{"id":1457,"date":"2015-05-21T13:01:51","date_gmt":"2015-05-21T13:01:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/?p=1457"},"modified":"2015-09-09T22:00:49","modified_gmt":"2015-09-09T22:00:49","slug":"learning-from-chris-norton-over-three-decades-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/2015\/05\/21\/learning-from-chris-norton-over-three-decades-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning from Chris Norton over three decades\u2014Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is the second half of a two-post series on the pro-feminist and activist Chris Norton at Feminist Reflections by Michael A. Messner. The first half of \u201cLearning from Chris Norton over three decades\u2014Part I\u201d can be found HERE<\/a>. <\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

…<\/p>\n

Flash forward to 2010. I was now a tenured full professor, pushing 60, a number of books under my belt. I was working with two young male Ph.D. students who in some ways reminded me of myself thirty years earlier\u2014inspired by feminism, wanting to have an impact on the world. Both Tal Peretz and Max Greenberg had, as undergrads, gotten involved in campus-based violence prevention work with men. Unlike three decades ago, this work had become pretty much institutionalized; a guy like Tal or Max now can plug in to a campus or community organization, be handed an anti-violence curriculum, and get to work with boys and men. I figured this was a great opportunity to do a study with these two guys, tapping in to the roots of men\u2019s work against gender-based violence in the 70s and 80s, and contrasting it with the work being done today.<\/p>\n

\"NortonCrop\"Of course, I thought of Chris Norton and MASV. I located Chris online. Ever generous, he agreed to be interviewed. In December of 2010, I drove to his house in Sebastopol, and as I knocked on his door, I wondered how different he\u2019d look or be. After all, I had morphed from a long-haired, bearded youngster thirty years ago to clean-shaven gray-haired, gradually balding, stooped-shouldered guy. I spied him through the window as he came to the door, and as he opened it I was mildly astonished to see that he looked pretty much the same\u2014bristly mustache and full head of hair\u2014reddish, but with some gray mixed in. He also still had the same warm smile, accented now by smile lines around his eyes that, if anything, made him appear even more warm and friendly than before.<\/p>\n

We went out to lunch, and did what older guys do: caught up on each others\u2019 lives, shared our hopes, fears, and challenges we\u2019d faced with our kids, commiserated about our ageing bodies. On this latter topic, Chris had more serious news to share than I. He was facing, with strength and optimism, a liver transplant in the near future.<\/p>\n

We returned to his home, and settled in for the interview in a cozy cabin-like structure behind his and Mary\u2019s home. We fell right in to a nice conversation, and I used bits of the transcript of my 1980 interview with Chris to prod his memory, and to probe ways in which he\u2019d changed, or not, since then.\u00a0\u00a0 Most interesting to me were his reflections on the work that MASV had done so many years ago. He joined the several other MASV men whom I would eventually also interview in saying that he was very proud of the work the group had done. But in retrospect, he said he wondered how effective they\u2019d been, and figured that if the group had it to do all over again, they might have done their work differently:<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think I would go at it at all the way we did then, \u2018cause I think in some ways, \u2026 I think we were doing something to prove something to ourselves and other people of our age group, and I don\u2019t think we were thinking about, like, what\u2019s it like to be a teenage boy in high school, and what are these images going to do to you when they\u2019re shown up on a screen, and is it going to have any of the effect that we\u2019re hoping to have? And I think it would have been really good to kind of get guys to talk about, well, there\u2019s issues of bullying, issues of, you know, being popular, not popular. I mean, it seems like there could be a lot of things that could have been much more valuable, \u2018cause in some ways, I think we almost had this stick and we\u2019re going to beat you over the head with this thing. And\u2026 perhaps if they felt like they were more understood, maybe they could be more understanding of women and, and where women are coming from. And I think that would be more the way I would go about it now.<\/p>\n

[Back then], we were really just making it up, I mean, it was the seat of our pants\u2026 we felt like we should be doing something. We were feeling like we need to be also talking about the same things that the women were talking about\u2014but we basically just took their analysis and presented it. You know, it didn\u2019t\u2014it didn\u2019t feel like it was coming from our core, you know, from who we were, other than maybe from our guilt<\/p>\n

And, and you know, I think\u2014having more of a positive vision of what a man should be, rather than going in there and telling men what they shouldn\u2019t be doing\u2014having a more pro-active, having a more kind of like, basically creating an ethic of, \u201cThis is what a man should do.\u201d You know, this is, this is a positive thing for a man to do, and also like, what does a man want? You know, rather than like, \u201cOh, you shouldn\u2019t be bad,\u201d but\u2026you wanna have a good relationship, you wanna have a relationship with someone that\u2019s based on some degree of equality, on some degree of, of mutual respect, of everyone having opportunities, or people feeling good about their lives, about who they are. And, that presupposes having some degree of, of understanding of who you are yourself and what you want. And I felt like we weren\u2019t, back then, we weren\u2019t coming at it from that\u2014it was more sort of like, you know, men are bad\u2014Andrea Dworkin told us this\u2014we know men are bad, we are bad, we\u2019re gonna\u2019 go and tell the high school boys that they\u2019re bad too, for looking at pornography, and that pornography\u2019s gonna\u2019 make them badder than they already are. And, there wasn\u2019t that\u2014I think there\u2019s gotta\u2019 be a positive vision. And you have to have, I mean, you don\u2019t want to be blind to the bad stuff that goes on, but there has to be kind of some upside for doing this, \u2018cause I don\u2019t think otherwise people are gonna\u2019 really pay any attention or wanna listen to you.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Chris\u2019s statement very neatly encapsulated about thirty years of change in the ways that men now approach doing violence prevention work with boys and men. In Some Men<\/em><\/a>,<\/em> the book that Max Greenberg, Tal Peretz and I wrote from this research, we chronicle the grassroots of this activism\u2014set in place in the 70s and 80s by community groups like MASV\u2014in part because it is important to honor the foundations of positive social change. But it\u2019s also important because today\u2019s younger activists, however savvy and pragmatic they may be about the ways they approach boys and men with their message, may also have lost something very important that earlier activists like Chris Norton had: a grounding in a larger view of social change that viewed their efforts to stop sexist violence against women as intricately connected with efforts to humanize and bring justice to the world.\u00a0\u00a0 For groups like MASV, feminist work with boys and men, Chris explained, was an integral part of a larger transformative movement:<\/p>\n

\u2026 an important way of sort of humanizing socialism, or getting rid of some of the hard-edged more Stalinistic tendencies that some socialist movements could have. And it also just made a lot of sense [for] those of us too, who also were rejecting militarism and the traditional terms of being masculine or man, and were looking for some kind of a new way\u2014when I came to Berkeley initially I was involved in the anti-war movement, and lived in communal houses, and we\u2019d gotten involved in the food conspiracy, and\u2014it was all part of this whole, you know, sort of community, alternative society in a way that we kinda\u2019 felt like we were creating it back then.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In retrospect, like many radicals of his generation, Chris expressed frustration with the current prospects for transformative social change.<\/p>\n

I think I\u2019ve retreated some degree from utopianism. But I do feel that it\u2019s definitely possible to have a far more egalitarian society than we do. And I just, I feel like\u2014and that\u2019s part of my frustration too, is those of us who feel that way haven\u2019t found ways to be very effective in putting forward that vision and, and making that vision something that\u2019s attractive to people, and making people realize that what we\u2019re living under is not actually that great for a lot of people, and it\u2019s very difficult for a lot of people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Part of my goal in writing Some Men<\/em><\/a> with Max and Tal was to encourage today\u2019s anti-violence activists to re-connect to that larger vision. It is stories from this generation of activists like Chris Norton that help to keep alive this larger vision.<\/p>\n

The community bonds that sustain that vision were palpable when I attended Chris Norton\u2019s memorial service in 2012, after he had succumbed to cancer. \u00a0Included among the scores of family and friends celebrating Norton\u2019s life were a handful of MASV men\u2014guys who in their youth had pioneered anti-violence work. Now considerably older, they shared a sense of pride in what they had accomplished so many years ago. Following MASV\u2019s demise, they had gone on to do other progressive work: Chris Anderegg worked for years helping women\u2019s DV shelters with their finances; Larry Mandella created workshops for fathers; Santiago Casal did community organizing to get a memorial built in Berkeley for civil rights leader Cesar Chavez. All of them, in their own ways, were clearly in it for the long haul.<\/p>\n

Still today, I am not and probably never will be much of an activist. But I hope that my research and writing makes some small contribution to progressive thinking, and progressive social change, a contribution that both honors and learns from the brave and important work that\u2019s been done in the past by the doers of the world, like Chris Norton, whom I so admire, and whose collective work helps to make the world a better and more just place.<\/p>\n

_____________________________<\/p>\n

\"Messner2013c\"Michael A. Messner<\/a> is professor of sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California, and author (with Max Greenberg and Tal Peretz) of Some Men: Feminist Allies and the Movement to End Violence Against Women<\/em><\/a> (Oxford University Press, 2015).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is the second half of a two-post series on the pro-feminist and activist Chris Norton at Feminist Reflections by Michael A. Messner. The first half of \u201cLearning from Chris Norton over three decades\u2014Part I\u201d can be found HERE. … Flash forward to 2010. I was now a tenured full professor, pushing 60, a number […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1958,"featured_media":1458,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[245,30335,30344,26,76],"tags":[35072,37852,35073],"class_list":["post-1457","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feminism","category-feminist-sociology","category-personal-stories","category-public-sociology","category-work","tag-chris-norton","tag-feminist-men","tag-michael-messner"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/files\/2015\/05\/NortonCrop.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1457","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1958"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1457"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1457\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1479,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1457\/revisions\/1479"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1458"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1457"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1457"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/feminist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1457"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}