to download - Voice Male Magazine

Mail Bonding
We Want to Hear from You!
Write us at:
Voice Male
MRC
236 North Pleasant St.
Amherst, MA 01002
or Fax (413) 253-4801
voicemale@mrcforchange.org
Please include address and phone. Letters
may be edited for clarity and length.
Deadline for Winter issue:
November 25, 2005
Brainstorming for Change
I received my first issue of Voice Male and
wanted to drop a line to voice my enthusiasm
at discovering this community of
men working toward positive change. Two
other men and I, one School of Public
and Environmental Affairs graduate school
intern and one social work major, have
scheduled a meeting at our place of work
and have invited all the men that work
there to join us in brainstorming and spitballing
ideas about what we’d like to see
in a men’s group and what functions we’d
like it to serve. I don’t (yet) know a lot
about the Men’s Resource Center but so far
it looks like just the thing our community
needs, and my two cents will include a
pitch to at the very least explore the work
the MRC for Change and Voice Male do as
a point of departure.
Curtis Swedran
Bloomington, Ind.
communities of sex, religion, skin color,
sexual behavior: we used to talk about the
“French pattern of integration.” Any kind
of difference was not to concern public and
global matters but was relegated to private
life. But for several years, this pattern has
been facing a crisis. The American pattern
of community is settling into our French
society, which is a cause of fear among the
intellectuals: a dangerous “social fracture”
appeared, resulting in an individualization
of interest, putting people into locked
drawers depending on their real, desired,
or imagined affinities.
The sense of exclusion dramatically
increased: a vicious form of exclusion,
neither admitted nor faced, whose victims
are mainly immigrants and their children,
women and youth.
Will society take its people more into
account if they are joining a community
in which they recognize themselves,
their problems and their wishes? People
suffering from exclusion believe in this
new power of community action, through
which they feel less alone. But in fact this
evolution is deeply questioning everyone’s
complex identity and the paradoxical need
of recognition in an excluding society.
We are not only male or female, black or
white, educated or not, heterosexual, bisexual
or homosexual or any kind of difference
some may create to separate humans.
Dividing has always been the best way to
rule. We don’t belong to just one or two
drawers—we are the whole chest of drawers.
As citizens in a given society, we should
feel concerned by the major issues our
society faces. Therefore we have to face our
political responsibility with our votes, our
voices. That will lead us to more constructive
directions than taking on a constant
position of victim. We are actors, but only if
we all choose to be part of this world.
I am still skeptical about limited community
actions, which to me separate
people from each other on the basis of fake
or created differences. I still believe there
is another way to manage our differences,
so we can live all together. But I wish to
give Voice Male my support for your global
action, because whatever males’ issues are,
I make them mine as I make the choice
to be a responsible citizen, a responsible
person in a shared world. VM
Adelaide Donon
Paris, France
• Voice Male
The Global Chest of Drawers
I received Voice Male through my good
friend Gretchen Craig and read it with
much interest, as a young sociologist who
has just spent several months studying the
process of implicit discrimination toward
immigrants in a Paris neighborhood.
At first, I was surprised by the magazine’s
point of view, in which I see a sense of community
that is different from the French
notion. Traditionally in France we have
tried not to separate our population into
4