Comments on: Gender Workshop

By: Pelle Billing

Pelle Billing — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 15:09:43 +0000

Thanks Eivind.

The Gender workshop was two hours long, and the tango workshop was one hour long. The gender workshop was mostly a lecture/dialogue, with one exercise in smaller groups to discuss the drawbacks of each gender role. The tango workshop had several exercises about leading and following, that connect to your work about masculinity/femininity. Tango is a great way to embody masculine and feminine polarities, and people simply loved doing those exercises. The feedback was that it was some of the most meaningful stuff they had ever done at retreat or a leadership workshop.

I think the combination of theory first and practise afterwards was a powerful one.

By: Eivind

Eivind — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:59:37 +0000

Wow, that’s great to hear, Pelle. It would’ve been a lot of fun to see you live again. How long were the workshops and did you do any actual exercises? Why don’t you make the slides available?

Eivind

By: Mark Davenport

Mark Davenport — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:39:40 +0000

Clear, logical and oersuasive, Pelle, In a sense, it’s no wonder your theses were well recieved, but thank God there are such receptive groups who have already “read” the earlier chapters of gender history.
Very encouraging.

By: Danny

Danny — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:29:52 +0000

When we say that men as a group have conspired to oppress women as a group for thousands of years, we are labeling men as evil and women as sheep. Is it really plausible to assume that men have managed to collectively oppress women across all cultures and large time spans? That assumption gives men far too much credit; it is exceedingly hard to maintain an empire, and to continually oppress 50 percent of the population seems like an impossible task.
This does seem to be a grave misconception women’s advocates make. I don’t know if its intentional or not but when it suits them they have no problem lumping the Elite Joes and Average Joes together. You can usually tell one’s actual understanding of men as a class vs. what they read somewhere based on this. The ones that just blindly say things like “men as a class have power” really don’t understand because if they did they would realize that we don’t. Male gender is not the key to the kingdom that they want, no more like need, everyone to believe it is.

Only looking at the female gender role is far too partial, and therefore feminism quickly becomes outdated the moment a society is fully democratized and has equal rights between the sexes.
Yes. There are some out there that really do want to address the male as well as the female gender role but there are lot that are just saying it enough to apply for Ally Street Cred. This also reminds me of feminists, whenever men’s issues are brought up, will try to fit men’s issues under a feminist umbrella as if the only label for equality is feminism.

I also talked about male disposability and “the missing men’s studies” (hardly anyone studies men’s issues without having a feminist agenda).
Yes and by men’s studies this would go beyond the nonsense feminists whine about when they claim that history is about men’s studies. It’s not.