My 2012 Valentine’s post — running again by request…. Valentine’s Day comes sugar-coated with images of flowers and chocolates, romance and love. Okay, it’s true: I’m a sucker for romance. Falling in love is a moment of such intensity that you simultaneously feel connected with every atom on the planet and yet are oblivious of…
Tag: Politics/Economy/Society
“Mistakes were made.” “We apologize to anyone who may have been offended.” You’ve heard it all too often: an apology that doesn’t really, well, apologize. When my mother taught me to apologize to my sisters for one grievous childhood thing or another, it was all very clear: an apology meant four things. You take responsibility,…
Reason One: Giving Up is Hard to Do I’m a strong believer that men gain a huge amount from feminism. It’s been a theme of my writing and public speaking for thirty years (including in my new book, co-written with Michael Kimmel, The Guy’s Guide to Feminism.) But, let’s face it, you don’t make omelets…
The Occupy movement has been an amazing success. It started a broad public discussion on social inequality. On who controls our economies and governments. On who controls our public spaces. It quickly spread around the world. Right now, though, it risks getting trapped in its single tactic. And, ironically, it risks getting trapped in fetishizing…
From time to time, I invite colleagues to write a guest blog. Jorgen Lorentzen and Oystein Holter are both prominent in Norway as profeminist men working to promote gender equality and end all forms of violence against women. All opinions are those of the authors. In Norway, Gender Equality Does Extend to the Bedroom by…
The genius of the Occupy movement is the proclamation, from the outset, that it represents 99% of the population. That stands as a far cry from the huge youth movement in the late 1960s/early 1970s. We made a fundamental mistake in those days: we were not only content but we were thrilled to be a…
What do the Pope, Republican Rick Perry, and Attila the Hun have in common? It appears they’ve all written rave reviews for my new book The Guy’s Guide to Feminism Co-written with Michael Kimmel, it’ll be in bookstores across Canada and the US by early November. It’s an A-Z book, at times serious but full of…
The riots in London were not a political protest. But that doesn’t mean they didn’t have a meaning. They were, of course, a miserable business. They further destroyed downtrodden communities. They traumatized children. In addition to chain stores, looters trashed small businesses sweated over by families, often immigrants. To figure out what these riots were…
1. FIFA WOMEN’S WORLD CUP Every four years, my neighbourhood in downtown Toronto goes crazy. With people living around here from all over the world, a United Nation’s worth of flags hang from front porches and apartment balconies or flap from car windows. Streets regularly clog with honking cars of celebrating men and women or…
In countries around the world, we’re witnessing one of the greatest and swiftest changes in human history: in the course of a couple of generations we are redefining what it means to be a father. In a growing number of countries, young fathers not only expect to, but want to, play a central role in…
SlutWalks are spreading around the globe. So too is the controversy around the name and the image it’s creating. I was proud to be invited to address the inaugural SlutWalk in Toronto on April 3. The idea is glorious and simple: grab onto one of the many epitaphs that get thrown at (some) women as…
Dear Sarah, Sorry it took me so long to get back to you. There was the busy schedule of high school, college and professional football and then basketball games: all those teams praying that I choose them to win takes an enormous amount of research time and personal energy. (A few months ago, a Viking’s…
Amnesty International has released one of its human rights lists. On it are China, Iran, North Korea, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria, Bangladesh, and Somalia. All are known for deep and ongoing abuses of human rights. When it comes to human rights, it’s not a list that any right-thinking person (or country) would want to…
The catastrophe at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan speaks of many things. It speaks of corporate greed – its owner has been convicted of falsifying safety data in a singular pursuit of enriching itself even if its workers and perhaps countless others might die. It speaks of generations of Japanese governments that have pumped…
Two, three or even four opposing things can co-exist. It is possible that someone is, at the same time, a) a courageous, even heroic, advocate who says that citizens should know the truth and who is willing to take enormous personal risks to make that happen; b) an individual who may have committed a form…
A million women hit the streets in 230 Italian cities on February 13. 400,000, alone, marched in Rome. Media around the world played it up as a march against the sleezy, likely-Mafia-connected, Prime Minister Berlusconi who seems to have a thing for hair dye, plastic surgery, and buying sex from young women. I wondered if…
Three young Egyptians have produced a wonderful music video, “The Sound of Freedom” (Sout al Horeya). Here’s the video. But first, a partial translation from Al-Jazeera: I went down and I said I am not going back, and I wrote on every street wall that I am not going back. All barriers have been broken…
It has been captivating to watch the sudden and massive upheavals in Egypt sparked by the uprising in Tunisia and, in turn, speaking protest movements in Yemen, Jordan, Sudan and beyond. I do not wish to speculate on outcomes. Perhaps countries will descend into bloodshed as those who desperately hope to preserve the status quo…
A terrific new documentary by Marc de Guerre starts with the dramatic drop of full-time employment for men in the United States. Between December 2007 and March of 2010 the United States lost 8.2 million jobs. 80% of these jobs belonged to men. In 2008, the share of men in the United States with a…
There are a lot of strange things we now take for granted. On Tuesday night, I watched President Obama’s State of the Union address. From time-to-time he would illustrate a point by telling a short, heart-warming story about someone or other. Each time he did, the camera would dutifully shift to an person in the…
Once again, at the beginning of a new year, we are treated to variations of the familiar newspaper cartoon: Father Time is rumpled and wrinkled, emaciated and exhausted from his year on planet earth. We know he’s been done in not by a natural process of aging, but by the human processes of our age. …
Canada’s leading paper, The Globe and Mail, has featured my “Red Light, Yellow Light, Green Light Program.” This is a new leadership program for managers to help them manage anti-harassment policy with confidence. This full-day, half-day, or two-day program goes beyond traditional training that focuses on straightforward lists of the “red light” behaviours of what…
The war and now the occupation of Iraq is indeed about oil and the arms industries; it is about a particularly nasty dictator; it is about who controls the Middle-east, and about the long-held political agenda of a small circle in the United States who happen to control the White House. All true, but it…