In fall of 2017, there was a large social media campaign #metoo that saw women posting this hashtag if they had experienced sexual assault. Harvey Weinstein, a famous Hollywood producer, was charged with sexual assault on numerous accounts over decades. Our social media feeds and larger world were suddenly filled with seemingly new concepts: affirmative consent, gender expression, toxic masculinity, and others.
Men were asked to step up and be accountable for previous non-consensual sexual acts. Consent is a simple concept but it is missing from much of our education regarding relationships. Media and mainstream society gives us messages that men pursue women, that women might “play hard to get” and it’s up to men to make the first move. In the last decade, shift has occurred from “no means no” to “yes means yes” but this shift in knowledge needed space to be shared with the general public.
In collaboration with the Alberta Council for Women Shelters, we had 3 circles that focused on teaching from their Leading Change curriculum and using the peacekeeping circle format to share knowledge and learn more about concepts and new possibilities.
Why is this work important?
As a facilitator with training in Conflict Transformation, I try to look at the systems and patterns within our society rather than individuals. With #metoo, I saw a need for real life conversations, focusing on compassion and simply allowing people to learn, allowing them out of the increasingly polarized freeway of information on the internet.
Why just men?
Anti-oppression theories, once reserved for activist spaces, are now making their way into the mainstream discourse. At it’s very basic, anti-oppression recognizes that the world is set up for some people to succeed more than others, giving them privilege in employment, living spaces and the general world and the rest at a disadvantage navigating a system with barriers. This also goes by identity politics: how we can be empowered and not victimized by our marginalized identities? Being anti-oppressive then means finding ways to correct this imbalance. A negative side-effect is that it can alienate people perceived to have all the advantages: white men. Privilege is invisible to people who have it and can be hard for men to understand, just feeling attacked.
Men have been asked to step up, learn on their own and take action against this power imbalance. I was aware of a missing step: for men to learn about this structure, very large academic terms that are becoming mainstream and processing feelings they might have around it.
What surprised you?
I had two main surprises in our 3 sessions: Social Media does not equate to real life involvement and intergenerational conversation is needed.
The event got a lot of traction on Social Media, including a spot On Air with the CBC Edmonton morning programming. It was shared through Facebook many times. However, only 8 people attended. There is a risk in coming in person and a commitment in giving time.
What did you learn?
In this process, I learnt the power of being in the room together, in the present moment as opposed to our social media presence. We can gauge each other better with all systems. I also learnt the power of sharing story and how art practices can help with this. It can be scary to share directly from your life: but art allows access to that expression in different ways.
Being together, learning and expressing also allows theory to land. We learn how we engage with our society, we can see ourselves in the structures but also that the structures are flattened. Everyone is a human with their unique experiences. In our culture we are repeatedly shown that men want sex and pursue it while women field options and want intimacy. Giving voluntary space to men to talk about this allows us to see that on a personal level, men are complex human beings that have unique relationships with loved ones and everything is contextual.
Why continue and the current next steps?
From our time together, it was clear that story is a way through to build compassionate dialogues that allow people to be humans not scripts with prescribed ideas. Many people of all genders were interested in the workshop. It makes sense to open up the dialogue to all genders to share their unique perspective about what is surfacing though social media. Society cannot shift without people with multiple lived experiences sharing together and creating pathways forward.
It is necessary for us to create physical spaces for us to discuss, be in moment, connecting and exploring beyond preformed ideas. There needs to be spaces where we create community: safer than our regular day-to-day lives to be open and share things that matter to us.
In this sense, it connects us with grace and the goal of showing our full personalities to share and grow together. It is the connective tissue between our private lives and thoughts and the larger structure, the in-between and the liminal. From here we can change ourselves and our world.
By Brooke Leifso