The Man's chief characteristic "was that he got away with everything."

But today, men seem to have lost their groove around the industrialised world.

By almost any statistical measure, the average man is worse off than he was forty years ago: men account for two out of three "deaths of despair."

• Suicide is now the number one cause of death among British men under forty-five.
• In the United States, one in three men with only a high school diploma are currently out of the labour force.
• 15 percent of American men report having no close friends (up from just 3 percent in 1990).
• The wages of most men are lower today than in 1979.
• Women's wages are higher across the board.
• Japan frets over its many male shut-ins, known as the hikikomori.
• Sweden has declared in its schools a pojkkrisen, or "boy crisis."

The first glimmerings of this crisis appeared in the late 1980s.

The mythopoetic Men's Movement attempted to treat this incipient sense of dislocation, which kicked off an apparently fruitless talk about the "inner male" served up on a platter of atavism, Jungian archetypes, and spuriously Native American practices like sweating in lodges, chanting, and running around bare-chested.

Our own moment is a familiar jumble: you hear the same carping about real men, weak men, feminized men, soft men, soy men, men's retreats, Men's Day, bug men, lizard men, etc.

Around and around goes the discourse, and yet we seem no closer to creating—or excavating—the Brave New Male.

The chief difference between then and now is that the statistical outlook for men was merely drooping in the eighties; now it has fallen off a cliff.

The structural disadvantage men now face

The proposed cultural solutions may float around without landing anywhere in particular, but the problem itself is grounded in hard facts.

In his new book, Of Boys and Men, Richard Reeves argues that the problem is structural. Society has undergone profound cultural and economic changes in the past few decades and many of them have left men—especially working-class men—disoriented and demoralised.

As certain structural barriers that used to hinder women have been removed, women have proven their "natural advantage" in several areas, including in our colleges and universities.

Meanwhile, the structural disadvantages men faced have only become more entrenched during the same period.

Several rounds of globalization, more outsourcing of traditionally "male" sectors like heavy industry, increasing automation, and greater workplace competition from women meant that, for many men, the economic picture has been getting bleaker by the year.

As a result, many men are struggling to fulfil their own outmoded expectations of what a man should be.

"The problem with feminism, as a liberation movement, is not that it has 'gone too far'," Reeves writes.

"It is that it has not gone far enough"—that is, it has not succeeded in replacing traditional models of masculinity with something more adequate to our current circumstances.

The Western male is stuck in a culture of masculinity that is now desperately mismatched with his material reality.

"Women's lives have been recast," Reeves writes. "Men's lives have not." Men have been consigned to "cultural redundancy."

Both Left and Right offer dissatisfying responses

Men in their twenties now earn slightly less on average than women of the same age.

While women are still catching up to men in the labour market, men are now falling further behind in education.

The gender gap in the awarding of undergraduate degrees is wider than in 1973, when Title IX was passed—but this time in women's favour.

Reeves points out that elite men are actually doing just fine.

He believes it's impossible to discuss the plight of men without discussing economic inequality, and the largest gap between men and women is inevitably at the bottom of the wealth, income, and academic performance distributions.

Reeves is dissatisfied with the usual responses to this set of problems on both the Left and the Right.

On the Right, one hears a kind of response associated with the Left on other issues, one has to do with societal norms and structural disadvantage ("It's not your fault; society has made you sick").

The Left is more likely to dismiss the whole phenomenon, hold men responsible for their problems, and advise them to purge themselves of their "toxic masculinity."

The Right's lamentations about male alienation too often serve as a pretext for—or gateway to—celebrations of the old patriarchy or even brazen misogyny.

One day a lost young man finds himself reading Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life; the next day he may be watching the former kickboxer and lifestyle influencer Andrew Tate ranting on YouTube or TikTok about how women "bear some responsibility" for sexual assault.

There is a lot of money to be made from exploiting the insecurities and fomenting the rage of frustrated male adolescents.

A less alarming but no less delusional example of this cultural mode is the cult of D-Day, or an unerring belief in the salutary, masculinizing effects of combat.

This idea is helpfully distilled in the following pablum, usually stamped over an image of Marcus Aurelius or a crowded Higgins boat: "Hard times create strong men / Strong men create good times / Good times create weak men / Weak men create hard times."

Apparently, today's strong men create history memes, while the longed-for test of manhood usually has the advantage of happening elsewhere at some other time.

A new model masculinity needs a new model of family and fatherhood

In any case, this is not what Reeves is about in this book.

He doesn't want to turn back the clock.

Nor is he proposing that we subtract from the gains women have made in the past fifty years in order to compensate the men who have lost out during the same period.

To voice concern about men and boys, Reeves insists, is not zero-sum. There are, for example, large labour shortfalls in teaching and health care that could be made up by enticing more men to consider these jobs.

If one aims to promote gender equality, one must consider that a society that serves men better—helping them be better fathers, brothers, and sons—will also serve women better.

And for society to serve men better, we have to start by asking what exactly our society needs men to be.

Reeves presents a cocktail of public policies that include longer and more generous paid leave for new dads, a reformed child-support system that no longer makes excessive demands of mothers, and more father-friendly employment opportunities (working from home, working part-time, or working flexible hours).

This would help alleviate the gender-wage gap while promoting a healthier fatherhood model—more "co-parenting," less "distant benefactor"—reflecting the demands of economic conditions not as they once were, but as they are now.

Men have ceded territory in the workforce; now it's time they picked up the slack at home.

And, as Reeves points out, in a nation like the United States where one in four children are without a father, it's difficult to imagine any successful new model of masculinity that isn't rooted in a new model of family and fatherhood.

The structural disadvantages faced by men and boys in education start early.

Almost one in four boys is diagnosed as having a "developmental disability", which Reeves attributes to the later development of the male prefrontal cortex.

The developmental gap is widest in the exam-heavy years of adolescence.

Boys are set up to fail academically in their youth, and that failure compounds over time. He proposes that boys should receive an extra year of pre-K instruction before starting school to offset their delayed cognitive development.

The problems facing men and boys are really those facing everybody

Notwithstanding Reeves's various schemes for persuading young men to consider new kinds of work, some disaffected men will still prefer to nurse grievances about being deprived of the world their fathers and grandfathers could take for granted.

They will prefer the antisocial consolations of callow idols like Tate to the practical advice of policy wonks like Reeves himself.

It is worth noting that plenty of seats in US federally funded retraining programs for displaced coal workers have gone unfilled.

Cultural norms and prejudices can be sticky.

They often survive long after the world in which they made sense has disappeared. And while no one is quite sure why, male pupils tend to perform better under male instructors, while the girls are unaffected by the difference.

However, a kindergarten teacher in the District of Columbia tells Reeves that "some people assume if you're a man teaching young kids that you're somehow a paedophile or weirdo pervert or something".

Where could they have gotten that idea? But a future of more male nurses does seem within reach.

The "murse" used to be a punchline.

Now, unlike many men working in factory jobs, the male nurse is solidly middle-class.

Reeves's concerns about the prospects of men and boys in contemporary American society come across as genuine. Despite his wonkish credentials and methods, the tone of this book is unabashedly empathetic. Of the opioid crisis, Reeves writes:

Opioids are not like other drugs, which might be taken to artificially boost confidence, energy, or illumination…. Opioids are taken simply to numb pain—perhaps physical pain at first, then existential pain. They are not drugs of inspiration or rebellion but of isolation and retreat. One reason that so many people die from opioid overdoses is that users are typically indoors and very often alone.

Reeves also notes that social dislocation leaves men "vulnerable to the attentions of a demagogue".

Donald Trump enjoyed the widest gender vote gap since exit polling began, and the counties with the most deaths of despair were the ones that swung most decisively to Trump in 2016.

This fact underscores Reeves's argument that the problems facing men and boys in America are really problems facing everyone, weighing heavily on our economy, schools, health-care system, and democracy.

Addressing the kind of male disadvantages that Reeves catalogues does not mean ignoring or excusing inequalities that favor men over women. It's possible, Reeves writes, to "hold two thoughts in our head at once." Indeed, it's urgent that we do so.

• Brendan Ruberry is a writer and editorial assistant living in New York City. This article originally appeared in Commonweal.
• Published in La-Croix International. Republished with permission.

It has been reported that the soldier, who is still awaiting court martial and has name suppression, was a member of multiple far-right groups, including the white nationalist organisation Action Zealandia.

He is facing numerous charges that include espionage.

Less widely reported is that a few months prior to his arrest, the newsletter of a parish in Palmerston North diocese lists him as receiving the Sacrament of Confirmation.

Sam Brittenden, who was arrested in relation to a threat to Al Noor Masjid in Christchurch in 2020, in the lead up to the first anniversary of the 2019 massacre, had also been a member of Action Zealandia.

In 2021 Brittenden became involved with the Sons of the Most Holy Redeemer (FSSR), before falling out with them and travelling to Ireland to join a fringe sect led by an excommunicated priest.

Why are young men like this gravitating toward Catholicism?

Vatican journalist Christopher Lamb, author of The Outsider: Pope Francis and His Battle to Reform the Church gave an answer when interviewed by Vanity Fair in 2020.

"The populists and nationalists were looking for some kind of soul for their politics. And they found it in some symbols of the faith."

The same article quoted David W Lafferty, who writes about conspiracy theories for the Catholic website "Where Peter Is," described this as "Catholic LARPing."

LARPing refers to ‘live action role play', that is, adopting the trappings of Catholicism without a real connection to the faith.

The contemporary far-right has adopted a view of history that sees ‘The West' as being in an ongoing conflict with Islam, dating back to the Crusades and continuing to this day.

The Crusader battle cry ‘Deus Vult' (God wills it) and the imagery of the pious Crusader knight reclaiming the Holy Land from Muslims, have become symbols of the alt-right movement.

Historical clashes between Christian and Islamic armies have been elevated to a kind of semi-mythological status.

The Christchurch shooter had adorned his weapons with the names and dates of centuries-old battles in which many Muslims were killed, and his manifesto anachronistically referred to Muslims as ‘Turks' throughout.

When he became involved with the FSSR, Sam Brittenden took the name John Capistrano, after a saint who led a crusade against Ottoman Turks at the Battle of Belgrade in 1456.

In a thread of quotes on a traditional Catholic web forum Brittenden frequently posted to, he shared one from Saint Bernard of Clairvaux preaching during the Second Crusade: ‘Fly then to arms; let a holy rage animate you in the fight, and let the Christian world resound with these words of the prophet.

Cursed be he who does not stain his sword with blood.'

Men from the alt-right looking to become practising Catholics tend to seek out the most traditionalist orders that reject the reforms of the Second Vatican Council.

Earlier this year in the United States, an FBI document, "Interest of Racially or Ethnically Motivated Violent Extremists in Radical-Traditionalist Catholic Ideology Almost Certainly Presents New Mitigation Opportunities," was leaked.

The document states that the FBI believes racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists will likely become more interested in "radical-traditionalist Catholic ideology" within the next 12 to 24 months, in the lead up to the next US presidential election.

The FBI planned to find sources within traditionalist groups to report on individuals seeking to use social media sites or places of worship as facilitation platforms to promote violence.

As we have seen, New Zealand is not immune to this phenomenon.

In addition to Brittenden and the arrested soldier, four men identified as traditionalist Catholics attended a recent rally in Auckland wearing garb associated with the alt-right movement.

A young man presenting at a parish and wanting to adopt the name of a crusader should trigger a response within Catholic communities — not one of rejection, but an opportunity for deradicalisation.

The supposedly Catholic worldview these men are acquiring largely through online spaces is out of step with the teachings of the modern Church, and their engagement with parishes is perhaps an opportunity to start them on a better path.

• Byron Clark is the author of ‘Fear: New Zealand's Hostile Underworld of Extremists'.

They are struggling in the classroom.

American girls are 14 percentage points more likely to be "school ready" than boys at age 5, controlling for parental characteristics.

By high school, two-thirds of the students in the top 10 percent of the class, ranked by G.P.A., are girls, while roughly two-thirds of the students at the lowest decile are boys.

In 2020, at the 16 top American law schools, not a single one of the flagship law reviews had a man as editor in chief.

Men are struggling in the workplace.

One in three American men with only a high school diploma — 10 million men — is now out of the labour force.

The biggest drop in employment is among young men aged 25 to 34.

Men who entered the work force in 1983 will earn about 10 percent less in real terms in their lifetimes than those who started a generation earlier.

Over the same period, women's lifetime earnings have increased 33 percent.

Pretty much all of the income gains that middle-class American families have enjoyed since 1970 are because of increases in women's earnings.

Men are also struggling physically.

Men account for close to three out of every four "deaths of despair" — suicide and drug overdoses. For every 100 middle-aged women who died of Covid up to mid-September 2021, there were 184 middle-aged men who died.

Richard V. Reeves's new book, "Of Boys and Men," is a landmark, one of the most important books of the year, not only because it is a comprehensive look at the male crisis, but also because it searches for the roots of that crisis and offers solutions.

I learned a lot I didn't know.

First, boys are much more hindered by challenging environments than girls.

Girls in poor neighbourhoods and unstable families may be able to climb their way out.

Boys are less likely to do so.

In Canada, boys born into the poorest households are twice as likely to remain poor as their female counterparts.

In American schools, boys' academic performance is more influenced by family background than girls' performance.

Boys raised by single parents have lower rates of college enrollment than girls raised by single parents.

Second, policies and programs designed to promote social mobility often work for women, but not men.

Reeves, a scholar at the Brookings Institution, visited Kalamazoo, Mich., where, thanks to a donor, high school graduates get to go to many colleges in the state free.

The program increased the number of women getting college degrees by 45 percent.

The men's graduation rates remained flat.

Reeves lists a whole series of programs, from early childhood education to college support efforts, that produced impressive gains for women, but did not boost men.

Reeves' has a series of policy proposals to address the crisis, the most controversial of which is redshirting boys — have them begin their schooling a year later than girls, because on average the prefrontal cortex and the cerebellum, which are involved in self-regulation, mature much earlier in girls than in boys.

There are many reasons men are struggling. Many men just seem less ambitious. Continue reading

Spending all his time between work, partner and family had destroyed his circle of friends.

So Max looked into the situation and found a lot of people in the same boat. His new book Billy No Mates is an honest, funny look at the dire state of male friendships.

Do men statistically have fewer friends than women?

A mental health charity in the UK did research asking men how many close friends they have.

One in three had none.

They also asked them how many people they could talk to about a medical, personal or work problem. Half of them had no one. There is a thing social scientists call network shrinkage. As we get older our social circle decreases. Over time men's circles get a great deal smaller than women's do.

Why are men struggling with close friendships, and what can we do about it?

A big thing is the way we are around one another. We use banter. Joshing, ribbing, taking the piss. It's great fun, but does it create a culture between men where they feel they have permission to take friendship beyond fun?

Men often don't show their full selves because that would give mates ammo. Competition, hierarchies and status are very important to men. We don't like to be seen as lower status, so we may not admit when things aren't great. Plus, there's a taboo against showing affection. We struggle with something as simple as telling a mate we like them.

Yeah, if you are blaming men's lower friendship rates on gender norms, it's very hard to argue that these haven't softened over time. If you compare the early 70s to now, it's pretty different, yet the problem doesn't seem to have improved. It suggests something fundamental is going on.

A bloke called Dr Robin Dunbar claims the male and female social worlds work very differently. Female friendships tend to be face-to-face, based on talk, and emotional disclosure. Male friendships tend to be less face-to-face and more side-by-side with much less emotional disclosure. It's more about sharing space and activities.

A close friend for men is someone they feel comfortable doing stuff with. When you ask men who their best friends are it's often more of a physical, active thing rather than a discussive form of intimacy.

So when men get divorced, laid off, bereaved or retire, men suffer worse physical and mental health outcomes than women. because they're more isolated on average. We often don't notice we don't have deeper friends.

Yeah, nuance is really important here because I wouldn't wanna be friends with someone who couldn't do some banter. It wouldn't be fun, but I suppose the point I'm making in the book is about having gears. Can you get out of third? Sometimes you need to go into fourth and fifth. I only had one gear. Always trying to be funny. It ended up putting a moat around me. It's just about making sure you have options.

Why is a lack of friends bad?

There's been huge research into the effects of loneliness on our physical health. Julia Holstead, a famous academic on the subject, discovered that being lonely is worse for you than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Worse than being obese. It's worse than drinking excessively.

There have been lots of studies finding connections between loneliness, depression and anxiety. In the UK, the Samaritans charity found the biggest killer of men under 45 in the UK is suicide. It's a complex situation, but they put the lack of close connections as one of the fundamental causes.

Then there's the big study by Robert Waldinger Harvard, following people over a whole lifetime. Social connection was the big factor for people living longer and reporting being happy. There are few things more important to our physical and mental life than having friends. But many men don't prioritise it.

It's hugely important but we treat it like a "nice to have". Continue reading

Their results surprised them, as they had expected conservative religious men to have lower housework participation due to their traditional gender ideologies.

Laurie deRose and Anna Barren suggest there are two basic reasons people assume religious men refrain from household chores: the first is a caricature of religious men as misogynistic, narcissistic, and controlling; the second is that many people understand that egalitarianism places high expectations on husbands and fathers, without recognizing that faith does likewise. Read more

At that time his wife took home a monthly salary of 12 million dong (NZ$785), much more than his.

Thinh ignored his relatives who advised him not to give up his job. They live with his parents, who are too old to care for their son, in Ho Chi Minh City.

"Now I both care for my child, do housework and run a laundry service at home to generate income, but my parents-in-law nag me to seek a job and support the family," the 35-year-old father said, adding that they tell him that as a man in a patriarchal society he must be the breadwinner and let his wife stay at home and look after the child.

Thinh admitted that he has an inferiority complex about his position in the family with his wife and picks quarrels with her about her relatives' complaints about him.

He said he plans to send their son to a Catholic-run daycare centre and look for a job but his wife, who is five months pregnant, asked him to take care of their second child after she gives birth.

"I feel disappointed with my wife, who tells me that she makes more money than me so she has the right to continue her work," he said, adding that she fails to acknowledge his sacrifice for their family.

"I am deeply ashamed of our problems and do not dare to tell other people including the parish priest," he said.

A recent social survey, "Men and Masculinities in a globalizing Vietnam," conducted by the Institute for Social Development Studies (ISDS), showed that over 80 per cent of interviewees agreed that women should do simple work and look after their families rather than build their careers.

The survey, which involved 2,567 men aged 18-64 from Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and the provinces of Khanh Hoa and Hoa Binh, disclosed little change in gender equality among men who claim that they have more abilities than women and are easily tolerated by the society.

ISDS director Khuat Thu Hong said men suffer from the burden of masculinity, have status as sole breadwinner on the brain and put themselves under pressure to show their firmness in front of women. Over 97 per cent of respondents said that they want to be the emotional and financial support of their spouses. Those who fail get stressful and consider themselves losers.

The findings revealed that 83 per cent of participants are concerned about the burden of supporting their families, while another 3 per cent admitted that they have considered suicide.

Over 30 per cent of participants in the survey experienced feeling lonely, 33 per cent feel weary and 16 per cent think they are failures.

Experts say many women are well educated and make more money than their husbands but their success hurts their spouses' pride.

Joseph Phan Van Huynh, 46, said he has grown weary of his marriage for years as his wife regards him as a social inferior.

Huynh, who has been married for 14 years, said his wife was a specialist in computer-aided design at a local newspaper and her salary was four times more than his. She made all decisions in the family.

"She asked me to support the children while she worked to buy a house," the father of three said. "I had no choice but to accept her request."

He said she quit her job and spends all time going out with her friends and doing charity work after she bought the house.

Huynh said he could not afford to cover his children's school fees, food and other family needs with his salary of 10 million dong per month. He has to ask for money from his siblings and ask them to prepare food for the children.

He said he asked his wife to share the family burden with him but she refused. "You are the breadwinner but could not buy the house. I already bought it. Now you must support the children. If not, you are not a fit man."

He said they no longer speak to one another.

Father Joachim Nguyen Thanh Tuu, an assistant priest from Vinh Hiep Parish in Ho Chi Minh City, said a Vietnamese saying goes "Men build houses and women build homes," so wives should treat their husbands humanely and kindly. Both have duties to work together and build their homes.

Father Tuu, who offers marriage courses to young couples, said men have practical experience in dealing with problems even though they have low education.

He said he tells couples to accept one another's weak points and help improve them rather than criticize one another. "They should respect one another and do their best to support their families, not focus on one another's education and finance," he added.

Mary Tran Thi Hoa, who works at a bank in Kien Giang province, said her spouse has just finished high school and works on farms to support the family.

Hoa said in the past they had bitter quarrels about little things and her husband avoided decision-making and dealing with family issues since he had a complex about his education.

The 45-year-old mother of three said one time he left her and returned home while they were out with her colleagues. Her colleagues unintentionally talked about broken marriages due to different education between wives and husbands.

Two years ago, she asked her parish priest to allow him to serve as the head of a group of Catholic households and he turned over a new leaf.

"He leads daily prayer sessions at church, gives the Eucharist to Massgoers and patients, and gathers people to pray for dying people and support those who have wedding parties," she said. He is content to make friends with other people.

"I am happy that he actively works with me to prepare for our son's wedding ceremonies next month," she said, adding that a happy marriage is based on real love, not education.

• First published in UCANews.com. Republished with permission.

We want our children, our coworkers, our friends, who are women, to find enjoyment and kindness in their relationships - whether its a short term hook up or a long term partnership.

In the wake of the trial of the man who killed Grace Millane, it is apparent that this is far from the norm in New Zealand.

As people who want women like Grace to be able to live normal lives, it has caused great disquiet.

The trial revealed that too many people do not understand what being in a respectful respecting relationship looks likes.

That this lack of understanding goes unchecked in our communities to the extent that men are harming and killing women. And that people in the justice system can either ignore the harm or comfortably frame women as being at fault.

The clearest voices of disquiet are women's.

While the trial of the man who killed Grace was happening there were at least two other cases (that I saw) in the media where women were subjected to cruel and harmful treatment by men in the context of a relationship.

The harm is ongoing and women are angry.

Many men see and hear that anger, and care.

I asked some of these men, what were they saying about the issues on social media, and in their everyday conversations.

There were many thoughtful responses. What the responses revealed is many men feel deeply that it is not right when women are blamed for contributing to their own murder. It is not right that sexual assault still gets minimised and ignored. Something needs to change.

Many said they felt it was not their story to tell. They wanted to make space for women to be heard. Some were scared of saying the wrong thing. And social media is a place where the impact of saying the 'wrong thing' or even just the hard thing can be brutal.

However, there is something important that should give men who care, confidence to speak:

• Men listen to other men.
• We listen to those who we share values with.
• We listen to those who are unexpected messengers on a topic.
• We listen to those who we perceive to be experts (not actual experts).
• In other words, men listen to other men they know about relationships.

Amplifying the stories and experiences of women matters. As important is for many men to have a voice about what good relationships look like.

Because both the story and the messenger has an impact on how people think about sex, relationships and consent, and how they act.

How can men talk about sexual violence in ways that sets up more productive thinking and prevents harm? Continue reading

• Dr Jess Berentson-Shaw is co-director of the policy and messaging collaborative The Workshop.

Since 1977, J.S.S. has been working for social change in Australia through a combination of delivering services to marginalized groups, like refugees and prisoners, and in-depth research and advocacy on their behalf.

As part of the agency's 40th anniversary, Julie Edwards, the group's chief executive officer, asked the organization to "sniff the wind," as she put it, to reflect on what they were seeing on the ground and consider what new efforts might be needed today.

"And what people kept coming back to," says Michael Livingstone, executive director of The Men's Project, which came out of that year of discernment, "was that the issues of boys and men persist.

They're overwhelmingly the people we see in our criminal justice programs and the perpetrators of family violence; they're also a higher percentage for other issues around mental health, risk-taking and drinking."

As former deputy commissioner of a state commission looking into family violence, Ms. Faulkner was intimately familiar with these problems and also the broader human web within which they exist.

"It's not just a matter of an individual," she told the group. "Society has to change."

The problem of Christian masculinity

The Catholic Church in the United States has long promoted notions of Catholic masculinity and offered groups and movements for men.

Recent decades have also seen the rise of an entire industry of Christian men's self-help books, with titles like Act Like Men: 40 Days to Biblical Manhood, Manual to Manhood and Catholic Manhood Today. Many are bestsellers. John Eldredge's Wild at Heart (2001) remains No. 1 on Amazon's list of titles about Christian men's issues 17 years after its publication.

From the #MeToo movement to the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court, from remembering the kindness of the children's television pioneer Mr. Rogers to examining the leadership of Pope Francis, the last year has witnessed the rise of an extraordinary international conversation around gender and power even as it has inspired an at-times vituperative pushback from some.

In this watershed moment, when it is so clear that thinking about men and masculinity is evolving, where is the church?

And how can it help? Continue reading

I'd been summoned to an editor's office at the Globe Magazine with the old "We have a story we think you'd be perfect for." This is how editors talk when they're about to con you into doing something you don't want to do.

Here was the pitch: We want you to write about how middle-aged men have no friends.

Excuse me? I have plenty of friends. Are you calling me a loser? You are.

The editor told me there was all sorts of evidence out there about how men, as they age, let their close friendships lapse, and that that fact can cause all sorts of problems and have a terrible impact on their health.

I told the editor I'd think about it. This is how reporters talk when they're trying to get out of something they don't want to do.

As I walked back to my desk in the newsroom — a distance of maybe 100 yards — I quickly took stock of my life to try to prove to myself that I was not, in fact, perfect for this story.

First of all, there was my buddy Mark. We went to high school together, and I still talk to him all the time, and we hang out all the . . . Wait, how often do we actually hang out? Maybe four or five times a year?

And then there was my other best friend from high school, Rory, and . . . I genuinely could not remember the last time I'd seen him. Had it already been a year? Entirely possible.

There were all those other good friends who feel as if they're still in my lives because we keep tabs on one another via social media, but as I ran down the list of those I'd consider real, true, lifelong friends, I realized that it had been years since I'd seen many of them, even decades for a few. Continue reading

• Billy Baker is a feature writer for the Boston Globe's metro section.

Part of Fr O'Connor's ministry, working in the Brownsville Texas parish, is to visit two detention centres, one for captured minor migrants and the other for captured adult migrants.

Given their personal circumstance and after all they have been through, Fr O'Connor offers a listening ear.

Fr O'Connor says that despite their detention he has a quiet admiration for the detained minors.

To get to the detention centre they travel around 1,200 miles.

Outlining a typical journey, Fr O'Connor says the kids ‘train surf'; travel on the top of long trains called the "Bestia" (the Beast), they walk and bus through Central America and Mexico, they cross over the border in the desert where there are no high fences and border control and are either caught or in some cases give themselves up.

The minors that make to the detention centres are treated very well, but many get left in the desert, Fr O'Connor says.

Not all end up in detention centres.

"Others make it and cross the border without getting caught and end up hiding for a time in ‘stack houses', where hundreds are locked in a room", he says.

The atmosphere in the adult detention centre is very different, run by the State, they are more like a prison; barbed wire included, he says.

"Those in red overhauls have serious criminal records in the USA, those in "safety orange" have light criminal records and the blues (majority) are just ‘illegals' caught crossing the divide", he said.

With more than 1,300 adult men detainees Fr O'Connor suggests it is not all negative.

"The last time there we had a full auditorium for mass, lots of pretty gutsy confessions too. Who says "men don't cry?

As well as "locals" currently there are three from Ghana, one from Somalia, people from Ecuador, Peru and five Chinese; whom he thinks made their first communion.

Commenting on his new mission, Fr O'Connor says that after being on mission in Peru and Venezuela for more than 30 years, he says it's taken a bit of time to get his feet on the ground.

With the Peru - Venezuela district closing, Fr O'Connor was asked by the Society of Mary's Superior General, Fr John Hannan, join the Marist mission in Brownsville, USA.

Fr O'Connor says while preferring to work with the more physically poor he can see the wisdom of living to saying, "‘Where the captain sends, the sailor goes'. It works for me".

On Tuesday 8 July, 2014, BBC reports:

"The fate of tens of thousands of child migrants in the United States is turning into a major political problem for President Obama.

"This week he is expected to ask Congress for US$2bn to build detention centres and hire new officials - just to cope with the number of unaccompanied children arriving from Central America.

"Many of President Obama's supporters are upset at plans to send the children back to their home countries."

Fr Tony O'Connor is a New Zealand Marist, working in the United States and part of the Society of Mary USA Province Brownsville Parish ministry.

Sources

• Fr John Murphy, Society of Mary New Zealand
• Image: Press TV

He knows that he's fortunate to be born in the right time and place, with the right gender and skin colour, to make him one of the privileged in this world.

He knows that he's the beneficiary of a history that has given him wealth and status, while depriving that wealth and status from others.

This history haunts him.

There is the dispossession of the Indigenous people, which means even the property he owns is tainted by the fact that it was never legally obtained to begin with.

There was, and is, the exploitation of people and resources in other parts of the world, which adds a human cost to the economic prosperity he enjoys.

The relative peace in his home country stands in stark contrast to the world wars his fellow countrymen fought on foreign lands, and the continuing conflicts in less fortunate countries. He might want to forget all this, but the boats that continue to arrive on his country's shores jolt his conscience.

His body itself is a symbol of his inherited power and privilege.

He hears women talk about being afraid to go out at night alone, and is conscious of the hunched shoulders of women he passes on the street.

He sees the great strides women have made in the workforce, yet sits in management meetings where nine out of ten leaders are men.

He reacts angrily at stories of domestic violence, but knows that the anger he feels carries the same seeds of that violence. He sees bikini clad women on his television screen and feels guilty at admiring their bodies.

The power within him both seduces and scares him.

Fences are built around his property, just as borders were created around his country, to mark what he owns, and to keep out those who don't belong.

As he drives around the sprawling city in which he lives, he sees the pollution filling up the waterways, the smog hanging in the air — the consequences of seeing a place as a possession to be cordoned off and exploited. He wonders if the obscenities he hears when he goes to the football are just a different form of that pollution.

He was brought up to think coldly, to analyse a problem and come to a logical solution.

He stays late at the office to meet the deadlines his boss has given him, while wishing he could be there to read to his children before they go to bed.

He watches while his company brings in labour from overseas to keep down wages. He invests in stocks, and follows the news stories of global economic crisis.

He believes in capitalism, but wonders if there would be fewer unemployed people, less talent and potential wasted, if our society weren't so calculating.

He also knows that what he has come to stand for doesn't have to be what he is. Continue reading

Her perspective has a lot of intuitive appeal in an era where millions of women have children outside of marriage, serve as breadwinner moms to their families, or are raising children on their own. Dads certainly seem dispensable in today's world.

What this view overlooks, however, is a growing body of research suggesting that men bring much more to the parenting enterprise than money, especially today, when many fathers are highly involved in the warp and woof of childrearing. As Yale psychiatrist Kyle Pruett put it in Salon: "fathers don't mother."

Pruett's argument is that fathers often engage their children in ways that differ from the ways in which mothers engage their children. Yes, there are exceptions, and, yes, parents also engage their children in ways that are not specifically gendered. But there are at least four ways, spelled out in my new book, Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives (co-edited with Kathleen Kovner Kline), that today's dads tend to make distinctive contributions to their children's lives:

The Power of Play "In infants and toddlers, fathers' hallmark style of interaction is physical play that is characterized by arousal, excitement, and unpredictability," writes psychologist Ross Parke, who has conducted dozens of studies on fatherhood, including a study of 390 families that asked mothers and fathers to describe in detail how they played with their children. By contrast, mothers are "more modulated and less arousing" in their approach to play. Continue reading

Sources

• The Atlantic
• Image: We Made

The rise in men and women entering religious orders is across a wide variety of different orders, some of which have not had novices for many years.

Last year also saw the highest number of ordinations to the diocesan priesthood in nearly 10 years, with 31 priests ordained for the dioceses of England and Wales.

Continue reading

"There's got to be something more than this!" This howl of discontent comes from Alex, a thirtysomething married executive, one of four Aussie males romping their way through Certified Male, the blokey comedy playing around Australia.

Alex rarely questions the 65-plus working hours he puts in each week. He's always agreed with his wife, Sam, that he has to work long hours so she can be there for the kids. Besides, she's got her charity work and, as she says, there's no point in her taking up a job just for the sake of earning money, is there? All her friends at book club totally agree.

But during the days Alex spends with his mates on a work retreat, his alienation in his marriage starts to surface. "I get into bed next to my wife and it's the loneliest place on earth." He determines he's going to have it out with her. Read more

Sources

• Bettina Arndt in Stuff
• Image: The Good Men Project

Bettina Arndt is an Australian sex therapist, journalist and clinical psychologist.

Despite these constructive qualities of sport, we need to ponder three not so positive, interconnected trends evident, not just in New Zealand, but globally.

The first disturbing fact is that, as never before, economic and corporate factors have come to dominate professional sport. Each year professional sport is becoming increasingly commercialised. In Australia television and broadcasting rights for sport are their biggest source of revenue for the media companies.

Corporate values have invaded our sporting world. As one observer correctly said: "the bottom line has replaced the goal line." A sporting event is judged in terms of the amount of money it produces for its sponsors. The markers of success are: how many spectators, media contracts, merchandise sales does a game attract. Even stadiums are named after corporate sponsors. Players are judged not only in terms of their physical skills, but also their ability to entertain their admirers by behaviour on and off the field. Invariably this increases the financial return to investors .

The second distressing quality of much contemporary sport is its over-emphasis on male power supremacy. The mass media repeatedly proclaims the message of gender domination through their extensive coverage of male sporting events. In Australia, for example, women's sports occupies only 8 percent of the total space devoted to reporting sports results.

Participation by boys in sport is often a kind of initiation ritual into manhood. They must be tough, show no pain, bond with one another. Coaches are known to berate unsuccessful teams as "playing like a pack of girls." The message is: since women are considered to be second-rate in sport, by inference they are less gifted in other areas of their lives.

When "masculinity" is portrayed as synonymous with physical strength and power to dominate women, for a man to be called "effeminate" is an insult of considerable proportions. In most sports men are associated with physical power and contact, but when they enter graceful activities like figure skating, the pejorative label "feminine" is common. Hence, these sports are considered of less importance, not "manly enough."

A leading thinker in the 19^th century, John S. Mill, believed that women should be educated in order to be able to maintain the social norms established by men. A poorly educated woman, it was claimed, would weaken a man's ability to keep society's standards at the "right" level.

This male-dominated view of education continues today in some subtle ways, even in the sporting world. It is not uncommon in the business world, dominated by male values, for female executives wishing to advance in business, to have to acquire the cultural language of male sport. If they do not appear at the latest big game accompanied by their clients, they are in danger of being ostracised by their corporate colleagues as irrelevant.

The third alarming quality of corporate-sponsored sport is its connection to violence. The similarities between big-time sport and war are a common culture of combat and competitive placement of force and violence. War terminology is regularly applied to sports, e.g. "might is right," "battleground," "combatants," "winner take all," "survival of the fittest."

Praise of ritualized violence is taken for granted in commercial sports journalism. There is admiration for the victors when they have been able to wound the "enemy" such as in boxing and wrestling. As a result, when pressures build up in domestic or other relationships, men can feel that venting them by violent methods is legitimised by society. Violent sports lower the threshold of repugnance in society toward violence in general. War and combative sports can overlap and reinforce one another, not as substitutes for one another.

In brief, as one skilled observer notes, sport has become the great masculine secular religion of our times. How can the positive Gospel qualities of sport again flourish such as relaxation, gender equality, development of good health, collaboration?

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Gerald A. Arbuckle, sm, is the author of Violence, Society, and the Church: A Cultural Approach (2004), which further develops the above themes.

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