On Belief and Masculinity

By Tony Barone

As funny as it may sound, people believe what they believe because they are assuming that it is the truth.

To borrow from Socrates, ideas about gender differences, philosophy, religion, the nature of society, one’s own values, are all things worth revisiting and examining. Only by comparing her own ideas with those of others can a person be certain that at any given time she is making choices and decisions based on a true set of personal values.

A person can, of course, believe whatever he wants. It is, however, crucial to understand that there’s a difference between beliefs built on a foundation of truth, and beliefs based on the tenuous and fallible foundation of popular consensus or socialization. The idea that each of us could have been acting on faulty information for our entire lives is a difficult one to swallow.

In your life look around and notice how many of your friends and family still hold on to ideas about the world, about life, about themselves, which they learned or developed as children.  From there, recognize that you may have ideas that are similarly incorrect or incomplete, and that there’s no easy way to tell whether your ‘story’ is missing something.

It is incredibly difficult to picture a world in which these beliefs are incorrect. It would be like growing up implicitly trusting the morality of your oldest friend only to find out later in life that he had been engaging in gender-based violence for years. This would be an exceptionally difficult mental jump to make.

So, what does all this have to do with masculinity and gender-based violence? Why am I meditating on the nature of belief for the Men’s Team blog?

Well, belief has everything to do with masculinity. Christopher Ford has written that there is nothing natural about masculinity. Rather, it is a set of ideas – beliefs – about what it means to be a man. These beliefs must be taken very seriously because at times they have had and continue to have abhorrent consequences.

25 years ago, a gunman entered a school in Montreal and massacred 14 female students.  Why? He was enraged because he believed those women were involved in studies meant for men. 

Now, not all beliefs about the nature of masculinity have negative consequences. For example, some traditional ideas about courage and devotion to family are difficult to see as anything but honorable. Still, these more positive characteristics cannot be separated from a broader system of belief that men are taught to act and identify with. These beliefs have everything to do with placing value on strength and violence and emotional detachment at the expense of care, vulnerability, and affect, and the consequences are experienced by both women and men.

Men have adopted these traditional beliefs as truths, and those who diverge from them are ridiculed by their peers. From a young age, children, boys and girls, are socialized into an understanding of their gender by the adults who shape their lives. Let’s use the question of emotional vulnerability as an example. In most cases, boys learn that they shouldn’t discuss issues about emotional problems, as to do so is deemed to be “like a woman,” or “not manly.”

A boy who experiences this conditioning will then be discouraged from seeking emotional support and will become increasingly emotionally-distant in his dealings with other peers. In the long-term, the result is that men are more likely than women to have a greater difficulty in identifying and expressing their true emotions, their true beliefs.

This is just one example of the way in which a belief in the inherent value of masculinity learned in childhood informs the ways in which men live their lives.

Given the incredible harm men have caused to women (and other men) based on such collective beliefs in masculinity,  it is time we started to do the difficult work of looking within and reevaluating whether those beliefs serve the interests of others and ourselves.

We have the responsibility of socializing future generations of men. We need a new set of beliefs to teach them.

The Myths of Manhood — A Series

By Christopher Ford

Beginning today and continuing into next year, I will be writing periodically as a part of a new series of blog posts here at The Men’s Team Blog that I would like to call The Myths of Manhood. It’s something a little bit different from our regular posts discussing violence against women, since the focus of this series is, as you can probably tell, men and masculinity.

But that does not mean it will be disconnected from the subject. Many folks often forget that violence and violence against women is by and large a men’s issue — according to Statistics Canada, approximately 8 out of 10 cases completed in adult criminal courts in Canada (2012) involved a male accused, and approximately 97% and 91% of persons accused of sexual offences and weapons offences respectively were men.

Furthermore, the largest age group of criminal offenders in Canada is men between the ages of 18 and 24, with the second largest being men between 25 and 34.

And so I affirm: we need to stop talking about violence against women as if it is a women’s issue. We need to recognize the massive role that socialization has on the behaviour of men (and the way others view men) if we ever want to put a stop to violence against women (and violence in general).

This is where the idea for this new series came from. I thought that I could investigate some of the ideas about manhood that derive from the patriarchal society in which we live, and to try and refute them. I will start with one for today, and then pick up next time with three more.

Myth: ’Masculinity’ is natural/innate in men

This will be a good myth to start off with, since many other myths about manhood are contained within (and we will be able to talk more about them later on!). But, basically, one of the fundamental myths of manhood is that every man is endowed naturally with ‘masculine’ characteristics and behaviours — you may have heard this myth phrased in different ways, such as “boys will be boys” or “it’s in our nature to be XYZ (sexually aggressive, tough, etc).”

Let’s try to unpack this a little bit. First of all, what do we mean when we say ‘masculine?’ The term masculinity for us — and indeed for our society — means the equation of manhood with violence, dominance, lack of emotion, physical strength and toughness, an insatiable drive for sex (with women), and other similar characteristics.

Now, some folks are of the belief that these characteristics of manhood are genetically inherited by all men, or, to put it another way, that to be a man (read ‘to have a penis’) somehow means that you are predetermined to have character traits like those listed above. And at some level, yes, genes may play a role in the way we behave. However, behaviours that our society ascribes to ‘masculinity’ are very often the products of the socialization of men through culture — and very often the sheer power of socializing forces is altogether ignored.

I know — some of you may be shaking your head in disagreement. But consider the following study performed by Margaret Mead, one of the most influential anthropologists of our time.

In her book, entitled Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), Mead studied three tribes in the region of modern-day Papua New Guinea. Although residing not too far away from one another, she found considerable differences in the ways men behaved, as well as the gender norms and roles for both men and women, between the tribes.

For the first tribe, the Arapesh people, she said that “both men and women were peaceful in temperament and neither men nor women made war” (although she does say that war did sometimes happen, but not very often). She also said that the Arapesh showed a considerable amount of egalitarianism, placing particular importance on egalitarian child-rearing.

Regarding the second, called the Mundugumor people, she said that “both men and women were warlike in temperament” — that is, violence was not something attributed to manhood or the nature of men, but it was a large part of the way their society functioned.

And, lastly, the third tribe, the Tchambuli, she said “were different from both. The men 'primped' and spent their time decorating themselves while the women worked and were the practical ones – the opposite of how it seemed in early 20th century America.” The Tchambuli men displayed many characteristics that we would associate with ‘femininity’ here in the West.

Yet, for all three of these tribes, men were not considered as any less masculine by the standards of any society but our own.

And so, in closing, I would like to say the following: we live in a culture that teaches men that they must be independent (i.e. like the protaganist in any American Western film, to not rely on anyone but themselves); that they have natural desires such as desires for sex and for violence that are insatiable (i.e. boys will be boys, or the myth that men think about sex every seven seconds); and that, in order to be a ‘real man,’ they have to be successful.

However, ‘to be successful’ as a man in our society often comes at the expense of others. According to our culture, the idea of success for a man living within it becomes conflated with the achievement of dominance over others, often either through physically overpowering another person or, as said by educator and entrepreneur Hamza Khan at White Ribbon’s What Makes a Man conference this November, through “having things.”

I will continue to unravel and overturn this myth and many others in later posts.

Stay tuned for the next Myth of Manhood — coming soon!

The lesson of 2014: Why we must believe women, always

By Nathan Kalman-Lamb

Well, it's December of a year that feels like it has been dominated by stories of gender-based violence. Of course, gender-based violence was no more prevalent in 2014 than any other year, it just feels that way because stories of domestic and sexual violence that are typically ignored or suppressed have achieved notoriety due to the celebrity of the figures involved.

We have attempted to engage with many of these stories in the inaugural year of the Men's Team blog, from  Isla Vista to Ray Rice. In these pieces we have tried to unpack from a structural standpoint how masculinity, particularly in its more extreme or toxic forms, invites men to perform acts of violence. This is an important project and one we remain fundamentally committed to. Indeed, one might say that spreading awareness about this reality is the reason why the Men's Team exists.

Yet, as the year comes to a close, I want to touch on a different dimension of gender-based violence, one that we have yet to engage and one that relates to perhaps the two highest-profile cases of the year (at least in Canada): Jian Ghomeshi and Bill Cosby. Of course, we could examine the violence performed by these two men over the years through the lens of toxic masculinity and coercive entitlement and it would certainly shed some light on their actions. That, however, is a project for a different day.

Jian Ghomeshi hosting a live taping of his radio show Q in Vancouver, 26 Mar 2009.  Image via Penmachine and has been distributed under the terms of this license. It has not been modified.

I want to end 2014 by focusing not on those who perpetrate gender-based violence, but those who are subjected to its horrors. The most resounding lesson to be gleaned from both the Ghomeshi and Cosby sagas is how remarkably difficult it is for a woman who has experienced sexual violence to speak about it and be believed.

Let us focus on the Ghomeshi case, for it is the most relevant to us here in Canada (indeed, it is particularly relevant to us here on the Men's Team given that Ghomeshi is a former York graduate who once led the York Federation of Students). When the news that the CBC had fired its most prominent radio host first emerged, Ghomeshi released a statement on Facebook exonerating himself of responsibility for any wrong-doing and instead cast aspersion on unnamed women he claimed were about to accuse him of significant sexual misconduct.

Within a day, those accusations emerged in the form of a report by the Toronto Star citing four anonymous women who all stated they had been subjected to sexual violence by Ghomeshi. This is the moment I want to dwell on, for it is the one that says everything about what women who experience this form of violence must endure.

The seemingly-overwhelming reaction online in the press and through social networking platforms was the call to reserve judgement. Let the legal process play itself out, we were told. This was a case of he said-she said. It would be wrong to make any assumptions about what actually happened.

Now, of course, hindsight makes it easy to suggest that this was not the most appropriate or rational response. And, it should be added, there is something deeply damning and disturbing that the word of one man was taken as commensurate with that of four women. Certainly, it speaks to the level of internalized misogyny that remains pervasive in our ostensibly post-feminist society.

But, that's not what I want to focus on either. No, rather, the point that I believe must be underlined repeatedly is this, and it is really very simple: we have an ethical obligation to believe women who say that they have experienced sexual violence. This moral imperative has nothing to do with the particular contingencies of the case in question. Instead, it is predicated on the fact that in the context of a patriarchal society - a society that systematically privileges and empowers men over women -  it is inherently unsafe for women to publicly articulate the harm they have experienced at the hands of men. If we are interested in building a world that is genuinely equitable from the standpoint of gender, we need to begin by acknowledging the systematic nature of women's oppression and the violence men perform against women. We need to believe women when they say that they have experienced sexual violence. Every single time.

Now, don't get me wrong, I am not suggesting that we abandon the legal system or the safeguards that exist to protect the innocent from being falsely proclaimed guilty. (I do reject the insidious and pervasive myth of the false rape accusation, one of Hollywood's favourite tropes most recently seen in the film Gone Girl, a myth that distorts the reality that the rates of false rape accusations are no different than those of false accusations of other crimes.) Men deserve a day in court, just like anybody else.

But, when it comes to the court of opinion, impartiality is no longer a legitimate option. Those who are genuinely concerned about the prevalence of gender-based violence need to stand by those who make accusations whenever they make accusations. We need to start believing women systematically in order to counter the systemic barriers to being believed that women face.

So, the next time that there is a Jian Ghomeshi, don't say you don't know who to believe. In 2015, when the time comes, believe every woman who has the remarkable courage required to say what happened to her.

I promise that there will be plenty of opportunities.