Out of the Man Box: Do you have a story to tell?

Tuesday, March 03, 2015

Do you have a story to tell?

I'd like to hear your story about one or more of the following:

Gender conformity enforcement – hazing, verbal or physical abuse, ritual group performances;

Struggle, recovery, change in the face of gender conformity enforcement;

Loving individual or collective support for you or others who have been wounded by gender conformity enforcement.

If this brings to mind anything in your personal experience as a child or as an adult, please be in touch.

In addition to my interest in stories from the 'victim' standpoint I am also seeking stories from 'perpetrator' and 'bystander' standpoints. All are important to the whole picture and our understanding of our gender world!

In particular, if you have a memory of being an initiator/perpetrator of an incidence of gender conformity enforcement (many of us have) please consider sharing your story and present reflections on the effect it has had on you.

I am looking to gather ten to fifteen stories from which to build a performance script of pseudonymous characters telling their stories.

My own story is summarized in a piece I wrote called “Ending the ‘Ordinary’ Abuse of Young Men and Boys.” You can read it here: http://t.co/gSN92MkMra.

Send me a sketch… or just ask me how I can help get your story out.

Charles Knight @outofthemanbox
outofthemanbox(at)gmail.com

about the editor, this blog & associated publications

I have been following the engagement of men in changing gender relations for a couple of decades now.

I have experienced both the difficulties and the great benefits of change. I have contributed a bit to the literature. I am on the advisory board of Voice Male Magazine and BKNation. I am a founding associate of the Center for the Study of Men and Masculinity.

I have worked [now semi-retired] as a national security analyst. I am a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy.

In that work I write critical studies of U.S. defense policy. I also spend time making information about national security issues available on the Web so that millions of people in the United States and around the world are better informed and therefore better prepared to engage in the politics of security.

In 2004 I watched while George Bush and Karl Rove successfully called John Kerry’s masculinity into question around a war in which Kerry had served with distinction while Bush had used family connections to avoid going. Given conventional gender performance expectations of men this seemed like an unlikely formula for political success!

But Bush and Rove used male insecurity and female attachment to the most fundamental of bargains in patriarchy (men protecting the women folk) to build an election victory.

I realized that in order to make it harder for men like George Bush to lead us into unnecessary 'wars of choice' we need to free as many males as possible from the tyranny of wondering if they are ‘real men’ -- so that they can confidently say ‘no’ to war (as well as other destructive behaviors!) And that will take men organizing their own liberation from the confines of conventional masculinity.

A friend called my attention to the literature of people who have trans-gendered. Reading their stories brought home to me how much of what we experience as our gender is socially constructed and can be reconstructed by our own agency.

If we allow ourselves to think outside the confines of the binary Male/Female, the possibilities for liberating males is huge and obvious.

In this blog I have sought to build out ideas and practice for the liberation of positive new masculinities. I call attention to instances of the expression of new masculinities and to collective action in support of liberation and an end to gender violence.

I started this blog in 2006. In 2015 I associated it with a curated publication called Out of the Man Box (on the Flipboard platform.)

This publication collects the best writing (also videos) I find on liberating masculinities from the so-called man box of conventionality.

Out of the Man Box is published in association with Voice Male magazine.

Charles Knight

Out of the Man Box

Man in Box

Tuesday, March 03, 2015

Do you have a story to tell?

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