BLOG UPDATE: 30 Apr 10, 22:30

New entry, Articles on Men…

Men Who Have Sex with Men (MSM), But What About MSW…?

Why Do Gay Men Bareback?

Oxford Street is the fading gay heart of Sydney. It is there where many gay clubs slowly meld into straight and then into boring and then into conversion into $2 shops. I remember once how I made the mistake of going to an Oxford Street doctor for nothing more than a simple check-up and before I knew it, I was being grilled about my most intimate sexual behaviours. Partnered for seven years? Monogamous? Condoms or bareback? The burnt-out doctor, himself a flowery fag in a so-promoted gay-friendly medical service, had decided in advance that I was a dirty filthy liar, that all gay men are dirty filthy liars, and that we root any hairy arse that walks. Condoms, when it comes to the latter, are optional.

People get sick and die for many preventable reasons. For example, that fat-drenched hamburger you had for lunch, the long hours stuck behind that desk in your dead-end job, the walk home routine that you keep putting off, singly, and in combination, help to advance your shuffle off the dial in great leaps. However, unprotected anal sex between men compels some people to single out that act as the ‘most risk-iest’ ever. How could gay men be so stupid? Are we thumbing our noses at the establishment? Are we mad? Do we have a death wish or do we, as the author of this little essay argues (see link, below), crave for intimacy the way that every adult person craves for intimacy?

If we put all the fast food in the world inside the equivalent of a condom (ie. a plastic bag) and chucked that bag in the bin, millions upon millions of people would be spared carking it from stroke, heart attack, diabetes, dementia, and so forth…

Raw Emotion…Thoughts on Why Gay Men Bareback 2010

The Veterans Forgotten Every ANZAC Day

Today is ANZAC Day in Australia, a day that we set aside to commemorate the sacrifices made by our war dead. It is meant to be a solemn and reflective time. However, missing from public display on ANZAC Day is any real attention to the enormous cost that war exacts. For example, when my da came back from active service in the jungles of New Guinea at the end of World War II, his body intact but his mind shattered by the horror of the death and destruction in which he had been entangled, the Australian Government did not want to know him. Those men who demonstrably show the telltale signs of war-caused trauma embarrass us, and call into question the filthy business of the industrial war machine.

The government department that was supposed to care for my father’s health and well-being, Veterans’ Affairs, instead deliberately treated my father like dirt, consigning him, his wife, and six children to a life of needless suffering and despair. While on this day, ANZAC Day, there will be much chest thumping and nationalistic displays of pride and glory, so many of those guileless men who signed up to defend their country will be homeless, imprisoned, drug-fucked, suicidal or possessed with uncontrollable rage. Mostly, they will spend every waking moment haunted by the horror of the inhumanity to which they have borne witness. On this day, ANZAC Day, those men are purposefully forgotten, a reality too present and painful and contrary to the mythology of war.

This story from the US (see link, below), demonstrates that we are not alone in our struggle to deal or not deal with the harmful consequences of war. However, at least in the US, people are willing to speak up, to question, challenge, and agitate for reform. Here in Australia, we remain deathly silent…

 GI’s Describe Despair and Isolation in Trauma Unit 2010

Men’s Rights Movement Confusion

If you have not yet seen the Men’s Health Australia website (see link, below), you are denying yourself quite a treat. It’s a bit, well, all over the place. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Greatness comes from chaos, so I say but here, plaintiff cries that men care as much as women (I hope so) and men are much less violent than it seems (I wish so), are matched by pages and pages of junk under a ‘Mythbusters’ heading. Why is it, I ask, that the men’s rights movement insists on ramming home the point that its versions of the truth are way more truthful than the other side’s are? Talk about diversions to make much of time!

Anyway, you can’t be banging on about men being as soft, gentle and caring as women and then elsewhere, that men being angry or emotionally sparse is just because we are ‘hard-wired’ like that. What rubbish! If it’s not bad enough to make up neurobiological faerie stories that have about as much credibility as phrenology does, what is even worse is to portray men as pathetic idiots, incapable of thinking, learning, and positive change. Emotions, for instance, are only gendered because so many men are too afraid to show how they truly feel, lest they be realistically or metaphorically kicked in the head.

Misogyny and hypermasculinity are not going to improve men’s health in Australia, nor anywhere else for that matter. Encouraging already troubled men to vent their anger against ‘feminists’ and other targeted enemies is unsettling, and counterproductive. Men need to take responsibility for their own choices, their own behaviours and attitudes. That is the big challenge we face. To follow the drift, confusion notwithstanding, of the Men’s Health Australia website, would be to impose even worse physical and mental health outcomes upon men. Denial can have no positive utility value in the context of promoting men’s health…

Men’s Health Australia

Taking Bets on a Dud Men’s Health Policy

Saunders M, & Peerson A (2009). Australia’s national men’s health policy: masculinity matters. Health promotion journal of Australia : official journal of Australian Association of Health Promotion Professionals, 20 (2), 92-7 PMID: 19642955

Australians love to gamble. We have more poker machines than we do shoes. If we can see it, we can place a bet on it, from corrupt football teams to two flies crawling up a wall. And so, in that much-loved tradition, I am placing my bet on the pending, first ever, National Men’s Health Policy, to be a total dud. Like Saunders and Peerson (2009), I too am curious how you can construct such an important policy in the absence of critical thinking. If you look at the accumulated documents that have informed the development of this policy (go to www.health.gov.au and follow the links), you will notice that the essential concepts of gender, masculinity and notably, hegemonic masculinity, are virtually non-existent. Saunders and Peerson (2009) are aghast at this shameful omission. So am I. That absence was not an oversight; it was deliberate. From the bean counters within Federal Health who inform the Minister to the gaggle of handpicked men who have carefully stage-managed the community consultation process, this will be a huge policy about nothing. Absolutely guaranteed. By refusing to get to the nub of why men of certain types and in certain situations cause themselves and others so much harm, a rare moment for meaningful reform will be lost. I could bet a red ute on that…

Update: This piece of what, whatever, from Men’s News Daily (see link, below) attacking Pr Raewyn Connell for her views on hegemonic masculinity as well as Pr Connell herself, would seem to characterise a large chunk of the thinking that is behind the new men’s health policy in Australia. I’d shout out ‘bush pigs!’ at this point, except that I have way too much respect for bush pigs…

Men’s Studies Foremost Authority Opts for Castration, Literally

Emerging Areas in Domestic Violence Research

The Australian Institute of Criminology (www.aic.gov.au) has published a report, in which they outline several key domestic violence areas that are ‘emerging’ (their term) and which require further research (see link, below). For example, while we now recognise that gay men can be violent within intimate relationships (2010, p.4), there is nowhere for gay men who are abused to go, outside of the Sydney and Melbourne CBDs, for support. In fact, many gay men suffer secondary abuse when they report to police, or health and welfare professionals.

Another key area mentioned in this report is the impact on children of witnessing domestic violence (2010, pp.7-8)…

‘What the available evidence indicates is that witnessing violence in the home poses a threat to children’s physical, emotional, psychological, social, educational and behavioural wellbeing (see McGee 2000; Morgan & Chadwick 2009; Richards forthcoming; Tomison 2000; Tucci et al. 2005; Zerk, Martin & Proeve 2009). Browne and Winkelman (2007) noted that child abuse and neglect have been associated with insecure attachment in both childhood and adulthood, as well as cognitive distortion associated with safety (eg preoccupation with danger), controllability (eg perceptions of hopelessness) and internal attribution (self-blaming). They also acknowledged that ‘long after trauma victims regain environmental control over their lives, they continue to suffer from perceptions of powerlessness, helplessness, ineffectualness, and vulnerability to poor psychological adjustment’ (Browne & Winkelman 2007: 693)‘ (2010, p.7).

The author refers to the lack of evidence supporting the efficacy of perpetrator programs (2010, p.8) as another area in need of (further) research. That problem has been aggravated by how governments fund such programs, prohibiting independent (and I mean ‘independent’), rigorous evaluation of program processes and outcomes. Moreover, many perpetrator programs are poorly structured, performed and supervised with, for example, boundary and role violations resulting in the damaged dynamic of facilitators explicitly and implicitly colluding with participants as the collective ‘victims’ of women. I think here of a colleague who runs perpetrator groups and who upholds the mantra that women give as good as they get when it comes to domestic violence, describing himself as a living Adonis who must constantly fight off the aggressive sexual advances of women. Just take that warped, narcissistic mind into a group full of perpetrators and see what happens…

Emerging Issue in Domestic Family Violence Research 2010

BLOG UPDATE: Sat 24 Apr 10, 2:00

New entry, Articles on Men…

Men, Capitulation to Distress, and GP Visits…

No Place for Traumatised Men

I used to a work in a public psychiatric hospital here in central Sydney. The place operated just like that garage model which Goffman (1961) warned us about oh so many years ago. That is, quickly in, little tinker, quickly out. Ten years later, public mental health in Australia remains both minimalist and negatively associated with need. The greater your mental health and related support needs, the less likely you are to receive care. It was routine practice in that psychiatric hospital in which I worked for patients with complex needs to be dumped either into inappropriate accommodation or, into the gutter. ‘Discharged to the street’ was the term in use. The only ‘therapy’ in that horrible place was more and more medication. Proper case management, discharge planning, and evidence-based practice, were nowhere to be seen.

Whenever I hear psychiatrists call for more beds and more meds (see link, below),  I want to puke, knowing that those archaic interventions typically produce diminished outcomes. People don’t get to be mad, as a rule, on the basis of nothing. They come from maddening places of trauma, abuse and neglect. It is those troubled sites where prevention and other positive interventions need to occur. Having worked therapeutically with so many traumatised men, and having lived with complex trauma myself for all of my adult life and then some, I am painfully aware that here in Australia we have no accessible, therapeutic services for traumatised men. We are happy to discharge such men to the gutter or lock them up in prison or compel them to go to rehab, but when it comes to actual ‘care’, we run for the hills. More beds and more meds will only add to that mountain of misery…

Hospitals Will Treat Em and Street Em 2010

BLOG UPDATE: Thu 22 Apr 10, 12:30

New Entry, Bent Freak…

The Bible Says: ‘Nobody Loves Gays’

Rural Men Not So Tough As We Thought

Alongside the concotion called ANZAC, no myth is more powerful and pervasise in Australia than that of the stoic man on the land. We write songs about him, make movies about him, and refer to him constantly in election campaigns as the ‘must do’ citizen. The trouble is, as is often the way when myth bangs into reality, the rural man is one totally sick puppy. A dud heart, mad as a cut snake, drunk, fagging, and prone to injury, we are sending our beloved icon to the boneyard in record numbers (see link, below). As we try to work out how to apply a durable coat of paint to his tattered image, I say we should be instead re-examining all those stupid masculine ideals that we mix up with the concept of the rural man. In one breath saying to those poor bastards, go and see and doctor but then, we love your gritty solitude, is mind confounding stuff.

A Snapshot of Men’s Health in Regional and Remote Australia 2010