Parade Magazine Article: Benjamin Bratt’s New Film LA Mission Examines Homosexuality & Masculinity in Latino American Culture.
Benjamin Bratt is taking on a powerful role in La Mission, a tiny budgeted Indie flick written and directed by his brother, Peter. Bratt plays a homophobic Latino dad in the tough Mission neighborhood of San Francisco who erupts in a frustrated rage when he discovers that his son is gay.
Parade.com’s Jeanne Wolf discovered why Bratt couldn’t say no to the wrenching drama that recalls a character from his own childhood.
His brother gave him a challenge.
“I think he probably felt that a lot of my potential was untapped. So he created a character that was multi-dimensional in a way that I’ve never really experienced in terms of stepping into someone else’s shoes. This guy, who was based on someone from our old neighborhood, was a powerful persona who took quite a journey from homophobia to enlightenment.”
Trying to open closed doors in Hollywood.
“When we went to sell the film, the responses we got were downright shocking. We were told that gay subject matter was an issue that had already been dealt with. Someone said something aboutWill and Grace, and somebody else actually said, ‘Haven’t you seen Brokeback Mountain?’ But, of course, the underlying assumption was about the mainstream culture and not the Latino or African-American communities where the whole idea of homosexuality is still very much taboo and homophobia is rampant.”
A surprising response from some of them.
“We’ve shown it to Latino men who are probably very much like my character. They got very emotional in a good way. They identified with the self reflection that he goes through after discovering that his son is gay which puts him on a path of a painful stripping away of his entire belief system — ideas of who he was, who he thought his son might end up being.”
How he’d deal with his own kids.
“If they chose a gay lifestyle, I’d be OK. I have always felt strongly that no matter what their desire is in life — as long as they’re being good to themselves, good to other people, healthy and putting good in the world and are loving and generous individuals with a spiritual core — I’ll support them in whatever they choose to do and whoever they choose to be. That’s always how I’ve seen things, and it’s how we were raised.”
What he envied in the guy he played.
“Whether you agree with him or not, he just speaks his mind, and that includes using more than a few four-letter words. You always get the truth from him. I think a lot of us often don’t express how we really feel because we’re afraid of what others might think of us. So we secretly admire people who could care less. They do things that we don’t allow ourselves to do.”
Sharing his fascination with cars.
“This guy was hooked on cars and I always have been too. My taste has been all over the map. The first car I ever owned was an Italian sports car, a convertible and I’ve kind of owned everything under the sun since then. The ’64 low rider Chevy that I construct as a gift for my son in the film is actually mine. I bought it 12 years ago when my brother first thought of the idea for La Mission. Now, in middle age, I drive what I think to be one of the smartest cars on the road. It’s a Prius.”
Role reversal with his bro.
“My brother Peter was always the life of the party and so the running joke for the first 12 years of my life was he was Pete, and I was ‘Re-Pete.’ It was like Pete and Little Pete. But things switched a little bit after I became a movie star. Now it’s the opposite, right? Now, he’s ‘Benjamin’s brother.’ The irony is that growing up I wanted to be anything but an actor. I was thinking maybe a racecar driver or a fireman.”
Why he cares about a lot more than acting.
“My mother’s a Peruvian Indian from Lima who raised me and my four brothers and sisters as a single mom. From the get-go, she really infused in me the idea that education was the only way to empower yourself. And she gave me a strong sense of social justice because she was very active politically. But, growing up in La Mission, you were presented with all kinds of different options, you realize how easy it would have been to go another way. I certainly had friends who made that choice.”
National Post Article: Is Male & Men’s Studies Important In The 21st Century?
Small step for men
‘Male studies’ the answer to overcoming ‘lace curtain,’ scholars say
Janet Whitman, National Post Published: Saturday, April 10, 2010
Worried about “the declining state of today’s male,” a group of leading scholars gathered at the bucolic campus here this week for a mini-conference to tackle the problem.
But before the panellists could begin their discussion on the increasing powerlessness many men and boys feel, the symposium got pushed from its planned venue to make way for the announcement of a new men’s basketball coach.
Miles Groth, a Wagner professor specializing in the psychology of being male and the event’s host, shook his head.
“We planned this thing three months ago,” he said on the sidelines of the alternative site as the conference was gearing up to go live online to participants in five different continents.
The ironic indignity might just be the first of many slights and obstacles as the academics attempt to establish what they say will be a first for modern man: a male studies program. Their hope is to begin offering degrees in the new academic discipline at a major research university — perhaps a Harvard, a Columbia, a Stanford –within the next couple of years.
When word of the conference started spreading on the Internet last week, some observers wondered whether it was an April Fool’s joke. After all, isn’t most of what people read in newspapers, watch on the news and study at university about men?
But Wagner’s Prof. Groth said that view fails to appreciate the well-documented decline of the state of men and boys, particularly those under the age of 35, over the past 15 to 18 years.
“It’s just now beginning to surface in the job market, in academe and in the offices of counsellors and psychologists,” he said. “[Male studies] is not to look at a few men who are CEOs and have a tremendous amount of money. I’m talking about what Australians call a bloke. Today’s five-and six-year-old boys into their 20s just don’t know who they’re supposed to be.”
While not exactly an endangered species, men are in danger of becoming an underclass, the panel of PhDs specializing in boys and men warned.
In the latest recession, 82% of pink slips handed out in the United States went to men, and a good chunk of those jobs won’t be coming back. Boys and young men commit suicide at a rate of more than four times that of girls and young women. Boys are far more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD and put on Ritalin. In the United States, women outlive men by an average of seven years. In Eastern Europe the gap is 15 years. At universities in the United States and Canada, women make up about 60% of the student population, men only 40%, a dramatic reversal from the early days of feminism.
Amid this growing divide between the sexes, 90% of the academic resources for gender studies are devoted to women, said Prof. Edward Stephens, chairman of the newly launched Foundation for Male Studies, which aims to raise US$2-million or more to endow a chair for the discipline at a major university.
“What are the ethics of devoting 90% of academic resources to one gender?” he asked the gathering and the roughly 250 participants listening in via videoconference. “What are the unintended consequences of the failure of our academic institutions to consider the 21st century needs of males?”
As a young psychiatrist, Prof. Stephens gave his daughter a gender-neutral name — Jarret — so that she might have an easier time breaking through the so-called glass ceiling many women encounter as they try to advance in the workplace.
Now, he said, there’s a new phenomenon: “the lace ceiling” or “the lace curtain.”
“We as men and males can see through it, but we can’t get through it,” he said.
Christina Hoff Sommers, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our
Young Men, told the story of how her son went to a camp where the kids were asked to go off each on his or her own into the desert with a pencil, a notebook, a candle and matches to write a journal about their feelings.
The girls did exactly as they were told, while the boys went in a pack and built a bonfire with the notebooks and pencils.
The creative-writing sensitivity trainer “thought they were sociopaths,” Ms. Hoff Sommers said. “I’m concerned that male-averse attitude is widespread in the United States, that we’re in a society where masculinity is politically incorrect.”
Enter the need for male studies.
Only in its infancy, the proposed field of study has already attracted some dissention — from men. Specifically, from professors in “men’s studies,” an academic subfield that started emerging in the 1980s as part of women’s and gender studies programs.
Robert Heasley, president of the American Men’s Studies Association, rejected an invitation to sit on the panel because of what he viewed as a combative attitude toward feminism. “If what they’re presenting — that feminism has
hurt men and oppressed boys — had some data to support it might be fine,” he said in an interview. “It’s not like men don’t have challenges, but they tend to present it in a way that says feminism has done this to men. Men’s rights are like having whites’ rights.”
Panellist Rocco “Chip” Capraro, director of Men’s Studies at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y., said vast teaching and research about men already is underway and ought to remain “pro-feminist” so the reality of sexism is acknowledged.
The rest of the panel scoffed at both notions. They argued men’s studies is generally limited to sociology and filtered through a feminist lens. The upshot: Boys can’t necessarily just be boys. Instead, they argued, boys and men are considered to be inadequate girls and women.
The scholars of boys and men behind the proposed male studies program said they have no interest in replicating women’s studies or men’s studies programs.
Unlike men’s studies programs, male studies — assuming it ever gets off the ground — will be offered as a major course of study. It will not only include sociology,
but also take into account biology, evolution, history, literature, anthropology, education, law, medicine and psychology.
The program will have to do a certain amount of bashing of some strains of feminism, particularly the ideological kind, said Paul Nathanson, a professor of religious studies at McGill who cowrote books on misandry — the hatred of boys and men.
“The fact is that much of this misandry is being generated by feminists,” he said. “Not all feminists. [But] there are some fundamental features of ideological feminism over the last 30 or 40 years that we need to question.”
Even egalitarian feminism can unwittingly deny men the possibility of establishing a healthy collective identify because, by saying men and women are equal, the implication is that men and women should be the same, Prof. Nathanson said.
Women’s studies programs got their start in the late 1960s as part of the second wave of feminist activism. But they’ve been on the wane in the past several years. Some programs such as Guelph University’s have shut down altogether, while many others have changed their names to add more inclusive words such as “gender,” “sexuality,” and “social justice.”
The male studies advocates on the panel said that women’s studies programs and women’s institutes are still going strong and can pose a danger to men and boys because they often teach that women live in a state of siege.
One of the first things teenagers get when they leave home to go to college is a rape seminar, said Lionel Tiger, a Montreal native who is the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University in New Jersey and author of The Decline of Males and Men in Groups. “Male students are informed right at the outset that they are predatory and dangerous organisms, and women are informed that they are potential victims.”
He described feminism as “a well-meaning, highly successful, very colorful denigration of maleness as a force, as a phenomenon.”
Ms. Hoff Sommers, the author of The War Against Boys, said although she’s critical of the feminist establishment, male studies proponents could learn a lot from its members.
When girls had a serious deficit in math, for instance, feminists galvanized around the problem and test scores in the subject strengthened.
By imitating feminists, in the same way, boys could become stronger in reading and writing, she said. “But we don’t have to imitate the ideological extremes in denigrating the opposite sex.”
Meghan Carboni, a senior psychology major with a minor in gender studies at Wagner, said she found the college’s gender studies program too focused on females.
Wagner offers only one male studies class: the psychology of men, taught by Prof. Groth.
“It’s the best course I’ve ever taken. That’s what made me realize what’s being left out,” Ms. Carboni said. “Everyone loved the course. They didn’t realize how big an issue it was.”
Prof. Stephens, the Male Studies Foundation chairman, said the group plans to wait until it has a US$2-million cheque in hand before approaching colleges about having a chair endowed for the program and a faculty established.
“Two million is on the low side. I’ve been thinking bigger numbers because the work to be done is so immense,” he said in an interview. “What’s happening right now because of this lace ceiling is you can’t even get a hearing.”
In the meantime, the foundation is putting together a marketing plan and will hold its first major conference in early October at the New York Academy of Medicine. The group will introduce Male Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal next year.
Article From Higher Education: Is There A Difference Between Male Studies & Men’s Studies?
Male Studies vs. Men’s Studies
By Jennifer Epstein
First came women’s studies, then came men’s studies, and now, a new field in reaction to both: male studies.
Scholars of boys and men converged Wednesday at Wagner College, in Staten Island, N.Y., to announce the creation of the Foundation for Male Studies, which will support a conference and a journal targeted at exploring the triumphs and struggles of the XY-chromosomed of the human race — without needing to contextualize their ideas as being one half of a male-female binary or an offshoot of feminist theory. Organizers positioned themselves in contrast to men’s studies, which is seen as based on the same theories as women’s studies and is grouped together with it as gender studies.
More than anything else, the event was a chance for supporters to frame men and boys as an underrepresented minority, and to justify the need for a male studies discipline in a society that many perceive to be male-dominated.
Lionel Tiger, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, said the field takes its cues “from the notion that male and female organisms really are different” and the “enormous relation between … a person’s biology and their behavior” that’s not being addressed in most contemporary scholarship on men and boys.
“I am concerned that it’s widespread in the United States that masculinity is politically incorrect,” said Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men.
The culprit, said Tiger, is feminism: “a well-meaning, highly successful, very colorful denigration of maleness as a force, as a phenomenon.”
Paul Nathanson, a researcher in religious studies at McGill University and co-author of a series of books on misandry — the hatred of men and boys — conceded that “there is some critique of feminism that’s going to be involved” in male studies. “There are some fundamental features of ideological feminism over the last 30 or 40 years that we need to question.”
He also decried “the institutionalization of misandry” which, he said, is “being generated by feminists, [though] not all feminists.”
Male studies’ combative tone toward feminism and women’s studies programs is one reason why Robert Heasley, president of the American Men’s Studies Association, turned down an invitation to speak at the event. “Men’s studies came out of feminist analysis of gender, which includes biological differences” — the very thing male studies says is different about its approach.
Heasley, an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, also sees the “new” discipline as an affront to his field, which has been around for three decades. “Their argument is that they’re inventing something that I think already exists.”
Male studies will hold its first conference at the New York Academy of Medicine on Oct. 1 and 2, but AMSA already has an annual convention, which met in Atlanta late last month. The foundation will launch Male Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal next year, but thousands of journal articles on men’s studies have already been published.
Rocco Capraro, an associate dean and assistant professor of history at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, said that “men are both powerful and powerless.” Though men and boys as a group may be powerful, “today’s discourse on individual men is not a discourse of power — men do not feel powerful in today’s society.”
Instead, they feel ashamed of their masculinity. While women may perceive pornography as degrading to their gender, men consider it to be a manifestation of “sexual scarcity, rejection and shame,” he said. “Porn falls into a larger structure of masculinity as a shame-based existence.”
Primary and secondary schools, as well as higher education, have been so heavily influenced by feminism, Tiger said, “that the academic lives of males are systematically discriminated against.” If the female-favoring gender gaps in postsecondary enrollment and graduation rates damaged a group other than males, “there would be an outcry.” But because men and boys are perceived to be a powerful group, few academics and policy makers see much of a problem.
Heasley, of the men’s studies group, said that much of what male studies’ supporters are propagating is untrue, or at least not the whole story. “These are really unfounded claims that are being made,” he said. “It’s kind of a Glenn Beck approach.”
Edward Stevens, chair of the On Step Institute for Mental Health Research, said he wants to see male studies search for ways to improve male academic performance. “What are the ethical concerns of devoting 90 percent of resources to one gender?” he asked (though without explaining exactly what he meant). “What are the unintended consequences of the failure of our academic institutions to consider the 21st century needs of males?”
Gayblackcanada 