse. Might doesn’t automatically make right. Changing the rules – and especially the unwritten codes – of professional hockey means changing our expectations about what it means to be a real man, even a heroic man, in the 21st century. And contrary to some tough guys’ intuitions, it’s men themselves who stand to gain the most from those changes.

Old-fashioned masculinity does not have many places to prove its mettle these days. Our information economy prizes creativity and networking over physical strength. Our social mores less often call on men to defend women from rogues in the street, and more often ask them to meet women as equals at work and in social life. Even the military seldom affords opportunities to fight bad guys and scumbags: Historical and cultural understanding in complex places like Afghanistan may now be more important than target practice. ....
Might doesn’t automatically make right. Changing the rules – and especially the unwritten codes – of professional hockey means changing our expectations about what it means to be a real man, even a heroic man, in the 21st century.
Both of these quotes from the Adams piece are worthy of consideration.
Old fashioned masculinity once meant hard knuckles, and an even harder head. It meant bulging biceps and 6-pack abs, horse-like thighs and calves, even, at one time, "brylcreem hair," black leather and swivelling hips a la Elvis Presley. It also included "Marlboro Man" billboards, cow-poking ranchers and ropers, along with six-shooter sheriffs in frontier towns where power was the law. John Wayne slow-talking bass suggested that nothing ever rattled a real man. Except perhaps anything that smacked of "girlie" attitudes, dress, hair, or even pop music choices. Shortly after these nuanced on the archetype, there were two "Easy Riders" who rode their way across the country, not too long after Jimmy Dean died in a car crash. His "Rebel without a Cause" was a Hollywood version of an unloosed male, among others. And, a little later, there were slightly less "macho" men like Pat Boone who, as an undergraduate student at Columbia seemed to some the antithesis of the Presley "masculinity."
Common to all of these male icons was the throng of females who pursued them...in concerts, on television, and in movies and photo-magazines, not to mention records.
The hockey counter-point to this era included Maurice, The Rocket, Richard (of the Montreal Canadiens), and his nemesis, Leo LaBine (of the Boston Bruins), who was confronted by his then coach, Milt Schmidt, upon his return to the bench in the middle of an NHL game from one of his many slashes on The Rocket, with, "What the hell did you do that for?" Now that you woke him up, he'll kill us! For God's sake, let sleeping dogs lie!"
It was a rare thing, in the fifties and early sixties, to learn that an NHL player was enrolled at university, studying in the off-season at "Summer School." I recall Eric Nesterenko was one of those special players who were attempting to combine "brain and brawn" in his life.
Male singers, including Perry Como, Andy Williams, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and comics like the Smothers Brothers demonstrated a more subtle, perhaps even talented masculine public figure, at a time when politicians like John F. Kennedy, never considered effeminate by anyone, were striding the public stage with rhetoric that smacked of Churchill, and even a hint of poetry, without ever compromising his masculinity.
Eisenhower's military history was not enough to block his now famous warning of the "military-industrial complex" in 1961, just before he turned the White House over to Jack and Jackie Kennedy.
Similarly, Richard Burton strode both the Hollywood screen and the front pages of most dailies with both his theatrical rendition of King Arthur in Camelot and his courting of Elizabeth Taylor, another thespian of considerable talent and testosterone, as were all the Kennedy brothers.
Another chapter in the evolution of masculinity came with the invasion of British Rock Groups, especially The Beatles, whose claim to fame seemed to include their lyrics, their rhythms, their 'long hair' and their Liverpudlian origin. These were young men who seemed unlikely to slay any public or private dragons.
And once again, pre-pubescent girls were smitten with their presence.
The Brady Bunch, while a soft spoof on family life, was not about to celebrate a masculinity of either brain or brawn, preferring a white bread version, behind the picket fence, without any potential threat to anyone.
Hockey, meanwhile, was slashing Russian stars out of their careers, (witness the Bobby Clarke incident in the '72 series), and watching Billy Smith slashing anyone and anything that happened into his goal crease, while protecting the cage for the New York Islanders.
The Broad Street Bullies from Philadelphia, under head coach Fred Shero, were the reigning cup champs not so incidentally as a result of their pugilistic power, both public and through "sleight-of-hand" antics that sometimes missed the eyes of the ice police.
It could be argued that Bobby Orr attempted to bridge the gap between the ballet and the alley, through his masterful skating and stick-handling and his willingness to 'mix-it-up' when the occasion required. Modelled on Gordie Howe, Orr seemed to combine the best of both worlds, as did Howe, in a proportion that rendered his public persona both exciting and sufficiently refined to keep him in the top echelon of hockey greats.
And then there was Mario (Lemieux) and Wayne (Gretzky), both exemplars of a kind of masculinity that was defined by intuition, vision, strength and sportmanship....of the gentleman variety. While they were protected by various "hit-men" so they were mostly left alone to make plays and to score goals, they personified an evolving masculinity that could still be fast, furious, exciting and successful, from a different perspective...the beginning of the "evolved" man.
Guy Lafleur, Marc Messier, the "French connection line" from the Buffalo Sabres, Dave Keon, and a host of other highly skilled players added considerably to the poster-hallways of hockey greats while also helping to flesh out a new form of masculinity, without fights, without dirty shots, without nasty slashes yet all the while providing excitment and surprise with their brilliance....as did Ken Dryden in the Montreal Canadiens goal.
A former Nader-Raider (as a summer student from his law studies at Cornell) working for consumer advocate Ralsh Nader, Dryden conspiculously combined both brain power and hockey skill and stamina.
Pierre Trudeau, in a parallel universe, demonstrated that martial arts, swimming, constitutional law and dating famous and beautiful women were a Canadian refreshment both in politics and in masculinity.
Let's not dichotomize too deeply, rendering some of the more nuanced models of a varied masculinity to which we have been exposed and through which we have come to understand both ourselves as men, and our national game, as a public tension between various example and tendencies of the masculine, including more recently a new and growing acceptance of both gays and lesbians among men.
It has always been men, and the strict definition of what it means to be male, that has barred gay men from acceptance in the male bastions of sports, the law, medicine and commerce. For a much longer time, they have been accepted among artists, actors, dancers and writers, thereby also rendering those professions as "less than adequate" for many young males to pursue.
Fortunately, that "off-limits" sign is changing, but has still not been taken down, although its letters are very worn and barely readable.
I have left the military out of this piece, for the simple reason that the inner sanctum of that establishment, along with the church, has been moated from society for far too long, and how they view masculinity is not a part of the equation that merits much time or energy, sadly.
However, while Mr. Adams piece provokes some thought and reflection about the nature of evolving masculinty, it must not be permitted to eradicate some basic truths of male hard wiring, nor must it be permitted to cause men to apologize for their manhood, in all of its forms...since such apologies including repression, are far more dangerous than the fullest expression of that manhood, including all of its testosterone.

Romantic, caring boys out of closet (Researcher)

By Amy Schalet, New York Times, April 6, 2012

Amy T. Schalet is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and the author of “Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens and the Culture of Sex.”
Why are boys behaving more “like girls” in terms of when they lose their virginity? In contrast to longstanding cultural tropes, there is reason to believe that teenage boys are becoming more careful and more romantic about their first sexual experiences.
For a long time, a familiar cultural lexicon has been in vogue: young women who admitted to voluntary sexual experience risked being labeled “sluts” while male peers who boasted of sexual conquests were celebrated as “studs.”
No wonder American teenage boys have long reported earlier and more sexual experience than have teenage girls. In 1988, many more boys than girls, ages 15 to 17, told researchers that they had had heterosexual intercourse.
But in the two decades since, the proportion of all American adolescents in their mid-teens claiming sexual experience has decreased, and for boys the decline has been especially steep, according to the National Survey of Family Growth by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Today, though more than half of unmarried 18- and 19-year-olds have had sexual intercourse, fewer than 30 percent of 15- to 17-year-old boys and girls have, down from 50 percent of boys and 37 percent of girls in 1988. And there are virtually no gender differences in the timing of sexual initiation.
What happened in those two decades?
Fear seems to have played a role. In interviewing 10th graders for my book on teenage sexuality in the United States and the Netherlands, I found that American boys often said sex could end their life as they knew it. After a condom broke, one worried: “I could be screwed for the rest of my life.” Another boy said he did not want to have sex yet for fear of becoming a father before his time.
Dutch boys did not express the same kind of fears; they assumed their girlfriends’ use of the pill would protect them against fatherhood. In the Netherlands, use of the pill is far more common, and pregnancy far less so, than among American teenagers.
The American boys I interviewed seemed more nervous about the consequences of sex than American girls. In fact, the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth found that more than one-third of teenage boys, but only one-quarter of teenage girls, cited wanting to avoid pregnancy or disease as the main reason they had not yet had sex. Fear about sex was intensified by the AIDS crisis and by sex education that portrayed sex outside of heterosexual marriage as risky. Combined with growing access to pornography via the Internet, those influences may have made having sex with another person seem less enticing.
Fear no doubt has also played a role in driving up condom use. Boys today are much more likely than their predecessors to use a condom the first time they have sex.
But fear is probably not the only reason for the gender convergence. While American locker-room and popular culture portray boys as mere vessels of raging hormones, research into their private experiences paints a different picture. In a large-scale survey and interviews, reported in the American Sociological Review in 2006, the sociologist Peggy Giordano and her colleagues found teenage boys to be just as emotionally invested in their romantic relationships as girls.
The Dutch boys I interviewed grew up in a culture that gives them permission to love; a national survey found that 90 percent of Dutch boys between 12 and 14 report having been in love. But the American boys I interviewed, having grown up in a culture that often assumes males are only out to get sex, were no less likely than Dutch boys to value relationships and love. In fact, they often used strong, almost hyper-romantic language to talk about love. The boy whose condom broke told me the most important thing to him was being in love with his girlfriend and “giving her everything I can.”
Such romanticism has largely flown under the radar of American popular culture. Yet, the most recent research by the family growth survey, conducted between 2006 and 2010, indicates that relationships matter to boys more often than we think. Four of 10 males between 15 and 19 who had not had sex said the main reason was that they hadn’t met the right person or that they were in a relationship but waiting for the right time; an additional 3 of 10 cited religion and morality.
Boys have long been under pressure to shed what the sociologist Laura Carpenter has called the “stigma of virginity.” But maybe more American boys are now waiting because they have gained cultural leeway to choose a first time that feels emotionally right. If so, their liberation from rigid masculinity norms should be seen as a victory for the very feminist movement that Rush Limbaugh recently decried.
When I surveyed the firestorm of objections that followed his use of the word “slut” to pillory a law school student who advocated medical coverage for birth control, men were among his most passionate detractors.
Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. The image of male sexuality Mr. Limbaugh perpetuates is hardly something to be proud of. And it sells the hearts of men, as well as women, short.
Liberation from rigid masculinity norms should be seen as a victory for the feminist movement...

Not so fast, Ms Schalet. And let's agree to stop using Limbaugh as a legitimate voice for anything human!
First, not all men have ever been rampaging hormones, attempting to carve notches in their 'wild west' belts, depicting sexual conquest. Not all men have even been championing the "football-basketball-high- school-hero-with-trophy-cheerleader as the "model" to emulate even in adolescent relationships. Those have been the "Type A" stereotypes, from both genders, who have, as usual attracted most attention from the image makers who attempt to portray "reality" in order to sell products and services.
Beer commercials were among the worst, depicting as they often did, highly erotic pictures of women as the "prize" for drinking "Budd." Car makers, in decreasing numbers depend on sexuality to 'arouse' potential consumers, although there are still strong signs that the archetype has not died in the Fiat 500 commercials with "Jaylo".
Cardboard cut-outs of any human type, while useful for short-term goals like sales campaigns, must not be taken for documentaries of conditions on the ground. In fact, the advertising sector is so manipulative as to seek to shape the definitions of reality for many of its viewers, given their 'natural'(?) tendency to snooze through much disciplined portrayal of reality. Cardboard cut-outs, however, constitute many of the adolescent portrayals of people to emulate, people to associate with, people to admire and people to bring home to parents when dating begins. They also constitute much of what passes for character references in hiring, given the glib and reductionistic assessments of head hunters, and the quotas they must fill. And certainly, they constitute many of the 'characters in television and movie productions where round characters are sacrificed for their more compliant 'flat' counterparts.
If young men are telling researchers they are taking more time, and being more committed to sexual activity and their potential partners, such a change cannot be ascribed to the impact of feminism alone.
It may have something to do with men throwing off the shackles of the cardboard cut-outs left by their fathers and grandfathers as part of a growing acceptance of the totality of masculinity, in all its various forms, eccentricities and shapes and sizes. That was hardly the case thirty or forty years ago.
Men want and need supportive and mutual and mature and sustainable relationships, and have been given, for the most part, few if any models by which to guide those needs to fulfilment. There is clearly a growing consciousness among all young people that we are leaving a very cold, very confrontative and even combative model of relationships in the corporate, the political, the academic and even the social service sectors of the economy, not to mention the military. The rapid rise in not-for-profit groups to serve the less fortunate, around the world, one would guess, is not detached from the evidence presented by Ms Schalet in her research. Of course, it is not part of the research specifically, yet it does represent a change in attitude about 'the other' that is both dramatic and necessary.
Acceptance of the gay and lesbian culture is another sign of change especially among men, who, historically, have been the most severe critics of that culture. Acceptance of life between the extremes, where most people really do live, is also growing, as a sign that the extremes are, by definition, self-sabotaging, and painting themselves into corners from which there is no escape.
Another sign of this growing tolerance of difference and rejection of absolutes is the increasing irrelevance of the church, all churches, whose traditional position of "duty" and "rules" and absolutes has failed both the institutions and those they were attempting to reach and potentially support.
For men to acknowledge the truth that intimacy, in all of its faces, is more important than conquering another human being, is a welcome sign that perhaps, after so many centuries of a cardboard definition of masculinity (linked to a similar definition of femininity) those cardboard definitions are suffering the atrophy so long sought and deserved.
Now, if those generating the images that "sell" their products and services for their clients can and will see the significance of a larger, non-cardboard-version of the truth about real people, they, too, will come to their own acceptance of the lie they have been perpetrating for so long, drop it and move on.
And there are so many factors generating these changes that singling out one does a disservice to the others and to that one.

Feminist columnist throws 17-yr.old male co-ed under the bus for a speech

There is a kind of woman unpopular with men.She is Controlling Woman.
Just say, "She doesn't like this one bad habit" to your male friends and they roll their eyes, shake their head in agreement, as in, "I know just what you're talking about!"
From when do Controlling Women come. I always wondered and now I know. Heather Mallick, probably forty-something writes a column for the Toronto Star. She wrote a piece throwing Paul Gomille under the bus for a speech he is alleged to have delivered at Archbishop Dennis O'Connor Catholic High School in Ajax.
In his speech, Gomille is alleged to have discerned between those girls he likes and those he dislikes, something every male in history has talked about with other males. Winning his approval are: the silent ones, the intelligent ones, the one's that don't talk about people behind their backs, the ones that guys don't flock to in droves, the ones that don't dress in revealing clothing...According to Ms Mallick, his principal, Donna Modeste told him to skip that section when he delivered the speech.
She allegedly approved this line: Attractiveness doesn't come from wearing the latest fashion, and it doesn't come from being scantily clad in public, or putting on makeup, of having a pretty face, or a nice body. No. Real attractiveness comes from having a certain dignity. (Ms Mallick calls that sentence, "Slutwalker Starter in Miniature" in an obviously controlling and patronizing tone.
Gomille allegedly did not obey the principal, and for passing out his speech (dubbed by Ms Mallick, "Dress Down to Win Me as a Boyfriend") in the cafeteria, he was suspended for two days, a decision Ms Mallick lauds: and this is what I like about the Catholic system--they don't worry about popularity. Students will obey. High praise to Modeste.
Next Ms Mallick proceeds to ridicule Gomille's own attire, dressed in dark pants, a grey hoodie and navy jacket, dresses like all teenage boys, nondescriptly and then in his Star photo against a grey Ajax sky, he looks like a disembodied head. Shockingly, and ironically, Mallick then patronizes him again, He looks perfectly pleasant...At 17,. I would have gone out with him, right up until he told me my dress was too revealing, at which point I would have run away, as girls will, and this well-intentioned young man will learn that. (Sorry, Ms Mallick, Gomille likes 'the silent ones, the intelligent ones and the one's who don't dress in revealing clothing'..so he would never have selected you, in the first place!)
After mentioning Gomille's sister's character assessment of her brother, Mallick mounts her bully pulpit:
Females from age 2 to 92 speak as one: We do not care to hear male opinions on our clothes unless it's 'You look fabulous is that. Radiant. Wow. When we ask you does the sweater works with the scarf, the word we want to hear is "yes." And then, frankly, we'll change the sweater. If he's a Controlling Man who says it's too tight or uses the phrases "no wife of mine will..." we detach....
(Truth be told, this is far from the truth. Many women far less filled with venom than Ms Mallick are far less anxious to join the Mallick "army" of Controlling Patronizing, Condescending Women.)
Mallick concludes her piece with:
Gomille may be 17 but he sounds 102 and we hear from males like him all our lives. They're correctors, judges, buzzkills. Mothers sound like this too, for different reasons. "You're going out like that, Cyndi Ahmadinejad? Over my dead body!"
Mallick continues: There is a worrying prescriptiveness in Gomille's unasked-for definition of how his fellow students should dress. We women are half the world. In the workplace men and women stand side-by-side and are gradually learning to to accommodate each other's differences.
Isn't it strange that a feminist columnist can pour such invective all over a 17-year old male student for a speech, and if a male columnist poured a similar invective over a 17-year-old female student who wrote a speech containing the sentiments and phrases contained in Mallick's piece (or Gomille's speech for that matter), there would be hell to pay.
When did females acquire immunity from unsolicited (and by the way, not far off the mark!) criticism?
Was there some opening of the skies and another set of tablets tossed down, granting immunity to all women, if and when any male attempts to point a finger at what most adults would call "immodest" dress, and that's in the most polite circles.
SLUTWALKS say much more about the women walking than they do about any suggestion of patronizing and prescriptive attitudes among males.
This piece of invective by Mallick directed at Gomille should require a retraction, and an apology, and the Gomille speech, in its entirety, deserves to be published in the Toronto Star. If I were Gomille's parent, I would also pull him out of Archbishop Dennis O'Connor High School, and find a school where his views can be aired, debated and discussed, perhaps at a school assembly where both teachers and students can demonstrate a maturity and a respect for "the other" that is completly outside the possible with Ms Mallick. That might, just might, lend some light and leven to the discussion about teen attire.
Congratulations for your courage, your maturity and your clarity, Paul Gomille. We can only hope that Ms Mallick's rant gives you an even larger podium than you would otherwise have enjoyed.

Literature could be key to getting men "in touch with feelings"

In the movie, The Descendents, Matt King, played by George Clooney, screams at his comatose wife in her hospital room, his anger that she believed he "was out of touch with his feelings and needed to go into therapy," as part of releasing his tension, fear and anxiety at confronting her extremely critical condition, resulting from a speed boating accident off one of Hawaii's islands. Apparently, their marriage had not been going well, and one of the themes of the movie focuses on her affair with a real estate salesman, as her statement in defiance of her desert-like marriage. King, a real estate lawyer, and trustee of his family's large holding on one of the islands, has been "emotionally absent" from the marriage, busy in his professional career, and not "there" for his wife and two daughters.

The explosion by "King," surprisingly in the hospital room, presumably in intensive care (she was in a private room), will echo around the North American continent at least for the next several months, as men project their own resentment, anger, possibly fear and even defiance at the reduction of the stereotype of "out of touch" with emotions, almost as an offense under the "Successful Marriage Act" a mythical document apparently written by the millions of women who wish to see their male partners as "more like them."
Learning about the emotions that one experiences and thereby articulating their identity, their strength, their roots and the potency of their implications, especially within a relationship, is not one of the skills that North America males have picked up along the way to their medical, legal, accounting, engineering or even theological degrees. Nor is it something that most, if not all, of those professions considers really important in growing and developing into what the marketplace of conventionality considers a "success". How many deals, the size of those deals, the complexity of those deals and the skill with which one can wear many hats, seemingly simultaneously, without losing focus or concentration on any open file, are much more important. In fact, in a male world, dominated as it has been with competition, with will, with endurance and with externals like the name on the hood of the car in the driveway, the number on the house and the number of square feet behind the number, the size of the pool and the number of trips to the exotic places on the globe...these are some of the ways by which the men have been trained and conditioned, much like "seals" (take that as part of the Marines, in the U.S. or merely as part of the aquarium shows that dot the continent). They have, many of them, captained their football and/or basketball and/or baseball teams, dated the cheerleaders in their high schools, gone to the "right" parties, been admitted to the better colleges, where the carved out what we used to call B.M.O.C. (Big Man on Campus) profiles in sports, politics, debating, journalism or even entrepreneur competitions. The nerds in their classes frequented the computer or the science labs, and made their 'marks' with experiments, professor alliances, and high grades. They were taught to "do" and to "be-a-success" however they could achieve that benchmark.
Relationships, for the BMOC's, usually came without much effort, without much competition and with little or no comparison to other males, with respect to the "being in touch with their feelings" co-efficient of those relationships.
For the most part, their fathers "were not in touch with their feelings" either, having clawed their way up the proverbial ladder to a career of their own, civilian or military, based, once again on accomplishments. They rested secure on the size of the investment portfolio, the number of college graduates among their offspring, the relative "calmness" of their spouses compared to other men of their generation and of their profession and geography. The fathers generally believed that "feelings" were for the women to explore; they generally despised reading Shakespeare, as it was both "archaic" language and the portrayal of complex emotions, often tragic, of both genders, and they merely "put up" with the pain while enduring those weeks or months, for which they learned the basic plot structures, a few literary definitions and possibly some potentially different twists and turns to the plot lines. They did not integrate those emotions from the literature into their own conversations, believing that to do so would emasculate them in front of their peers.
With the rise (and some would argue fall) of feminism, in its several faces, new standards of what constitutes a "healthy male" have been defined by women, with the support of other women, yet without the universal acceptance and support of their male partners. "Evolved" men were the standard in the nineties; the rise of psychotherapy as women sought refuge in the offices of these practitioners, generated an encyclopedia of new terms for new anxieties, irritations, pains and even both neuroses and psychoses, much of the new information provided by female clients/patients, depending on the background of the treating practitioner.
Women, for example, on The View on ABC television, would state publicly, they would prefer to go on a date with a gay male, because they would know that he was not interested in taking the relationship "further" (a code word for "into the sexual"). Women, it seemed, were more interested in the development of their own careers than in the potential of a mutual relationship with an unevolved male.
Telling their male partners, both personally and publicly en masse, that "you need to go into therapy" will generate precisely the kind of resistance to such an experience that is the opposite of what those female partners wanted. And that resistance will be enhanced by a judicial system that "sentences" men to psycho-therapy as a result of their "acting out" in the marriage. Court-prescribed "anger management" for example is based on the notion that male anger is destructive, dangerous and requiring elimination, through finding words to express those feelings, with which men are out of touch, rather than smashing a wall, or worse, a woman's face.
However, did you know that the definition of "depression" for example, in the DSM-4 comes exclusively from female patients/clients and that it might be possible that a man is experiencing severe depression when he smashes that wall. Yet, such a possibility is not inside the professional lexicon of the psychiatric encyclopedia of definitions.
Women withdraw their affections and their sexual availability without incurring the wrath of the courts, because there is no physical evidence of injury. When men respond, physically and in appropriately, they are immediately charged with assault and often convicted by the bruises, blood, or witnesses to the event that triggered the violence.
Learning to talk about emotions, while difficult and especially threatening to men (as one doctor put it in conversation) "Women do it so much better!" as if the whole idea were another competition, will not come readily, easily, fluently and comfortably, unless and until the intellectual and pragmatic components of health come to include respect for one's inner life, one's spiritual health, one's capacity to cope with the various tragedies and traumas that accompany every human biography. And that will only evolve as men and women together, seek to understand that emotions have historic roots in events long forgotten, but deeply and permanently remembered in one's psyche, stored there because, when the events occurred, they were so painful that we could not cope, we were too young, too overwhelmed, and too naive...and only later, when we encounter a similar or a trigger incident, do they come tumbling out of some hidden closet and scatter themselves all over the floor of our consciousness. And we then have little choice but to confront both the trigger and the deep emotional connection to the trauma in the first place.
And this, while complex and appearing a waste of time, is really the only route to healing, both the current tension and the root of the emotional definition of the current event. And only if and when men come to "see" and they will never do that out of either fear or force, whether medical or legal, that they can unpack their histories, safely with a partner whose understands just how difficult this process is, at first, for their male partner and who takes his hand and walks slowly and deliberately through the darkness and out into the light at the end of the tunnel. And it will take more than one such chapter, in every life and relationship, because we are all fraught with memories of pain, often the projections of similarly insecure parents, teachers or supervisors, that we just could not adjust to at the time of their judgements, and we buried them 'for future reference' hoping that time would never come.
So, thanks to the writer of the novel, on which The Descendents is based, and thanks to George Clooney, for delivering this line with such power and conviction, in the hope that other men will come to their own awakening, without having to do it in a hospital room with a dying, unconscious wife, who had already emotionally departed an "empty" marriage.