 My name is Elizabeth Sackler and I'd like to welcome you to the second Elizabeth A. Sackler Wildcard of 2009. And the Wildcard is an invitational event bringing together the best and the brightest and the most important women to talk about the best and the brightest and most important issues of our time. The Elizabeth A. Sackler Center as many of you know because you come here fairly frequently opened two years ago. And we call for equality in art for wall space and for prices. We call for equality in culture and global consciousness and global conscientiousness. And I think since actually the center opened we now have a wonderful new president and a wonderful new group of people in Washington. So the thrust and the import with which I often say those words has now been moderated a little bit because I feel like we're making some headway and people are starting to open up and to discuss the very things that make us human and bring us forward in a world that is more just and equitable for all people. We are a center that's alive and vibrant and we have discourse about goals that we choose to name and the pain of the experience of suppressed people and we're a center that's daring to challenge the status quo. That's one of the reasons that I really like the Brooklyn Museum. They're willing to status the challenge the status quo along with us and to assert the creativity and education tolerance and equality and respect and love must lead the way. If you haven't already been to the center today to see our most recently lauded we got one we received wonderful notices in the New York Times on reflections of a glass mirror new feminist video and also Patricia Conan, Harriet, Osmer Lost and Found and of course the Great Dinner Party by Judy Chicago. I hope you'll take the time after our panel discussion to do so. Today we have dads, dudes doing it. I love it. The awesome women who are women girls ladies have dared to ask when are more men going to care about work, family balance and what is the role of men in the feminist movement and of course those are questions that have come up all along I think over the last 30 years and have certainly come to the fore again since the center opened and those are questions that come to me all the time and that come to the museum all the time. It's going to be wonderful to have a whole other take and an opportunity to hear this great topic on the day before Father's Day. 2009 and I understand Gloria Felt told me that Time Out said today was one of the top 10 things to be doing on Father's Day. So welcome fathers. Glad you're all here. And welcome mothers and welcome children. There are a few. So that's great. Women girls ladies are the fabulous Gloria Felt, Debra Siegel, Crystal Brand Zook and Courtney Martin and they tackle these provocative questions from four generations. They're from four decades as you will hear at a moment and they've self stated that they have wrestled and continued to wrestle with the men in their lives, fathers, partners and sons and with the men out in the world from Rush Limba to Barack Obama. And I want to know if everybody saw Courtney Martin wrestling with Bill O'Reilly. A few months back. It was really good. I've taken a boxing Courtney and I think that might be something to do before you go back on there again and give them a good job. Anyway, they're really ready to talk about these things and I think they're really going on the road, what you've been on the road to fix a lot of what is bothering us about these issues. So I would like to read to you their bios. Crystal Brand Zook is 42. Their ages are damned by their choice, by their own choice. I'm reading their ages because I think what's relevant about their ages is the fact that we have generations, a span of generations coming together and that's part of what all this is about, is linking generations. So Crystal is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in publications such as Essence, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, The Washington Post, USA Weekday, Weekend Sorry, Vibes, Savoy, The Nation and many others. She's the author of three books. Her latest is I See Black People, interviews with African American owners of radio and television to be published by the nation in February I guess it's out. This is February 2008. It was last year. Crystal speaks regularly on popular culture and gender, multiracial identity and blackness as well as social justice issues involving health, the environment and criminal justice, all things that we all care about. She has appeared on national cable and broadcast outlets such as NPR, CNN, MSNBC, C-SPAN, MTV, Fox and TV One, the major outlets and is currently associate professor of journalism at Hofstra University in Long Island. Gloria Felt is 65 and she's an author, a commentator and speaker. She is an expert in women's rights, health, politics, media and leadership from where the personal meets the political. She was a teen mom whose passion for reproductive justice led her to a 30-year career with Planned Parenthood Federation of America culminating as its national president and CEO from 1996 to 2005 and I say thank you very much for that work, Gloria. Gloria's forthcoming book in collaboration with Kathleen Turner is Send Yourself Roses. She has appeared on Hardball, O'Reilly Today, Good Morning America, The Daily Show, Lara NewsHour, NPR and the most major national news case. She has written commentary for the New York Times of Boston Globe, USA Today, Huffington Post. It goes on. It's marvelous and we're very lucky to have all these women. It's fabulous. She has been named top 200 women leaders, legends and trailblazers by Vanity Fair and I want to thank you very much for being with us today. Courtney Martin, 27. 27. It's a lie. She's 29. Okay. She's under 30 and she's done more under 30 than most of us have done in twice as many years. She's a journalist, a filmmaker and a teacher. She's written for Bust, Bitch, Newsweek, The New York Times and The Village Voice among other publications and has been featured on the Today Show, MSNBC, Fox News, PBS, Seventeen, Glamour Family Circle and radio programs across the nation. Isn't this a great lineup? This is a terrific lineup. She's also contributing blogger to Feministing.com. If you haven't gone on there, it's time to do it. Courtney is currently an adjunct professor of women's studies at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn, New York. Her recently released book, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, the frightening new normalcy of hating your body was called a hard cover punch in the gut. I knew you were going to be a boxer by Huffington and a smart and spirited rant that makes for thought-provoking reading by The New York Times. And Deborah Siegel is 38. Is that true or not true? That's not true either. These are obviously outdated. You must be 40. She's 40. We're two years off on these. She's 40. And she's going to be a mother of twins in November. Yay. It's right. She's a writer and consulting specialist in women's issues. She's the author of the newly released book. It's not so newly released if this is two years off. Sisterhood Interrupted from Radical Women to Girls Gone Wild. It was in 2007 that that came out. She has written about women's ex-feminism family and popular culture for magazines, anthologies, and on her blog, Girl with a Pen, and for the Huffington Post, in addition to writing Siegel consults with organizations that link research on women's and girls' lives to media and policy, including the National Council for Research on Women. And the Wood Hole Institute for Ethical Leadership, where she is currently a fellow. She is still currently a fellow. She has still currently a fellow. She received her doctorate in English and American Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2001. After today's panel Q&A, these four incredible authors are going to be giving a free book giveaway and signing their books outside in the hallway. So I hope that you will take a moment and pick up your copy and get it signed. And I think that's a very generous and wonderful thing. And I'm delighted, delighted to have you here. I thank you for accepting my invitation for you to come as my wildcard, and please join me in welcoming these four great women, girls, and ladies. I asked Gloria where women, girls, and ladies came from, and she gave me the first two verses of the country western song it came from. So maybe you can just do it one more time. Should I do the honors, Gloria? Go for it, Courtney. It's a country western song. There's women, there's girls, and there's ladies. There's noes, there's yeses, and there's maybes, which we figured was pretty representative of the contemporary feminist movement. Welcome so much. Thank you to Elizabeth Sackler, who is this incredible force for those of you who don't know in creating intergenerational conversations among feminists, in addition to creating this home for feminist art, that I think we can all agree is a totally important unprecedented sort of value for all of us. I just want to give a big round of applause for Elizabeth Sackler. We also want to quickly thank Rebecca, Lindsay, all the team at Brooklyn Museum and the Sackler Foundation. You all have been so helpful putting this together, and we'd love to thank Vanya and Alex, who have been tremendous in helping us get the word out. So thank you to all of you. So we're here today, as you know, to... Let's see if this is going to work for me. It's warming up maybe? All right, I'm just going to talk. We're here today to reclaim the frame from feminist media, or from mainstream media, excuse me, which often pits women, particularly of different generations like us, against one another. When women disagree, it's a cat fight. Think about the mommy wars, for example. When men disagree, it's usually called a conversation. So, prepare to see us potentially disagree. We got it. Prepare to see us potentially disagree with the utmost respect for one another and our differences. We think that this is the stuff that progress is made of. In honor of Father's Day tomorrow, we're going to do something a little different than we've ever done before. We're going to focus on men and masculinity as it relates to the personal and the political and feminism. We feel that too often conversations about feminism are seen as solely conversations about women, rather than as conversations about gender. We want to buck that trend today and really open the dialogue up to look at how we are all limited by restrictive gender roles and likewise, all liberated by pursuing the still unfinished business of feminism. As we were looking forward to today's conversation this week, we paid careful attention to all the various messages about men and masculinity in the media. I have to tell you, it feels like we're living in a pretty schizophrenic time in this regard. Just a few flash points from this week. Men's health editor David Zezinko argued that men are, quote, an endangered species in an op-ed in the USA today. I encourage you to check it out. John Stewart and Mike Huckabee had a lengthy conversation about abortion on one of television's most popular shows. And just this morning, The New York Times reported that President Obama, who was a fascinating study in a sort of new masculinity, if ever there was one, attested that one of the best moments he's had since becoming president was going to a parent-teacher conference. That was pretty amazing. So, this is the world we live in. Let's all try to make sense of it today. We'd like to kick off the dialogue, which we fully expect you to be a part of, especially the men out there. We recognize that we don't really represent the full spectrum of gender up here. We want to kick off this dialogue by really focusing on some personal stories because we really do try to live that mission of the personal as the political. And we designed our stories, which are very diverse around these three questions. How are your ideas about men in masculinity formed while growing up? How did men shape your thinking about your own identity as a woman, and what is the role for men in the contemporary and future feminist movement? We're ambitious ladies, as you can see. These are pretty big questions, but we all tried to answer them in our own sort of personal ways. And hopefully you can find some identification with one of us through that sort of personal conversation. After we each speak briefly, we'll launch right into our conversation. We're also, as Dr. Sackler said, going to have a few door prizes. We're going to sell and sign books. We'd love to talk to you, so feel free to stick around afterwards. But without further ado, let's get started. The first up is Gloria Felt. Thank you all so much for being here this afternoon. I was born into a man's world. I was born into the World War II cohort that was so small, it was called the ungeneration. My parents were children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who settled in small Texas towns. My ideas about masculinity and femininity were formed in hard-scrabble places that looked like the last picture show. If any of you have seen that movie, if you have, then you know it's about a small, dying town in West Texas. And it's kind of a documentary of my life. I was Sybil Shepard, but with dark hair. The boys were the actors. The girls were the scenery. This is my father. Max stood six foot three. When he had a personality that was equally large and the towns that we lived in were so small that the Postal Service once delivered a letter to me that said only to the eldest daughter of Big Max, Stamford, Texas. Family lore said that he roared after I was born that prior to my birth, he had been bragging to everyone that he was going to have a son. Who said I wanted a boy, he said. He bought me this fabulous electric train when I was three. He took me on business trips. He often told me, you can do anything your pretty little head desires. His empowering advice, however, conflicted with everything I saw at home and in society. My mother's deference, the culture's low aspirations for women, the June Cleaver or Marilyn Monroe images in the media. My mother actually ran the office in Daddy's Western Ware Company that she felt powerless over her own life. I was mortified that she worked outside the home. My goodness, you know, June Cleaver cooked, sewed, and was home in the afternoon when the kids came home from school with cookies that she had made. My mother wasn't normal. Big Max was not normal. Like most adolescents, I just wanted to be normal. Well, I had bought the memo that was given to girls about what we should aspire to was marriage, babies, and young, by the way. Picket fence, and at all costs hide your intelligence. Never be smarter than the boys. I became a teenage jelly woman, molding my body and my personality to what I thought society and, most of all, boys wanted. Little did I know just how normal I actually was. This is me with my youngest, with my oldest child. I became pregnant in 1957, which turns out to be the year the United States had the highest teen birth rate ever. I married my high school sweetheart. We were sort of like the, you know, the Bristol and Levi of the 1950s. And we had our third child by just after my 20th birthday. To be fair, men's roles were also very limited. Like they were like a penis and a paycheck. The pressures of too young parenting and too low paychecks began to scare me. And despite wanting to be normal, I needed to earn money. Employment ads, those days were segregated. Anybody remember that? I had no employable skills anyway, even for those girls wanted jobs. Miraculously, though, a new technology entered the scene just about that time. Anybody want to guess? There you go. The birth control pill saved my life. It literally gave me a life. It let me plan a life for myself. It all happened. And I started to college then when my youngest child was four years old. And it was in that wonderful fermenty era of the 1960s social justice movements, largely led by men. I began getting involved in the civil rights movement. And as I worked for other people, I began to grow my own personal courage muscles. I realized as I was working for civil rights of African-Americans that, you know what? Women deserve rights too. The political became very personal for me then when I couldn't get a credit card or a car loan without a male co-signer. And that, my friends, is when I became a feminist activist. This led me to my 30-year career with Planned Parenthood. And this photo was actually taken when I became national president. Those were my three children. They all had those silhouettes done when they were in kindergarten. It's just one of my favorite things that I have of their childhood. I've had the privilege then of working for a world of planned and wanted children. I feel that nothing could be more important. I know from my own life that barefoot and pregnant are conjoined twins. And that reproductive justice is the most essential key to women's self-determination. Fortunately, I met a man who shared these values. We're actually sharing wedding cake here that we actually bought. It's in our wedding brunch that we bought at an ACLU auction if that gives you a clue of how kind of how we are. Alex taught me a few guy things too, like how to interrupt Bill O'Reilly and that there is a time to march. You see, big structural changes can only happen when people join together in a movement. This is the front line of the March for Women's Lives in 2004 that some of you were there too. It was a place I never imagined I would be, let alone standing before all of you here at the Brooklyn Museum, which brings me to the question of the role for men in the contemporary feminist movement. There is a stunning change that has happened between my father's generation and my son's generation. Feminism has without question changed men as much as it has changed women. Daddy Coochie Cooed the babies, but he never changed a diaper. My son, on the other hand, has been intimately involved with his children since the day they were born. As USA Today put it, there's a new datitude. These are my adorable, brilliant grandsons. For them and their children to be, I want three things. First, I want men and women to join together in a new movement to change the workplace so both can have a life and earn a living. Second, I want this recession to become the transformational moment when we finally equalize gender power at home and in the workplace. And three, I want reproductive rights to be absolutely guaranteed as human rights. I know we'll succeed because my daddy told me we can do anything our pretty little heads desire. I remember my father sent as equal parts tobacco, leather briefcase, and Aramis. That cologne that was named after the most gentle of the three musketeers. Like other liberated dads living in the suburbs of Chicago where I grew up, whose wives were middle-class women who were newly awakened by the women's movement and heading back to school for advanced degrees as my mother was, my father woke me up in the mornings and helped me get dressed and ready for the day on the mornings that my mother left before dawn. I am the daughter of a liberated man. My father was a nurturer. That's not him, that's my mother. Who people say I look like. My father, when my mother was pregnant with me, planted a narcissist bulb in a race to see who would bloom first. I did. I won. He's a psychiatrist by training and he worked part of the time in our home and part of the time downtown. And when adults would ask me in that knowing testing way that adults have when I was a little girl, do you know what a psychiatrist is? I would reply with certainty, yes, it's like a mother. And there it was, clear as a promise and solid as a stone. Growing up as part of the free-to-be you and me generation, we got a lot of you in the house, I see, yeah, free-to-be you and me. I knew that daddies were people. People with children. They were nurturers. They were caregivers to an extent. I still had the sense that mommies, even when they worked outside the home, still did the lion's share of caretaking. As a young adult at a large state university in the Midwest, I had the privilege of dating feminist guys. These were sons of feminists and they were the kind of guys who walked in the back of the take-back-the-night rallies. I bet we have a couple of you in the front row. They were the kind of guys who volunteered in the women's homeless shelters and they were the kind of guys who took women's studies classes not just to pick up chicks. Although there were those two, I just didn't date them. Raised by feminist moms, these guys were fellow explorers in helping us discover ourselves. They were allies, not enemies, in our own awakenings. But not all was complete, of course, in daughter of feminism land then, nor is it today. I wrote my last book, Sisterhood Interrupted from Radical Women to Girls Gone Wild because I wanted to understand how feminism had in fact changed women across the generations. And in that book, I argued that, yes, feminism clearly had changed women since the radical women of my mother's generation threw out their bras and told men to stop pinching their asses and rallied for equal rights and equal pay. But that far more had stayed the same. And now, as my late 30s roll into my early 40s, I'm on my way to becoming a mother myself and I'm starting to wonder, had feminism missed a beat? Had feminism forgotten to engage men? I'm writing my next book on this subject but it's all very, very personal as so much of feminism is for me. This is my partner, Marco. He's dancing on the beach in his native Puerto Rico which is where we got engaged. This is us at our Jewish wedding in upstate New York. And I actually have to pay homage to Dr. Elizabeth Sackler and the Sackler Center for Feminist Art because I had a very alternative bachelorette party instead of the normal or whatever the normal is these days. I took my girlfriends to a private tour of the dinner party right here. So we got married in July 2008 and in January 2009, my husband got canned. Joining, of course, men and many women but mostly men because women are cheaper, you know, we're easier to keep in this great recession. In March 2009, we learned that I was carrying twins. So full of expectation, hope, anxiety, fear, I did what feminists have been doing for decades. I started writing about it furiously and I started connecting my own personal experience to a larger political frame. This is a website called recessionwire.com where I write a column called Love in the Time of Layoff. Recessionwire's tagline is the upside of the downturn. So what's the upside in being pregnant and having a laid-off partner, you might ask? And what's the downside of feminism's unfinished business around men? Crisis, I think, can be opportunity. During Marco's time at home, he's developed a newfound appreciation for the rhythms of domestic life and we both sense that in certain ways his values are starting to shift. Okay, in some ways both Marco and my father remain traditional dudes. This is my dad entertaining fantasies about being a pioneer. This is Marco who still is very attached to his King Arthur days. This was a festival at the Cloisters where he got to dress up as a knight. But in many ways, both Marco and my father continued to evolve, straddling new and old versions and visions of masculinity as the world around them continues to change. The other week, for instance, after Marco had returned from buying me eggs on a very rainy morning when I was in danger of throwing up and really needed those eggs, he came back and I asked him, how do you think life might be different for us again when you find work once more? And this is what he said. Corporate life, he said, it takes you away from the eggs. Being home, I feel more in tune with a much bigger timeline. I've gotten used to a life in which everything is attached to real values. You, me, these unborn babies, staying healthy, providing a life that's not just an income, but an organic whole. There's something in me when I heard that that felt so immensely relieved that Marco has had this time to commune with the eggs. Because the babies that are growing inside me need not just an involved father and not just a nurturer, but a fully committed partner, somebody who's willing to rethink his orientation toward work and family life. And this I think is something a lot of men are learning right now these days. The way we got here is not necessarily how I might have wished to have gotten here, but it's what we've got and it's where we're at and the feminist in me thinks it ain't bad. Hello everyone, thank you so much for coming. I have to confess, on the day that I knew I had to write this talk, I tossed and turned all night long. Just before 5 a.m., I dragged myself to my desk and started the dreaded task of looking for photos. I received my PhD from the University of California at Santa Cruz at the age of 27. That same day, I saw my father for the first time in my adult life. I had hunted him down, actually, using my investigative journalistic skills and after some initial calls and emails, I decided to invite him to the big day. I didn't know my father at all growing up. He left unexpectedly when I was still a baby. He later confessed on my graduation day, in fact, that how much he had loved my mother. Well, that didn't do me much good, except perhaps to fuel my fascination with these fairy tale romances that had absolutely nothing to do with real life. It was a day of firsts. It was actually the first time that my mother and father had seen each other in more than 20 years. I think she handled it very well, considering. I grew up in an all-female working class, African-American household, with my mother and grandmother raising both myself and my cousin, who also happens to be biracial. This is us with our aunt. My mother and grandmother didn't have to say the words out loud. The unspoken messages we received were clear. Men don't stay. Even if they do, they don't necessarily do much good. These are just the messages that I heard. Not necessarily what they said or even what they believed. But women are stronger. Women are better. They have to be. The few images we had of our fathers were fleeting, heartbreaking. They seemed so strong in their youth, so capable, so masculine. I couldn't figure out how was it possible that they couldn't take care of their little girls. For many, many years, I thought I had the solution all worked out. I would be strong. I would be a strong black woman who didn't take any shit from men. A relationship was a distant dream that I entertained only in private, usually while soaking up Jane Austen movies of pride and prejudice and sense and sensibility, and castles. And then something in me just shifted. I met a man for whom family, commitment, and fatherhood were the very foundation of his being. I was inspired. And by inspired, what I really mean is that he gave me the courage to believe in the fairy tale and to believe that fathers possibly can and do stay with their little girls. This is my partner, Alfonso, who he works and lives with me here in Manhattan, but he also returns to Spain at least once a month to visit his little girl, who's here on the left with the glasses and his niece in the middle. And even though he's been separated for more than six years from his ex-wife, he still has to fight. I know some men can probably relate to this, but has to fight for the right to be a father. Spanish laws and customs are not so different from US customs and laws in that it's assumed in the courtroom and in the streets that women are somehow biologically inherently better caregivers. But even through this struggle, Alfonso has something that I didn't, his father. And the memory and reality of that ongoing support remains strong even today. I'm trying not to cry because I don't have the excuse of hormones, but it's hard. I believe that the future of feminism and men's role within families and relationships is profoundly influenced by our experiences as young boys and girls. And that the expectations we have for these roles are based on the images we see or don't see before us. This is his daughter again with her little cousins who live in New York actually. For me, the very idea of having a stable father figure, a grandfather figure in fact, on hand every day and for long intimate family vacations was so foreign to my psyche that it actually stopped me cold the first time I experienced it, my first summer in Spain with Alfonso. Luckily, the future of men in feminism is not only determined by the past. More importantly, it's based on the strength of our desires and I really do believe this. Our desires right now, right here today in present time are more powerful than our past. So no matter how painful or delayed the process may be for us, we all have to face the day men and women when we decide that it's time either to reject past models or to embrace them. Whatever we decide, I believe that it's in this conscious choosing. This is what feminism was fought for, choice. So in the conscious choosing, we finally begin to build the foundations for our very own fairy tale castles. Thank you. Beautiful, thank you. So I was born on the last day of the last year of the 70s. I was raised by not one, but two feminist parents. My dad retired from the All Men's Business Club downtown in Colorado Springs, Colorado where I grew up because as he said in the letter and I remember reading this very well at 12 years old, I refused to belong to an organization that might one day welcome my son but never invite my daughter. My mom started the longest running women's film festival in the world while also being a clinical social worker and community activism. As you can see, feminism was the water I grew up in. But as I reflected for today's topic, I remembered that there are many ways to tell a story. In this case, in one version I am part of the generation that inherited a world permanently altered by feminism, as Gloria put it. My father supported me in my athletics and academics just like my big brother. I went to an All Women's College, excelled. Go Barnard! Stay tuned, I say some not so nice things later. Excelled, made a career for myself as a writer in the male dominated landscape of opinion journalism. I bought my own apartment, I have my own money, I met a funny artistic sensitive man and we have a relationship very much shaped by both of our expectations for equality and independence. Kind of a feminist fairy tale, right? But in another version, a more complete version, the unfinished business of feminism comes to light. I am part of a generation that inherited a world half changed by feminism in my opinion. My father had high hopes of being an equal parent, but didn't fulfill a lot of his promises to my mother and she didn't enforce them. His firm was rigid and demanding. My mom's career was so much easier to adapt. He was present, but my mom was definitely the primary caregiver. She did the typical superwoman juggle through the 80s and 90s. I was told you can be anything, but I heard you have to be everything. This mistranslation was in the modeling. My mom was absolutely amazing, but also over-scheduled and exhausted. By the time I was in middle school she had a chronic illness. My dad was successful in the world in very recognizable, obvious ways and when he was home he just seemed completely happy-go-lucky. The lesson? Female-ness is about dynamism and exhaustion and male-ness is about traditionally defined success and taking it easy at home. I went to that all-women's college indeed and in addition to being surrounded by the most amazing educated young women in history I was also surrounded by anxiety and eating disorders, depression, sexual politics as antiquated and sexist as the 50s in many ways. My friends, the most liberated in history, were also raped, pushed by their boyfriends, starving, purging, often self-hating. I wrote a book about this paradox in Perfect Girls' Starving Daughters. I do have an incredible partner. He's going to be kind of easy to spot now my friend. And we do aspire to have a relationship largely shaped by our shared feminist values but sometimes he has to work really late at his demanding job and even though I know it's his turn to do the dishes, I do them anyway. I try to resist that quintessentially female form of resentment but I feel it creeping in. I wonder what it would be like to have kids someday and like my parents being in a position where he has a traditional job, lots of responsibility and supervisors to answer to and I have a flexible job and a pension for taking responsibility for too much. I love my big crew of guy friends but sometimes, this isn't them in their natural habitat, this is really an authentic view of them, sometimes I see them interacting with one another and it's almost as if they lead divided lives. On the one hand, they are much more comfortable being emotional than their own fathers were, much more vocal about their desires to be present fathers. On the other hand, some of them still make gay jokes and they often seem to experience intimacy with one another through teasing. They don't seem to take on the issue of violence against women, for an example, as their issue, which I truly believe that it is. This version is no feminist fairy tale. There's so much work to do. Here are the few of my ideas to get started. This is another one of my guy friends in his natural habitat. Individual guys have to start striving for less divided lives, making the courageous move to stop their friends from making gay jokes or talking about women as if they were just sex objects. This doesn't mean being humorless, it means being consistently accountable to your values and serving as a role model for other men. Guys need to understand that sometimes the internalized oppressions are the most intractable, the proverbial enemy within. Guys need to start working together to end violence. Read Michael Kimmel and Jackson Cat, see Byron Hart's amazing film, Hip Hop, Beyond Beats and Rhymes. Women and men need to work together on creating infrastructure necessary for all of us to lead whole lives, characterized by fulfilling work and family lives. Mom's Rising is this amazing force right now that's working to get the policy that needs to be in place for women and men to take paternity and maternity leave, to get healthcare, to have subsidized childcare, all of these critical parts of the collective infrastructure that we need to create. I would love to see men take these issues on as their own because till that happens, the work-life balance issue will always be seen as a women's issue. Men must advocate for their own rights in workplaces as fathers and just people with lives outside of work, not completely identified with that paycheck. All of us have to work towards a healthcare system that doesn't leave women picking up the pieces when children and elders are sick. Women like myself need to hold our partners accountable to our parenting and household duty agreements. I feel like this is like the old paradigm. We also need to trust, and I think this is really important, we talk so often about where are guys, why aren't they picking up their part of the sort of slack, but I also think women need to be really conscious about the ways in which they interact with men around these issues. I think we need to trust our partners to develop their own style of caregiving and cleaning rather than imposing our own. Our partners, of course, need to follow through, not just pay lip service to their desire to share the load. Women need to remind themselves that there is courage in stepping back, letting go, giving up a little. A wisdom men seem to embody more readily. Men need to remind themselves that the deepest fulfillment in life is not found in bringing home a big paycheck or saving face, but in authentic relationships and the joy they bring, something I think women have known in their bones for years. This is my brother and my mom and I in Santa Fe in a snowstorm. These are some of my ideas. Mostly I've got a lot of questions. I'm living my way into the answers, trying to see having a hell of a time doing it. Thank you very much. Questions, comments. There are microphones on this side. There's a microphone on this side. We would love to know what you think. Tell us, ask us. Disagree with us. Thank you for that wonderful Father's Day gift. I really appreciate that mixture of wit and wisdom. Video as well as vocal. I can't thank you enough. The introductory comment about purpose of the panel to challenge the status quo suggests what the status quo really is. And what occurs to me is the idea of Emma Goldman who happens to be my favorite American political theorist and activist. For her, the status quo was, yes, gender, but also economic. And she felt that a liberal approach to changing the status quo was insufficient. She challenged the women of her time, particularly the suffragettes, and felt that voting, for example, was only a sop. It had no real meaning. So she wanted to get to a radical approach to changing the capitalist structure. What do you think about that? Courtney? This is my dear mentor and political theory professor. So I am going to be in the position to answer the most difficult question. I think that anything that creates a word that my brother taught me, disequilibrium, in terms of gender roles and gender relationships and economic systems that sort of pressure us in certain directions, both sort of fundamentally and socially, is a good thing. But I have to say that it's hard from... One thing a lot of people say about my generation is it's very pragmatic, and I actually think that that's true to a large extent. And I think that pragmatism, for me, gets in the way of the idealism that would be necessary to believe that that's possible. So it feels more possible to, for example, as we were saying, take advantage of the recession as this moment where things are just kind of shaky enough that we can create change than to actually create a systemic change. That just feels overwhelming and sort of impossible idea to me in a lot of ways. As much as I love Emma Goldman or ideas about kind of looking at the ways which capitalistic structure at heart has been a patriarchal structure, the pragmatic part of me that has to wake up tomorrow morning and do something with my life feels like let me just get the low-hanging fruit of change. I don't know if anyone else feels differently. Yeah, glory go for it. This is where you really see the generational difference, I think. I am way more optimistic, and that might be a little odd. It might seem a little bit odd that I would be way more optimistic, particularly because I'm actually kind of obsessed with part of the question that you answered because I'm currently writing about women's relationship with power and how it has changed and not changed over the years in spite of some massive social changes. And one of the things that we have seen is that there have been these cycles in about 30 to 50-year cycles in which women have made big steps forward and taken sometimes bold leaps only to step back themselves. And just even the term suffragette instead of suffragist, which is really the grammatically proper term, but suffragette got into the discourse and became, you know, et, you know, cute. Aren't we cute, these little women who want to vote? And I think that is symbolic of the fact that what Emma Goldman was reacting to was that women had bought into the notion that if women could only vote it wouldn't matter because they would just vote like their husbands, right? I'll ask the professor. And that's what we have to guard against. And that's what if we aren't willing to take some bold leap sometime, we are in danger of moving back. You're either moving forward or you're moving back. And so when I talk about the personal being political, I see it as being a very purposeful thing, not just a reaction to a current crisis but a very purposeful vision of the kind of future that we want and then step by step, we have to break a few eggs to get there. Emily, that wasn't discussed, which is looming for a lot of people who are in their, I guess, baby boomers, is the preponderant responsibilities that women have for their parents in their transition to old age and death. And that doesn't seem to have changed. When I was involved in that very much myself, I would say three quarters of people, 80% of the people who were involved were the daughters and not the sons directly. And I was wondering if you see any hope, signs of hope for that changing among the younger women. Another question I have is that in a way women have gained ground in the area of getting jobs and indeed, maybe we might say some of it was economic because they've had to get jobs. The fact of the matter is, to use a good male expression, that buying power of a male salary has declined so much in the last 30 years that women have had to work. It's not been a choice but a necessity for more and more even middle class women as well as working class women. And the flip side of that is that feminism in providing so much support and encouragement of that, which I am a product of and am wholeheartedly in favor of, in a way devalued the so-called stay-at-home mom. And I find it painful to talk to stay-at-home moms who, you know, often express that kind of devalue because it's self-devalue. So I was wondering, you know, what hope you see on that horizon. And my third comment is that you guys didn't talk about sex and how sexuality has changed. And I was expecting to hear some of that. So I throw those to you. Thank you. I know we'll get to the sex because we talk about it a lot amongst ourselves and we're happy to talk about it here. But I want to answer the first two questions or take a stab. As Courtney likes to say, the message is in the modeling. And I have to say, speaking personally as Generation X, daughter of Boomers, that my... I lost both my grandmothers last year. I'm actually wearing a bracelet that belonged to each of them. And I watched my parents take care of them. And one of those grandmothers ended up moving into my parents' home. And my father was the one who really invited her in. It wasn't his mother. It was his mother-in-law. And watching the care that... and the nurturing, you know, that he did with this older generation, I learned and my partner learned. And I think, again, the message is in the modeling. The more we see Boomer men taking care of their greatest-generation parents, the more we Xers and Yers, you know, learn that that kind of caretaking is a man's job too. The second theme about stay-at-home mothers being devalued, that was the question. I think it's an interesting question. Feminism and motherhood has been an ongoing conversation from the start. And I think much of what feminism has done is to support motherhood in all its forms. And one thing that I often find myself reacting to is the idea that ours is an opt-out generation that we're all just leaving the workforce to become stay-at-home moms. As you mentioned, you know, our families have been the norm in America since 1992. And so the idea that there is this exodus, you know, and there are more stay-at-home moms than ever is a myth. You know, I think we know by now it's happening among a very thin slice of women, those who can afford to live on, you know, their partner's salary. It doesn't quite address the disparaging, but maybe somebody else wants to take that on. Well, I think there have been studies done that show, it's pretty clear, that younger men who have been raised by single mothers have a very different attitude about, you know, housework and relationships even than men who haven't. So going back to that idea of modeling, I think that it's, you know, even if they haven't been raised by single mothers, there has to be some sort of modeling or some sort of conscious framing of these issues for the generation that's coming. And just to go back to my example of Alfonso, I think that he's far more nurturing than I am. And I think that's because of the modeling that he had in his family and far more nurturing of his now growing older parents, even calling them at least once a day in Spain, sometimes more than once a day. And this is not unusual maybe for, you would say, maybe for Spanish people, but it is actually. It's unusual even for his own family. And maybe that has something to do with him being younger and the modeling, I'm not sure. But the other question I think I kind of lost track because that one was so provocative. Sex, let's go to sex. Sex, yes. Let's see. It's the doing it part of our title, Dad's Dude. The last talks actually came up more for some reason. We talked about how many of us are cougars. Two of us, I think. But we can get back to that later. Another comment on the G rated side of things, which is I think at the deepest level, this stay at home question, first of all is a problem of language because I don't think, you know, as I said in the introduction, there's really, that's sort of a media manufactured pitting against one another because so many women, like I even thought, I remember when I learned about stay at home moms and working moms, I thought is my mom a stay at home mom because she didn't have a formal workplace that she went to and a lot of the work that she did was unpaid. So I was very confused about what that even meant about my own life. And then I realized that the reason it didn't fit was because that language is not very helpful. The majority of moms who might be framed as stay at home moms or be activists or doing all sorts of consulting, it's that we all leave really interesting, complicated lives and stay at home versus working mom is completely inadequate language to describe that. And at the most fundamental, that question is about fulfillment. I mean, it's about economics, but it's from a psychological perspective about fulfillment. And I think books like Get to Work by Linda Hirschman, which is very controversial and she's not the most empathic human being as I have experienced personally. That book, in part, what I love about the book is it's about the fact that women just like men need to have intellectual and sort of career focused fulfillment in some way. That looks different for all women, but I think that that's the part that maybe gets misconstrued in the media sometimes is that feminists are saying women have to work. When I would rather put it as feminists think women need to be fulfilled in whatever form that takes for them, which is where we get back to choice as usual. I wanted to invite, I know we have one special guest, special invited guest here. Do we have any others in the audience? No, I don't think so. Okay, so one of our special guests, Jimmy Briggs, is here who's an author who's written, come on Jimmy, written on this subject. And we've asked a few people to stop by to share thoughts since they have experts. He's being shy. It's over? Since they have expertise and particularly we have a man who's written on this subject and would like to share some thoughts with us. And now he's leaving altogether. Hi Jimmy. Come back Jimmy, come back. Voice, and I'm curious to just, I wanted to bring into the room the perspective of queer women and also a perspective of single women, which some of you talked about the experience of having single moms, but just of the power or opinion and experience of single women. And I think sometimes the part of the feminist fairy tale is finding this male partner to support us as women, which still relies very heavily on finding a partner, which is part of the mystique of fairy tale narrative. It doesn't get us out of that Beauty and the Beast box, right? And find the Prince Charming. Maybe the Prince Charming's resume has just changed a bit. So I wondered if you could comment on your, just on that broader view of your maybe relationship to queer women's movements and narrative within the feminist movement and just a need for kind of a gender evolution 2.0 of sorts, of really embodying feminine and masculine characteristics. Yeah. I would like to just take that one on, because I so identify with what you're saying and so many parts of me were conflicted for a long time about what I like to see now as the imbalance within me of Yen and Yang. You know what I mean, the masculine and the feminine. And I have to bring it there to a personal place just because I think that my feminism was like that picture. It was totally out of balance. And I think that that's the stereotype of feminism. And so this is a part that should generate a lot of controversy and disagreement, which we like, because I fit the stereotype. No, don't help me. I can do everything. You're just in my way. And I think that that has to be, you're saying let's talk about single women. Well, as a former single woman, that has to be part of the conversation is that changes within us too. It's men, but it's not just waiting for that Prince Charming and it's not just not waiting for that Prince Charming. It's also finding out where's the balance within us and within our own feminism, if that makes sense. That's how I come at it. I want to add too, I think we're living in a moment where Prince Charming has been laid off metaphorically as well as pragmatically in a lot of respects. But there's a new book out by a dear friend of mine. It's actually called In Her Own Sweet Time, Unexpected Adventures in Finding Motherhood, Commitment and Love. It's a book that chronicles her own personal experience and it also does a lot of work in investigative journalism. I think that as, you know, I've become very interested in this group called Single Mothers by Choice. And I'm very interested in the new configurations through which women are forming families, queer women as well as straight women on their own. I think we're living in a moment where the norms are the kind of popular perceptions around single motherhood are ever so slowly beginning to shift and I find that exciting in certain ways and liberating. Ray, I also think you and I have had conversations about this but one of the really, I think truly exciting and interesting things about the younger generation is all the studies done about sexuality. Here we're getting to sex people. That show that more women identify as being on a spectrum of sexuality as opposed to, you know, heterosexual, homosexual, and not even using the word bisexual because that also, I think, feels very limiting for people and I really identify with this idea that, you know, and I think it would be, I haven't read the studies on how men identify. I think men are still feeling pretty clearly in one category or the other but there's just a wealth of research now that shows that this sort of spectrum of sexuality is really alive for young women today. And Oprah even said it so that's a little fun. Yes, Oprah even said it. Can you believe it? And so I think that there are a lot of interesting questions that come up around that spectrum in terms of the way it destabilizes what we understand about, you know, courting one another or whether people are straight or gay or how to create relationships around those different times of our lives and I think it's like a really wonderful destabilization and I'm really excited about it. Mine was the generation that created such comments as, I am my own handsome princess, you know, a woman needs a man, like a fish needs a bicycle, things like that. So, I mean, it's like, it had to be an awakening of recognizing first that I am a whole human being and it seems to me that that is the first and essential matter that has to be, that has to happen or be sought or to be the opportunity provided for any human being, whatever sexual orientation, whatever other characteristics that we might have, that's just like the most essential thing and for so much of human history, that has not been the case. And I think we live in very exciting times. Actually, the last time we were on stage together, I believe, no, the next to last time we were on stage together, we had a, one of the individuals on the panel was a lesbian and she was about nine months pregnant and there was a total discussion of her life, her motherhood, her partner. No one asked, no one assumed. It was, I thought it was magnificent and I would like to say in conclusion however that I think your point is very well taken about the makeup of this panel and that we should, I think, make that point at the beginning that we recognize that this is a heterosexual panel. That is absolutely, I think, a fair challenge to us. But we do mix it up. Sometimes one of us will step out and someone else will step in when we can't all be here and we try to really bring in the diversity that we don't represent ourselves when that happens. Thank you for inviting me to be here. Well, the book that you're referring to, it's actually, I should be working on it now and I'm not working on it as much as I am. But for me to come in and hear you all speak, it's very provocative for me. It caused a lot of personal reflection just to hang your individual stories, particularly about men who aren't there, I mean, fathers who go away because it's something I grapple with continually. The book that I'm writing, it's actually, putting in my journal is tied, it's a book about women around the world who stand up in the face of gender violence, whether it's in war, whether it's cultural, cultural with honor crimes. And the book is a series of letters to my daughter because I am divorced, but I'm in her life trying to co-parent her. And about a year ago, a year and a half ago, she confronted me when she was six and said, why do you go? Why do you leave me all the time? And so for me, it caused this profound period of reflection like why am I choosing to go focus on other people's kids or other women and girls, and I'm not staying around to be fully present for my own child, which is why that's the motivation for the book. But I guess in many ways for me to be here again, it's humbling because I really feel like if I can speak individually as a man, I feel like I'm very much an accidental advocate around the issue of gender and gender justice. It's because of having a daughter, because of what I saw as a journalist in the field. Presently right now, and Gloria, whom I've yet to meet directly, but Crystal, who knows me, I've been working for the past almost a year now working with the coalition of organizations in this country and abroad to bring together young people globally to act against gender violence in their communities. It's called Man Up! And next year, during the World Cup of Soccer in South Africa, we're bringing 200 young people from 50 countries to Johannesburg for a summit which will launch a five-year campaign around gender violence. And so for us, for me, my personal experience, and I'm very new to this conversation, I think the missing component which someone, I think maybe Courtney referred to earlier, is the presence of men and boys in the conversation. I think too many men, whether you're a generation XY or a boomer or whoever, we don't amongst ourselves, we don't talk about sexuality or we don't talk about these issues in a very real way. And particularly on the issue of gender violence, we don't consider it to be our issue. It's very much a woman's issue, whether you're talking about it here or internationally. And I think until more men, until more of us talk about these issues amongst ourselves, but also talk about it with women, with girls, it's going to be difficult to move the conversation forward. Yeah. Thank you so much for your work and your comments about it, because I think that, and Courtney brought it up earlier, the violence question is so huge. I'll just put in a little plug for an organization that I've worked with. The Family Violence Prevention Fund is doing amazing work on that front, too, in terms of a campaign called Coaching Boys Into Men. And it's coaches, high schools across the country, having conversations with their teams about violence against women, which they found to be the most effective because the coaches have a different kind of interaction than parents or teachers. And so, you know, that's the kind of thing and the work that you're doing, it's so encouraging to see men taking it on, you know, as their issue. I think it reminds me also of a conversation I've had with a couple of my guy friends around the, even the statistical stuff, with, you know, that it's obviously a very difficult statistic to confirm, but, you know, chances are one out of four women in her lifetime will be sexually assaulted in this country. One out of four women, right? Which is wild. So, even if it was one out of eight, even if it was one out of ten, having conversations with my guy friends around, have you ever had one of your guy friends admit to sexually assaulting a woman? Have you ever had a conversation with a guy about this going on? Because I've had conversations with friends who've been raped and sort of where, how do we create more of those kinds of conversations? Obviously prevention is the key, but it just sort of blows my mind that there's a flip side of that equation that just never gets discussed or seems to never get discussed among men. Well, I always challenge, you know, the guys, the men in my life, whether they're friends or family, because people often ask, people have been asking me more and more lately, why do you even care about this issue? Why are you focusing on gender? What's your ulterior motive? And, you know, I always counter, every male in my life, the first thing I ask them when they confront me is, you know, who do you know in your life who has been assaulted or victimized or targeted in some way for discrimination or violence? And every male I know has at least one person. I mean, you can't not have someone in your life who's been a target of this. So you just, I just take it to the personal level and go from there. I think also too, and I missed the very beginning, so you may have talked about this, is more candor around race, culture and class and how that, because even in the conversation we're having here in this space, it's a very different issue and the rest of America is a very different issue, a very different perspective in Europe and Africa and other places. So just, you know, how we, you know, how we can tackle it, you know, go beyond, you know, our geocentric or our class-centric perspectives, you know. Can I ask, how do you think would be the best way to start the conversation with men and boys? I mean, it's not hard to get women to come and talk about these things. And I always laugh about when we get our feedback forms at the end, you know, a man's will say good and, you know, a woman will write us like a page of her thoughts about what we talked about. So help us out here. I mean, what do you think would start the conversation? I think, and again speaking very broadly, I think it's very difficult to, it's very difficult for women to reach men on this issue. That's just the bottom line. I mean, there's a layer of defense that's up whether you, no matter how open you think you are as a man, it's up. I think men and boys respond to their peers. You know, we have to have the conversations amongst ourselves. You know, like I was thinking about that picture Courtney had with the guys, you know, drinking the beer or whatever. Like, you know, it's a social situation that's loose, but that's a situation where there has to be space to talk about it, you know. It's a place of comfort, but also of honesty. You know, again, within ourselves, it's hard for men to be honest. Because of how we define masculinity, you know, if you're seen as being soft around women's issues, your masculinity is questioned, you know. So even then, amongst ourselves, it's not an easy task. But I think more men have to engage with other men, I think we have to start young. We have to start talking to boys at a very early age about these issues. How do they grow up with a certain perspective? It also feels like there's something around individual integrity versus group integrity, because I feel like, individually, the guys I meet have, you know, a tremendous amount of sort of feminist identification, even if they wouldn't use that term, and integrity around, you know, LGBTQ issues and gender violence and all this stuff, but that there's a group integrity, and I know Michael Kimmel writes about this really well in Guy Land, kind of this idea of what happens when men get together that doesn't allow for that individual integrity to always be expressed fully. Well, you know, just again, my journey in this area has been a very recent one, and I know Michael Kimmel well, but in talking to he and others and just talking to young men, regardless of class or race, I understand what you're saying about integrity, but a lot of guys, a lot of men and young men will always say, you know, I'm a good guy because I don't hit women, or I don't hit my girlfriend, or I don't call them certain names. But, you know, I think, and Michael is one of those people who think that just because you don't do something, doesn't make you a good guy. I mean, not raping someone doesn't make you a good person. I think, you know, the issue of integrity, you know, it was important when you can actually stand up in the group or in beyond your group and sort of check someone for using a certain slur name, or when you step in, we see a certain abuse happening or escalating to a point where there could be abuse, where you actually prevented or halted from happening. That's being a good guy, going beyond, well, I'm not doing it so. You know, that's not me. We have to get past that point as well. Thanks, Jimmy. I just want to throw in another, you know, kudos to you, Jimmy, for your work. And I also want to mention another book by Shira Tarrant called Men Speak Out, which is a really wonderful anthology. Her most recent one is called Men in Feminism. I really highly recommend them both. Speaking of forums, we have forums for you to fill out. And we also have a giveaway. I don't know if we have the cards. Oh, I'm sorry, one more. Yeah, we have one more question, and then we can do that. Okay, all right. Tristan. Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know it was going to be the ultimate question. My name is Tristan Aaron, and I work at the Women's Media Center, so I was privileged to know that this was going to happen for a little while before it happened. And I just was moved to come up and share something and ask you something about it, which is that I felt personally some dread as this event came closer to like you did, Crystal. And I appreciated what you said so much because I also didn't know my dad at all. And I realized the reason I had this anxiety, I guess, about all that being brought up in this context of feminism is that when I was a young feminist in my teens and 20s, I was very much of a firebrand, and people who knew me well often said, oh, well, do you think this has something to do with your dad or your daddy issues? And I said, no, of course not. What are you talking about? It's a political philosophy. I mean, I've definitely come to integrate the different pieces of my experience more and reflect on all the parts that made me who I am. And I so wanted to ask you, do you think that this is kind of an intergenerational reaction? I mean, do you think it's possible that feminists of one generation are more comfortable drawing from their personal experiences and acknowledging the role of that in developing their identity as feminists? And I think that's a great question. I think that in developing their identity as feminists and maybe coming down the road, women feel like it's less valid or it's de-legitimizing in some way to acknowledge that you have some personal history that informs your political philosophy. That's such an interesting question. It's come up a lot as we travel and with some of the different responses we've got, Courtney can attest to that from certain camp of feminists who don't agree at all with us talking about personal. You know, I have to say, when I was writing Sisterhood Interrupted, I was thinking a lot about these different generations and how different generations come to feminism. And I think it's actually a truism that each generation comes to it through a very personal way and that personal stories remain at the center of the feminist narrative. The stories are different, but we're still needing to hook that personal into the political to have that click moment, as I know Courtney is doing a lot of thinking about too. So I think that's actually one of the through lines rather than a disconnect, but I don't know, I'm curious what others think. Yeah, I usually feel like our generation gets criticized for being too personal, that our version of feminism is about aesthetics and about body image and the controversy Chris was referring to as a philosophy professor in Michigan basically like eviscerated me and said I hope you won't talk about body image. I think that in my experience young women's version of feminism often gets typecast as only personal that we don't recognize the political or the collective or the policy or all the other stuff that needs to go on. But I also feel like sometimes I feel a bit which is why I'm so honored to be on the panel with Gloria that we have to sometimes drag personal stories out of older feminists to really understand what they experienced and Gloria and I met actually because I interviewed her she got an award and I was asked to interview her to get her bio and I was so floored after meeting her and hearing her personal story and I thought why isn't this happening more often? I feel like maybe older women sometimes think we don't want to hear their personal stories because it will sound like I trudged through the woods in six feet of snow thing, but I think most young women are actually really hungry for those stories, so that's where I see sometimes a disconnect. I wish I could describe to you Courtney's eyes when I told her that there was a time without birth control pills. I was like, what? I think Tristan that what you raise is something I think about all the time and I don't know how to do it, but I often feel like the generation of feminists that, and I wasn't one of the first feminists I was just an early adopter, but I think we did a lot of good things but one thing that we didn't do very well is we didn't transmit the power of sisterhood, the power of just sitting around and telling those stories, the power of, I mean the wonderful things that happen when you do share those kinds of experiences and stories and therefore what happens is I think that women tend to isolate and we all feel like it's our problem that we have and we have to solve it ourselves and so I mean that's why I think women's history studies are so important that's why I think just being able to have venues like this to talk about these issues is so important because I, you know when you're on the front lines of a big battle sometimes you just have to suck up a bunch of emotional stuff and go do it and yet I think as everyone else has said when it really comes down to it it is the personal stories and while I'm often, I am often told that it's old fashioned to keep harping on how the personal is political and the political is personal, I don't care, I say it anyway. I really believe it. So, thank you. Oh, we have one more? Okay. I was going to. I was going to get the final closing here, but no. I just thought it would be worthwhile trying to get one more male voice in conversation about masculinity. Are you going to talk about sex? I'll try to do that as well. No, I'm not going to do that. So, you've been talking a little bit about how do you get men involved in the feminist conversation. I just wanted to try to challenge that language a little bit, I guess, because I think in it is a potentially really serious problem for some of these issues, which is that we've bracketed issues that affect all of us as women's issues. So, I'm thinking about through this conversation two of my best friends, one of whom they've both been in long-term relationships for seven, eight years. They're thinking about families, they're thinking about the rest of their lives and they both, in a very sort of unmasculine way, although they would never describe it this, they both are not, they don't love working, right? They would love to figure out how to have a life where they work as little as possible, right? I actually know a lot of guys like this. So, you know, but part of the problem is you start talking about life work, you know, family work balance, and no, no, those are women's issues, right? Or when you, you know, the classic one I think is around choice, which has been bracketed as a women's issue, right? This, you know, I think it was Professor Dalton's part at the beginning. You start talking about families, who's gonna work, who's gonna support kids. These are just issues that come up and how do you figure out how to build a life together. But no, we've bracketed, you know, family leave as a women's issue. So, I think that part of the problem is how do we begin to think about some of these issues that through the, you know, achievements of the feminist movement have become feminist issues, but in a way that then sort of, there's an ownership around that, right? There is a giving up of power and control and voice around these issues that is going to be part of making them broader. So it's not just, you know, how do we get men talking about abuse. But if we're gonna start talking about family leave as not a women's issue, then it means that it's not, you know, just the sort of territory of, you know, now or all the other sort of, you know, quote unquote women's advocacy organizations. So, I think part of the problem is just thinking about how do we get men into feminist issues that in and of itself I think really limits the way that we're talking about some of these concerns. I think that's a great point. I really thank you for raising it. And I think we have a language issue here. You know, I think we need to invent some new language because all the research is showing, all the data says that men of a younger generation, of your generation would be willing to sacrifice pay and promotion if it meant that they could spend more time at home with their families, which is good news. And yet, we have that reality on the one hand and then the other reality that even in companies that offer paternity leave, very few men take it. So, I think the question is, how do we put language out there and make these not just women's issues and make it okay in our culture for guys to take family leave? Because I think there's a larger stigma that's still attached to guys who want to be stay-at-home dads. And I was also thinking on that point that I think what Gloria was saying about women have seen their issues as personal, like in a silo rather than seeing as collective. I think these guys that we're talking about also see this as a very personal issue rather than seeing it as something that they could collectively organize around and do something about. But I would like to turn it back to you to ask, like, what do you think could be done then? Because we're feminists. We're gonna be labeled that way no matter what. So, like, what could we do to support men, even if it's not called a feminist issue? It's not called, but what can we do to support men to organize around those issues? Well, I mean, I think, again, it's a language question. How do we talk about family economics? I mean, that's something that everybody in my, you know, I'm 31. I mean, that's what people are thinking about. Who's gonna be around to raise the kids? How do we begin to, you know, my folks who are here bought a house when they were my age for $27,000, right? And three blocks from the beach in California. I mean, even if you do all of the inflation, right, that's so far out of the possibility of imagining for me and most of the folks that are my age. So beginning to figure out how do we talk about these issues in a language that is encompassing of not just, okay, how do men organize around the men concerns and women's concerns, but begin to think about this as issues that are just about how do we begin to create the kind of lives we want to live? So I don't have any great answers, you know, but just something that's been ringing in my head through this conversation. It's awesome. Thank you. I'm gonna insert myself here because I think that's terrific. Where are you? Thank you. Thank you very much. I think that's absolutely right. And it will mean we have to give up a little bit of ownership. Won't be my kitchen anymore, huh? But boy, wouldn't we be happy to give up a little bit of that ownership and share it. And thank you. Thank you very much. It's terrific. I was thinking about a couple of things to drag in a sled. In 1966, when I was in my freshman year of college, I was at a dorm party, a male, well, it wasn't a dorm party, it's off-campus housing party. And there were all of us and there was a lot of beer drinking and I was standing in a hallway talking to a guy and there were a couple of other people standing around and there was a door there and the door kept opening and closing, guy kept coming out and another guy would go in and another guy came out and another guy went in. And it was going on for about 10 or 15 minutes and frankly none of us were paying a whole lot of attention. And finally I said, why are people going in and out of the door like that? Why is everybody going in and out? And they said, oh, so-and-so's in there and she's really drunk. So we're just having a little fun. Well, I have to tell you, and this is where I bring in the grandma sled, it never occurred to me or to any of the other girls, and we were girls, we were 18, who were there to be appalled, to be angry, to stop it, to get in the way because that is what was going on over and over again. So that's just a little more history for you to add to that and that's sort of a downer after this wonderful, this wonderful thing. So I bring it back to you and 31-year-olds and buying houses by the beach, I think that's a much better way to end and also on Gloria Steinem, who has been saying all along that, well, actually before I say what Gloria Steinem's been saying, I have to say what I've been saying to Gloria Steinem, which is to thank her for my daughters and my granddaughters for all of the work she's done and I was introducing her and doing a conversation with her in March out in New Mexico and when that was all finished, I suddenly realized that I have continuously forgotten to thank her on behalf of my son and my grandsons as well because I think that the women's movement has opened that door, it has begun that wedge, but as Gloria says, until we have a men's revolution, we are not going to all of us be fully liberated and I think the goal here, as you have pointed out and as I think we're all working towards, is liberation for all people and that we can all work and live and be together in ways that are fruitful and supportive for one another. I want to thank all of you, this was a marvelous panel and I hope you'll come back again. Thank you very much.