I remember exactly when I first understood what “rape culture” meant. I was nineteen and a sophomore in college. I was talking with a woman I knew about gender and sexual politics, and I just wasn’t getting it. She was describing what it was like for her to move through the world as a woman, […]

The amazing Alex Morgan posted this on Facebook today: Post by Alex S. Morgan. I don’t think there’s any doubt that had this driver’s passenger been a cisgender man, he’d never have dared to pull something like that. But there’s more to this that needs to be unpacked. It’s disturbingly common for men try to […]

I have a confession to make. Once upon a time, I was a Sensitive New Age Guy. I suppose I should explain what I mean. As I’ve written in other posts, I’ve always been rather dainty. And in my struggles with the Act Like a Man Box, there were several years where, rather than rejecting […]

There’s a post on SexIs today from Roland Hulme, in which he shows that he almost gets how his privilege works. In his piece, he discusses the responses to a previous post of his, in which he wrote that (at the time), he was of the opinion that transgender people shouldn’t be able to change […]

I’ve been teaching workshops on male gender socialization for about 15 years or so. The foundation of my presentation is the Act Like a Man Box, which I learned about from Paul Kivel’s book, Men’s Work: How to Stop the Violence That Tears Our Lives Apart. I like calling it the “Act Like a Man […]

Psychology Today posted a piece by someone with a PhD in computational neuroscience and someone with a PhD in biologically inspired models of machine learning, which apparently qualifies them to make some remarkable statements about gender, sexuality, and relationships. They seem to prefer making some remarkably reductionist and essentialist claims about how sex works, along […]

One of the many challenges of being a parent or a teacher is helping kids and young people learn how to treat others with respect. It’s certainly not easy, especially when we’re surrounded by (among other things), disrespect masquerading as humor. One of the most effective ways to get away with saying hurtful things is […]