.:.Welcome to Voice Male Magazine .:.

By Rob Okun

From members of the baseball team at the University of Massachusetts to the state’s Lieutenant Governor, Tim Murray, men are taking a pledge not to commit, condone or stay silent about domestic violence or sexual abuse. They are part of a week of activities that get underway statewide March 1 in advance of International Women’s Day on March 8th. A proclamation day gathering at the statehouse in Boston is being celebrated on March 2.

Why should men get involved in what many have called a “women’s issue?” It’s simple: domestic abuse and sexual assault against women are community issues impacting wives and partners, mothers, daughters, sisters—everyone. As men, White Ribbon Day gives us an opportunity to proclaim, “From this day forward, I promise to be part of the solution in ending violence against women.”

Dozens of men came down from their seats at a UMass basketball game last month to take the pledge read by Lt. Gov. Murray, a longtime advocate of domestic violence prevention efforts. The Massachusetts undertaking is part of the White Ribbon Campaign (WRC), an international crusade to engage men and boys to help end violence against women. Besides the baseball team, members of fraternities said no to violence at the halftime event.

Spearheaded in the Bay state by Jane Doe, Inc., the statewide coalition working to prevent domestic and sexual abuse, WRC is a powerful symbol of a social movement aimed at transforming men from perpetrators of—or bystanders to—violence against women, into advocates on behalf of girls’ and women’s safety. It was founded in Canada in 1991, after the Montréal Massacre on December 6, 1989 in which 14 women students at a polytechnical institute were brutally killed and 13 students wounded by a lone gunman. The first year 100,000 men across Canada wore white ribbons. The campaign is now worldwide operating in nearly 60 countries, and has gathered more than five million signatures of support.

According to Craig Norberg-Bohm, coordinator of the Men’s Initiative for Jane Doe, in 2008 the organization first organized the Massachusetts component of what now is an “international effort for human rights, engaging men to help end violence against women, men and children.”

The campaign focuses on men’s violence against women because of its fundamental connection to all forms of personal, economic and structural violence and oppression throughout the world. Not all men are violent and the campaign is not about individual acts of violence. It focuses, Norberg-Bohm says on “a broader framework that confronts unhealthy behaviors and promotes positive masculinity.” It has adopted an international human rights perspective, because, he believes, it “challenges us to change the ways in which male authority has been equated with power and control over others’ individual freedoms and liberties and the world around them.”

In my work with men, I have witnessed a slow and steady openness among a range of men to speak up about the minority of males who perpetrate abuse. Events like White Ribbon Day are raising the profile of this work. Across Massachusetts, Norberg-Bohm says there are nearly 400 White Ribbon Campaign “ambassadors” promoting the campaign and its message of nonviolence in Massachusetts.

Despite the harrowing cases of domestic abuse and brutal sexual assaults occurring in communities from small towns and cities in the U.S. to the Congo in Africa, antiviolence efforts by men are gaining adherents. It’s especially encouraging to see the number of college-age men initiating campus campaigns to challenge male violence. I met scores of them at a first-ever conference of campus males committed to gender equality in Minnesota last November, and was heartened to learn they are developing campus cultures that promote respect and safety for women and girls. They are the future—emerging leaders in the work of ending gender-based violence.

Any campaign that has as goals “changing societal attitudes and beliefs that perpetuate and make excuses for violence against women; promoting safety and respect in all relationships and situations; fostering a positive image of masculinity, and inviting all men and boys to join in a celebration of personal peace and cooperation” are ones everyone should get behind. I know I can.

To take the pledge or to learn about more go to www.janedoe.org/whiteribbonday.

What an image. With tears in his eyes New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Blees held his son, Gaylen, aloft moments after the Saints stunned the Indianapolis Colts to win their first-ever Superbowl.
The boost to the city of New Orleans notwithstanding–even as the new energy that marvelous city feels can’t be overstated–there’s an important moment in the evolving definitions of masculinity that shouldn’t be overlooked in the midst of all the celebrating in the French Quarter and around the country.

For several minutes it was a teary-eyed father looking into his son’s eyes, holding him, transmitting love and care before an audience of millions. The high fivin’ and shuckin’ and jivin’ with teammates was playing second fiddle to a father beaming love to his son. We need lots more of that expression of manhood seen and celebrated, affirmed and acknowledged.

For so many dads that moment prompted memories of their own teary moments with their children, moments that were never televised but are just as real. We see too many images of men behaving badly–bad news seems to take care of itself–so every opportunity to put the loving face of fatherhood and manhood before the public should be celebrated. I’m not so naive to believe that, among the revelers in N’awlins “who dattin’” all over town, there are a few saying “You go, Drew!” to the Saints quarterback, winner of the MVD–Most Valuable Dad award–at least on a glorious Sunday night in Miami.

Originally published in June 2008.

It was no accident that New Orleans was the site of the 10th anniversary of V-Day, a dizzying two-day celebration in April of the global movement to end violence against women and girls. The vibrant, pulsating city, though far from healed in the two and a half years since the levees broke, flooding the city in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, offered safe harbor for the slam poets, artists, writers, healers, hell raisers, and hope mongers — activists all in the struggle for truth, justice, and a new American way. I was part of the tribe that converged on the Big Easy, in my case to also speak at Tulane University and to visit one of my daughters.

While it was a far cry from Mardi Gras, colorful costumes, laugh-outloud T-shirts (“Viva las Vulvas” read one), Native American dancers, and the Mahalia Jackson Choir made for a celebratory mood. We needed all that upbeat energy as a counterweight to the grim stories of violence against women recounted from the main stage. It was both chilling and hopeful that V-Day was held in the Superdome where so many suffered, primarily New Orleanians of color who had no way to get out of the city after the storm. Transforming the space from a suffocating container of despair to a vessel of great hope was accomplished by imaginative art—installations suggesting vaginal canals and portraits of “sheroes” of the women’s and civil rights movements. Upper floors had places for women to go for free health care, a hair salon, and yoga instruction. An “activists’ lounge,” open to women and men, was filled with literature, art, books, and animated conversations.

An imaginative, urgent effort to raise consciousness and money, V-Day grew out of playwright-activist Eve Ensler’s wedding of art and activism. Her awardwinning play, The Vagina Monologues is expected by the end of 2008 to have been performed at more than 3700 V-Day events around the United States and the world. A star-studded performance of the play, featuring Jane Fonda, Julia Stiles, Salma Hayek, and Jennifer Beals, capped off the two-day gathering and included music by Jennifer Hudson, Faith Hill, and the New Orleans Gospel Choir.

Among the conversations Eve Ensler facilitated from the stage was one with women activists from conflict zones — Iraq, Bosnia, Afghanistan, the Philippines, and the Congo. The struggle for women’s lives in these war-torn countries was as heartbreaking to hear as it was inspiring to learn of women’s vision and small victories.

At V-Day, men were also visible, albeit a minority of all who attended. Some were activists working to prevent violence against women; others were eager to learn what they could do. A men’s panel featuring local and national figures in the antiviolence men’s movement held the attention of the audience with a sophisticated discussion of men’s roles in perpetuating and preventing violence.

As more men — from high school to middle age — are encouraged to examine (and break out of) the box of conventional masculinity men have been socialized to inhabit, a burning question looms large: How can we inspire more men to acknowledge that some men’s violence requires all men to reject any kind of abuse of women? There is no middle way. To paraphrase the current tenant of the White House, “Either you’re for the abusers or you’re against them.” We have to continue to challenge ourselves to find our voices and to shift our position from the “I’m-a-good-guy-I-don’tabuse-women” bystander to someone who won’t tolerate men who act abusively. Men’s participation in inspirational gatherings such as V-Day is a part of the strategy.

Perhaps the most compelling expression of the possibility for men in the movement to end violence against women was the conversation Eve Ensler conducted with Dr. Denis Mukwege, director and founder of the Panzi General Referral Hospital in Bukavu, in South Kivu in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The lone physician at Panzi Hospital, Dr. Mukwege said the hospital is the only center for victims of sexual violence in eastern Congo. The level of violence against women there is unthinkable: vaginas violated with bayonets, bottles, sticks. “This is not rape,” Dr. Mukwege said, “this is a decimation, destruction, the destruction of life force, of life.” At Panzi Hospital, he repairs and reconstructs that which has been destroyed.

After 10 years of the world knowing about these unprecedented assaults, why has there has been no real progress? Ensler asked Dr. Mukwege. “The world needs to be altered,” he said. “The world comes, sees, is moved and then forgets.” He said V-Day inspired him with the spirit of healing and hope it engendered. “I see the image of a snowball gaining momentum, of change coming.” To the question, “What about you, as a man, keeps you in the Congo, keeps you giving your life to women?” he answered: “We live with women. We understand the strength of women. Women’s work – unlike men’s — extends throughout the day. When you’ve been raped, when you are without your strength, it is necessary to help women regain their strength, to work beside women.” Dr. Mukwege is currently overseeing construction of the City of Joy, a refuge for healed women, survivors of torture and rape who have no family and no community.

Throughout the gathering, Dr. Mukwege’s words came back to me, like a call and response one might hear out on the bayou. “Every day… every day …Say no to violence, say no to rape… Say no to violence, say no to rape… In each community… In each community… Each individual should say No! Should stand up and say No!… Each individual should say No! Should stand up and say No!… If everyone would do that, things will change… If everyone would do that, things will change…

V-Day’s 10th anniversary brought together women and men of conscience from around the United States and around the world. By being held in New Orleans, symbol of struggle and possibility for a renewed America, the gathering radiated a moral urgency. Creating a world safe for women and girls means creating a world safe for boys and men. Women have long been doing their part; as men we must redouble our efforts to do ours.

Originally published in December 2007.

“From this day forward, I promise never to commit, condone or remain silent about violence against women, sexual assault and domestic violence.” — White Ribbon Campaign pledge

Is that a pledge you can sign onto?  I hope so.

At the Men’s Resource Center for Change, we care about men and support men.  So it makes sense that from the earliest days of our organization that in addition to looking at how we could support men we would also want to address how we could compassionately but directly confront men who’d crossed a line in their behavior. Among the range of programs and activities we coordinate (including several drop-in support groups for non-abusive men), are batterers’ intervention groups in all four western Massachusetts counties. Why do we do this work? Because the epidemic of men’s violence against women compels us to do nothing less. Society needs to hold men accountable for their behavior, pure and simple. We also do this work because we believe in men. We believe in men’s capacity to grow, to learn, to heal, to change. (That’s why we also run groups weekly for non-violent men.)

Today we are committing to continue to that work by lending our name and experience to a new effort here in our home state of Massachusetts — the White Ribbon Campaign (WRC). White Ribbon was founded and launched in Canada, two years after the Montréal Massacre in which 14 women students at the Montreal’s École Polytechnique were systematically killed and 13 other students wounded by a lone gunman on December 6, 1989. One hundred thousand men wore ribbons across Canada that first year. Today, the WRC is a worldwide campaign in 47 countries, with well over 5,000,000 signatures and counting.

Our friends at the Men’s Initiative for Jane Doe, Inc. in Boston, and other colleagues and friends across the Commonwealth, have concluded that is “time for Massachusetts to join this international effort to engage men to help end violence against women, men and children.  It’s a chance for all men – heterosexual, gay, bisexual and transgender – to challenge the to challenge the notions of masculinity that equate strength with violence and control and instead foster positive images of masculinity that will help us create a world free of abuse.” We couldn’t agree more.

Through the Men’s Initiative — and with the assistance of organizations including the Men’s Resource Center — Jane Doe Inc. is launching an annual statewide White Ribbon Day Campaign in Massachusetts on next February 14^th.  Valentine’s Day was specifically chosen to launch the campaign to highlight the need to combine safety and respect with romance and love. (On Valentine’s Day 2005, the Men’s Resource Center organized a full-page newspaper campaign headlined “A Valentine’s Day Message from Men of Heart” in which 155 men signed on to a message that urged “… creating a society where women are safe from violence every day,” and encouraged men “to reject a masculine culture of violence and to support an egalitarian culture of peace.”   (To see the entire ad, which, provoked protest from some men who felt the ad’s text ignored abuse men experience, go to Men of Heart 2005).

Outlined below are the goals of the Massachusetts White Ribbon Campaign

• Invite men throughout Massachusetts to take the pledge (cited at the top of the page), put on a white ribbon and speak out against violence against women, sexual assault and domestic violence;
• Send the public message that men must and are taking responsibility to end men’s violence against women;
• Highlight the inspiring and creative work being done by and with men in nearly two dozen communities throughout Massachusetts and encourage their replication;
• Engage more men in transforming social norms that perpetuate and support sexual assault and domestic violence create an environment that promotes respect and equality by connecting them with their local Jane Doe Inc. member program and with JDI’s statewide efforts; and
• Raise funds to support the work of local victim services groups and the state coalition.

To learn more about how you can participate — including becoming a White Ribbon “Ambassador”, “Sponsor” or “Affiliate”, please visit Jane Doe or Men’s Initiative for Jane Doe Inc.

Originally published in October 2007.

Can advocating for a new brand of masculinity find a place in the national conversation about next year’s presidential election? Manhood — even with the presence of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the race — is still a central aspect of presidential politics. In post 9/11 America, the question, “Who is the toughest and strongest, firmest and most decisive candidate to best protect me from the terrorists?” is one most voters would admit, on some level, they are asking themselves. For many, “Who is thoughtful, deliberate, compassionate and collaborative?” is not. It’s not a question we read about in the paper or hear a talking head on a television news program ever raise, and rarely see blogged about online.

Gender, of course, is on display in the campaign; so is race for that matter. The candidacies of Senator Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama have helped to assure us of that. But we’d be missing a lot if we only focused our attention there. Each has bowed under the weight of conventional masculinity’s strong grip: Senator Clinton sounding at times like Margaret Thatcher and, with Senator Obama’s strongly expressed sentiments about sending troops into Pakistan and/or Syria, he sounded a “No More Mr. Nice Guy” message. On the Republican side, all the candidates seem to share at least a common desire to be seen as tough, no-nonsense guys whose shoe sizes are big enough to fit into George Bush’s shoot-first-ask-questions-never cowboy boots.

Nothing out of the ordinary here and, of course, that’s the problem. There is very little questioning of the framework in which the manhood debate is presented. “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” still seems to be the subtext of political life in the United States, a life overrun by male bluster and blather. Candidate Dennis Kucinich, the longtime Ohio congressman, would qualify as an exception, but he continues to be marginalized, in part because of his advocacy for creating a Department of Peace. (What kind of a real man would sponsor a bill like that!?)

Senator Obama and former North Carolina Senator John Edwards have offered tantalizing looks at their “kinder, gentler” sides. Yet their campaigns have carefully studied what happens when they do so and more often than not they have retreated, fearful of the way they have been feminized — seen as too kind, too gentle. Blending the best of new ways for men to be—nurturing, vulnerable — with the best of conventional manhood — decisive and courageous (to carefully name a couple of attributes) creates a middle way, a path wide enough for a lot of different kinds of men to pass through. Whatever one thought of his presidency, for those interested in an example of a political figure representing this middle way blend, think of Jimmy Carter in the years since he left the White House. For those interested in a more contemporary example, think of Al Gore. Both spent time after leaving electoral politics learning more about themselves and sharing with the rest of us a lot of what they learned. Each presented himself as more vulnerable, more open, more real. Maybe not perfect examples, but certainly steps in the right direction.

Showing support for candidates at all levels of elective office who are, for example, actively involved fathers (and who acknowledge the stress running for office places on their role as dad) is one step we can take. Even if we don’t agree with other positions such candidates take — and we choose not to vote for them—we can raise the profile of a more balanced way to think of manhood by pointing to that aspect of their candidacies.

Just as the country as a whole has been well served by having the voices of women in leadership positions across the spectrum of government, so, too, will our future be more secure if the voices of new kinds of men are heard.

It’s up to us to help identify those men, to support them to know they won’t be denigrated for speaking from the heart some of the time. There is no aspect of society—education, sports and entertainment, medicine, the courts—that couldn’t benefit from an infusion of men committed to replacing bravado with humility. Male presidential candidates may not be willing to do so in this coming election, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t demand they do so anyway, or that we shy away from articulating what we want from men in the days — and elections — ahead.

A version of this September 2007 web editorial, “Women’s Equality, Men’s Liberation” originally appeared as “Men Also Share Fruits of Women’s Equality Day” in the cutting edge, online publication WomensEnews (www.womensenews.org).

On August 26, 1920, 72 years after the struggle had begun, women in the U.S. had at last won the right to vote. Eight days earlier, suffragist (Anita) Lili Pollitzer, a 25 year-old activist, had successfully persuaded Tennessee state legislator Harry T. Burn, 24, to cast the deciding vote. The 19th Amendment to the Constitution was finally the law of the land and the nation’s 26 million voting-age women were at last enfranchised. Woman Suffrage Day (now named Women’s Equality Day), beyond commemorating the date women succeeded in getting the right to vote, also symbolizes women’s ongoing quest for equality. While acknowledging that pivotal anniversary, the day can be more than only a celebration for women. It affords men a chance to learn from women’s struggle for independence valuiable tools we can apply to our own liberation.

If we’re willing to honestly examine our long held fear of powerful women–and the false notion that we lose some of our power as women gain more of theirs — there’s much for men to learn from Women’s Equality Day. Not the least of which is a direction for leading rewarding lives, including understanding our inner world more profoundly.

In this arena, women have long led the way. If that’s a problem for some of us guys, well, it’s time for us to get over it. Healthy leadership knows no gender.

Four decades ago, when women began renewing their demand for self-determination and freedom across the board–including the ongoing process of examining all female roles in society — they uncovered a silver lining of independence from which men can benefit too.

But first we have to unflinchingly examine our fears. Many of us have felt confused, unsure, angry and threatened by the gains women have made. In some households, being supplanted as top wage earner has triggered men’s insecurity; in others, it’s been women returning to school to finish a long-delayed degree. Some men feel they’re paying a steep price for sharing power: not just losing control but also self-respect.

What a set up. For healthy men, sharing power can have such a healing, eye-opening upside: offering us an opportunity to lighten the load of responsibility so many of us still feel we have to carry.

Danger Lurks

Danger lurks, though. Many unhealthy men, too shut down to examine their own lives, may cross the line, exhibiting controlling, even abusive behaviors. These behaviors must be confronted.

Some believe the advances women have made — increased job and career opportunities, improved wages, better child care — have come at men’s expense, as if freedom and independence were finite: “If she has it, then I’ve lost it,” the thinking goes. Truth is, liberation is like love: there’s an infinite supply.

Instead of men feeling resentful about the gains women have made, we might study women’s accomplishments and apply what we learn to our own lives.

For instance, many women have been public about their struggle to balance the world of work and career with that of relationship and child rearing. The public conversation about the “mommy track” may be a difficult one for women, but it reminds women they are not alone.

Sadly, men wrestling with those same issues usually do so in private, too often silent and isolated. In groups I’ve facilitated and with individual men I’ve counseled, I’ve heard the same refrain: “I was always too ashamed to talk about it.”

Unsympathetic supervisors have frowned upon, or have been outright hostile to, men who tried to organize their work schedule in order to make the game, the recital, the doctor’s appointment. As a result, many spoke about the despair they felt, the lack of support. Some described developing physical conditions that seemed to develop out of their inner condition: high blood pressure, depression, even suicidal thinking.

Sharing Stresses

For many men, the idea that sharing with others the stresses they were carrying could actually play a crucial role in shifting their experience had never occurred to them.

The world inhabited by my three daughters — 29, 26, and 22 — and son, 19, has been informed by the struggle for equality women have been waging since before they were born. They’ve all benefited greatly from their mothers’ many acts fierce acts of independence. That one daughter is in Tibet right now working on a film about Buddhist nuns, that another just completed an emergency medical technician certification training in Montana, and that the third is in North Carolina beginning a nurse practitioner graduate program speaks volumes about what women can achieve.

Does their younger brother, a college sophomore, feel undermined by their stepping into the big, wide world, arms flung open, reaching for the sky? Hardly. He’s inspired. Just as I am. He knows there is room for him to think big, too. He freely acknowledges how their many trips, when he was in elementary, middle school and high school to Asia, the Middle East, and Central and Latin America, emboldened him to begin his own international travels.

Like many men, I’ve backed away from admitting the fear and vulnerability I’ve sometimes felt navigating my life. Long before I began finding strength and hope, wisdom and love, friendship and healing, in the company of men, I found it with women: women in the anti-war movement in Washington, D.C., in the late ’60s; strong leaders in the anti-nuke movement in the ’70s, proponents of feminist political art in the ’80s. Their uncompromising honesty all contributed significantly to my learning how to open up to myself.

I didn’t have the language for it at the time but women were modeling a kind of courage I was hungry for, going for a full life without limits.

Men Join the Celebration

It’s fitting that men join a celebration of the 19th Amendment that the suffragist movement left to the world 87 years ago.

While we’re celebrating, let’s include a generous dollop of hope for what’s possible for our sons, too.

So thank you, sisters, for being unwilling to accept the restricted lives society imposed on you for so long. Thank you for setting no limits for who you could become. Thank you for articulating the link between the civil rights and the women’s rights movements. Thank you for expanding that link to include so many other vital causes, from gay and transgender rights to environmental justice and immigrant solidarity; to name just a few. Thank you for your leadership in the anti-war movement, then and now. You are an inspiration.

As important as Women’s Equality Day is in marking what women have accomplished, there is still a long way to go.

Yet as a powerful symbol for men to consider, it raises a question: Can men commit to appreciating women’s lives and women’s leadership on more than just this one day? Absent our fears, jealousies and unfulfilled longings for connection, can we unabashedly commemorate this holiday and, in the process, open to our own possibility, our own questions?

I hope so. For those of us who can, we will be well on our way to celebrating our own Independence Day.

Originally published in June 2007.

Inspiration. How do you bottle it and keep it with you for those times when you’re feeling down?  I was wondering about that conundrum the other day after I participated in a rally for gender equality organized by a group of high school students.

About 40 people gathered on the town common in Amherst, Massachusetts on a sunny late afternoon at the end of May for a Speak Out on Gender Equality organized by the Women’s Rights Club of Amherst Regional High School (a group of 60 students, more than a quarter of whom are male). I’ve written about this group before in this spot and in the pages of Voice Male magazine. The Women’s Rights Club, some may recall, is the group which, among its other activities, successfully staged the Vagina Monologues at an area arts center last February—and did so completely on their own.

The movement for gender equality is growing on college campuses and in communities in pockets around the country. It is fueled, in large measure, by women and men who decry men’s violence against women. But it is also energized by the growing ability of younger women and men to communicate honestly and openly with one another about relationships, their different gendered experiences, and their hopes for a better world. If you want to feel hopeful consider this: one young women told rally-goers that she joined the Women’s Rights Club because her boyfriend knew it was a great group and thought she’d find it worthwhile!

Both women and men spoke. Older women and younger women took the microphone at the rally, sharing personal experiences of the damaging effects of media representations of women (and the stereotyping of men). It felt good to be among kindred spirits who shared an analysis of the media: television’s dumbing down of women and men and its unrealized promise as a vehicle for raising consciousness and hope was roundly castigated. Their was a sense of outrage that today, several decades after the movement to challenge men’s violence against women began, women are still being assaulted physically, emotionally, sexually in alarming numbers. And yet. And yet when it was announced that when the club resumes activities next September it will be co-chaired by a female and male student I felt a surge of inspiration and hope. That this group, less than a year old, has reached the place many women’s and men’s organizations of longstanding are just now arriving at—collaborating more intentionally and regularly—should give us all pause. I found myself breaking out in a broad grin when I heard the incoming male co-chair announce that one of the club’s goals for next year is to recruit more young men to at least attend a club meeting.

Among the many remarkable speakers–professors of women’s studies and media criticism, astute high school women whose wisdom balanced both what was in their heads and in their hearts–one other speaker’s message stayed with me. It was a man who had been walking by the rally and stopped to learn what was going on. After listening for quite a while, he took a turn at the microphone to say he was moved by what he had heard. He said he initially had had no intention of speaking but felt compelled. He was 27, he shared, and in every relationship he’d ever had with a woman, somewhere early on in the process of getting to know one another, all had shared that they had been abused in some way by their male partners. He was saddened and upset to be remembering that but being in the company of those at the rally, he felt hopeful too, he said. It only took a few dozen young people a half a generation behind him with a wisdom a half a generation ahead of them to make the difference. Neither he nor I may have the elixir bottle to fill with the over-brimming sense of inspiration we shared, but both of us have our memories of that day. I hope each of you has some of your own.

Originally published in Spring 2007.

It’s happened again. Another male has shot up a campus, killing 32 people and himself. We are heartsick, angry, outraged–and strangely numb. Many of us are suffering from post-Columbinitis, a malaise that desensitizes people to violence. We distance ourselves from our feelings, passively consume television’s carefully packaged new infotainment program, “Tragedy at Virginia Tech.” Numbly, we watch the same footage, interviews with students, families and expert talking heads, or we tune out, overwhelmed by a culture that feeds on violence. All that temporarily awakens us from our torpor are touching photos and testimonials about the victims.

At the men’s center I direct, we’ve worked with males for 25 years, including abusive court-mandated men. Our work both supports men and challenges men’s violence. The horrifying tape Cho Seung-Hui sent to NBC revealed a gruesome level of life-crushing violence. While he was an extreme case, a severely disturbed man who slipped through the cracks of a social net riddled with holes, there are way too many other men walking around stuffing their anger, ready to explode.

Violence sells, renowned culture critic the late George Gerbner succinctly said. It’s an international commodity. Spoken language is almost irrelevant in the wake of so many brutal images, cascading from every nook and cranny of U.S. popular culture and hungrily rebroadcast worldwide. Not just Hollywood, the music biz, video games, and media spinmeisters, but briefing room culture at the White House, Defense and State departments. War sells, too. Just ask the profiteers at Blackwater and Halliburton. From the glitzy TV graphics broadcast when we first invaded Iraq, through the start of this fifth season of the reality series “War in the Middle East,” we keep refining our most profitable export: the culture of violence. Posturing tough guys–from the president on down–keep articulating the wanted dead-or-alive paradigm. It can no longer go unchallenged.

Among the host of emotional triggers that ignited Cho Seung-Hui’s killing spree, our contemporary U.S. culture provided plenty of matches. This dead man walking had opportunities daily to tune in to talk radio for a dose of vitriol to get the juices flowing. Just as we do. He had access to the latest shoot-’em-up-blow-’em-up playing at the local cineplex. Us, too. We are so saturated with the stench of violence, is it any wonder many have felt too full to come to the table for a 33-course killing fields feast?

By now, eight years after Columbine and eight months after the Amish murders, we know the profile: angry loners, alienated and insecure, diagnosed with mental illness. They think it’s manly to kill people, often women. How many more men like them across America must explode before we create programs that teach men that getting counseling makes you more, not less, of a man? That it is a sign of strength, not weakness, to ask for help? Mental health treatment for troubled men must rise to the top of our national agenda if we’re to have any hope of preventing another Virginia Tech. A concurrent campaign to teach our children that strong men are nonviolent needs to be launched in concert with a national effort to change men’s attitudes about guns, one on a scale that changed our national attitude about smoking.

Some claim that media violence is the cause of real-world violence. Gerbner, who was a leading researcher on the social effects of television, encouraged citizens to consider the issue more broadly. He urged critical thinking “about the psychological, political, social and developmental impacts of growing up and living within a cultural environment of pervasive, ritualized violent images.” That is our current predicament and may explain why so many of us are numbed by this latest horrific rampage rather than stirred to action. But it is not too late.

Our children, especially the younger ones who must, at all costs, be shielded from the details of what happened in Virginia, need us to get this right and get it right now. In my work helping men to overcome the damaging effects of tough-talking, conventional masculinity, I know that abusive and violent men can change if they want to. I’ve seen them do it, even in the face of a society that keeps dishing out super-sized portions of violent pop culture. Still, I wonder if we have the collective will to walk away from the table where such poison continues to be served. Are we ready for a new dinner menu, replacing the burnt offerings of violence with fruit from the tree of peace?

Originally published in the Hampshire Daily Gazette in March 2007.

Among the many men who walk through the doors of the Men’s Resource Center for Change are soldiers returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of these men have been ordered to attend one of the many batterers’ intervention groups we run for men who act abusively in their intimate relationships. We’ve been teaching men in these groups that there is never any excuse to abuse another person—and a lot more — since 1989. We give men tools to stop perpetuating domestic violence in their families. The truth is, many of these returning vets are haunted by much more, by deep and complex problems associated with being at war.

These men need a lot more attention than a weekly two-hour, narrowly focused domestic violence prevention group can provide. Often husbands and fathers, these returning vets, along with demonstrating reprehensible behavior toward their wives or girlfriends, are also military men who, in too many cases, have been deeply traumatized by their time at war. Many are suffering from post-traumatic stress brought on by their wartime experience. Even if some were previously abusive before heading overseas, how futile, and shameful, that their plight is now being left, in many cases, to a weekly batterers’ intervention group. Where is the range of federal veterans’ services to be doing the heavy lifting? These men need in- and out-patient services, group therapy and individual counseling—along with support services for their families, employers, and coworkers—to assist them on the arduous journey of healing. Batterer intervention groups like ours can only play a small role.

Not long ago a longtime facilitator in several of our batterer intervention groups described for me the pain he is seeing every week in these suffering vets. They feel duty-bound, he shared, not to talk about what they did – or saw – in Iraq and Afghanistan, adhering to an oath of silence. They may be in a numbed silence in group, but before they got there their pain, feelings of helplessness, and stomach-burning anger had boiled over, scalding the safest person they could direct their rage at: their partner, often the mother of their children. While their abuse must be confronted—and it is—it also must be understood as a symptom of the stress and strain they brought back with them from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Does the Department of Veterans Affairs even know of the incidence of vets’ in batterers’ programs like ours? It would be a big step forward if the VA began coordinating its services with organizations like ours that work with men. They would better understand the work we do and how it could enhance their efforts. We know these men need more help than we can provide. And certainly returning women serving in the wars need help, too; they’re experiencing stress and emotional wounding the same as their male counterparts. They also deserve complete and comprehensive services.

Meanwhile, this heartbreaking war, now in its fifth year, grinds on, and too many returning vets feel ground down. Many citizens are working to end the madness; still more are needed sound the call of a farewell to arms. Of course, it is to expect a batterers’ program could care for the complicated, wide-ranging emotional needs of our vets; it is also naïve to expect the Democratic majority in Congress to strengthen its backbone enough to end the war on its own. But it isn’t hard to connect the dots from the Bush administration’s bankrupt war policy to its bankrupt veterans policy for our psychically wounded military brothers. One only need look at the scandal at Walter Reed Army Medical Center to get an idea of the depth of the failure.

From our perspective, any rallying cry to end the war must also include a demand that we help our returning vets begin to heal. Isn’t it time we proclaim more than just “Bring Our Troops Home”? Shouldn’t we also add, “...and tend to their inner wounds”?

Originally published in February 2007

In the trade I ply–encouraging men to explore options outside the constraining box of conventional masculinity–there’s certainly no shortage of bad news. Men’s violence against women (and other men) remains at catastrophic levels; there’s little chance the Men’s Resource Center for Change is going to be short of problems to address anytime soon. Nevertheless, my family and friends will tell you I’m a glass-half-full person—upbeat, optimistic. Even in the face of gloom and doom–the senseless, tragic war in Iraq, the criminal neglect plaguing the Gulf Coast and New Orleans, the indifference to the suffering in Darfur–I always seem to look for ways to connect the dots of possibility, the signs of hope trumping despair. So where is the good news?

Let me cite three examples.

Not long ago, I talked into the night around a fire pit in New Orleans with young men volunteering to help with the city’s renewal, shared Chinese food with an inspiring group of male college students challenging sexism and violence on an elite New England campus, and met in a classroom after school with male high school juniors and seniors, all members of a “women’s rights club.”

It was hard to retain my glass-half-full demeanor after spending time in New Orleans before the holidays. My wife and I came to visit one of our daughters, part of the legion of twenty-somethings who have moved to town to help with the relief effort. The mix of women and men, many volunteering with the Common Ground Collective (www.commongroundrelief.org), represents some of the best our troubled, creative country has to offer. Since Hurricane Katrina and the ensuing floods overwhelmed the region, thousands of volunteers have passed through Common Ground, headquartered in a three-story brick school where floodwaters peaked above the second floor.

Sitting around a fire pit in the backyard of a funky, colorful house in the Seventh Ward, I talked one night with male volunteers. I saw in their faces and heard in their words a sensitivity to, and awareness of, the class and racial issues plaguing the city (issues predating Katrina) that stirred in me a sense of hope. We talked for a while, then played some music (guitar, banjo, harmonica)–it was N’awlins after all–then resumed wrestling with how to reconcile the enormity of the calamity with the limitations of volunteer, underfunded grassroots efforts. Their compassion caught my attention–soft, understated, not an attribute necessarily associated with men. I think the scope of the devastation and the shameful neglect, plain for all to see, helped crack open their hearts. On the plane home, I thought about that night and my eyes welled up. I had been witness to a quiet, powerful expression of men’s courage. Despite the struggle New Orleans faces, these young men filled my glass with more than just dregs of hope.

Back home, I went to dinner with most of the members of The Men’s Project of Amherst College and filmmaker Byron Hurt (his important new film, Beyond Beats and Rhymes is scheduled to air nationally on PBS on Tuesday evening, February 20 and is the subject of a cover story in our magazine, Voice Male,) The college men’s group was founded on principles similar to those of the Men’s Resource Center for Change, adapted to a college community. Their goal is to sustain a male-initiated, profeminist, antiviolence/anti-sexual assault presence at Amherst College, even when prevailing attitudes objectify women and pressure men to strike a tough guise.

They’d invited filmmaker Hurt to screen his new film. At dinner, one young man asked Byron how he had gotten involved in “men’s work.” Byron responded by asking each of us to answer, too. As we passed around steaming platters of food, one by one we shared the spark—a teacher, parent, sister, friend, girlfriend, a training, becoming a father–a cascading series of experiences that had resulted in each of us reaching a similar conclusion: there’s a better way to be a man. As we headed over to see the film, I could feel my glass of hope filling up.

A few days later, in a classroom at Amherst (Mass.) Regional High School, I met with the male members of the Women’s Rights Club, a 60-member group, a quarter of whom are guys, 16 to 18. With little prompting, they shared why they’d joined: becoming aware of the sexual harassment female students experience; wanting to support an upcoming Vagina Monologues performance; not wanting to have to pretend they were a “certain kind of (tough, strong and silent) guy.” A starting member of a varsity sports team told how, at a team meeting, he’d announced he had to leave early to attend the Women’s Rights Club meeting. He was met with a string of derisive comments, all questioning his manhood. His response? “I don’t care what you say. Being in this group is important to me.” Other group members then shared how their male friends had teased them, too. But they had all withstood the criticism. It was an hour after school had ended, and there they all were, a young men’s group. Their voices may not be as deep as those of the men around the fire in New Orleans; their mission not yet as broad as the Amherst College students’. Nevertheless they, too, had connected the dots clearly enough to know that there are other ways for men to be, possibilities much richer and more personally fulfilling than the old “tough, strong and silent” model. For someone who likes to see his glass half full, I left the high school that day with my cup overflowing.