 My name is Jess Wilcox, I'm the program's coordinator here at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Arts. I want to thank you all for coming out today on such a beautiful fall day and choosing to be with us. And here this fascinating panel of discussion, Salander Moonquist, Challenging Stereotypes. It's also my pleasure to introduce and give you a few words about our extraordinary panelists that we have here today with us. First we have Michael Kimmel, one of the best known experts on men and masculinity in the world. Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook. He's the author of more than 20 books about men masculinity, including the bestseller Guy Land, as well as Manhood in America, Men's Lives, Misframing Men, the Politics of Manhood, and the Gendered Society. And the brand new, just out, Guy's Guide to Feminism. And as a little plug, I would like to mention that there will be a reading of the Guy's Guide to Feminism at Blue Stockings Tuesday, November 27th at 7 p.m. I think there's a brochure outside on the tables in the antechamber that you can pick up if you'd like to find out more about that. One of our second panelists, who was slated to come, Shelby Knox, best known as the subject of the education of Shelby Knox, a Sundance Award, award-webbing film, unfortunately is not able to be here due to travel complications. But we still have, as our third panelist, Jimmy Briggs, who we're pleased to have, the founder of Man Up Campaign, a global initiative to mobilize young people to stop violence against women and girls in their community through music, sport, and technology. Through extensive travels in Africa and the Middle East and Asia, Briggs has produced seminal reporting on the lives of war-affected youth and children soldiers, as well as survivals of sexual violence. He is the National Magazine Award finalist and recipient of honors from the Open Society Institute, National Association of Black Journalists for Work in Uganda and Rwanda, and the Carter Center. His next book is The War's Women Fight Dispatches from a Father to His Daughter. And last, but certainly not least, is Linda Stein, who will be our moderator today. She is an artist, activist, lecturer, performer, and video artist. The core of her work addresses issues of empowerment through gender justice. Stein's solo exhibition, The Fluidity of Gender, Sculpture by Linda Stein, is currently traveling the country through 2013. Accompanied by her feminist lecture, The Chance to Be Brave, The Courage to Dare, collaborative Stein gig performances by local community members and students, and exhibition catalogs. Stein is represented by Floemhaus Gallery in Manhattan and has her archives at Smith College. You can also see in the antechamber she has a series of catalogs out there which you can feel free to browse through but are also available on Amazon.com. So, with no further ado, I will pass it along to this fabulous moderator and get the program going. Thank you. Good afternoon. How are you all today? Did you get caught in the two-and-three train coming to Brooklyn? It's really a privilege to be here and I want to thank Elizabeth Sackler first for all the work she does for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. She was brave enough to use that word feminist in the title of her center. And Catherine Morris, Rebecca Taffel, Jess Wilcox. Thank you very much, Jess, for all the work you did. Massa has been here and Osario is handling the technical stuff today. And I want to thank our sponsors for taking part in this event by asking each of you to stand up and remain standing. And I'll call your name and your organization and we'll wait to have a round of applause when all the people are standing. Is Tata Triore Rogers from the Australia Foundation here? Allison Fisher from the Bella Absa Leadership Institute. Joyce Whitby, Gloria Jacobs from the Feminist Press. Len and Ellie Flomanhoft from my gallery, Flomanhoft Gallery. Jimmy Briggs from Man Up Campaign. Joan Sammelin from Men Can Stop Rape. The National Council for Research on Women. The National Organization for Men Against Sexism. Gabriel Kahn from On The Issues Magazine. Agatha Patterson from Third Wave. Voice Mail Magazine. Women of Color Policy Network. Stephanie Yassanda from Women's E-News. Thank you, thank you all. Appreciate it. So you have on your chair a couple of things. Panelist introduction and what I call a garf. I bet you don't know what garf is. Garf stands for Gender Alert Response Form. And I hope you'll take a couple of minutes afterwards to fill it out. You could do it anonymously if you'd like. Lisbeth Salinda, Mikael Blunkvist. Two main protagonists from Steve Lawson's Millennium Trilogy. And the subsequent Swedish movies. Two figures from pop culture who stand out as fictional characters. Who shake up, break up, unhinge, scramble, reverse, blend, blur, and challenge the binary stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. Reaching and stretching toward a mobility and fluidity of gender. Exploring beyond what is currently considered normal and acceptable. And opening the viewer to a multiplicity of emotions. Of simultaneous fascination and discomfort. There is in this trilogy a frightening excitement. An ambiguous and complex overlapping of strength, aggression, power, and sexual energy. Issues of sadism intersect, slam into fears of being held down, bound, trampled upon. Without agency, without defender, without selfhood. Come close at your own risk to the mesmerizing fantasies of omnipotence and libidinal domination. Or enter the terror of victimhood and vulnerability. Open up to your own oceanic waves of righteousness and transgressiveness. The oscillating feeling of being safe and then in an instant unprotected. In my art I can deliberate on antithetical emotions like these. I can be stirred up and naked in my exposure to the inner turmoil that I'm only just beginning to let loose. As an artist I can only be surprised by the relentlessness of my investigation and journey. The take no prisoners search and destroy need to reveal my own verboten emotions. As I create icons representing gender fluidity. Sometimes with a femaleness that stands in for all of humanity. Or sometimes looking to icons of strength and justice already in our popular culture. This is what brought me to this trilogy. So let's look at how these emotions play out and say this first story, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Let's see in the movie how stereotypes are challenged. How the viewer is challenged to accept the blurring and scrambling of binaries. Now I'd like to turn to my distinguished panelists, Michael Kimmel, Jimmy Briggs. Please come up on the stage and we hope we'll have an interesting conversation. He's working? We okay? So Michael let's start with you, Michael Kimmel, who will speak on how Michael represents a new prototype for masculinity. Michael. Thanks. Before I do I just want to say that was wonderful. This is the first time I've seen it so thank you. That was fantastic. I barely feel like I have anything to add to it. I want to talk off of an essay that I've written about whether a blunt quest represents a new model of masculinity and also talk a little bit about what some of the costs of that new model of masculinity might be. The first thing I want to say though is that these novels, this trilogy, perhaps the most widely read novels in the world over the past half decade, you know, struck some nerves. And I think one of the reasons that it struck a nerve at least for me is not sort of the sort of dark, cold Swedish winter part of it but rather the fact that these seem to be leftist political thrillers. The typical American political thriller, the Robert Patterson-Tom Clancy type, always seem to end up resolving in a kind of bushy and chanian world of, you know, if you see something say something, mutual surveillance and a police state. So I think that we liked, I think we kind of caught into the millennium trilogy in part because they were not only, because they were I think explicitly, you know, sort of at least social democratic, if not further to the left, but also explicitly feminist. Larsen himself said, described himself actually as a feminist starting as early as 1972. And I just thought I would tell you one little story about something. After he had died, in 2009, his life partner, Eva Gabrielson, cited a moment when his books won an award, cited a moment which she thought was decisive in Larsen's own development as a feminist man. In 2003, there was a very well-publicized murders of two women in Sweden. A Kurdish woman and also a Swedish model were both murdered that fall. And the media continually stressed the difference between the two. One was an honor killing, the Kurdish woman was honor killing, something completely foreign to Swedish culture. And the model was a crime of passion, a homicide. Larsen didn't buy that for a second. He called them, in an article that he wrote, sisters in death. And he stressed in fact the similarities between these two murders of these two women. And this is what Larsen himself wrote in an essay about these. He says, the forms of oppression differ, but not the cause of oppression. The forms vary dramatically between Sicilian honorary murders, burning widows in India, or battering of girlfriends or wives on Saturday nights in Sweden. The culture does not explain the underlying causes as to why the women of the world are being murdered, disfigured, circumcised, beaten, and forced into different forms of ritual behavior decided by men. The causes being that men in patriarchal societies oppress women. This is a systematic violence against women, but this is exactly what this is about. And it would be described as such, a violence of the same proportions were directed against trade unionists, Jews, or handicapped people. Feminism and anti-racism are two sides of the same coin. And remember this is a man writing in 2003, this is not Catherine McKinnon, not Andrea Dworkin, but perhaps the most popular novelist in the English-speaking world. So it's really quite telling that he described himself this way. So in the first book, which is, I'm sure everybody in this room knows, the first book, literal translation, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in English, was actually called Men Who Hate Women. It's literal translation in Swedish. So, and really it's a book about, in some ways, a contrast of masculinities using this punky feminist heroine on the one hand as a foil and also promoting a certain new model of masculinity in Blumkvist. So look at the evidence. There's a lot of male characters in this film, in these three books, sorry. There's the explicit villains, like the sexually predatory legal guardian, whom you saw in the video. His father, her father, who she tries to murder in that scene, pouring the kerosene and then lighting them on fire. There's her brother, who's sort of a maniacal cold-blooded killer. All of these are hyper-violent, selfish. So those are the explicit villains. But actually Lawson spends a lot of time talking about the complicit villains. The Vanger family, the spineless bureaucrats like Bjork, the corporate miscreants, the immoral old-world industrial tycoons like the Vangers, the corrupt police and CIA types like Goldberg, the utterly, I mean, he has just, Lawson is just dripping with contempt for a tellerborian, the corrupt venal psychiatrist. So these are the foils. These are the men who hate women. And against this, he posits Blumkvist as a kind of pro-feminist or proto-feminist man. On the one hand, he's utterly ethical. He's not at all exploitive of women. There's a scene early on in one of the books in which one of the interns, a young woman coming to the Millennium Magazine as an intern, shows up at his apartment late at night and virtually throws herself at him. And he rejects her. He's not exploitive. He's not predatory. He's obviously a competent lover. Erica Berger, the editor of Millennium, with whom he has an affair with the knowledge of her husband. This frees her husband to have dalliances with other men. She's satisfied with their sex life. But on the other hand, there's some certain costs to this that I want to talk about. I think there's a certain desexualization of this new Swedish masculinity in the way that Larson portrays it. The affection that Michael Blumkvist exhibits is dispassionate. It's almost chilly and functional. Is this necessary? Larson seems to think so. But I ask the question, can pro-feminist masculinity also embrace a sexual desire that's neither predatory nor violent, but still remains hot? I'm not so sure that Larson would agree. For example, the scene that you saw was the only time that Lisbeth and Blumkvist actually have sex, those two scenes when they're in the cottage together. She buys him a Christmas present. This is in the first book. She buys him a Christmas present and she sees him with Erica on the street. She gets absolutely so freaked out by this. This is what Larson writes. He says, The pain was so immediate and so fierce that Lisbeth stopped in mid-stride, incapable of movement. Part of her wanted to rush after them. She wanted to take the metal sign and use the sharp edge to cleave Berger's head in two. She did nothing, as thought swirled through her mind. Analysis of consequences. Finally, she calmed down. And you may remember this pivotal scene, she throws the gift into the garbage. Momentary jealousy scares her. She's vulnerable and she has made it her life's project to be utterly impenetrable. She vows never, at this moment, never let anyone, including Blumkvist, back into her heart. She spends the next thousand pages, the next three volumes getting to a port where she can actually begin to trust him again. What I thought I would do is just, I'm going to read a couple of passages about this because I think there's something to this. Larson's answer comes, I think, closest to what you might call the sort of second-wave writers on sexuality, second-wave feminist writers like Andrew Dworkin or John Stoltenberg. For them, like Larson, I believe, men's sexuality is inherently predatory, violent and oppressive to women. Erection signified domination, intercourse of violation and occupation. Under patriarchy, women's heterosexual desire is collaboration. Lesbian sex can be liberatory, but only if it in no way resembles heterosexuality. Men's sexuality can be politically unproblematic, only if it was denuded of what men had come to understand constitutes desire. Aggressive, energetic, possessive. In a post-patriarchal feminist universe, gender equality in sex requires that men's sex come to resemble stereotypical feminine sex. This is not the case among contemporary third-wave feminists, and like Elizabeth Salander herself. One might even say that the pursuit of sexual pleasure is a feminist act. Third-wave feminists have embraced a more masculine sexuality, more agentic, more pleasure-seeking as opposed to pain-avoiding. The encounter between Elizabeth, the epigrammatic third-wave feminist, and Michael, the embodiment of second-wave pro-feminism, encapsulates the dilemma. They constantly misinterpret each other. They vacillate between being lovers, friends, enemies, capture the contradictions of this particular historical moment, and provide part of the pleasure, at least for me, of reading the trilogy. Lawson resolves this tension temporarily, and in a way I think that at least leaves me feeling unsatisfied. In the third volume, those of you who've read the three, Blomquist and Berger, Erica Berger, decide to end their affair. It's just not anything wrong with it particularly. They both enjoy it. Her husband's accommodated himself to it. It's just that there's no magnetic attraction that is enough to sustain it. It's somewhat passionless. And look, let's face it, an affair without passion is kind of hard to sustain. In the trilogy's final scene, the absolute end of the three books, Blomquist shows up at Lisbeth's apartment. Now remember, they've been lovers. You've seen it. But their affair was somewhat desultory, a bit of momentary comfort. He brings her, I like this being a Brooklyn boy, he brings her bagels and an espresso. He announces that he is, quote, just company, unquote. Now, however, Lisbeth has done something she has not done before, feels something that she has not felt since she was a little girl. She trusts him. He, and this is a quote, had in fact been a good friend to her over the past year, unquote. He was not a man who hates women. The cost, however, is their sexual relationship. This is a quote. She looked at him for a moment and realized that she now had no feelings for him, at least not those kind of feelings, unquote. She's no longer attracted to Blomquist as a lover. She's no longer vulnerable, doesn't love him like that. And when Lisbeth's salander opens her door and invites him into her apartment, she speaks for all the abused women who have shown themselves to triumph over their victimhood, who have steeled themselves to prove themselves resilient and indeed heroic. She also allows the possibility that the term feminist man is not an oxymoron, that men can be friends with women. Mikkel can actually become, quote, a man who loves women, unquote. He just can't have sex with them. Thanks. Jamie Briggs. I was going to tell Michael every time I'm on a panel with him, I usually follow Michael, and he always says things that has me scrambling, scratching out notes, putting things back in, trying to catch up with him so that I can somehow add to analysis he provided. It's interesting, and I'm sure we'll get into this once we open the discussion up amongst the three of us, because it's always my reaction to the first novel, but the trilogy was somewhat different. I don't know if I saw Blumquist as much as a proto-feminist, a pro-feminist as anti-masculinist, because one of the things, throughout the series, but particularly the first one, we see a very striking pattern. Of course, it's easy to see this trilogy and the character of Salander as exercising some sort of revenge fantasy. But the thing about Blumquist that's very striking, he is a very moral right person. As a journalist, he protects the sources. He's very ethical. He never leaks information. He follows trails to a somewhat satisfying end. But he's never the one to take forceful action or respond in equal measure to the violence that's happening around him. That role was for Salander. I thought it was interesting, especially Mike referred to the incident, or the comments he made in 2003. What I thought was interesting was Larson's own background. Some of you or most of you probably know that in adolescence, actually in 2015, he witnessed a gang rape committed by friends of his. He never reported that gang rape, nor did he try to stop it. I thought it was interesting reading the trilogy and then learning that fact because throughout the series, it felt like, to me at least, in many ways that this character of Salander was really almost a tool of redemption. Or I guess sort of a fantasy based scripting of what happened in his adolescence. Linda asked me to talk about some of the parallels and some of the lessons that the trilogy and the character of Blancquist have in real society, contemporary society, particularly of late, with some of the most more high profile incidents we've seen with harassment and sexual assault. I'm sure this was intentional, but I thought it was interesting that we had this conversation, this specific conversation in the context of the 20th anniversary of Anita Hill's testimony. Because now, it's very much in all of our minds, those of us who can recall that time period and the troubling issues it raised, particularly with power dynamics around harassment and the lessons or responsive men. And one of the things I think, you know, Larsen does, he, in his context, he justifiably goes after the power structures. All of the violence in these books comes from varied and infallible institutions of power, whether it's the Vonger family, this family dynasty, whether it's industry, whether it's sex traffickers, whether it's social services who ostensibly are meant to protect. In the case of Salander, they didn't protect, they actually failed to own over again. But for me, I think that the series really sort of highlights the banality of misogyny and harassment. Because most of, you know, in the real world, everyday real world, a lot of the harassment and violence that we see is, it is banal. It takes very, very rarely, if ever, does it reach the levels that we see in these books where women are mutilated so graphically in great detail as described by Larsen. This banality exemplifies itself in how, in the workplace, particularly the workplaces where men are in majority and the discrimination oppression women face in those situations, we saw it very strikingly in the Dominic Strauss Con case, where you had a white male figure, a very easily identifiable villain in these dynamics, you had a white male villain and then you had a black African working class survivor who, in the process, at least in terms of media representation, becomes voiceless as this typical in many situations of harassment or abuse, and Michael highlighted this, is individuated. And by that I mean, you know, a lot of times media coverage and readers or consumers of that coverage, we look for reasons to explain why it happened in that particular case. What made this special? How was this person different from me? What excuses can I find so that what happened to this person or what this perpetrator did is not the norm. And it somehow serves to affirm or provide comfort to the majority of men who don't harass, who don't abuse, don't oppress, at least not overtly, but do nothing about it, who are apathetic or somehow powerless to prevent or stop it, much like Larsen was at adolescence. I'm going to stop there because I do have some more points, but I want to actually respond to some of the things that Michael said in the conversation. Thank you. Let's go back to Michael for a second. You talked a little bit about the proto-feminist. I think it would be good to put a little more meat around that phrase. Can you elaborate a little bit more about what the proto-feminist would be like today? You mean like a pro-feminist masculinity, I mean, what it would be like now? Yes. Okay. Let me just say something about the term, okay? Yes. Because I'm asked this a lot. I suppose other people, Joe, you probably asked this a lot. Why don't you just call yourself a feminist? And to me, I think I've thought about this a lot over the years in the organizations that I've been involved with. I call myself pro-feminist in part because I think that feminism, politically, feminism really requires that you share one empirical observation. And from that empirical observation, you take a moral position. The empirical observation is really easy. Women and men aren't equal. That's the empirical observation. And I would suspect that virtually everybody in this room suspects that that's largely the case. The moral position is very simple also, and they should be. That's really all you need to support feminism. One empirical observation, one moral position. But to call yourself a feminist, I think for me, I always felt that that would be indulging in what I like to call premature self-congratulation. It's kind of like a little bit too hasty and a little bit too easy. I think in order to be a feminist, one has to experience that inequality in a particular way. And I don't. I'm privileged by gender inequality, not privileged by it. So it would be just as presumptuous for me to say that I'm a gay liberationist or a black militant, as it would be to say I'm a feminist, for the same reason. I think it would be appropriative. So rather than say that, I think, you know, look, I mean men have an important place in the movement for gender equality. I firmly believe that. But I don't think we can be the cavalry. I don't think we say, well, thanks for bringing this to our attention, ladies, but we'll take it from here. You know, I don't think we ride to the rescue. I think we are the gentleman to auxiliary. And I think that's a really honorable place to be. And so I call myself pro-feminist as a way to say I'm the support network. I'm the cheerleader for this. But it's not me. I don't claim to be that. I felt that way. I actually have to say, you know, when I was one of the founders of the National Organization for Men Against Sexism, you know, almost 30 years ago, I thought I felt this way. But I have to say now, you know, feminism has come under such relentless assault as a term for so long that I kind of loosened up a little bit about it. If a guy wants to stand up and say he's a feminist, I'm like, I'm down with that. It's really interesting as I go around to colleges around the country, and I really love talking to the students. But that word feminism is just such a hard word for them to put their arms around. And it's when we break it down and say, are you for equal pay for equal work? Every hand goes up, yes, I'm for equal pay for equal work. Are you for parity in the ability to run for office or something like that? Yes, everyone's for that. So then what's wrong with the word feminist? You know, everybody seems to embrace the word but have some difficulty with it. And Michael, you know, when you say an empirical observation and then a moral observation, I think that's great. I think that's really a great way of putting it because if people would, if men would say, you know, we aren't equal. And we start there. I think then there's a lot that can be accomplished after that. I like that very much. So man-up organization, Jimmy, do you discuss current events and what's going on with Dominic Strascon and that he got off the hook in America and facing things in France and kind of probably will get away with it there too. But that's the short range. I think the long range effect of what he went through is going to be significant for women and for men going forward. Is this the kind of thing you discuss with your man-up group? We do. And I was just thinking something that Michael said that men can't be the cavalry because I agree, I don't think men should be the cavalry, but at the same time, I think that men should and probably could easily say that, you know, there's not, that equality does not exist. But I think that the issue is, that's not the issue. I think the issue is helping men understand, creating the space to understand, to talk about why they should care that there's no equality. Men know there's no equality. And amongst themselves, they may even be pushed to say that. But I think it's a matter of curing why there's not equality and what impact it has on them individually and collectively. And it's really, you know, that's why I said the term before, anti-masculinist, which I think maybe could be synonymous with pro-feminist when men say it because I think that term anti-masculinist, it's really upending and challenging what manhood means and really offering and affirming alternative masculinities. Not, you know, and you said it so eloquently in the video presentation that you did. You talked about, you know, subtly and not so subtly how bonkers character, even by the way he dresses or how shadows present in a certain way, his physicality or lack thereof, how it challenges traditional notions of, you know, the male hero in so many western films. You know, almost to the point where I won't say it makes them weak or, you know, in terms of sexual terms, de-sexualizes it, but it really, it's a very stark contrast to what we're normally seeing. In terms, to your question, in terms of man up and even beyond man up, and Joe does, it's similar in the same, in the same word, in talking with young people, especially young men, adolescents, high school students, a lot of times, you know, you're having to struggle against this overwhelming, consuming tide of pop culture, whether it's music or literature, especially visual pop culture, videos and movies, which affirms this traditional negative masculinity, which becomes very easy for them. And the more power, the less power they have, whether, you know, or perceived less power, whether it's because of color or economics or geography, whatever language, you know, what society tells them is that, you know, when everything else, if you can't achieve power in these other pathways, financial, political, so forth, you always have your physicality and your sexuality. And that's what they hold on to that very tightly. So it's really, you know, it's really a painstaking process, and I was talking to Joe before about how, you know, the work that his organization is doing, the wonderful work they're doing is intergenerational, because it takes time to break down that profound socialization that happens really from birth, especially for young men. And Joe's organization, again, is men can stop rape. Michael? I wanted to just respond very quickly to something that you said, Linda, and then something that Jimmy has said, both in his first remarks and then just now. The first thing I want to say is that, you know, you were talking, Linda, about going to college campuses and the sort of sense that, you know, that you get among a lot of young women that, you know, that feminism was, you know, my generation's issue. They say, you know, it's your generation's issue. We won, you know. We've inherited it all of it. We can do anything we want. It's over, you know. And so you get this thing, and a lot of, you know, my colleagues, you know, fret over the fact that, you know, the constant phrasing is, I'm not a feminist butt. And then the butt is, as you say, you know, they actually agree with everything. If you gave a kind of top 10 policy initiatives that feminism offers, they would agree with every one of them, but they're not feminist. So I just want to say, I'm an activist and I'm an academic. And as such, temperamentally, I think, you know, as an activist and as an academic, as a professor, I'm an optimist. You know, it's sort of, it's a temperamental position. You know, I have to believe the world can get better. And I, so I focus on the butt part, not the, I'm not a feminist part. But I agree with everything they stand for. You know, that's not so bad. You know, glass is still half full. And I think we often do ourselves a disservice by saying that we focus on that I'm not a feminist part of the phrase. But I want to say something else about, to me, you said, Jimmy, that really struck me. You were talking about the banality, you gave the, used the phrase banality of harassment initially. And then you and you were talking about Anita Hill. Clearly, every, you know, we all recognize now, 20 years later, that that was a turning point in the conversation about gender in the United States. You know, that kind of overt, you know, kind of, I mean, you know, when that first happened, you may not remember this. They did surveys, half of Americans believed her, half of Americans believed him. You know, now that it's like 88% believe her, the conversation changed as a result of her. And DSK, I think what you're saying is something really interesting. And that is the level at which his behavior, and this is uncontradicted, whether or not he did, you know, it was consensual with this maid or not, ridiculous, is he thought of it, basically it came, it was a perk that came with his position. It was the routinization of that behavior in every single hotel, with every single female intern, with every single female, you know, person that he came in contact with in any position. But it was a perk. As did Bjorman, the guardian in the trilogy. As does Teleborian. This notion that, well, of course I have sexual access to you. I have power over you. So it gives me that kind of routinized sexual access. And I think if you're, I think you're right. I think you're on to something here, that this may be a real turning point, not in the naming of harassment, but in actually exposing the routinized quality of men's sense of entitlement to women's bodies. And if that's the case, it will have served an enormously salutary sort of function in pushing that conversation forward. Twenty years from now, we're gathered here, and everybody says, you know, that DSK case, he got off, as did Thomas, he got off, but it changed the conversation. I think it'll have been a really valuable, you know, moment. I told you I'm an optimist. And I think it's important. I was at that Anita Hill conference, and boy, it was fantastic. How many of you here were at that? It really was breathtaking, I think, in its reach going forward. I think it's not only the men that accept male privilege, but the women, look, his wife said, so my husband's a seducer. I mean, all men, or all politicians, I think she said, are seducers. So we're all kind of buying into this ordinariness of privilege, male privilege. I was going to say the same thing a little bit. It's true, Anita Hill's, Clarence Thomas' wife defended him. DSK's wife stood by and defended him. But I was going to say, even just here, boiling down further here in this city, I think there are lessons that can be drawn and paralleled with Blomkwist and Larson's analysis through the emergence of the Slutlock. Yes, very much. Very interesting because early this year, two NYPD officers acquitted of someone who was intoxicated. And there was a certain conversation around that fast forward several months most recently with the sexual perpetrator here in Brooklyn. And the remarks and attitude of some within the New York Police Department that women should not wear short skirts, or they should cover their legs. And I think, again, it goes back to the modality question of, it is easy to look at Clarence Thomas or Dominic Strauss-Kahn, but I think the modality happens, and the average person and not just our attitudes, but how we do or don't support women and their choice of dress and their behaviors and our reaction amongst ourselves with those forces that would seek to dictate a particular gender role for them. Yes. Position to put all these baby blues on him and his black leather and tattoo, which Eva Gabberson, his Stig Lawson's companion, called Warrior Paint. So the filmmakers really went out of their way to reverse stereotypes. Would young men today, or maybe older men, see this as weakness, see Blunkfest as weak? Maybe passive. I don't know. It's hard because one thing is, as I said before, he really, I forget the phrase that Michael used, he's really the auxiliary. He's the auxiliary support to Salander. I mean, he's not holding accountable directly for this hyper surreal violence that they're committing against the female characters. I think this is an empirical question, being a sociologist, because as you know, you just watched clips from the Swedish movies, and most of what you watched actually was from the book one. It was all from the book one. All from the first movie, because in the second movie, she gets more punky and she saves her head, she gets a mohawk and she does a lot more. So this is the Swedish version. And in this version, you see Blunkfest in Baby Blue. He cooks with his children. He's passive sexually. He lives there. She fucks him. He wants to cuddle afterwards. She doesn't. Now, here's the question. This is coming out around Christmas time this year. Around Christmas time will be the American version, because Hollywood does not trust the American viewer to actually read subtitles. So they're actually going to have a trilogy of these movies in an Americanized version. So here's the empirical question. How will they image Blunkfest? Now, it's clear that they have an already made audience of young women that they think that they can spike up and punk up Elizabeth. But the question is, can they possibly get away with this Swedish, this Scandinavianized, nurturing, cuddly, passive masculinity, or will they have to butch him up? It's an empirical question, and I offer it to you as sort of when you go to the movies, check that out, because my hypothesis, he's not going to be wearing a baby blue v-neck. I agree with you. How many in the audience think they're going to butch McHale up in that next movie? And how many think that they're going to make more of a sexual object of salad? I'm almost afraid to see the movie. Well, we'll see. Come December. Don't make it much hotter. Yes. Well, they've already done that. I mean, there was a controversy earlier over the poster choice. Yes. You know, in the American version, Hooney Mara who plays Celander, you know, the poster image is a very provocative, seemingly sexual one, and also the casting of Blomquist. I mean, it's Daniel Craig. Daniel Craig is not this person and the Swedish interpretation. Even if he is in a powder blue v-neck sweater, it's not the same. I mean, they have been, you know, they're going to use his use of physicality. Otherwise, why cast him in that role? He's macho. Exactly. I'm almost afraid to see this next movie. There's a part of me that doesn't want to see it. But then again, you know, I'm curious and just to be able to say how bad it is, I guess I have to see it. So this is extremely, extremely interesting. So if we were to say that McHale is not weaker in this movie, he is, in fact, his ego is strong enough so he could wear baby blues and be a little bit more passive so that we don't use the word passive as a negative for masculinity. And we say that he can listen to her when she's smarter or more informed in some way and that doesn't make him less manly. There are other things that you would say for this new prototype of masculinity or what we're aiming for, what women would like, you know, but from a man's point of view, sorry, Shelby's not here, she would offer a 20s view of this also but she's in North Carolina now, her plane got canceled. So if we were to define this really strong, positive masculinity, what kind of words would you use? So that they're not weak, so that men don't feel weak by this? I think in the language, something Michael said when you think about this, we were talking about pro-feminist and feminist because maybe passive, passive isn't the right description for this character because that does convey at least a weakness in character. I'm not sexually passive in that scene that we saw. She walks in, she says, and he's sort of like, what? He's like surprised, like what's happening? He kind of seems to get into it but we're not clear, she comes, she leaves, we're not sure what happened with him. Talk about gender reversal. She doesn't even ask, was it good for you? She doesn't really care. She's gone. So there is a way in which he is passive, sexual as in my context. But a little bit more throughout because she kind of takes the lead in solving the mystery and because she has this photographic memory and she's so assertive. I was trying to remember the name from yesterday. Yesterday there was a conference on masculinity. Cuny had it, the grad center. Anybody there from, yes I know Magda was there. And one woman, Jen Gabori was the name I was thinking of. She said, she talked about, now I never saw her, Betty Draper on TV. How many of you have seen this Betty Draper? She talked about her being an abuser and a bad mother but she said there was something that women, perverse satisfaction almost, that women found in just another woman being powerful in the situation. I think that's one of the things that so many women find so attractive in this trilogy that, gee, finally after, you know, seeing all those movies whether the girl or the woman is raped or battered or victimized in some way, here is a defender with agency and power and smarts and like Wonder Woman she doesn't have the lasso and the magic wristbands but she has all these other accoutrements of power, this photographic memory. I was going to say something, you know, I think in a way, maybe we're, I think we're talking around something by talking about active and passive and agentic and it takes them, you know, it takes them, you know, 1,800 pages but by the end of the book and if you remember how the different how the different mysteries and thriller parts resolve in book one, she comes in with the golf club, she rescues him. She's aware of his plight. She rescues him. At the end of the third book he rescues her. He's aware of her plight. He intervenes for her in a way that is quite unintrusive but quite, you know, but helps. And maybe what we're really talking about here is mutual dependency that they have to both acknowledge second, that they are friends and friends are equals. Think about friends, you know, we make friends with people who we consider our peers, not, you know, our servants and our bosses and maybe that that is what, it takes them 1,800 pages to actually get to the moment when he shows up at our apartment and we're actually witnessing a relationship that is founded on gender equality. They are mutually dependent. They acknowledge each other's strengths. There's no sexual tension any longer between them, right? So in a way it's the community of equals, you know, it's, you know, you can pick your utopian theorists, you know, you can have, you know, you can go Jeffersonian, you know, you can go anywhere you want, but it seems to me that that's the sort of that community of equals. It takes them a long time to get there but they actually have recognized that they depend on each other. And it does, and needing doesn't require power. I love that, and I love that about state loss. Now, can we have that between a husband or wife? Could we have that where sex is involved? That, that's the goal, or one of the goals anyway. How about if we, unless Jimmy, did you have anything else? I guess for me, you know, I agree with Michael. I mean one of the things that just really hung you up, maybe partly because of my own personal experience with seeing violence in this woman here and abroad, I guess I just was thrown by the violence at the end of the trilogy. Because I felt like, I kept wrestling with myself, you know, there is this powerful female figure, thankfully, but I wasn't sure about the message that Larissa was telling women and telling men in the context of this violence. Yeah, I have this conversation with friends. I respect a lot. And the conversation from that point goes like, why would women mimic the worst in men? You know, the violent part. Why? And it is a conundrum and I kind of wrestle with it myself. And that's why I said she defines herself Liz Salander by her own sense of morality. So this is a question of morality here. And I agree with those that say, well, why should women be violent like this? Isn't there another way? And I'm struggling with it. Maybe there will be some answers in the audience. Michael, did you want to say anything else? Otherwise I'd like if you would be a little different with us. How many have seen the trilogy? How many have seen all three? Okay. Ellie Flomenhoft, you had a question. That's great. Yeah. Right. You made your point anyway though. That's a very, very good point. That's a great, great question. That's a big question. Obviously we recognize maybe it's not obvious that justice is gendered. There is obviously the levels of impunity particularly as one the thing of one's social position and level of power. The degrees of impunity increase. I mean, I think I totally forgot about the Martha Stewart case. I guess because in my mind I'm distinguishing gender-based violations from financial ones. I mean, and I think there are examples of men going to prison as well for financial violations. But you don't see many men going to prison, especially at the high level of power where gender is concerned or harassment or sexual abuse. That's the problem because so many, I mean from almost some birth boys and then men are socialized that if you can get away with it why not do it? And society has enough examples of men getting away with it not just Donnie Strauss-Kahn but everyday citizens. I mean, women are so stigmatized that it's coming forward in the first place which is another reason why society is so profound. But as we see in some situations most recently with Dominic Strauss-Kahn becomes a he said, she said. You know, and somehow the perpetrator's narrative consumes that of the survivor. You know, we try to find as I said before, we try to find excuses for why why this happened. Strauss-Kahn was the president of IMF potential candidate for president France. There's no way he would, you know, sink to having to assault a domestic, especially a domestic from West Africa and that doubt starts to grow in your mind and then of course you know, because she wasn't the perfect victim you know, that gave us the easy out to kind of let it go away. But at the end, he was the perfect victim I mean, huge, the perfect witness. You know, you're a black man and a black woman accusing each other. I just want to say very quickly, I think your point is really well taken. I think you know, the Martha Stewart part it's a little bit complicated because Martha Stewart held herself up as somehow a moral arbiter of how people should behave and what good you know, being a good nurturer family caregiver would look like and we love to see people who hold themselves up as above us. We love to see them fall so in a way it was a little bit pushed by that but your larger point I think is quite telling and let me offer a counter anecdote that illustrates your point also and the point I want to make is that sexism is still so much more readily permitted than even racism is so let me give you one illustration of this because I think it's part again of the rootinization of this, you know, you shrug your shoulders boys will be boys, this is what guys do you know, everyone in power this is how they behave. Now some of you, you know, you probably it's hard for us in this kind of climate to remember that we actually had a primary competition in 2008 you know, before the the past three years of relentless assault on you know anything that resembled democratic politics um and during the primaries do anybody remember this during the primaries there was a moment at a Hillary Clinton rally when two men held up a sign that said go iron my shirt now how many of you remember that from the primaries a few of you now that's because it got virtually no media coverage at all it was absolutely sort of you know, quickly but there were these two guys that held up a sign at a Hillary Clinton rally and said go iron my shirt now what I'd like to ask you to do for a moment is to imagine if two white guys got up at an Obama rally and said go shine my shoes I think every, it would have been front page on every single newspaper, it would have been the lead story on every single evening news and every single candidate including John McCain would have said whoa, stop everything that's wrong because racism is still at least somewhat more visible and somewhat less permitted than sexism sexism was so routinized that that passed without even mention that only four or five of you even remember the event but I bet if that had happened in the other way everyone would have known about it yeah, very good point and if the Rutgers basketball players were white and Rush Limbaugh called whatever what? but the nappy headed hose and that whole racist comment got tremendous publicity so Ellie, your point is very well made and I think with DSK most people believe that he has a history of committing whatever we want, womanizing sexual abuse, I mean there's various takes on it but most people believe he at least has a problem with that some people call him an addict but however one defines that for oneself but what happened with the woman is that they picked all these little things that she did wrong and forgot the big picture that yes, this man probably did commit some kind of sexual assault in that room the survivor is thought to a higher standard than the perpetrator she had a lot of missteps in his background but because she made the mistakes that was enough to to color everything any other questions? yes, Judith Lawman yeah, with love and over and over again I mean I don't believe it very very much it's just, you know again also Stig Lawson might be saying that that the new man of the day we call him can be sought after by women and not be not have all these macho qualities I agree with you Michael, did you have a thought? sure I don't think that we disagree all that much Judith I think that the I think that the point that Lawson is trying to make is exactly what Linda just said you can be the new man which is to say more nurturing, more caregiving more cuddly, all of those things that we see and in fact that makes you even more desirable to the women so the new man is certainly is no less desirable but I think in the relationship with Lisbeth he recognizes that in order to be a real equal to her he recognizes as well that he's just company at that moment so that's all I was sort of arguing at that point I think there is a contrast between the predatory, entitled violent sexualities of the other men who hate women and then Blomkvist on the other hand and also by the way I think his name is Svensson the journalist who's killed in the book who has a very egalitarian relationship with his graduate student partner and it's quite explicitly stated that their gender equals so that's another a case sort of an example of that new masculinity that Lawson is trying to describe as terms of whether or not I think it's a semantic question at this point what I think we want I think what we need are to engage men to step up and recognize that gender equality is actually in their interest as men whether they, what they call themselves in so doing is not as much of an interest to me as the fact that they do it so the book that I just did with Michael Kaufman the guy's guide to feminism is really basically a book basically saying look guys, feminism is not that scary it's not really that complicated even you can understand this until we have a kind of lighthearted funny book about it it's just, I think the point is not what we call ourselves in that engagement the point is the engagement I think just as we're getting so many gender fluid terms and gender fluidity is is redefining masculinity and femininity I think it will be so different for a kid that's 4 years old today when he or she becomes a teenager it's going to be so different because I think our definitions of masculinity and what one needs to be masculine and the pressure we put on men men have this terrible set of rules they have to follow in order to be manly I think we're going to see a real change and I think the book you wrote probably is going to help it a lot Michael Magda Magda Thanks Magda Thank you so much for your comments I think some things just going back to the semantics conversation I think I agree with Michael that it's really about the actual transformation or the semantics itself I think semantics do matter because at least with the young men that I work with and talk to it's hard to say to them I'm going to work with you to become a feminist they shut down language doesn't matter especially in conversations like this men or young men don't see it as relating to them because of language they hear certain buzzwords like feminism or euphemisms like violence against women or interpersonal violence and they become so gendered they feel like it's not my issue especially if they don't see themselves as perpetrators or abusers they really don't feel like you're talking about them and so I feel like the semantics of it doesn't matter it's fine maybe a new term for men who support an ally with feminist and with women and stand up for them with women but I think the issue at your point is in terms of parenting and mentoring and Jill knows it's better than I do we're really working against this huge wave this all consuming wave that drenches all of us ourselves included with this negative masculinity and manhood and one of the things that I've been learning and we're doing with man up is we keep going younger and younger at first we started off working with high school age students now we're in middle school and hopefully the next year or two we'll be in elementary school because personally I feel like to start a conversation about equality and leadership and advocacy with high school students it's a positive thing but it's almost too late because by that point the adults they've been socialized 16, 17, 18 years it just takes that much more time to enact the transformation I think from the beginning when there are boys and girls we have to work with both of them individually and collectively in terms of interpersonal relations and issues of equality and it has to come from parents but in the absence of parents it has to come it has to be reinforced by the society of that child I mean if we're going into schools and making stop rape does this beautifully if we're going to schools and working through clubs academic situations the same message we're talking in the educational setting has to be reinforced at home it has to be reinforced on Sunday at church that's being reinforced by the peer group it has to be reinforced by pop culture it can't just be that hour once a week or twice a week because the message it may not stick it may not last and the conversation has to continue and as I went around to the colleges after a lecture one guy raised his hand said okay I get it what do you want me to do you know and this young woman raised a hand frantically and said look here's one thing you could do every time I go out on a date the guy does all the talking I'm not given a chance to say anything he doesn't even care about what I do or what I think one thing you could do and then she stood up like this and said one thing you could do is just listen a little bit more and so the conversation and groups like man up and what not is so so important and I have a question do you think this conversation is best held in gender segregated groups do you think the men open up more if it's boys only and the girls open up more if it's girls only or are you able in men against rape and men up well I guess yours is mostly a man's group so it is segregated to that extent I mean men can stop raping and Jo should be able to space this kind of a talk as well but men up is actually coed it is coed with young men and young women together but I know men can start rape it's mainly solely male kind of I'm agnostic on this question I've gone around on it for such a long time I think it's different and so what I would add is I think it made perfect sense from the 1970s to now for women to get together in sex segregated groups to talk about the kind of experiences that they have but it doesn't transfer willy-nilly to men in the same way that of course people of color would get together to talk about race issues but you know if you have a kind of like white group you know if you have a white group it's different from having a whiteness group that is to say if you have a group of white people talking about being white what you end up is we have it so hard it's unbelievable do you know what pressure we're under all the time and you know this as well as I do in May a big study came out that found that a higher percentage of white people in America believe that they are the victims of racial discrimination than black people so you know you have no idea how hard we have it man so that's one and I think men's groups had that kind of same quality which is when you get together it becomes a kind of fetch-fest but a whiteness group takes as its core principle racial privilege and starts there and says how does it feel what is your experience of having privilege now a men's group that would take as its core position and I have an idea of how to do this a men's group that would take as its core moment of origin men's privilege would be I wouldn't be opposed to that and the only way I believe we could do that is if it had men of different sexualities different races and different ethnicities and different ages and the reason is because then people would not be speaking from positions of privilege exclusively but also have some kind of movement between privilege and marginality so under those circumstances only because I'm asked this question all the time I testified for the government in the VMI and Citadel case so people would ask me are you against Wellesley and of course the answer is it's quite different when women a men's group is speaking to women it's a challenge to inequality and an all men's group can and often has been a way to perpetuate it but I want to can I just come back to one thing okay I wanted to address something that Magda said earlier and something that you said as well I'm the researcher so I want to tell you first I want to say that here's the bad news and I have some good news is this generation the current generation this is how much work we have to do the current generation of college age men subscribe to pretty much the same ideology of masculinity if you ask them we just did this some of my graduate students here we just did this the other day in class they had the same idea of what it means to be a man that I did when I was in college my dad did when he was in college it's really remarkable being stoic and shut down so there's the bad news that on the one hand the abstract ideology of what they think it means to be a man remains relatively the same here's the good news I think you're quite right Linda in the sense that we are coming to a moment in which these two forces are going to clash on the one hand they have very traditional ideas about masculinity if you ask them their abstract ideas about it on the other hand my male students survey after survey show they expect fully assume that their wives and partners will be equally committed to their careers as they are there's no more will you let your wife work for mad men sort of thing that's number one number two they fully expect and assume that they will be really involved fathers that's two and three they all have experience the biggest change going on among young people they all have experience with cross sex friendships 25 years ago when I started doing this teaching I would ask my students how many of you have a good friend of the opposite sex and I would get maybe 20% now if I get one hand raised when I say how many of you do not have a good friend of the opposite sex it's a surprise they all do and again my point about friendship is you make friends with your peers you have a good adult experience in everyday life of gender equality in a way that previous generations simply did not have now that's the good news it's going to clash with these traditional ideologies at some point and I'm hoping soon and on the garf that I hope you fill out there is that question do you have a cross sex friendship so I really am hoping you fill that out there was a very good point yes but that's a good point yes but it hit a nerve it hit a nerve with women that were not abused as well this movie and the trilogy and I think that's significant but we can't forget that she was an abused person yes good point I think her point is a good one about the issue of trauma and gender violence and oppression even with the movements we don't really talk about the response to those real concerns whether or not you've been physically abused or emotionally it does affect the relationships so you come from that PTSD yes we have 5 minutes so is there yes Joe no you yeah last question yes would that we could would that we could last question yes would that we could I like the phrase man that you used earlier when you said humanist I feel like that says it all right there it's self-explanatory it's all encompassing I agree with you because I think this is the whole language a lot of times and then unnecessarily it creates barriers to the work that has to happen I have to say I don't I don't agree and just at the risk of sort of ending this with a little bit of controversy I think it's giving in I think that the right wing has claimed words like the family to be pro-family is somehow to be sort of like anti-LGBT anti-feminist to be pro-boy these days is to be anti-feminist I'm just reluctant to give up the word I think it's valuable and I think it names something and I think it is part of humanism but I'm just reluctant to give it up I think it's giving in to the assault that has happened to feminists and to feminism as an ideology by the Rush Limbaugh's of feminazi world I just won't give up but I won't give it up that quickly but if we're asking men to evolve and transform why can't the language evolve and transform as well I mean why should we ask men to change but then maintain these definitions from 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago I think we change the content not necessarily the form I think we say you don't have to give up being a man you don't have to give up masculinity in order to embrace equality and gender justice and sexual equality you don't have to in fact what we need to do is instead say you know what the package of being a man actually includes things like doing the right thing, speaking truth to power having integrity behaving with honor for me when I was in sixth grade I remember reading Profiles in Courage it was a book that changed my life I read that book and it was about men who stood up, did the right thing and in every case it cost them they didn't get reelected and I thought that's what men do they stand up and do the right thing even if it cost them so I'm saying let's change the content not necessarily the package it comes in but those dignity, integrity, honor, courage, strength those are transcended terms feminism is not a term that transcends for like men I agree but what I'm saying is that so you fill the word with a new content rather than just say the package is wrong let's use a different one this is a great conversation and obviously we don't want to resolve it today but I wanted to throw a wrench into an emergent consensus that we all just want to get rid of the words I think on this note of passion I think we have to thank Michael Kimmel very much and Jimmy Briggs very much and thank you very much for coming out here today and please fill out the forms and Henry would you stand go to the back of the room and give them to Henry thank you