Men (and boys) at work

bsichel — Fri, 08 May 2009 20:46:07 +0000

An interview with David Hatfield, specialist in work with men and boys

David Hatfield has worked with over 18,000 men and boys in his career as a leadership consultant and facilitator. He was recently at the Tatamagouche Centre in Northern Nova Scotia delivering a 2-day workshop entitled “It’s Better to Build Boys than to Mend Men,” a seminar aimed at people who work with adolescent males.

Hatfield describes his work as “social justice, masculinity, and leadership”. Though programs aiming to create healthy young girls and women are becoming more common, similar programs for boys are sorely lacking, says Hatfield. The Halifax Media Co-op caught up with Hatfield before he returned to his home in Vancouver.

What kind of work do you do with teenage boys?

I describe my work as masculinity work that focuses on exploring male identity and building male community. Once we step into that male identity conversation we can aim that focus on any particular aspect of life. “Brotherhood is a constant possibility” is a line I use often – that’s how it’s meant to feel and that’s how I think it should be felt.

How do you go about your work?

Whether it’s boys or men I ask them the same question to start off with: What do you feel the world is telling you and expects from you as a male? I’m not telling people how to be, like I’ve got some thing about masculinity all figured out. It’s more their views, their opinions, their experiences. That’s the raw material.

Then we look at the world, our lives through that lens. Examples would be relationship to self, relationships with other males, relationships with females, relationship to father figures, mothers, sexuality and intimate relationships, emotions, power, conflict, and violence, assertiveness, life purpose, body image, peaceful power.

Orgasm and the West

Bruce Wark — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 20:58:26 +0000

The Vermont legislature’s vote to uphold the law granting the right to same-sex marriage this week was another victory for gay rights in the U.S. So far though, only Vermont and three other U.S. states (Massachusetts, Connecticut and Iowa) have legalized same-sex unions. Canada, on the other hand, made same-sex marriage legal in the whole country in 2005. French historian Robert Muchembled notes the difference between how the two countries deal with this gay rights issue in his new book about the politics of sexual pleasure over the last 500 years. It’s called Orgasm and the West: A History of Pleasure from the Sixteenth Century to the Present.

“Canada seems more relaxed and less dominated by the laws of the market,” Muchembled writes. He argues that American culture wars, raging since the 1990s, have split the U.S. into fiercely opposed camps on issues such as gay rights and abortion. Unlike Europe and to some extent, Canada, the U.S. seeks “to preserve the dogma of the heterosexual family and the principle of the strict control of sensual pleasure.” Yet paradoxically, market-driven America has also cashed in on orgasms with legalized brothels in Nevada for example, and a booming trade in sex toys.

“The first West Coast Good Vibrations, an adult store, opened in California in 1977,” Muchembled writes. “Initially modest, around $15,000 a year, its sales reached more than eight million dollars by 2000.” He adds that by then, Americans had bought more than a million vibrators manufactured by four large sex toy companies while Europe had a dozen such firms of its own. “The globalization of pleasure is underway,” he concludes.

gender politics

Men (and boys) at work

Orgasm and the West