In the past, men have been seen as tough and invulnerable, but in recent years across the world, the Mankind Project and other movements have started to redefine the issue of masculinity. Within the Durango community, people are working to bridge the gap between men and women.
Masculinity is a system of meanings people associate with being a man, Keri Brandt, a professor of Sociology and Gender and Women’s Studies at Fort Lewis College, said. These meanings differ with different cultures and time, Brandt said.
“All cultures have an idea of gender, but this idea of sort of masculinity and femininity is very much a Western-European, Anglo belief system,” she said.
Media Portrayal of Masculine Violence
Masculinity can be learned through a variety of role models including family, education and popular culture, Brandt said.
“I think today in our highly media-saturated culture and a visually saturated culture that a lot of role models that boys and men see through the popular culture are in sports and in film and in music,” Brandt said. “In those three areas, there is very little vulnerability that is ever expressed.”
In today’s Western popular culture, masculine violence is glorified, she said. This glorification of violence extends beyond popular culture. The prison-industrial complex, the military, and even school sports in the education systems glorify violence, she said.
“Without some way of confronting our false notions we’re just left caught up in what we saw modeled as boys and what we took in,” Matt Kelly, a member of The Mankind Project, said.
Boys learn at an early age that being violent is an innate quality for men to hold, Brandt said.
“There is data to show that this constant interaction with images of violent masculinity is shaping how boys and men see themselves,” Brandt said.
There is a pattern to show that men and boys are the people commiting the mass shootings America has seen, Brandt said.
Misperceptions of Masculinity
In today’s society men do not have a safe place to feel vulnerable, Brandt said.
“We forget how hard it is for boys and men to live up to sort of masculine standards,” she said.
There is a gap between the social and the psychological realm of boy’s and men’s lives, Brandt said. The power that society gives to men through social structures is not being felt by these boys and men, she said.
“It might sound really conservative, it might sound anti-women that, these narratives, maybe some of the things we are attributing to the alt-right,” Brandt said. “But, I think part of that is coming from our inability as a culture to allow space for boys and men to be vulnerable.”
Redefining Masculinity: The Mankind Project
The Mankind Project is a worldwide network of men’s circles that focuses on men’s issues, Kelly said.
The Mankind Project has about 600 men’s circles around the U.S. and also has a global reach with groups in Canada, Mexico, Europe, Argentina, Australia, Nordic, New Zealand, as well as trainings in India and Israel, he said.
In Durango, the Mankind Project currently has six peer-facilitated circles, he said.
Each group has between four to more than 12 group members, but Kelly finds it best when a group has eight committed men, he said.
These circles are men only so that men can learn a mature and healthy sense of masculinity and learn to have healthy relationships to benefit everyone, Kelly said.
These peer-facilitated groups focus on redefining how group members view their own masculinity as well as teach participants to take accountability for their actions, he said.
Outside of the men’s groups, The Mankind Project hosts the New Warrior Adventure Training. Since its inception in 1985, the week-long training talks about mission, vision, and purpose, he said.
The New Warrior Adventure Training runs from Friday to Sunday and asks participants to participate in different activities to help them step into their own unique sense of themselves, he said.
Participants are helped through the weekend by 25 to 50 staff members, some who are new and others who have decades of experience, Kelly said.
The Mankind Project focuses on helping men take responsibilities for the future of humanity, Kelly said.
On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, the Mankind Project’s groups generally meet from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. in a variety of places including homes, men’s offices, and the Smiley Building, he said.
Bridging the Divide
The way in which society thinks about men and women is problematic, Brandt said. There are small differences between the two sexes, but people frame those differences to be larger than they are, she said.
“We used to think of women as an inferior version of men, but they weren’t sort of the opposite of men, and now we have created this story of system of meanings that men are from Mars and women are from Venus,” Brandt said.
The meanings associated with gender are not arbitrary–they have power associated with the meanings, Brandt said.
“Now we have, and I mean I don’t mean this lightly, but we have like pink and blue apartheid,” Brandt said. “We are raising our children in this highly sort of duelized pink and blue world today that didn’t exist when I was a kid.”
Brandt said communities need more collective groups of men and women working together to fix the current problems men are facing, such as violence against women.
For some men, they may have a reaction to a women’s march because they feel guilt and shame for things they have done in their own lives, Kelly said.
“They might have a reaction that says ‘you’re trying to take my power away’ and most of us don’t really like to give up our power,” he said.
Another way to bridge the divide is to understand that standing as an ally of a target group is a vulnerable position and not a place of weakness, he said.
People may not associate with a target group if they are afraid of being perceived as weak, he said.
Kelly said he thinks it’s very confusing for both women and men to grow up.
“It is confusing to be a young man and to be a man, period,” Kelly said.