- You were able to gather from the introduction that I have an interest in women's liberation and I have to say that my interest in masculinity stemmed a great deal from what women started telling me and what women started pointing out to me. I find it's very difficult for men to admit that they have learned anything from women and for men to, at all, agree or feel that perhaps women's liberation could have contributed to their . I think though that a great deal of what women's liberation in this country has meant has contributed very definitely and very deeply to the self confidence and to the more positive image of women that has not considered a very, very strong element that is affecting the women's image and affecting simultaneously the man's image and that is something that we are going to be calling men's liberation for the problems with masculinity. Let me illustrate some of the connections I'll be doing through out my presentation between what is now called women's liberation and the new masculinity and the new masculine concept. Right now women's liberation has for a long period of time contributed in a very serious way to the problems of the image of women. The image of women have a major women's liberation issue. Now in this organization the women have done a study of the image of women and have found little girls in text book after text book, children's book after children's book saying, "Even I know that, and I'm just a stupid girl." Or stories in which boys in these children's books, that are still being used in 1973, saying, "Girl's advice isn't worth two cents, yours isn't worth a penny." The study of 134 children's books documented hundreds of stories with this type of orientation. A theme showing the stupidity of girls. This argument, I think, has a great deal of validity as a women's liberation issue. Until this point has been also a men's liberation issue. It has stopped one step short of addressing some of this. As a result of this negative image of women, I have seen many boys who want to and say to themselves, more than anything at the age of 5 or 6, a real boy. Afraid to do anything that he feels will make him appear like a girl. Anything that he feels will make him appear like a sissy is something that he gets away from, keeps away from because the last thing a boy wants to be called as he's going through his adolescence is effeminate or feminine. I think it's this negative image of women that creates the boys, at a very early age, an underlying contempt for women. I believe that this underlying contempt leads boys into having to prove themselves masculine as opposed to feminine. Boys, even in grammar school and high school compete with other boys because boys are the only ones that they feel are really worth competing with or really worth winning against. This competition is made to prove themselves as men, more of a man than the other guy. The competition lasts throughout a man's life, as all of us know. It's okay for a male matcher to lose out to another man if that man is really good. But he can't face losing out to another woman, less the government force it down his throat in an affirmative action program. But his basic attitude is that he doesn't deserve, he shouldn't because of his bread winning role lose out to a woman. I think once this connection between men's and women's liberation is recognized, I think men's liberation movement has to be more than just pointed out. I think you have to start a network of nationwide consciousness raising groups or a network of groups raising people's awareness through out the country to make them more aware of the fact this image not only is an image that is easy for an individual man to overcome that all society is putting pressure on him to keep living this image in the way that he's learned to live it. I think that a men's liberation movement also has to be become eventually an activist movement. It has to become a movement that presses for pictures in children's books of men caring for children. Not just pictures of women becoming astronauts or presidents or executives. That's presuming that women's liberation means women coming up to where men are. I think what we've got to start realizing is that men's liberation is men being able to learn from women and seeing some of the real values and contributions that women, even in their traditional role have contributed to society. I think a men's liberation movement has to start demonstrating for men being staffing in elementary schools, men staffing child care centers. So many women's liberation persons have said we have to start childcare centers. Implicit in that is being more jobs for women. But from a child's perspective it's more jobs for women staffing childcare centers if it's exclusively women staffed, basically means the reinforcement of the image of women as the parent and as the sole parent which is one of the fundamental problems with children in the United States today. We have to press for pictures of men changing diapers, men wearing aprons, pictures of men crying, pictures of men being warm, touching, feeling, and the thousands of things that overcome the male image but can only overcome that male image if the male is not afraid of appearing like a woman and therefore lies the connection to women's liberation. I think the second reason that women's and men's liberation is connected came to me about a year and a half ago when a woman called me up from a and she said, "Warren, I've been a member of women's consciousness raising group for about 6 months now. I am married 7 years, I have 3 children." She said, Every time I come home to my husband he says, and it's a constant harassment she sees. The more reinforcement she obtains from the group the more harassment she received at home. 4 and 6 months ago I had a nice marriage. I have grown a great deal since then. Every bit of my growth has been a separation from all practical purposes with my husband. I literally sometimes can't stand this man anymore. She said, "Can I get him to come and speak with some of them in the women's consciousness group . We tried to get him to come and he said, "Oh no, I don't want anything with that type of women's liberation stuff. You keep going, I don't want anything to do with it." It was back and forth for a long period of time. Eventually she wrote me that she and her husband had gotten into a fight where he had literally chased her around the house with a knife ready to kill her, kill himself and kill the children. Time and time again I've seen women's liberation where the woman is growing and the man stagnating lead to the man and the woman growing apart and not having any ability to communicate with each other and live together. What I'm suggesting is not a cessation of women's liberation consciousness raising groups, a solution to that. I'm suggesting a beginning of men's consciousness raising groups. But I also don't think that multi men's groups meeting separately accomplishes much of a purpose and not as much of a positive function as men's groups meeting separately for about three months and then women's groups meeting separately for three months and then meeting ultimately together and ultimately separately. This is something that I'll talk about in some detail after the conversation this afternoon. It's something that I've addressed to some extent in this magazine article that's out in this issue. I won't spend a great deal of time focusing on it now but I did want to get across the basic point that I see this movement having to grow and if it's ever going to expand to people in the country at large having to grow to be a two sex movement, not with men standing up there saying, "My dear, this is your problem and I'll help you solve it maybe, but if I do you'd better be grateful." That's just the condescension that we need and I think we've all seen it to the extent that men get involved because they have not been acting on this as their own problem as well. Women's and men's consciousness raising group too one of the problems it runs into, how does a man attempt in this culture to overcome when we go out today and ask him to see what some people perhaps more accurately call the masculine state? A men's consciousness raising group is literally a group of about 7 or 8 men who sit around in a circle and try to raise their consciousness or raise their awareness of the things that they're doing in their life, the decisions that they're making that are based on their image of themselves that are related to masculinity as opposed to the type of things women's groups do which is the same basic thing but in relation to femininity. When we stared this group about 2 and a half years ago I'd say that perhaps there was not a man in the group who had ever learned how to listen. There was not a man in the group who learned how to listen to other men or learned how to listen to other women. As we started talking about who our closest male friends where we realized that since the the two thirds of us who had graduated from college had graduated, there was not one of us who had really obtained a close male friend since our graduation from college. Even our close college friends were based on some dubious types of relationships we were now beginning to question, such as interest in sports or a common interest in going into to law or a common interest in some type of business or profession. Once in our group we wrote down what I call these male crutches of being able to discuss sports and business and profession, we had nothing else to discuss. We did a lot of talking but we couldn't talk personally to each other. I had just finished my doctoral orals and I was a master at intellectualizing. But I didn't know how to personalize it. I didn't know how to talk about myself and talk about myself in a way that admitted weaknesses. Few of us in the group knew how to sympathize in any real way and none of us knew how to empathize in a way that was meaningful. We were all, in a sense, caught up in defining our manhood as getting to a higher step on the different ladders that we had chosen to specialize in, and to prove ourselves an adequate man. We were constantly worried when we were coming back from our job whether we had made it or whether our supervisors approved of us this time. This constant need to have approval from somebody higher than us on this ladder made us unable to admit that we were wrong to that person on the ladder and kept up teaching ourselves all the time how to keep our weaknesses to ourselves, how to shield ourselves and protect ourselves from criticism, how to build up an expertise in our job so that we could claim we knew something better than anybody else. In that area, which was a function of our life, we could not be questioned. Once we had built up that expertise we realized we were afraid to even walk nextdoor to ask a question to somebody that exposed our ignorance to them in any way. These were the male weaknesses that prevented us as a group from saying anything about something that reflected poorly on us in our job. The first time I took my doctoral orals and the first time I took my doctoral written exams I failed them. It took me a year of grooming to admit that because that's a reflection on the fears and it's a reflection of my intelligence and a reflection of my masculinity. My ability to show that I was the type of breadwinner and type of man that other men and women could respect. We found ourselves as a group interrupting each other, constantly trying to overcome each other's points. One man would make a point, another man would his point and a third man would say, "The point to this is." As if he had the only point in the world that could possibly be contributed or that could possibly be valid. And more than what we would say we finally began to discover the condescending way that we were saying it or as soon as the conversation got serious and somebody started pointing to an error they were making we would find ourselves jumping as a statement so that, oh well, there's been plenty of that. Society really does this to us. It wasn't society only that did it to us, yes, it was society that helped us learn it but it was ourselves perpetuating. It was much easier to joke than to face that aspect of ourselves. Men have learned by way to manipulate other men into listening but we've spent very little time in our lives to manipulate ourselves into listening and paying attention and to respecting others. I'd like to mention 4 experiments that we tried in our groups, in our joint consciousness groups in particular, the groups that meet with women that they found very successful and very important indicators of how far both the men and the women have come toward developing an independent and considerate way of communicating with each other. One is an experiment called dominance timing. Dominance timing is done by somebody just taking out a watch when nobody else is aware that they're doing it. When the conversation gets serious timing the amount that the men speak and timing the amount the women speak during that conversation. Just a simple timing. We did this the first time as a joke on the part of the men when we had met this group of 7 women and a group of 7 men who were in one way or another associated with the women there. The timing resulted in the men speaking 18 minutes for every 1 minute that the women spoke. This is far greater, people. The amazing thing though was not the dominance, the amazing thing was the excuses that came after they discovered this. All of the men in the group said, "We know a lot about the subject." The women in the group said, "In fact, you do know a lot about the subject. You know much more about the subject than we do." The subject was employment. A woman had come into the group and presented her problem of discrimination in employment and all of the men took turns solving her problem for her. We then went around the group to see if we were right on this and see if we were being unfair to ourselves. We asked every woman in the group what she thinks she should do for that problem without the men disrupting and talking. With the exception of one woman in the group, every woman had a contribution that she could make and every woman experienced and contributed to helping that first woman solve her problem. None of us, either allowed in the dominance pattern that the opportunity for the women to speak and the women also contributed to the same feeling by feeling that her contribution was not and she didn't want to play the male game of interrupting the people and therefore she would wait until somebody asked her privately or not make any contribution at all. Dominance timing is a very, very impressive experiment to see how far men and women are with each other. The second experiment is called self listening. This can be done by watching the men's faces when they are speaking. When the men are speaking and they finish speaking and then a woman starts speaking watch the man's face when he is supposed to be listening. See if his listening is really a type of listening that's going, "Ah huh, ah huh, ah huh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's the same thing I did last year. And when I did that this happened to me." He listens for about a moment, gets the gist of what the person is saying, transfers to his own type of story or his own type of ego he feels will satisfy or impress the group and the moment a pause in the conversation occurs he interrupts and tells a story which is supposedly helping the other person understand the problem better but in fact is impressing the group with his ability to have knowledge of everything or his relationship to that. Self listening is a problem that women also engage in but if you watch the men and the women I think you'll find the men do it considerably more frequently than the women do. It's a type of problem that's fundamental to men's and women's liberation because it's a type of problem that reinforces the contempt that men have for women and the lack of self respect that women have for themselves. Because men miss all the subtleties that the women and other men are saying while they're trying to come up with their own stories and their own ideas as to what is the best answer or the best solution to the problem. A third area is related to . It's called man the problem solver. In the 18 to 1 timing that we had, when we did this timing over and over again we found that it wasn't just that the men were dominating the group but it was also that the men . The women were not making statements for the most part. They were asking questions. Their questions were directed at the men. The men were spending time answering their questions. Frequently their answers were directed at the other men and the argument was between the two men but the women were just like the cheerleaders at the football team. They were the judges and they were the supporters and they were evaluating which man was making the best contribution to solving the problem. That can be picked up in a consciousness group or in a mixed group by just watching what the content versus contribution to the group is. Its frequently the woman asking questions and the man answering the questions. The most subtle but I think most important area is the area of the fourth experiment which is topic security. That means that frequently in this type of group the men will do a fundamental thing of using the advantage. And moving along with the man through this as well. the topic will move to an area that the man is most comfortable in. My wife is a computer systems manager and I'm in political science. Inevitably in a group where the 2 of us plus 4 or 6 other people are sitting around and talking the area will tend to move into politics. Unless it's somebody else in computers there that's male. Then it'll move into a balance between politics and computers. But until we're aware of this we focus naturally that I should contribute more to the conversation because I do know more about politics than my wife does. But that is one of the fundamental underlying errors in conversation that we move to an area that I feel most comfortable in and therefore I would feel right about dominating in. That's very, very seldom picked up unless you're aware of it because women contribute to saying, "Gee, that's really good. You really must know a lot in that area." Involving catering to the man and the man just feeding right back into that and the fundamental problem is that men, once this occurs, are put under pressure to have to have a solution to their problems all the time. They can never say, "I don't know that." They can never learn from somebody else. They can never really listen. Even though topic security is an important thing to pick out in these types of joint groups, in any mixed conversation, we found that even when there are mixed groups we were talking about the areas that the women in our groups knew the most about. Areas like child raising, areas like raising children. The men still dominated the conversation in these areas and still provided more solutions to how the children should be raised, even in areas that the women in the group had been trained in and had experience in more than the men. I think this dominance and this inability to admit weakness is really the first sin of masculinity which might be termed then for me, Thou shalt not be vulnerable. The corollary of that commandment. We can't really come close to somebody with whom we might have to admit weakness and admit vulnerability. Men's attitudes toward women are going to change. What types of things do men have to overcome? What types of things change their attitude most effectively? What types of things ultimately change their behavior? These were the fundamental questions that I posed to myself three years ago when I started studying men's attitudes and what I basically did was I presented 17 articles on women's liberation literature to a group of 250 men, literally random samples of men and a lot of them substandards of the population. I found there were 2 types of myths that had to be solved before men could even begin to consider the whole topic of seriously. One type of myth I call factual myths. The other type is self fulfilling myths. The self fulfilling myth is really the more devastating type of myth. You know what a self fulfilling myth is? It's basically you start out saying something like women are the meager sex. Women are the dependent sex. And then you do everything altering your life to fulfill that prophesy of weaker sex and the more dependent sex. For example, studies have shown by Goldberg and Lewis that when women and men who are parents are sitting in the living room and their boy child is crying they will allow the boy child to cry for a longer period of time before picking it up than they will the girl child. They are assuming at the age of two or three days that the boy child can solve it's own problems and that the girl child cannot solve it's own problems. They are reinforcing in the girl at that age that if she cries and when she expresses fear or when she expresses weakness that she will be taken care of, she will be paid attention to. But when the boy child cries, unless it really is a lot of crying, that he can solve his own problem. That he doesn't need to be catered to in the same way. At the end of a month, at the end of 2 months, at the end of a half a year the parents proudly take part in saying, "See how independent my boy child is?" "See what a difference between him and the girl next door." It's assumed that these weaknesses and independence are natural as opposed to, we as parents could not possibly have had anything to do with contributing to it. In fact, consciously they did not. That's an example of a self fulfilling myth. Yet the self fulfilling myth is constantly maintained by a whole series of factual myths. One of the most convenient things to do in maintaining myths that literally could be disproven by presenting other facts is closing our eyes to places like Sweden where 75% of the players are women. Or to Romania where 40,000 women hold political office. Or Czechoslovakia where 70% of the district judges are women. To say nothing of some of the differences and roles that are assumed in places like Israel, the Soviet Union, and Cuba. In none of these countries are women's roles and men's roles ideal. But one of the values of looking to some of these countries is that we can see that they are at least different and if they can be different there there's probably less of a natural reason why they can't be different here. changing. Once men recognize these facts on the list, they tend to be able to look themselves up to exactly the way they're explaining them and the way they're trying . I think for that, the part I'd like to address is primarily the motives. I have seen over and over again women contribute to what ends up being men's insecurity. Women are frequently, especially as I teach I see women constantly doing this to men, they're frequently building up men's egos. The process of building up men's egos is building up one large, fragile, and insecure instrument. The problem is insecurity that men have. I think a woman who is constantly at their incessant questions as to, that's really great if you're gonna be a lawyer. That's really great if you're gonna be a principle of a school . Or it's really great that you're gonna make a lot of money. Or what are you gonna do next year? Wow, your finished your masters in a year? This type of admiration is a type of admiration that reinforces in men the need to constantly have to keep producing and it also reinforces in men the inability to admit weakness and admit fault when they do fail. When they could just say, do I take 3 years to do my master's degree because I think I would enjoy the more doing it that way. Or I think I'm going to stay home from work a year because I think I would enjoy something else that isn't as productive monetarily. I think that weakness and that inability to admit weakness transfers to not only men's bread winning role but also to men's inability to relate to women in a warm way. I think once men reach this age, I think it's also important to start addressing not how women's liberation is it's present form threatens men, and not how men's liberation is a retaliatory force against women, but rather how women's and men's liberation really work very much together and how both of them benefit each other. I'd like to give a few example of that which I found To be the more misunderstood things that I ran across as I was doing my interviews with these children and men. The first type of complaint that I would get from men as I was doing the interviews was that men would say look at the divorce rate now. If we keep up with all this women's liberation stuff the divorce rates will increase and things are gonna be much worse than they were before and so on. The same man who's talking about divorce rate growing is doing the type of thing by concentrating only on his labor and his struggle, is doing the type of thing that's dividing himself away from his wife and women friend. He is doing the type of thing that is forcing his woman friend to spend all of her time taking care of the children and working on just her type of labor. The man and the woman that worked part the point of diminishing returns, he in his job and her in taking care of the children. To the extend that you could actually see this division occur in any living room situation where extra polite types of introductions are happening, the men are staying in one corner talking about one thing and the women are sitting in the other talking about another thing. That division of labor tends to lead to division of interests. That division of interest creates that between men and women that is then solved by saying to each other, I think there's something missing in our marriage. I think perhaps something else needs to come in to fulfill it. I think the reason, honey, that you're not fulfilled is because you don't have any children. Children are brought in as a fulfillment type of device. Obviously this is not always the reason for children but it's too frequently one of the contributing factors for having children and the perfect almost proof of this is looking at statistical divorce rate increase at the end of 25 years. Which soars then when the children have grown and gone away to college, then the man and woman take their focus off of the children which was hiding the central problem all along so to speak and sometimes realizing that they bore each other and their interests are too far separated that even despite all the social in divorce, they'll go ahead and get a divorce anyway. I believe the divorce rates, if women's and men's liberation will work together, will actually decrease or at least increase for the right reasons of people being able to get divorced because being insecure and not . Another example of men complaining about the effects of women's liberation is by . Listen, don't tell me that women don't have power. My wife controls everything. She controls me, she controls the children, she controls the money, she controls the home. She controls everything. How can you say women should . How can you say women should have more power? Yet the same man is a man who is so willing to keep women in the type of position where they only have one thing to control. I would suggest any human being who only has one small area of control is ready to have control in that area to such an extent that will be a threat or oppressive. It's the same type of thing that men do with their jobs or their specializations, they hang on for dear life and they over control. They over control their employees and they do everything to try to expand their power base. Any man who has to live vicariously through his job is doing that just as any woman who has to live vicariously through children and her husband. The same, nagging, petty wife that this man is complaining about was the type of woman that could be eliminated or could be the type of attitude of that woman could be eliminated by reorienting his own thinking and his own behavior. The third complaint that I would get from men, especially employers, was the constant complaint that listen, I'm oppressed in my job too. I have a lot of pressures on me, don't just talk about women's liberation. In fact, I think that man has a point. Many men are oppressed in their jobs too. But I think what women's and men's liberation has to offer is a much greater in that oppression. When I spent a great deal of time during the next 4 years listening to the problems that my wife had at work, talking about that with her, that time spent with her economic independence has helped me to begin to say and do the types of things on my job that I want to do. It has made my job less oppressive. It's enabled me as a political scientists, for example, to study sex roles and to put the science community studying sex roles looked at as being . I was able to speak up at my job because I know that if I lose my job I don't have the sole responsibility for bread winning. That my wife shares that responsibility and we don't . I've seen many radicals graduate from college and suddenly tuck their radicals underneath their shirt because, well, I have a job. I have a family to support, I have children to support and I can't speak up now. I've got to wait until I get to the top of business or the top of the academic ladder before I can speak up because otherwise I'll loose my job. As long as they are taking sole responsibility for bread winning that will always be a type of oppression that they will have. Part of it is that the family, I believe, can grow considerably closer together as a result of women's and men's liberation. The family does not have to be broken apart. This does not mean that we should not be seeking alternative arrangements such as communes, alternative arrangements and alternative options such as childcare centers. What it does mean is that any heterosexual, and I believe, ultimately homosexual unit will have a better chance of surviving if there is an increase in communication and doing away with the stereotyping that are forcing people to be driven away from each other. One of the things that is also happening to a lot of families with children when both parents are sharing the responsibility of the bread winning is that the man decides that he doesn't want to do a lot of the cooking and they eat out at restaurants more frequently. It's an interesting phenomenon because the children, when they eating out at restaurants, find they are for the first time able to talk to both their parents as adults and almost as an equal type. Not as adults, but on an equal type level. The woman who used to be serving the meals in the house is not seen by the children as a servant who has to get up to get more salt or get more napkins, to get more food, to serve the next course, therefore they're not participating in conversations in an engaging way. It reinforces the contempt that the young boy and young girl obtained from children in a very early age, at least in some of the problems that I mentioned. I think that this freedom to question on the job is also very fundamental to overcoming one of the major problems in the business world with the capital system today. That is the leverage the business world has on individual men to stay on their jobs because of the security that that job offers. I think once that leverage on the part of the business community is gone a lot more questioning, a lot more fresh air can be introduced to corporations. This is all some what attitudinal in discussion and it's also personal behavior. I think personal behavior is level with men's consciousness raising groups and the men's liberation movement has to start discussing it. But there's also also a lot of institutional changes that have to be examined simultaneously with changes in personal behavior. One of these is work on childcare centers. People usually think when they think of childcare centers as only government sponsored or city sponsored childcare centers. I've seen a lot of childcare centers start just by informal exchanges of children, unfortunately too frequently among women but ultimately we have to start this exchange of children among both parents, with both parents taking responsibility. There's also a great deal of work that is being done now and some of which is already published on childcare centers in places of employment. Experience with that area shows that it's one of the very few economic fringe benefits that companies can offer that gives a direct return for the company. Frequently now it's the woman who is being trained by the company for a certain job and anyone who knows anything about the economics of training knows that it costs a great deal to train employees. If they loose that woman because of turnover and companies that are installing childcare centers can claim that as fringe benefit for employees, which is actually a very essential benefit, but at the same time it prevents so much turnover that occurs for these companies in the employment area. Childcare centers, I think, have to be looked at very definitely as something that both parents can bring their children to and therefore you have two jobs that companies or two areas of employment or childcare centers in that area. Too frequently the man says, okay honey, why don't we try and get your university and your business to have a childcare center when he should be making just as much effort to do it in his area of business. It would be a good opportunity for the boy and girl children to commute back and forth to the childcare center with the man or with the father during the day and the father therefore has more time with the child. I think other changes have to be brought about, they can be brought about and open up more options are to a four day work week. A lot of factories are beginning to find the four day work week very beneficial and very economical. Other series of changes are such things as staggered hours. When you start putting staggered hours and four day work weeks and childcare centers together you start increasing your flexibility to arrange for childcare and not just in terms of woman's responsibility for childcare, but women's and men's responsibility for childcare, you add an additional alternative for that childcare which I think is very important. I think there's also a whole series of changes that have to be brought about by a men's liberation movement. Some of these are establishing a nationwide network of men's consciousness raising groups which will ultimately become joint consciousness raising groups of men and women meeting ultimately one week as all men, all women and then one week together. I think we have to start protesting book publishers not just for not picturing women in roles such as president as I had mentioned before, but also for not picturing men in the type of roles we discussed before. We have to start pressing the universities, University of Iowa, for courses not just on women's studies but courses on sex role studies. Women's studies apply to women's problems when in fact it's a men's problem as well. We have to start passing out literature equally protesting much of what football means and what it's implications are for . We have to start making men more aware of when they toss as being aimless and more aware of sex objectivism. One of the ways people do that that has been very effective is conducting conscious raising experiments such as men's beauty contests. When men call it a beauty contest, let me tell you something happens. We did this I our conciseness raising group and for weeks before hand I found myself looking in a mirror. Watching if my beard was growing in too wide, if it was trimmed right, finding myself doing pushups for the first time in years. A whole series of things that I had considered I had outgrown. But when I knew people were gonna judge me on that basis I suddenly started becoming much aware of it. My ease of saying women should just not cater to that, became a much deeper understanding of the pressures on the part of men that women receive and the pressures that men could possibly have received to become sex objects in society. It also made me even more acutely aware of what I call the isolation espousing which is thinking that it's so easy to change all by yourself without recognizing the societal pressures to stay the way you are. We have to start demonstrating for people's sanity of what is now called women's jobs with men as well as equal staffing of men's jobs with women. That means equal staffing of childcare centers with men, that means . But sometimes the only way to accomplish things in society. We have to start pressing for men being involved in elementary school teaching. For men being involved as nurses. For men being involved taking care of children in the home. For men being involved as stewards in airlines. For men being involved as teachers and the whole series of occupations which are now considered women's occupations. As long as they're considered women's occupations they will maintain the low pay, the disrespect, and contempt that they now hold. These are changes that have to occur at societal level. But some of the most difficult changes to bring about are changes on the personal level. I just wanna conclude what I'm saying with a few anecdotes of how difficult it is to change on the personal level. Men are constantly involved in wanting to change but when they want to do a dramatic change, I can remember wanting to, they said, oh, I'll do all the cooking. They did all the cooking all right, but it was one meal a week and it was a gourmet meal. And it was a meal that they could finish off saying "I am really a better cook than my wife." They were better than their wife because they spent six hours preparing gourmet meals once a week and their wife did all the routine meals. Anybody that spends six hours preparing a meal maybe a better cook than somebody who has to do it on a routine basis. We tend to like or we tend to learn from a very early childhood that we as men are worthy of making dramatic changes but the routine changes and the routine things, the women take care of that. That's one of the things that, in a personal way, has to be overcome by men in consciousness raising groups. Also, we suffered under the illusion for a long period of time that changes were very simple to make. Changes in behavior were very simple to make. When in fact even the simplest changes that we would agree to in consciousness raising groups were often very difficult to implement in real life. One of the things that we found in our first meeting, gee, we had agreed at that point which we disagree with now that some of our wives naturally love cooking. We thought that if we're going to be liberating that we should at least clean up after a meal. At least take the dishes into the kitchen after the meal is finished with. First day of liberation. We had six of us sitting around a table, three men and three women all attached to each other, all middle class heterosexual. At the end of the dinner the women automatically stood up and started cleaning off the table and the men continued our conversation when I suddenly realized I was supposed to get up and clean up the table. So I started cleaning up the rest of the dishes. As I got into the kitchen and came back and took another one of dishes out, the woman next to me said, "Gee Joe, it's really nice to have a husband like Warren cleaning up all these dishes. Why don't you do something like that?" The man looked at me and said, "Warren, what are you trying to do?" I was standing between the kitchen and the table wondering whether I should keep taking the dish back to the kitchen or whether I should take the dish back out to the table. Knowing that if would take the dish to the kitchen I was being called a girl's boy or a women's liberation boy or a and knowing that I sat back down . The very simplest of changes which I presumed anybody could do I began to feel the pressure of trying to do something in isolation. Eventually what this began to bring back was our slowly cutting off friends that could not accept our living a slightly different lifestyle than they were living. I also began to see a lot of things that I thought were fundamental interests in my wife and I were not fundamental in actual interests. They were interests that were bought about by a structured situation that we allowed ourselves to be involved in. An example of this was about half a year later, went over to one of our better friends homes that were involved in men's liberation. Again we cooked a meal there. What we decided to do was go a step further this time and the two men would do the dishes together. I mentioned before that my wife is involved in computers and I was involved in politics and my wife has very little interest in politics and I have some interest but not a great deal in computers. We finished the dinner and Dan and I decided the two of us, the two men would do the dishes together. I got to the kitchen and I rolled up my sleeves and I said, "I'm down with the dishes." I looked at the kitchen sink and said, "Which soap do I use? The one of the left or the one on the right?" He said, "The one on the left is better for your hands and the one on the right- I was doing the dishes and as I got the first dish clean I noticed that the towel that he was drying with had green and yellow on it and the dishes that I was cleaning had green and yellow on them. I said, "Gee, it's nice that you have dishes that match your towel. Where are your dishes from?" He said, "We got dishes from ." I said, "Where did you get your towels from?" He said we got our towels from a magazine. I said, "What about your dishwasher?" He said, "we don't have a dishwasher because we don't see a need for a dishwasher." Finally we realized we spent five minutes talking women's talk. We looked at each other and said, "Oh, it's made of plastic, of course." We rushed the rest of the dishes and we rushed outside and I interrupted my wife to tell her, she said, "Shut up for a minute. I'm in the middle of talking about politics." It's taken me by surprise so many times that when situations change the actual interests that we have start changing as well. One of the tremendous values of what changing behavior as well as attitudes, is a beautiful understanding that does not come from just one person growing while the other person is stagnate. I guess what I'm saying in a sense is that I think that men have a great deal to gain from women's liberation understanding a great deal more about women's liberation. Some of those gains are statistical gains like having less ulcers, having less heart attacks, having statistically a longer life, but I really don't think those gains are the biggest gains. I think the gains that are the most important ones are the ones that are occurring in almost every moment during the short life that we life. That is just learning how to listen to people. Learning how to respect others. Learning how to ask questions rather than always having the answers. Learning how to sympathize. Learning how to empathize. Learning how to cry. Learning how to be warm and open. I think for the first time, at least in my life, learning to love. Thank you.