Why We Don't Need a 'Men's Movement' to Be Good Men

The first and only time I saw Robert Bly, author of "Iron John," the touchstone of the modern "mythopoetic" men's movement, I was in college... and I wasn't sure I was impressed. Although I found the man captivating in many ways, I wasn't convinced that the manhood he was talking about in poetic terms (and accompanied by a lute, no less) was something I aspired to recapture. Beating drums in the woods never seemed to come naturally to me; to me, it sounded more like feminism for guys than the stuff of manhood.

At the time, I was immersed in the sport of rowing -- a male bonding experience that had little to do with poetry and a lot to do with the testing of physical limits. I suppose the fistfight I had with my best friend during a training session in a cemetery was related to something Bly was getting at, but it sure wasn't poetic. It had to do with my questioning my friend's manhood and his retaliating in kind. We both emerged stronger from the exchange.

Our coach, Will Scoggins, had watched our fight from a distance, grinning. He told me that the process of developing underlying trust as a team involved spilling your guts along the way, even showing raw emotion. He had made clear from the very beginning that this was about rowing, but it was also about growing up and learning -- the hard way -- how to avoid making excuses. The payoff was that we could use this wisdom in any situation later on in life. To his way of thinking, the fight was a sign of progress -- a sign of growing faith in one another.

The fight on a cemetery hill with my rowing buddy summarized the kind of men's movement that I respected a heck of a lot more than what I heard accompanied by a lute.

♦◊♦

In many ways, the Good Men Project was born not out of the men's movement, or the men's rights movement, masculism, anti-misandry or MGTOW (men going their own way), but out of the brutal facts of our own lives as fathers, husbands and guys trying to make a living. In fact, I had never even heard of any of these philosophies until I started writing about my own life and publishing the stories of other men. In the process, I somehow got myself in the middle of a political issue that to me completely misses the fundamental challenge for men in 2011. There are plenty of ways the law (particularly family law) and popular culture, as represented by the media, have limited men. But we have no one to blame but ourselves. We made the laws. We control the media. We have, in the end, suffered too long in silence. Too many of us have knuckled under and become absentee fathers.

Mothers have more rights than fathers, more women are going to college and Oprah rules the gender discourse. So what? Do we allow ourselves to be emasculated by feminism, by divorce law, by women, who, God forbid, want to break the glass ceiling once and for all? Or do we embrace their successes while developing our own powerful voice for good in the world, most particularly when it comes to be being fathers and husbands? To me, having guys beat drums or set up some grand zero-sum gender war ignores the opportunity -- an opportunity that's right in front of our faces -- that we might figure out a way to get out of the cave of our own suffering.

To me, this opportunity has always been about the power of completely unfiltered communication between men once they stopped thinking about what they were "supposed" to be saying and started speaking from the heart about their own lives. In fact, it saved my own life. I realized that I could learn a lot more from men -- damn good men -- with no formal education, but a lot more street smarts than I had. No poetry, no gender warfare, no bullshit. Just the truth.

♦◊♦

I was surrounded by 30 other men at a grade school classroom in South Boston, many of whom had been sober barely 30 days. They looked pretty tough, and I imagined I must have been the only one in the room without a gang affiliation. The leader at the front of the room began to speak about his structured approach to sobriety. "You miss a session, and you are out," explained Frank, a blond guy in his 40s. "You are required to do each assignment and come prepared to every meeting." Frank asked us to stand up and pledge our commitment to this course of action, posing a series of questions, to which the group responded in unison, "Yes, I will."

Frank began to tell his story. He'd been to prison for breaking and entering, but now worked as a mechanic for the MBTA. He talked about family members who were dead from overdoses or had been shot in drug deals gone wrong. "I gotta admit to you guys," he said, "I was driving over here and I stopped at a light in a neighborhood I had no real reason to be in. A couple of hookers who I know better than I'd like to admit from the old days came to my window. The thought crossed my mind. But then I thought of this room full of guys. Always remember that a thought and an action are two different things."

My initial feeling of not belonging vanished as Frank spoke. He talked with a level of honesty that I'd never heard before -- one that made me reconsider my own life. Hearing Frank's unvarnished story of addiction and the struggle for sobriety was a great relief.

I'd grown tired of listening to men talk about alcoholism as though they were delivering some kind of political stump speech. These were working-class drunks, mostly Irish Catholics, with equally strong doses of blind faith and bad behavior. Many had done time and had experienced lows well below mine. Listening to them talk made me stop feeling sorry for myself in a hurry. I had a penthouse apartment and two healthy children. I had endured a bad marriage, an inferiority complex and a vicious drinking problem. I had lied to myself and others and had gotten caught cheating, but at least I had a roof over my head and plenty to be grateful for.

To get to the root causes of our alcoholism, Frank asked each of us to get a notebook and start writing. This was the fourth step: to take a fearless moral inventory. Frank handed out pieces of paper with the guidelines, "one for resentments, one for sexual misconduct, one for fears and one for harms other than sexual. Dig deep. Write it all down. Once you've identified the facts, start thinking about how it affected you. What part did you play? I don't care if some fucker punched you in the face -- you had some role in that happening. Write it down."

Several weeks later, I still hadn't written a thing. I asked Frank to meet me for a quick dinner before class. We ordered fish and chips at a fry joint on L Street and sat at a scratched Formica booth with graffiti scrawled across the table. Our food arrived just as I started complaining about my ex. He cut me short: "I thought you told me you cheated on her, Tom."

"Yeah, so what? She is still being a complete bitch, never giving me an inch, accusing me of being a bad father," I snapped back.

"Well, what you did was not right, plain and simple."

"Yeah, but..."

"No fucking buts about it, pal. Let that sink into your fucking brain."

I thought to myself, "Why the hell am I taking advice from an ex-con who was just last week talking about cruising hookers," but pushed that thought away because I trusted that, despite our apparent differences, Frank was the first person willing to tell me the truth. I tried to listen to what he was saying.

"The only way you are going to get over fucking up is to admit that you did. Stop denying it," Frank continued. "You made a mistake. A big one."

I realized that the whole point of what we were doing in Frank's sessions was to actually change behavior, not just talk about it. In the past, not taking full responsibility for the impact of my actions -- even if I'd apologized, which I did frequently -- got me nowhere. Writing down column after column of times I had committed the same sin, however, made it hard to refute my defects of character. If drinking to excess was insane, this shit was even more self-destructive. It was the reason I drank.

"Maybe you are right," I admitted. "I can't seem to get over feeling shitty about being a cheat, which causes me to do all kinds of insanely stupid things to cover up the past. I just keep making the same mistake over again in the present."

"Bingo!" Frank said. "Let's go help some sick motherfuckers who have a hell of a lot more to worry about than you do." With that, Frank got up and paid our bill. We walked over to the classroom. Our group was down to 12 guys; everyone else had decided that drinking was a better option. Not that they hadn't wanted to be good men at some point, but somewhere along the road they had fallen away -- again.

♦◊♦

As a man aspiring to be good, I've gotten into a heap of trouble with women. I realize that the current men's rights movement is based on how men get screwed by divorce laws. Like so many other dads, I've stood outside my ex-wife's house after dropping off our kids -- Seamus, who was one year old, and Kerry, who was one when we separated -- and cried in agony. I was tempted to spend my time in the years after my divorce railing against the laws and, frankly, the whole female sex. But at the same time, I wanted to find love and believe that I could be a good man to some woman, and to do that, I had to rediscover some long-lost innocence that would allow me to shed all the bad behavior insulating me from being hurt again. I had to find the balls that I had lost along the way, and stop being a cheating bastard, like so many other men these days.

To do that, I needed to hang out with some good men in a faraway country.

♦◊♦

I traveled to Italy with four friends. Each of us had suffered a loss that drove us to search for a personal renaissance. Tuscany seemed as appropriate a place as any.

We soaked up the local culture. I learned the history of Santa Maria Del Fiore Duomo, designed by Brunelleschi and built over generations with pure faith that its unprecedented scale would remain structurally sound -- a daring belief at a time when the Black Plague had wiped out the city's population and the ruler of Milan threatened the Florentine republic. I stood on the floor of the church and looked up in awe because I couldn't imagine that much faith.

We stayed in the countryside among the olive trees. From my bedroom window, I often watched an elderly man patiently harvesting the olives, a single tree at a time. He moved with great precision as he raked the olives onto cheesecloth. He never seemed to be in a hurry as he went about his task.

One afternoon, I sat at a picnic table with my friends on the grounds of our little inn. I heard a horse snort and stomp its feet on the hillside across the valley. I turned to look at the animal, examining the color of its coat and the grace of its movements in the afternoon sun.

For the first time in years, I recalled riding horses as a boy. My instructor, a young woman four years my senior, had told me that horses are the most intuitive beings on the planet, perfectly mirroring the mood of their human handlers. Although she feigned indifference as I backed my horse into a briar patch the first time we saddled up, and then made me clean out the stalls, her eyes always let me know that something about my gangly awkwardness stirred her wild streak.

As I continued to watch the Italian horse shake its mane, I remembered the day the handler and I rode bareback at a gallop through the woods near the horse farm her father owned. Afterward, I looked at my teacher with the eyes of a 12-year-old boy who has seen the perfection of a 16-year-old girl and doesn't need to take another breath.

The vision of perfection was shattered a couple weeks later when she told me she had to leave, that she was pregnant and planned to marry the father -- a mean-looking guy with a beard -- and move to Maine. I could still see her fake smile, trying to make something all right that really wasn't, even for her, and feel the shattered expression on my face that, as much as I tried, I couldn't hide.

Back at our villa near Florence, I drifted back to our circle and listened carefully. One of my friends wept gently as he whispered the story of his wife succumbing to cancer. He'd held her hand as she slipped away, their five children surrounding her bed.

I looked back at the horse. It had moved to the other side of its corral and was now munching on grass. I held the sight in my eyes for a moment.

Another friend told the story of seeing his son on the evening news after the boy had carjacked a woman, actually removing her from the driver's seat. In a drug-induced blackout, the son had left the car in the middle of the road and walked home. He only escaped serious jail time because a judge sent him to treatment instead.

I noticed that the old man in the grove below us was now up in the tree picking his olives. He was quietly going about his business, something I imagined his father, and his grandfather before him, had done. His movements were intentional and beautiful in their simplicity.

The friend next to me described discovering his teenage daughter having an affair with his best friend. He'd had been at a cookout when he finally put the pieces together and then suffered for months afterward as this man stalked his daughter.

The distant pop of gunfire in the woods nearby -- locals hunting for birds or perhaps wild boar -- startled me. It was my turn.

I told my story: athletic success, financial success, marriage, kids, booze and utter failure as a husband and father. When I was finished, I looked up the hill. The horse lifted its head, mid-bite, and looked my way. It was the first time there was no darkness in my heart -- only Tuscan sunshine and thoughts of riding bareback through the woods at a gallop, chasing a schoolboy crush.

Inside me, something let go, and something else was restored. I had remembered how much I was capable of romantic love for the right and most innocent of reasons. The gender war in my heart had vanished. I had behaved badly out of fear of rejection, but now I knew that my life story didn't have to end that way.

My friends and I played bocce that evening in the olive grove. We swore at one another like brothers, smacking balls and talking trash until the sun went down and we had to go inside for dinner. And somewhere deep in my soul, I knew, from that day forward, that I would end up with a woman -- a woman whose Italian roots would bring me full circle back to that day.

When I got back to Boston, I met that woman. On the day I celebrated six years of continuous sobriety, I married Elena. That was eight years ago, and our marriage is still going strong, now with the addition of our son, Cole.

♦◊♦

At its most basic level, the Good Men Project and the variety of men's groups organized to advance our emotional, legal and political interests are talking about the same thing, albeit from different perspectives. While my focus has always been on the power of one man spilling his guts to another, telling the radical truth about himself, I am willing to concede that in all those stories two themes that the various men's movements have rightfully picked up on have emerged: the difference in the very vocabulary of men's speech and the difference between a father and a mother.

Women dominate the very vocabulary by which men's lives are described and interpreted, both at home and in the media. Men are afraid to dip their toe into the unfamiliar waters of their interior lives, since they fear they might end up crying on Oprah's couch. As I have traveled the country, I have realized that men are struggling, and most are struggling in silence. Our popular culture has dumbed down men to sex- and sports-crazed idiots, with very little space for the nuanced truth of how hard it is to try to be a good dad and a good husband and breadwinner, which is what women still expect of us, all at the same time. The whole point is that we don't have to talk about these issues from a female perspective in female terms. For it to matter, we have to have the guts to talk about the male experience with our own voices, digging beyond the discomfort to the truth of what it means to be a man amidst all the conflicting expectations and confusion about what is really important at the end of the day.

Scoggins, Frank and my Italian buddies changed my life because they described my fears and my aspirations in a way that I simply could not deny. They inspired me to be a better man by revealing to me the radical truth about myself. That's what guys have to do a hell of a lot more of, rather than whining about women -- breaking the silence to tell the truth of our own lives in our own male voices, uncolored by what women expect to hear. That is a basic mission of the Good Men Project.

The other issue that has come up again and again is parenthood. Whereas women were trying to leave the home when the feminist movement really got going 50 years ago, men are trying to find our way home in 2011 (and, damn, we need to). As a group, fathers have been woefully absent. The number of children in this country growing up without fathers is staggering. How are all those boys ever going to grow up to be good men if their dads cop out? Men, despite all the divorce laws that disproportionately favor women, have to start focusing on that.

In my case, such inequitable laws made me determined to become a decent father. I realized, looking down at my son Seamus, who was just a baby at the time, that I had missed the very thing that was most important to me, and nothing,no one, was going to take that away from me.

A decade and a half later, I have realized how much I love being a dad. It's the one thing I know how to do well. Like most divorced dads, nothing came easily; I had to learn how to care for my babies on my own. I had to fight for every day of visitation, from the time they were in diapers until now, as my daughter prepares to go to college next year. I had to shut out the constant refrain repeated to my face, and for too long internalized in my soul, that I was "a shitty father, and always will be." I had to let my own intuition take over, my own sense of connection with my children. I had to learn to protect my kids, and also how to let them go. I learned to relish each moment in their company, even the most difficult ones, as the core substance of my life.

I have also realized that being a good dad is no less important than -- yet distinctly different from -- being a good mom. Neither is better; moms and dads each bring to the table a completely different temperament, a different vocabulary, a different way of being. My approach with my kids is a lot less about what I say and a lot more about what I do, with them and in my life. The health of my relationship with my kids is about physical contact and an unspoken love by which they know I have dedicated my life to them, above and beyond anything else. In return, they have given me more joy and peace in my heart than I ever could have imagined.

♦◊♦

Cole had outgrown his baby nursery, and to replace it, Elena designed a cowboy-themed bedroom with a tepee and log cabin bunk beds. When Cole's eyes are heavy after a long day of pretending to be a knight, I get his jammie-joes on, brush his teeth, and he gives Mommy a goodnight kiss and hug before I carry him down the hall. We snuggle into the lower bunk and read three books -- about lost penguins, monkeys toying with alligators and dogs wearing strange hats and driving cars.

Often Cole starts snoring before I have finished the first story, but sometimes he goes the distance. Either way, I turn out the light. Even if he is already asleep, he stirs when he hears the switch and asks, "Daddy, will you stay with me for a little while?"

Holding my son as he slumbers, surrounded by big chunks of raw pine, is a cocoon I have to force myself to leave. I listen to Cole snore and stare up in the dark at the bottom of top bunk, my mind empty of any thoughts.

I eventually get up and walk back into my life. But every night I return nourished just enough to make it through another 24 hours, until it's time to get his jammie-joes on again and climb back into the cowboy bunk beds.

I feel like a decent guy, and I know that, more importantly, I am raising my sons Cole and Seamus to be the same, and my daughter Kerry to know what a good man looks like. This has nothing to do with a movement, and everything to do with the men who have shared their truth with me along the way. Those men made me the dad I am today, and the man I still aspire to become.

♦◊♦

Read a reaction to this column at Dadvocate.

Like this? You might also enjoy "Manhood in Four Moments," "Why Do We Forgive Adulterous Women?" and "Do Divorced Dads Get a Raw Deal?"

 

Follow Tom Matlack on Twitter: www.twitter.com/tmatlack

Comments

[JayHammers]

12:51 AM on 04/23/2011

What a bunch of baloney.

You're saying all men are to blame for the problems today and that we should merely "man up" and "do nothing".

I was born in the 1980s. I didn't cause these problems. And I'm not going to sit idly by and ignore these issues because men like you don't care.

Here's another man's reply to your drivel:

"By blaming men for the problems that feminism has caused; accusing people who champion shared parenting laws, parity in reproductive rights, a return to due process and the presumption of innocence of setting up a 'zero sum gender war,' they conclude we can 'get out of the cave of our own suffering.'

Please."

http://www.avoiceformen.com/2011/04/22/gaining-momentum-the-mens-rights-movement-meets-increasing-opposition/

[JoeySoCal]

08:44 AM on 03/26/2011

Don't worry so much about some specific or 'existential' meaning about what it means 'to be a man.' How about just be who you are and appreciate the freedom not to have to conform to some contrived structure. Define it however you want by being who you are.

But overall the post is naive. Truly, cheers on the anecdotes and epiphatic moments, but to entertain the notion that they are somehow a substitue for political power, and the power of state and societal force is just, well, juvenile really. Men need to wake TFU.

http://www.veetle.com/index.php/channel/view#4d39826fa28ea

http://wyim-wmim.blogspot.com/2011/03/some-pigs-are-more-equal-than-others.html

[Absolon]

01:02 AM on 03/23/2011

Oh, man! I read every one of your peices I come across, but this one really broke me through to an element of a man's plight I've never been privy to before. I grew up fatherless and it's been hard, through the years, to imagine the heart of a man who just left us without a glance back. I have nothing but honor in my heart for you tonight after I've read this. Your goodwill and your hurt-but-beautiful self will bleed into your children, do not be mistaken. Gaining consciousness is a profound thing, and you are doing the heavy lifting for a new era of western men. Be proud of yourself, please. I'll say it again...Please be proud of yourself. My spirits are lifted tonight because of your honesty, your bravery, and your willingness to make things better for yourself and your children. You are a pioneer in the wasteland of all fatherless children. I applaud you from the depths of my soul. I wish you all the best, and wish the best for your family, too.

There is a place in consciousness where women and men can meet, can admit their failings and hear one another, and can grow from it into the future of humankind. You are there, my brother, it seems to me. My comments may seem "touchy-feely" but they are from my heart, as were yours.
Here's a big "Hell-Yeah!" to you, from across the divide.

[ExitZero]

01:19 PM on 03/22/2011

I've always found it amusing how men are so hung up on "what it means" to be a man. I don't believe women engage in this kind of thinking. Why does it have to mean anything? It means you have an XY chromosome.

The interesting point in this article is the concept of goodness - whether for man or woman. The human experience is infinitely varied, whether one is male or female, and there's a wealth of philosophy, poetry and science that goes into defining it. The concept of goodness transcends gender, it would seem to me, but this writer always tries to make that connection. Are men and women practice "goodness" in different ways?

I've always liked this writer's posts, but he seems to draw the wrath of men more than women. Is it that men object to the idea that, in the course of this search to find "meaning" in their XY chromsomes, they should give some consideration to the concept of being a good person? The hostility this writer generates always leaves me wondering why so many men seem to think think it's a bad thing to strive to be good.

[jf12]

03:34 PM on 03/22/2011

I don't any such men; I think Matlack says he started his site in an attempt to generate some interest among men where he saw none. Most (99+%) men know what it means to be themselves, and reasonably think others' views are far less relevant.

[Jason Ungar]

01:17 PM on 03/23/2011

I agree with you. I don't have time for this stuff. It's fun to read I guess but can careless.

[recless]

11:41 PM on 03/22/2011

Yes, but in my accepting that my masculinity has no real meaning I've been accused of narcissism and apathy. By women exclusively. Why do men worry about what it means to be a man? Most likely because society and culture have pushed to control and "domesticate" men and told them what it means to be a man. It is ingrained in us from childhood. Ever told a young boy he's a "big man" or becoming one?

There MAY be an aspect to it in regards to how men don't have kids and women do... but I'm not qualified to comment on such.

[ExitZero]

06:38 AM on 03/23/2011

But society has sought to control women as well. Arguably more so than it has men. Girls are presented with artificial standards of femininity in childhood that they are forced to conform to as well.

Yet women don't obsess over the "meaning" of being female. And certainly there's no controversy about the topic of whether one should be a "good woman". Women would think in terms of being a good person, not a good woman.

[whalepeace]

05:11 AM on 03/22/2011

Yet more semi-coherent whining from Matlack about how unfair the world is to men even though men control the politics, the economics, the legislatures and Congress that makes the laws, the militaries, entertainment, the religions, the media, everything.

It is delusional to posit that women control the vocabulary that interprets men's lives, when males control the language and conversation through the executive branch, legislatures, military, the Rupert Murdoch media, the corporations, the male-dominated porn and entertainment industries and all the power structures of society.

A clue: good men do not use the b-word to refer to women. How does it teach your daughter goodness when you refer to her mother, a woman you picked and chose to reproduce with, as a b-word? What does it teach your sons about how to view women? Good men do not whine and good men do not put women down as b-words. Good men lack narcissism and do not make it all about them.

I know good men. They are able to talk and communicate quite well and do not make excuses. They coach girl's basketball. They work to save endangered species. They teach nonviolent conflict resolution. They raise their chlidren to be gentle, kind, compassionate, curious people. They work on pediatric wards. They work with juvenile programs to help troubled kids. They help their families, friends, neighbors, communities and world and do not blather all over the Internet about what good men they are. They just do good.

[recless]

12:50 PM on 03/22/2011

So, "good" men to you are the ones who do what you think they should. Yup. Know that one.

Sorry, don't accept that being a "man" has anything to do with morality. That's culture and society telling us what it means. The things you describe as "good" in men are equally "good" in women, I would argue. Therefore it isn't even a gender issue.

[huffpostreader10000]

04:00 AM on 03/22/2011

With all due respect, aside from the verbosity of this article, there isn't much about WHY we don't need a men's movement. The headline grabbed me and I was truly curious. But far from convinced. While the original basic tenets of feminism may have been noble, today it has gotten to the point of demonizing men. When men feel good about themselves, or if they are nice and do something to help someone, they are quickly judged as being egotistical i.e. their nice behavior is about feeding their own egos and nothing to do with truly helping. Boys face a hostile school environment today than do girls. More men die at work than women. Men die earlier than women. Prostate cancer kills more men than breast cancer kills women yet more focus is on the latter. And on and on. And part of the problem is perpetuated by men in that they aren't vocal enough and aren't standing for their rights. Feminists are quick to say there are more powerful and wealthy men than women. They forget that for every such men there are countless who are the opposite. And these powerful men don't necessarily have a life that is a bed of roses.

http://www.avoiceformen.com/

[huffpostreader10000]

04:41 AM on 03/22/2011

I correct myself:
Breast cancer DOES kill more women than prostate cancer kills men. However, more men are affected by prostate cancer than women are by breast cancer. And also, there is way more publicity and funding for breast cancer than prostate cancer.

[livefortruth]

06:50 AM on 03/23/2011

Maybe men should go to the doctor more often?

[Majestry]

10:10 AM on 03/22/2011

Right on the money! F&F.

[recless]

01:46 AM on 03/22/2011

You know what I hate? Absolutely everybody's got an opinion about what it means to be a man and they ABSOLUTELY HAVE to tell everyone else about it.

I've reached a similar state as with my atheism. When it comes to "being a man" or what it means to be one I've decided that it is the same as religious and spiritual talk. Lots of people talking out their rear ends and acting like it doesn't smell. All a woman can tell me about being a man is what she wants in a man. All another man can tell me is what it means to him. I've become perfectly happy with just being "male" and to Hades with the babbling nonsense of social discourse. Living up to one's responsibilities is not a gender issue.

[Shaun Hensley]

01:24 PM on 03/22/2011

Word.

[McJeff]

12:21 AM on 03/22/2011

Your heart is in the right place, but you really, really need an editor. Or writing classes.

[Absolon]

01:20 AM on 03/23/2011

Reading this, I wince with the recognition of my own English teacher coming out to critique the grammar of what someone was trying to say, regardless of the merit of their thrust.
I'll make sure not to post any grammatically judgemental drivel from now on, and I surely have been guilty.This post and it's comments have been a graduate course in one evening.

[Cowboylove]

08:48 PM on 03/21/2011

Good article and basically true, though most of us do not have the luxury of traveling to a villa in Tuscany to discover ourselves.

[mjegan59]

07:48 PM on 03/21/2011

Tom,

This is my favorite of your articles and i read them all. A single dad of a two and a half year old daughter, i'm typing with one hand because other arm is over her shoulder while she takes a break and watches a show. i feel this is the most authentic article you've written yet and it catches me at a moment of thinking about my fight for visitation with my daughter, my pondering of a men's movement and my own desire to be a good father. what you are doing is very helpful to others. i too played college sports - sweated, bled and fought with my teammates - found career success and found that once my relationship ended the court was the first thing i felt i couldn't control (and i am a lawyer from a top 10 law school). i even started representing dads in family court after years of representing high-end contractors - i felt i could play a role in shaping their lives by taking the hardest cases (in some instances i did help but not all). i will never get used to not seeing my daughter every day (or most days) and i too have spent many teary nights at the loss, but i find something true in my precious minutes with her; it's grounding and enlivening in a world full of otherwise seemingly unrelenting challenges.

Thanks again,
MJ

[Peace Walker]

07:29 PM on 03/21/2011

We have learned long ago that the more society ensures and protects the rights of women to education, opportunity, self-determination the stronger society is as a whole (which includes men). The reverse is also true. The more consideration given to parents, because they are parents, the better off and healthier, and more productive our entire society is. Men wanting to return home finally challenges businesses to rethink the way that they penalize workers for having families (and having family priorities). We must stop thinking of things in terms of the mythical zero-sum game. Everyone impacts and is impacted by everyone else. The sooner we figure that out, the sooner we will achieve true equity and reach our full potential, both individually and collectively.

[SaneThoughts]

06:13 PM on 03/21/2011

A men's movement is a bogus idea. Men are firmly in charge. Its kind of like the fantasy idea that white people experience reverse discrimination. Open your eyes people!

[Shaun Hensley]

07:15 PM on 03/21/2011

Women run the world and always have.

[angelcakesinc]

01:59 AM on 03/22/2011

Yeah, that's why up until the last sixty years or so they were basically treated like property, and up til a hundred years ago they WERE property. Damn those women and their insidious plots to rule the world by being chattel!

[whalepeace]

05:21 AM on 03/22/2011

Hogwash. According to the United Nations data, women do 2/3 of the work of the world, yet get paid less than 10% of the wages and own less than 1% of the real property.

Everywhere on the planet, women are in danger of male violence. In this country, according to the Department of Justice, one in four women will be raped or sexually assaulted. All over the planet, women suffer from men's propensity for war. Everywhere women and children starve or live in poverty while the men waste the world' wealth on militaries. Half of the US federal budget goes to the military while education, nutrition programs and health care are cut.

The world is run by and for men, from the presidents and popes and imans and ayatollahs and kings and generals and corporate CEOs to the nuke plant engineers and the slackers who spend their days watching porn and denigrating women.

Sorry, but if women ran the world, it would be a very different place. Instead of wasting wealth on warfare, resources would go to making sure that no child was deprived or forced to exist in poverty; violence against women and children would be ended, the violence and destruction of the natural world would be halted, and the corrupt ayatollahs and popes and rabbis and imans and their misogyny would be dethroned.

[Peace Walker]

07:23 PM on 03/21/2011

Then you have never stood next to a man when he is denied his children.

[french queen13]

10:39 PM on 03/21/2011

That doesn't change the fact that men hold the overwhelming majority of wealth, property and social/political power throughout the world. The man-denied-his-children phenomenon is very much limited to Western countries.

[Dacyl Acevedo]

03:56 PM on 03/21/2011

Great article! I really enjoyed it. It was great to hear a man's poin of view about themselves, manhood, parenting, etc... I'm just disturbed by some of the comments to the article; women are not the enemy. We're not trying to put men down, we're trying to lift ourselves up. The Women's Movement has been so maligned as "man-hating". Let's not get it twisted people. The Women's Movement fights for reproductive rights, equal pay for equal work and to end violence against women around the world. It's much bigger than our personal, petty, little relationship melodramas. There are still women in the world who are being stoned to death, suffering genital mutilation, gang rape as a form of institutionalized punishment; burned with acid for wanting to go to school. Just recently an 11 year old girl is gang raped in TX and people still say she must've been asking for it.

[jf12]

04:31 PM on 03/21/2011

We agree that women *shouldn't* be the enemy.

[Absolon]

01:33 AM on 03/23/2011

What, but ARE? Just trying to clarify.
I think a human is a human is a human. I hope you feel the same. Woman is not sin, no matter what the Bible's edicts are. Man is not sin, either.

[dancingstu]

03:39 PM on 03/21/2011

"Mothers have more rights than fathers"
 
I know this is just a small aside aking up part of a larger point in the article, but it's simply not true.  It's a talking point that comes from a biased perspective of some fathers who feel they got a "raw deal" in divorce court.  If they really thought that women had a right over men, they could challenge the laws or court rulings on constitutional grounds, which they often do and invariably lose.

[Peace Walker]

07:24 PM on 03/21/2011

Then you have never stood beside a man as he fought for his rights to be with his children and were denied those rights.

[angelcakesinc]

02:03 AM on 03/22/2011

And you must not have stood next to a woman who had the same happen to her. Personally I've never stood by anyone in that situation but since I'm only 22 and hate kids I tend to avoid the whole 'parent' thing. Though I do seem to recall that a good friend of mine from high school who got married and had kids with his wife separated from her and I'm pretty sure he has custody.

[dancingstu]

09:38 AM on 03/22/2011

Nope, but I've seen countless custody cases where both men and women were denied custody, because they were proven to be unstable or an unfit parent.
 
Please tell me about the case where you stood beside a man who fought for custody rights and tell me the basis for the judge denying him custody.

[whalepeace]

05:33 AM on 03/22/2011

Actually, when men choose to seek custody of their children in the courts, more often than not, they win custody. In part, this is because most men have greater resources than women and can hire more experts to testify on their behalf.

And in part, this is because most judges are still male and biased agaisnt women. We have a Supreme Court justice and federal circuit court judges who are porn addicts, some watch porn on thier computers during court recesses, and no way do women ever get a fair shake in their courts. Studies show that judges are biased in favor of men and grant them more credibility than women.

Most men simply do not want custody of their children, most are not interested in the drudgery of caring for young children, the mess, the crying, the colds and sniffles and ear infections and spitting up. But men who want custody and seek it in court very often get it.

One of the most common whines from men is about having to pay child support for the children they sired. I guess they want the benefits of fatherhood without the concomitant burdens. Half of the divorced or unmarried fathers in the United States, according to the Departmnet of Justice, do not pay any child support at all. Even though studies show incontrovertibly that a man''s economic status improves after divorce and a woman and child's economic situation worsens, men still whine and want to deprive their kids. Nice.

[dancingstu]

09:43 AM on 03/22/2011

"Actually, when men choose to seek custody of their children in the courts, more often than not, they win custody. In part, this is because most men have greater resources than women and can hire more experts to testify on their behalf."
 
With all due respect, if the couple is still married, the husband shouldn't have any greater resources then the wife to hire an attorney and experts.
 
On the other hand, if the couple was never married, it would depend on their individual finances.  I can't comment on the average financial positions of couples in that situation, as they might not mirror the national average for men and women.

[YouKnowSteve]

12:58 PM on 03/21/2011

Interestingly, what I came out of the article with, was a strong sense of an attempt to masculinize the best attributes of the feminist movement -- not a pushing aside of women's gains, but a reinterpretation of our own personal gains via shared philosophies. You sought to find what many women fight against (and yet need so much) -- a group of strong, independent, and brutally honest friends. It's difficult to have that spotlight on us, to have our motives questioned, to have past statements provided as reminders of repeated mistakes. As men, we need that close and honest contact as well, yet lack it, generally, as men. So many missed opportunities to reach each other on a fundamental level, and we therefore do not properly learn from each other's experiences. Oprah may remind us all to connect, but we have to make the journey. I'm more than willing to make that journey with you, if even from a distance, Tom. I have a Hell of a lot to learn, too...

[HalfBakedSushi]

06:34 PM on 03/21/2011

"You sought to find what many women fight against (and yet need so much) -- a group of strong, independen­t, and brutally honest friends."

What exactly do you mean by "what many women fight against"? Do you mean we fight against our men having strong, independent, and brutally honest friends? Or do you mean that we fight against finding those types of women as friends?

Either way, I take a bit of an issue there. It's an assumptive sentence which generalizes women. I'm not exactly sure about the "and yet need so much" part either for those same reasons.

Speak for yourself, please, not for the female gender. Otherwise, I agree with your post.

[YouKnowSteve]

04:03 PM on 03/25/2011

I can't help but feel from your response that you asked me what I meant, then proceeded to answer yourself without allowing me to respond first to your questions.

I made sure to include the word many, not all, in order to ensure that I was not being overly generalizing in my statement. Please note that I also included men in that same description of those struggling (or fighting). It is a rare occurrence for me to find someone (male or female) not having difficulty in facing issues,or having faced issues of growth and personal change in their life. Many of us fight changes and growth as a rule. Many of us have made the sad mistake in our lives of casting aside true friends because we were unwilling to face (at that time,) honest statements made by them about how we do things, how we treat others, or other decisions we've made that worried them.

We (men and women) fight against OURSELVES. I apologize if my comment did not make that clear...

[Absolon]

01:46 AM on 03/23/2011

Your're right on, Steve.