Two Guys Talking Masculinity: Recent Episodes
Raoul Wieland and Andrew Pauls
We are two friends who were drawn together by a shared interest, curiosity, and urgency to have conversations about men as men.We believe that language and social imagination needed to contextualize, understand, critique, and shape what it means to be and live as a man in our culture is lacking and one-dimensional.We speak from our experiences as white, heterosexual, cis-gender, and middle class men growing up and living in Canada, with the recognition that the conversation about men is a broad umbrella sheltering many diverse voices and experiences. In contributing our perspectives, we understand ourselves as being a small tributary feeding into a broader cultural body of discourse, hoping to add insightful ideas and searching questions. We aspire to challenge ourselves and our listeners to have difficult and necessary conversations to improve our own lives as men, and the relationships that we tend to and are embedded in, including with our family, partners, friends, neighbors, and broader political and cultural institutions and systems.Thank you for stopping by, and please share any constructive feedback and topic ideas that come to you as you listen to our conversations.
In this episode Raoul and I reflect on the podcasts we have published so far discussing future plans and directions and the meaning both of us take away from sharing time and talking on a public platform.
In this episode, we talk about emotional abuse in heterosexual relationships, how men can talk about and heal from the emotional abuse they experience while acknowledging that there are important gender difference to how men and women experience emotional abuse.
We discuss why it might be difficult to recognize when one is being emotionally abused, and why for men emotional abuse might be particularly difficult to recognize, given the masculine gender scripts that we grow up with and into.
In this episode, we talk about Marshall B. Rosenberg’s book, Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. This book has been influential for many people attempting to change their communication patterns, be that with their intimate partners, co-workers, friends, or family. It is based on the premise that communication can be violent and life-alienating, which gets us away from what we ultimately want to do – communicate effectively from the heart and with empathy.
In this episode, we are discussing the emotion of shame and draw a lot of inspiration from Sara Ahmed’s chapter on shame in her book The Cultural Politics of Emotions.
In our 5th episode, we discuss an essay called “Identity: Skin, Blood, Heart” written by Minnie Bruce Pratt that was published in the 1984 book, Yours in Struggle: Three Feminist Perspectives on Anti-Semitism and Racism.
In this episode we discuss questions about how men and women come to be the kind of sexual self that they are, how they develop a 'sexual character', and what values or principles are pivotal for enabling each one of us to cultivate our (sexual) self.
One of the central issues of this article that we wrestle with in this podcast is: “how and why do men become so invested in a particular social structure to the point that any challenge they face is experienced as a personal threat to their very existence.”
In this podcast, we reflect on the phenomenon of retreats for men, advertised sometimes as gender exclusive spaces where men engage with each other and talk about masculinity, what being a man means to them, and learn how to become vulnerable, practicing emotional intelligence.
We touch on some of the following questions:
– Why talk about masculinity – do we need the concept of masculinity to talk about men?
– Is talking about masculinity different than talking about men?
– What does masculinity mean to you/us?
– Is masculinity how we understand what being a man is and does?
– Why is it important to be talking about masculinity? As opposed to men? Or both?