The Bear, #MeToo, and, well, me too....

   True story.
   A few years ago, I was walking through the forest, alone, and I came across a bear. It was a mother bear and she had a cub with her. From all I knew of wilderness safety, this was a bad combination. I stopped dead in my tracks and watched them. My mind, however, was racing a mile a minute. It was going through all the small bits of data it carried regarding bears--- their tendencies, behaviours and inclinations.
   I had been in close proximity to wild bears before but it was always from the safety of a car, stopped by the edges of mountain highways. I had never been on foot, alone, with only the fresh morning air between me and a bear.
   What I knew in that moment was that the bear was the one who would be deciding what happened next. I knew I could neither fight nor outrun it. 
   Without the presence of the bear, the situation was as

benign as you could have made it. The sun was filtering down through the treetops, the forest was moist and primeval, and the air was easy to breathe. With a bear and her cub added to the equation, however, I was suddenly faced with some terrible possibilities, the consequences of which might leave my life seriously compromised or, possibly, over.
   The mother bear saw me at the same time I saw her. Neither of us lost eye contact for what seemed like an eternity. Blessedly, the cub had no idea I existed and was intent on exploring its surroundings. Its curiosity took it across the trail I'd been on and back up into the forest. The mother briefly continued to look at me but then decided to follow her cub. I gave them a minute to get further into the forest and then I hurriedly continued on my way.
   It did not occur to me then but it strikes me now that this must be what it's like for women to travel a landscape which, as much as the forest is made for the bear, is almost entirely advantageous to men---men of many ilks and dispositions.
   I, obviously, am a man and part of a subgroup which benefits from a great many things not always afforded to women. Of all of these, personal safety is perhaps the area in which there is the largest chasm of difference. For the most part, men go where they want with no fear. Until, perhaps, you are in the forest with a bear.
   When you are in the forest with a bear, you are at the mercy of whatever natural instinct strikes them. You have no idea when (or what) they might have eaten last, what the nature was of the interaction they had with the last human they saw, or, more simply, whether they were having a bad day or not. If you are lucky, you get to safely share their environment with them. If you have picked a bad day to be in the forest, then you are maimed or dead.
   In a way, is this not the same for some, many or even all women? Whether or not it is at the forefront of their fears, is it not at least subliminally there, whispering warnings? As benign as the setting may be, if you are a woman in close proximity to a man you are unfamiliar with is it not that much different than coming across that bear in the forest? And how many hundreds of thousands of women have found themselves in the forest, on a bad day?
   

It is now the era of #MeToo and #TimesUp. In an age when communication between people is both instant and constant, women have been able to rally around these hashtags and share their stories and fears. Because of this, both collectively and individually, they have found the ability to rise up against the evil which men sometimes do and have almost always gotten away with. #MeToo has also exposed the pervasiveness of male sexism---at any given point in their lives, pretty well all women could justifiably claim to have been victimized in some way, shape or form.
   In part because of #MeToo, patterns of male behaviour have been laid bare, open for inspection, and many of us men have been found lacking. We have also been found complicit---many times by simply looking away. We have heard stories from other men about the many ways they might have abused women, or continue to do so, and we have remained silent.
   In the ongoing aftermath of all this, many men, I believe, are now looking back at their past interactions with women in an attempt to determine whether at some point they might have strayed. Some men may have done this in an effort to predict possible fallout headed their way. Other men, simply in an effort to understand how their attitudes and behaviours in the past can be changed for the better.
   As a man, you can learn if you pay attention. I have a female friend on Facebook I've known for many years. She has an amazing smile, in my opinion, but she rarely uses it when she posts photos. In the past, I have gone out of my way to point this out to her, while commenting on the occasional pic. It has only been since the emergence of #MeToo and the accompanying discourse on latent sexism, that I've come to realize how inappropriate it is for me to do this, regardless of how well I know this woman and and how light-hearted our exchanges seem. So I've stopped making this mistake and am actually contemplating an apology. It is simply not my place to offer an opinion to someone on how they can more closely live up to what my expectations are on how physically attractive I think they could be.
   This seems like just a small thing to me but I also think it is indicative of what hopefully the new climate around gender roles is bringing---men rethinking how they act and react around women. And if you are on social media and you are paying attention, women will actually provide you with do's and don'ts.
   For a moment, back to the bear in the forest. 
   I drew the comparison between me encountering that bear in the forest and women interacting with men in common, everyday environments. I'm not sure how far-fetched or unrealistic comparing those two things may sound to you but the fact of the matter is this---for that length of time I was in that forest with that bear, my life was basically upside-down. Whatever vestige of male privilege I'd carried with me prior to that moment slipped away into nothing. No amount of physical strength or intellectual reasoning was going to come between me and that bear. If the bear thought it had any good reason to seriously hurt or kill me, well, that's what was going to happen. I would have done nothing wrong but having been in the wrong place at the wrong time, with a predator. Is this not sometimes what women face? 
   I'm going to present yet another metaphor or scenario which, as far-fetched as it might sound, I think might actually be applicable. As women walk around in this world they are faced with about 50% of the rest of the population being male. Out of that 50%, perhaps 75% of men are capable of performing whatever act of violence they wish upon whatever women they encounter. As a man, I can only think of one sphere of existence wherein, on a daily basis, I might have to live my life faced with similar odds of having to face violence or possible death. Prison. 

Is this what it's like for women, in a man's world?

   These are not numbers which will ever change and I doubt that many of us view life this way. But, for many women, this is a reality and for many women it will become a reality. As men, we need to understand our role in all of this and come to grips with some of the changes which need to happen.
   This will probably screw us up. How we treat women (how we treat people, in general) is something we started to learn basically as we were lying on our mothers' bellies for the first time. We learned from how our mother treated us and then watching how she was treated.  We have witnessed the many ways power can be used. We have spent our lives watching how the people around us used or abused relationships and we have formed behaviours around all this which will now be difficult to change. There will be confusion and there will be anger and we will rail against what seems to suddenly be an injustice we don't understand.
   Make no mistake about it, though, women will force a change.  Women will save themselves. Along the way, men will need to provide fewer reasons for women to be wary of us. We will need to come to grips with masculinity also meaning protecting, enabling, and respecting as much as it does anything else. We can do this if we just think. What we can't become, or continue to be, is the bear in the forest.
   
   
   

   

Idiot Men

   About a month ago, my ball hockey team won against a team higher in the standings than us. The game had been close and this generally leads to tight, physical battles during play. After the game, both teams ended up beside each other in the dressing room hallway, waiting for the rooms to be unlocked.

   I was a little late getting there but apparently something had been said by someone on one team to someone on the other team and this had led to a verbal altercation. It was one of those chest-pounding, my-brother-is-tougher-than-your-brother kinds of things, with the two teams sidling dangerously close to each other. Sort of like playground stuff. I stepped in between two of the main verbal combatants (fairly safe when you've got goalie equipment on), faced my guy and basically gave him the "let's knock it off" speech. The refs were also busy keeping the peace and so both teams retreated to their now-unlocked dressing rooms and the whole incident was over.
   Men, acting like idiots. Again.
   Not long after I got home (and possibly the next day) I came across an article in social media. It's a piece written by Margaret Wente for the Globe and Mail and it's called "When men behave badly." You can read it for yourself here. 
   In it, she refers to a British Medical Journal study in which they investigated male behaviour in regards to risk-taking, particularly low-reward risk-taking. The gist of the study was that men have a much higher propensity for doing stupid stuff than women, stuff which might not even offer viable rewards. Essentially, men are idiots. The study even coined the term "male idiot theory" (MIT).
   Okay, I didn't tell you anything you didn't already know, did I?
   For the purposes of this blog post, I am going to lump in the types of men Wente described (those who relish in silly stunts and risk-taking) along with men who see their maleness as a licence for power. I consider them all to be "idiot men". You may have an idiot man in your life and, if you're lucky, he's one of those idiot men who has a few other redeeming features and that is why you possibly still love and/or allow him to exist in your world.
   If you are un-lucky, however, the idiot man in your life is (at best) an albatross around your neck or (at worst) a threat to your life and the lives of the ones around you.
   My circle of friends has supplied me with examples, seemingly endlessly, of idiot men.
   These men treated their spouses or girlfriends with extreme disregard. The women were belittled, ridiculed, controlled, ignored and quite often kept away from their support groups. They were asked to conform to the man's idea of what he thought was good for them. In the odd case, women came face-to-face with physical violence.
   Most of this was reported second-handedly but some of it happened right in front of me. Each time it happened, my jaw dropped, at least figuratively. It was incomprehensible to me that one human being could be so disrespectful to another, let alone a man to a woman he professed to care for.
   Every time something like this happened, my list of idiot men grew. A brief sojourn through the daily news and the list becomes seemingly endless.
   It is the quest for power (or perhaps the irrational fear of losing it) which fuels idiot men, I believe. When we won that game over that better team, we stripped them of some of their power. Their power became our power, suddenly, and out of this arose the post-game conflict. 
   Losing your power to a woman is even more problematic for idiot men. In all the gradations of power conflict, the fact that most women are at least physically weaker than men (ignoring for the moment my own personal belief that most men would die during childbirth) makes losing power to them that much more inconceivable. An idiot man can rationalize his team losing or his male boss having control over him or a big loss on poker night but he will have issues when and if a woman strolls into his life in a position of viability.
   

So, from male idiocy on a global basis (think Boko Haram) to male idiocy on a national basis (think Jian Ghomeshi) to male idiocy on a neighbourhood basis (think that guy you know who referred to his wife as a stupid bitch), the world is rife with men acting like idiots. The irony, though, is that often when you give up that irrational need to be in a position of power you actually become more powerful! If one hockey team stands outside a dressing room voicing insults at the other team and that other team just goes yeah, whatever and marches into its own room then where does the true power lie there? 
   It is a freeing thing when you give up the trappings of male idiocy. When there is  no need to live up to some testosterone-driven hype or standard about the need for dominance, you become free to simply live your life. Threats will disappear or become diminished. People will work with you, rather than against you. And, chances are, you'll live longer!
    
     
   
   

Jocks: Part Two

   In the previous post, I began to describe to you how I was initiated into the world of jocks. I purposely attempted to keep the tone light and hopefully somewhat amusing. The longer I wrote, however, the more there seemed to be to write about and I realized that not much about it was light and amusing. So I saved it for today.
   If you have spent any appreciable amount of time being around jocks for whatever reason then you've probably seen something ugly. This has probably happened on a team you've played for, on another team you played against, as a spectator or perhaps as a friend or relative of someone on a team somewhere.
   The ugly thing you saw was an athlete or possibly even a fan who simply forgot who, what or where they were and acted reprehensibly. They shouted an insult, they made an obscene gesture, they physically assaulted someone. Subconsciously, they reasoned that their mere presence at a sporting event gave them licence to act in a manner that, if it had occurred almost anywhere else in public, would have gotten them totally ostracized, fired or thrown in jail. If you have been lucky enough to have avoided any of this personally then it is still more than likely that you've seen an example of it on t.v., in the newspapers, or on the internet.

   I have spent about fifty years being involved in sports one way or another, as a parent, as a viewer or as an active participant. It is clearly the jock mentality occasionally rearing its ugly head that is my least favourite aspect of having been involved for so long.
   It is probably unnecessary to spend a lot of time here analyzing why the jock/violence mentality exists. It is a very multi-faceted issue involving, I believe, psychology, sociology, economics, and even sexuality. Regardless of the reasons for their existence, it still bugs me that I run into these knobs or am assailed in other ways by their mindless antics.
   In the blog previous to this, I talked about my trials and tribulations with the jocks at Oakridge, my high school. In a blog I posted back in early May, entitled "Bullies", I described an experience I had as a hockey parent many years ago. I had been with my sons in a dressing room after a game and one of the mothers was frantically trying not to be the last parent left in the dressing room. The reason for her fear was that her estranged and physically abusive husband was in the arena and she was terrified at the prospect of possibly ending up being alone with him at some point. What I didn't mention was that the abusive husband had also been on the Oakridge high school hockey team during my tenure there. He wasn't someone I knew personally but, at the same time, it was disturbing to think that a high school contemporary of mine had gone on to this kind of a relationship with the mother of his children. It was also hard to disassociate this man from the sports environment, the only environment in which I was familiar with him.
   Obviously, sports is not the reason why people abuse. Just as often, I suspect, sports plays a role in stopping abuse. It`s just that I have personally seen some of the nicest, most mild-mannered people go all gonzo once you get them into a sports setting.
   I play a lot of ball hockey. We pay to play, there are no salaries involved, and there is no fame resting on the results of games. And yet there is still belligerence and ugliness. There are players out there who will berate you for every little mistake. There are also players who have invested way too much of their manhood into the outcomes of even small little battles, let alone the outcomes of games or seasons. I was involved in a game once and one of our players and one of their players got into a minor altercation in the corner. The rest of the play headed towards the other end but these two guys walked back, jawing at each other. In a classic prelude to a hockey fight, one guy`s glove "facewashes" the other guy and this is reciprocated. Before you know it, fists are flying. Their guy is about three inches taller and forty pounds (all muscle) heavier and the fight is over very quickly, with their guy on the floor on top of our guy. At this point, the ref jumps in and basically grabs their guy. While being grabbed by the ref, their guy still manages to haul our guy up of the floor and then starts kneeing him in the head! To our league's credit, their guy was suspended for about a year and a half for this. This is better than time in jail, which is really what should have happened.
   I tell my wife, Doralyn, about stuff like this and she then needs me to explain it to her. She wants to know why it happens. It is hard to come up with a plausible explanation. As close as I can come is that I think sports is sometimes an arena wherein you can revisit your lost hopes and dreams. In an effort to live up to those lost hopes and dreams some over-compensation occurs. If, as growing up, you never won a game,  you never were able to play your best or make it to the big leagues, then making a mark for yourself in a municipal hockey league or recreational baseball or some other amateur sporting endeavour is really all you have left. Unfortunately, sometimes the easiest way to do this is by picking a fight, shouting out a slur or putting your fist through a window.

   I occasionally wonder what happened to the other jocks at high school. I do know that they are not all still alive. I also know that the vast majority of them probably ended up with decent jobs, raised great families, and suffered their own triumphs and the usual amount of tragedies. If somehow or other they provided roadblocks to me or anyone else over forty years ago I'm pretty sure they were unaware of it. I'm also pretty sure they had their own insecurities, high school is like that. It is sometimes difficult, however, not to lump all of them in together. I myself played on a handful of sports teams, perhaps someone out there thinks I'm a jock, perhaps I impacted some one's life in a way I'll never know about or understand. In the previous blog I talked about having a crush on the same cheerleader who was the girlfriend of the captain of the football team. Well, maybe that cheerleader liked me...
      
  
  

Anxiety

   About a month ago, I was asked to give a short speech at a work gathering. I was fine with this when asked and agreed to take on the responsibility.
   I was still fine with this right up until the day before the work gathering when all of the sudden it hit me--holy crap, I have to give a speech at a work gathering!
   At this point my anxiety simply took off. I began to visualize standing up there in front of the crowd and everything going wrong. Originally, I had envisioned doing a very informal, off-the-cuff type of speech, using perhaps only point form reminders on a piece of paper. I then envisioned looking down and not having any idea what the point forms meant. I envisioned my papers flying away. I envisioned the worse case of dry mouth, totally incapacitating me. More than anything, I envisioned the dreaded pause. The dreaded pause as over a hundred people are staring at me, waiting for me to say...anything. At this point, I actually envisioned having to leave the microphone, make up some half-baked excuse for why I was unable to continue and then never face those people again. Ever.
   At times, I was able to convince myself that I was going to be talking in front of a group of people I'd known for almost my entire adult life and that they would understand and not be judgemental, if anything did go wrong. Momentarily, thinking this way set me more at ease. Of course, then I remembered that if anything did go wrong, I would somehow be reminded of it daily, because these were people I saw every day.
   The end result of all this was that I spent much of the day with my stomach tied in knots. I wasn't hungry (unusual for me) and I couldn't force myself to actually do anything around the house. To escape this feeling, I actually went back to bed, in the middle of the day and pulled the covers up over my head. All this over a little, informal speech, in front of friends!
   My boss, Ken, asked me to do this speech, mainly because he didn't want to do it mainly because he feels the same as I do and neither one of us can really figure this one out. It doesn't really make a lot of sense, this suffocating sense of anxiety around public speaking. I've had it ever since I can remember, way back in public school. Once a year, we all were forced to do a 5-minute speech, topic of our choice. I never had much of a problem writing the speech, of course. It was the five minutes I had to spend at the front of the class that terrified me. I knew we were all in the same boat together but that didn't really make it feel any better. We would draw numbers to determine the speaking order and I was never quite sure whether I wanted to put it off to the end or get it over and done with near the beginning. One thing was for sure--I never even heard the people who spoke ahead of me. Once I was done, though, I was able to sit back and actually listen to what was going on.

   A little later on in my life, I occasionally found myself reading poems I'd written at poetry recitals. This, again, was agony. The agony was in the waiting, more than anything, once I got started I would quickly relax and actually begin to enjoy myself. This is pretty common with me, once I am in the middle of whatever kind of presentation I am doing I'm okay. Unfortunately, it's almost like I need drugs to get there.
   At some point, the day before my work speech, I decided to abandon the "off the cuff" approach and simply write out exactly what I was planning on saying and then read it out loud, to the assembled masses. Once I changed my plan of attack, the anxiety (the debilitating part of it) seemed to more or less melt away, much to my relief.
   I don't do a lot of public speaking so I have never really spent a lot of time working on strategies to avoid this kind of anxiety. I greatly admire people who are able to get up there and just talk comfortably, without having to read right off a page and perhaps that is the ideal I was aspiring to when I got so off track. Perhaps I will never be a professional emcee. If not, no big deal.
   My brief little anxiety attack now has me truly wondering how people with real anxiety cope, on a regular basis. What must it be like to wake up every day and be so totally paralyzed that all you can do is crawl back under the covers. It's also not hard to understand why some people don't cope, at all. My biggest fear about my speech was that I would not perform to an acceptable standard. I wonder what life would be like if not performing to an acceptable standard meant you got the crap beaten out of you on a daily basis. Or that you were constantly on the edge of losing your job. Or that someone might die. And no covers to hide under. Contemplating such things certainly put my little work speech in its rightful place.
   My life has returned to normal thank goodness. Actually, it was back to normal about five seconds after the speech ended. My boss, bless him, has promised me many more of these speaking assignments. For my part, I have promised only to ghost-write!
  
  
  
  
  

Bullies

   I am ashamed to be a man some days. Most of the time I am not but every so often I have to admit, in the face of what I see happening in the world these days, that men are not a subset of humanity I am proud to be a member of.
   I have felt this way for a long time. I suppose the seeds of this were sown early on in a youth that was frequented by bullies and the macho posturing of adolescence. It is not that I was constantly being terrorized by them but bullies, like rogue elephants, are out there cutting their wide swaths and it is essentially impossible to avoid having to interact with them at some point.
   What grated on me was the power they had. They had the power to break things I held dear, they had the power to chase me down, the power to make me say things I did not believe, the power to change my way home. They had the power to humiliate me and my friends right in front of ourselves.
   In retrospect, we gave them more power than was warranted, obviously. As an adult, it is now a little easier to see bullies for what they were--as kids who simply were doing their best to cope with generally difficult, and, at worst, horrific conditions at home. However, when you are flat on your back, hands pinned, and the only thing that will end your torment is when the bully sees you cry it is difficult to imagine then that there are areas in his life that are horrible and over which he has no control, either.
   At a staff meeting the other day, there was a presentation on domestic violence. It was very informative, with stats showing its prevalence and results and who the main perpetrators are. It also centred on a recent case in southwestern Ontario in which a woman, Sandra Schott, who'd been domestically abused by her husband over a long period was then murdered by him. A short video was shown in which the woman's friends and family talked about all the warning signs they'd missed, while watching this relationship unfold, tragically.
   The presenter went over the list of typical warning signs. As I sat there and listened to them it was difficult not to think of a personal friend who seems to be on a similar path with an abuser in her household. In this particular case, it is not the typical spousal abuse situation but the perpetrator seems, in fact, to have usurped the spouse's role. He engages in most of the behaviours listed as being typical of abusers--slapping and grabbing and hitting, secrecy, control of the woman's ability to communicate with supportive friends, creating situations wherein she is forced to tend to his agenda, forcible confinement, verbal abuse and presenting himself as happy-go-lucky and engaging to the outside world.
   This friend of ours lives in fear of physical harm from this man and has found it necessary to adopt measures to minimize the risk to herself when she is alone with him. Counselors and friends have urged her to get the police involved. Her emotional attachment to this man makes this nearly impossible. Barring police involvement, there is very little natural consequence for him and he seems to be aware of this. It is difficult to not see this whole situation escalating to even more dangerous levels.
    One of the things that makes it difficult for us as observers is that this woman is very perceptive and intelligent. She has also been connected to a system that understands the dynamic in this case and is willing to help. She seems to have opted out, however, in many ways. Her friends are more concerned for her than I think she knows.
   It is very difficult to maintain the status quo with this man. As another man myself, it infuriates me to either watch or hear about him engaging in some of these abusive behaviours. The sense is, though, that if we don't "rock the boat" it will go easier for this woman when she is alone with him again.
   Here is part of the problem; my gut feeling is that I would like to take this man by the scruff of the neck, pin him up against a wall and get in his face like no-one has ever done before. But what would that be, apart from a frustrated man wanting to relieve his frustration in a violent, coercive way? Me, a man, doing the very thing I find so repulsive in other men!
   So, as I stated at the beginning, I am sometimes ashamed to be a man. I am also sometimes fiercely proud to be one.
    I remember sitting in a hockey dressing room with one of my kids many years ago. It was after a game, the kids were getting changed and groups of players and their parents were filtering out and going home. There was a single mother in the dressing room whose abusive ex-husband had been at the game. It was clear that she was terrified of him and it was also clear that she was beginning to panic at the prospect of being suddenly alone in a dressing room with him out there somewhere, loitering around. It got to the point where it was only her and me left in the room with our kids and she was beside herself at this point. Even though my son and I were ready to leave, I told her I would stay until she was ready to leave as well. The relief on her face spoke volumes. Me, I was feeling quietly heroic.
   But there was another angle on this. The abusive ex, who apparently was under some kind of court order to stay away from this woman, was also a man with a hockey background who had been recruited by the team to assist with some of the coaching! At the time, it seemed as though the male hierarchy on the team conveniently ignored the spouse-abuse issue. So, though I was quietly heroic, I could have been justifiably heroic and raised a stink. But I didn't. And I don't think that a lot of men do, when faced with similar situations. I am ashamed, not that I did nothing in that hockey dressing room, but that I didn't do more.
   Not all the male staff who viewed this domestic violence presentation felt comfortable with its tone and some of the stats being spouted. I gather that the feeling was that it was very slanted and anti-men. As a man, sitting there and viewing the presentation, it was somewhat uncomfortable, on different levels. Statistics generally don't lie, however. The lady presenter did say that not all the perpetrators of domestic violence are men. It's just that the stats clearly present men as being at fault in the vast majority of cases.
   As a man, this seems like a safe world to live in, for the most part. In my late fifties and still fairly active I figure that I would be totally defenceless against about 5 per cent of the adult population, should I be physically attacked. Against the rest, I would lose a lot of fights but hurt a lot of guys going down.
   This is not the same for women, obviously. I'm just pulling a stat out of the air but I'm guessing that any one woman would be defenceless, more or less, against half the adult population.
   Thankfully, I don't think many of us run our lives based on stats such as these (as unscientific as they were) but we also need, as men, to understand the underlying effect of this. In a world that may be set up to be legally, morally and ethically equal for both sexes it needs to be remembered that physically there will never be the accompanying equality. When it comes right down to it, women will be at risk.
   How much at risk they will continue to be hinges on our ability to recognize the warning signs of domestic abuse. Having recognized the signs, it is then contingent upon us to state our concerns and be supportive.
   We must also arrive at a place where we feel we can openly contest misogyny and bullying in all its forms, whether in the form of domestic violence, workplace abuse, sports violence,  schoolyard confrontations or in all other areas of our daily lives. This will never be easy, especially not the first time you need to do it. The value of it, though, is immeasurable. And the second time it will be easier.

   Bullies and abusers thrive on elusiveness and anonymity. Part of the task at hand is to strip that away from them. At the same time, it is fair to acknowledge that they became this way as part of a process. This process needs to be understood as well. It needs to be traced back to its beginnings, analyzed, and understood as much as possible. We then need to do our utmost to ensure that we recognize this in our (and all) children, from the earliest moments possible, in order to minimize its future effects on them. And the people in their lives.