Riane Eisler describes gendered stereotyping of roles and behavior as the second cornerstone that shapes societies, along with childhood and family, economics, and narratives and stories. In this episode of the Power of Partnership podcast, Jed Diamond, renowned author of Male Menopause, The Irritable Male Syndrome and many others, sheds light on how our culture’s deeply ingrained domination narratives related to gender negatively impact men’s health and contribute to both internal and external violence. This episode is a journey of revelation that promises to change the way we perceive societal norms and men's health.
https://centerforpartnership.org/
MenAlive.com
Center@Partnershipway.org
Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, Riane Eisler
Nurturing Our Humanity, How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future, Riane Eisler
Inside Out: Becoming My Own Man, Jed Diamond
The Irritable Male Syndrome: Managing the 4 Causes of Depression and Aggression, Jed Diamond
Riane Eisler describes gendered stereotyping of roles and behavior as the second cornerstone that shapes societies, along with childhood and family, economics, and narratives and stories. In this episode of the Power of Partnership podcast, Jed Diamond, renowned author of Male Menopause, The Irritable Male Syndrome and many others, sheds light on how our culture’s deeply ingrained domination narratives related to gender negatively impact men’s health and contribute to both internal and external violence. This episode is a journey of revelation that promises to change the way we perceive societal norms and men's health.
https://centerforpartnership.org/
MenAlive.com
Center@Partnershipway.org
Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future, Riane Eisler
Nurturing Our Humanity, How Domination and Partnership Shape Our Brains, Lives, and Future, Riane Eisler
Inside Out: Becoming My Own Man, Jed Diamond
The Irritable Male Syndrome: Managing the 4 Causes of Depression and Aggression, Jed Diamond
Welcome to the Power of Partnership podcast.
Speaker 2:I'm.
Speaker 1:Rianne Eisler, president of the Center for Partnership Systems. This podcast brings you voices from the partnership movement, people using partnership practices to build a world that values caring nature and shared prosperity. The Power of Partnership podcast is hosted by Cherry Jacobs Pruitt, a health policy and partnership scholar. Today, cherry interviews Jed Diamond, internationally acclaimed author and founder of the Men Alive and Moonshaw for mankind programs. And now on to the PLP podcast showing how we can heal the wounds of domination and leave violence behind.
Speaker 2:Welcome, jed, and thank you so much for joining us for the Power of Partnership podcast.
Speaker 3:I'm so pleased to be with you. Truly, it's a great honor and I'm glad to share our continuing connection with all the work that Rianne has been doing over the years.
Speaker 2:Wonderful. How did you first learn about Rianne's work and how did you first meet her?
Speaker 3:Well, probably like many people, I read the Chalice in the Blade many years ago and I had written my first book in 1983 on men. It's called Inside Out, becoming my Own man. And it happened that Rianne was in San Francisco when I was there and we met in San Francisco after her book was published and I shared with her that I was really pleased with the way the book, her book, was presented as it referenced males, because at the time so many you know, real active women in the field were seeing men as the enemy or patriarchy as the problem that needed to be, you know, eliminated. Her language, as you well know, of saying that the problem isn't patriarchy, the problem is not any of the systems that we intend to view, but was the, the dominator culture, the dominator type system that we really were dealing with. That was impacting both men and women in negative ways and what we needed was a true partnership system. That she, you know in my experience, first described in the Chalice in the Blade, in a way that nobody else had and I really don't think anybody else since, has captured both the breadth and depth of her work and she and I have been connected ever since.
Speaker 2:So I've heard you speak about internal versus external violence. Can you share a little bit more about what you mean by that?
Speaker 3:Well, I think we can see it most starkly in this rash of mass shootings that, I think, touches everybody in a very both personal way and societal way, and what you often see is the shooters number one are male. So this is generally a male issue in terms of the way in which the violence happens, and you often see the shooters are both hurting other people, obviously, and killing other people, but often it's part of a shooting and suicide. Not always, but quite often the shooter dies as a result of the encounter, and often we see this, you know, in the in the realm of police work, they often call it suicide by cock. In other words, a person is shooting others, expecting to be killed, and so there's this two edges of the way in which the violence expresses itself, and this is the most extreme. You know the shootings and the murders. Violence, of course, occurs at other levels of domestic violence and men hitting women, although it can be women hitting men as well. But the damage when men hit women is greater and it ties in and this is where people often don't recognize that the internal violence which, at extreme, is suicide. So when we see, for instance, that men are primarily the ones who act out violence and are doing violence towards others. We also see that men also have the highest suicide rate, that on average, men die by suicide at four times the rate that the females die and, what's even more stark, so four times the difference between males and females on average. But males over 65, we think of violence as kind of a young man's problem, but the suicide rate goes up with men 65 and over to six times the rate of suicide that you see in women. And 75 and older which is my demographic, which turns out to be the largest demographic increase in the country because there's more of us living longer the suicide rate for males 75 and over is 10 times 10 times higher than it is for women of the same age, which is, to me, a horrible tragedy. All of this is a horrible tragedy.
Speaker 2:And so related to these rates of suicide. You know what is kind of the narrative, the mainstream narrative. We hear about why that increase, and then what would be more, the cultural transformation narrative based on Rihans, and that relates to the domination perspective.
Speaker 3:Well, take the stories that get incocated in our psyches, that go back to when we're children, the nursery rhymes that society feeds us, and one of the early ones when I was growing up, and I don't know that it is still something we say to children, but it's definitely part of the culture that little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice. Little boys, on the other hand, are made of snips and snails and puppy dogs, tails, and if you think about, I mean, what that's saying. It's saying to females that you're good, you're nice, you're sweet, and males. There's something violent about who we are inside. You know what happened to those dogs tails? They were cut off and that's who we are. We're made of cut off pieces of life which, if you think about it, is, I think, a very early, and we see this in many other forms of the narratives that boys grow up in like big boys don't cry, so we're cut off from our emotions. We're taught in sports that winning isn't everything, it's the only thing. Those are some of the things. So, in many, many ways, these kind of disconnecting narratives that were disconnected from ourselves, and also the lone wolf narrative that males are to be dominated in business to be the ones that? No, they don't. They don't come from a way, no A page or source Les Mلمs or somewhere short, try to strive for the top, to be the top dog. All of these then get translated, I think, into the kind of childhood that many males experience. We know that as a group, males experience higher levels of physical abuse as children, and physical abuse when you're children we know now with many, many studies contributes to later abuse of others. Not that everybody who was abused as a child abuses others, but everybody and I've seen this over the years and I can pretty much say it as a blanket statement everybody who was abused as a child and goes on to be violent. So when I see violent men at all different levels, whether it's violence towards themselves, who are depressed, suicidal, or violence towards others who have been in domestic violence groups because they've been violent towards their partners or have been violent externally and have beaten up other people have gone to jail because of violent, violent crimes themselves. When you really look at their early childhood or how they grew up, grew up in violent circumstances. They were either abused themselves or they were in a home where their mother was abused or a sister or a brother was abused. So the narrative of the disconnected, wounded man and the narrative that says men are tough, you can take it, men shouldn't cry when you're hurt, when you're abused. And those are the narratives that then turn into self-destructive behavior and external violence that we're seeing increasingly in our society.
Speaker 2:Yes, so can you talk more about specifically your work and how you're helping men to? I love the term that you use in some of your writings about how you're helping men to heal the domination wounds, or the wounds of domination.
Speaker 3:Well, I can just take you back a little bit how I got started in this field, because it really began for me. There's kind of a start date for me November 21st 1969, when I held my newborn son in my arms for the first time and I made a promise to him that I would be a different kind of father than my father was able to be for me and to do everything I could to create a world where men were fully engaged in their families and were fully healthy and healed throughout their lives. So my son is 53 this year. I have a daughter and, as I said, other children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, but my father, who I was wanted to be a different kind of father than, became increasingly stressed, depressed, angry, irritable, to a point of taking an overdose of sleeping pills when I was five years old and getting committed to the state mental hospital, and I grew up wondering what happened to my father, whether it would happen to me or when it would happen to me and what I could do to prevent that. And so that kind of was the impetus to starting my work, and when my son was born, you see how it re-stimulated my desire, and my website that I started is called menalive. Menalivecom is my website, and so the work that I do in all those areas, the outreach, counseling that I do all over the world, the teaching and training, and I've started what we call our moonshot for mankind, which was a research project that some colleagues had conducted 20 years ago. So I've been doing this work for, you know, 50 some odd years. But 20 years ago, two colleagues who did studies on longevity in different cultures throughout the world, comparing males and females, and what they found was that in every country they studied, in every culture, various cultures, men died at younger ages and suffered diseases at rates much higher than females in every country in the world. And that's still true 20 years later. So their conclusion for me was a call to action. They said that if we could help men just live as well as women, you know big changes in the systems, other than if we could shift because to do that you have to shift away from domination to partnership, which women as a group have, I think, done better than men as a group. But together we can do a lot more. They said we would save 375,000 men's lives every year in the United States alone, and if you could do that. You would do more good in the world than curing cancer. And so 20 years ago I reoriented mental life to do the things that we knew were most significant, like violence prevention, like dealing with depression and aggression and preventing the kind of violence that was happening. Getting men involved in men's groups I've been in a men's group now that's been meeting for 44 years. My wife, karlyn, will tell you that one of the reasons we've had, and continue to have, a very successful marriage of 43 years is because I've been in a men's group for 44 years. So a year and a half ago I decided, if we're going to do that, we needed to bring together not one organization but thousands of organizations, because when I started out, there were very few people doing this kind of gender-specific healing work focused on men. Most of what was being done in the area of gender was done in the work of women, in women's health and women's world, and I invited seven of my colleagues that I knew were doing really significant work in the area of gender and men's health, and we were joined together with an idea that I called our moonshot for mankind and humanity. And the idea of the moonshot is if we could really draw together and pull together the resources that we know are out there, that work, we could do something that would be more significant even than going to the moon and more outrageous. And so we are. For the first time now, after meeting for a year and a half, we'll be launching what we call our moonshot for mankind. We'll have a series of online events that will happen in July, and we will then be inviting what we believe are probably a thousand organizations throughout the world that we know of right now that are doing significantly good work in the area of gender and health. What you're doing and what Rianne's doing would be certainly one of those organizations we would invite and hope would want to join us, and we suspect there's probably millions right now of men and women who recognize that if we can help men be healthier in body, mind and spirit, men healthier in emotional, mental and relational health, because part of the genius, I think, of Rianne and what she talks about in the partnership model is relationship how can we create and bridge the relationship divides that we have in all areas, and so that's our hope that if we can join together with many, many, many organizations and individuals and really recognize that, although partnership needs to happen at many different levels and many different, the window of helping mankind and humanity and we use mankind specifically because there is something realistically different about the way males and females operate in the world and that males right now are living sicker, having more problems at all levels, dropping out of school at higher levels, at higher rates, going into prisons at higher rates, being more violent at higher rates, suicide at higher rates, dying sooner, the whole COVID thing we know that males died at higher rates than females who got COVID. So, at many different levels, if we can, I think, operate within this window of improving men's health, this is going to be good for men, obviously, for our sons, our fathers, our grandfathers, our brothers, our friends, our lovers, all the men in our lives. But it's also going to be great for women, because when I talk to women they say one of the biggest problems in my life is a man who is hurting, is not here, or women who have lost their husbands through divorce or through death, who could have been here longer if they were healthier or could have been more present in the lives of their families if they were healthier. So that's our vision, that's our invitation to others to come join us, if this resonates with you, because we need us all, men and women, all the healthy organizations that are tilting towards partnership and learning new ways in which we can help ourselves and each other. This is our future.
Speaker 2:Jeal, I'd like to move us into next steps for our listeners, in terms of what resources may be available. So I want to include in those resources the books that you have written.
Speaker 3:Absolutely so let me speak to all of those things. Probably the easiest and most direct way people can learn about all of this both my books, my work, the things that I have been doing in the world and will be doing next is through my website, menalivecom. So it's all one word m-e-n-a-l-i-v-ecom, so that's my window to the world. You can learn a lot about that there. There is a box that you'll see if you scroll down that will tell you about the Moonshot for Mankind. There is a book that I wrote that talks about the Moonshot that will be out later this year, called Long Live Men, and it speaks to those issues and, as I mentioned, the actual invitation to the world and that will also invite you to a new website and will offer the direct connection to this hopefully worldwide movement and call to action for everybody who feels that if we could change the terms we're talking about, the dominator paradigm that impacts the lives of men and our relationships, if we could change that to a more active, engaged, partnership way of life and if we could engage millions of men who right now are caught up in some part of the dominator system and, I think, men if we can change the men part of the system and the system part that impacts men. This will make the ways in which women are going to be impacted a lot more easier, a lot more joyful. To have men and women coming together as true partners, I think, is a vision that many, many people have, and I know that's something that infuses my work as well, as I know does Reans as well.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's very hopeful and hopefully it'll lead us, as the title of this episode says we'll be able to leave violence behind, both that internal and external. So, jed, before we close today, I wonder if you have any final words of wisdom you'd like to share with our listeners.
Speaker 3:Well, I think the thing I would want to share is both the feeling of optimism that I look forward to, but also, I think, accepting a reality that there are some systemic forces of domination that have been put into form probably thousands of years ago that are still with us, and I think that's what I think the man talks about this in her new book Nurturing Humanity, where we go back to the early cultures of hunter-gatherers, as we call them, or the icon, as she talks about the original partnership societies and some of the things that have happened in the last 6,000 years, I think, are creating a ripple effect. So, I think, accepting that we're going to be in store for some really difficult times and that not only calls on us to help bring a new partnership world into being, but also the reality that while we're doing that, we have to really take good care of ourselves, because we all are impacted by the effects of domination that are causing environmental problems, they're causing problems in our relationships, they're causing separation, and we can't effectively heal if we either are optimistically polyanishing, saying everything's going to be fine. You know, if we could only do this one thing, or get this person elected or have this thing happen, then it's all going to turn around and everything's going to be lovely. I think that's a, it's an unrealistic and it's a in a sense. Part of the domination perspective is that humans are somehow separate from the world, and if humans are not their thing, then we could make everything fine and human. Effective practice in the world will be good for everybody. Well, the world is more than humans and some of the things that humans have done are irredeemable and we're going to be showing the effects of those. Partnership, I think, is in the end, but we need to be really good to ourselves, take care of ourselves and accept the fact that we're in for a bumpy ride, but together, while we're here, we can make a difference for good.
Speaker 2:Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us today, Jed. It has truly been an honor.
Speaker 3:And my pleasure Absolutely.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening to the Power of Partnership podcast. We're grateful to Rising Appalachia for the use of resilience as our power of partnership theme music. If you would like us to feature your partnership story or if you would like to be a proud sponsor of the Power of Partnership podcast, please contact us at center at partnershipwayorg. We hope you enjoyed this episode and will leave us a review on your favorite podcast channel. And don't forget to subscribe to be notified when new episodes are released every other Tuesday. I'm Cherry Jacobs-Pruitt. See you next time on the Power of Partnership podcast.