If you’re like me, your social media has been populated lately with commentary using emotional appeals to get people to change their vote for President, with a combination of scare tactics to vote for Clinton or Trump in order to vote against the other and stubborn posts about the lesser of two evils still being…
Category: Good Men Project
Dismantling the Manhood Myth: Why It’s Damaging to Define Men in Terms of Size
When Donald Trump responded to Marco Rubio’s comment about his small hands being no indication of a problem elsewhere on his body, he invoked one of the most vulgar tropes about masculinity: That the size of the male genitals reflects an individual’s power. Like a pair of juvenile frat boys, Rubio and Trump quickly turned…
The Privilege of Not Discussing Privilege: How the Hypersensitive Invoke an Oppressive Past to Justify Themselves
It’s a common experience: We try to talk about privilege or Black Lives Matter or institutional racism, and we find ourselves walking on eggshells, carefully choosing our words to avoid offending any white males who might be in our audience (oops, sorry: I should clarify that not all white males respond this way). Even if…
Losing the Sense of Decency
George Santayana famously said, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it.” Recent political events have stirred up the most famous altercation from one of the darkest times in our government’s history. On the ninth day of June 1954, American TV viewers were watching the thirtieth day of hearings involving the Senate…
Beyond ‘It Was Just a Joke’: Denial of the Obvious as a Distraction Technique
During the 2016 Republican National Convention, Scott Baio sat down with MSNBC’s Tamron Hall to discuss a tweet he’d made about Hillary Clinton. The tweet contained a photo of Clinton standing in front of the word “COUNT,” with her head obscuring the “O”; the meme contains text referring to the blocked letter. Baio had also added the…
How Police can Regain the Trust of Their Communities
We can build relationships with people so they want to cooperate with us, or we can bully them into compliance. Broadly speaking, these are the two basic approaches authority figures can take to elicit the people’s compliance with rules and expectations: Authoritative or authoritarian. As the father of a small child, a teacher with experience…