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A National Review Online (NRO) interview with... Kathleen Parker
Hail the Male
Fathers, sons, and ghosts of feminism past...
It’s Father’s Day this weekend, in a land where men are underappreciated, disrespected, and under attack. Kathleen Parker is here to save them, with her cultural wakeup call, Save the Males: Why Men Matter. Why Women Should Care. She recently took questions on her new book from NRO editor Kathryn Jean Lopez.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: Well count me among those who think men matter. Why do they need saving though? Don’t they usually do the rescue missions?

Kathleen Parker: Men are, indeed, excellent rescuers. We like that about men. In fact, Western men rescued women once upon a time from their status as pack mules. As my friend Matt Labash might say, I like to call that Western Civilization. Men also created the big-idea documents that ultimately resulted in women’s suffrage and equality under the law. Women have demonstrated their gratitude by reaching the summit and basically pulling the ladder up behind them. “See ya, guys. You’re on your own now. Oh, and we’re taking the kids.”
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MSN Article... By Jeff O'Connell
Male suicide a growing concern in tough times...
The psychologist Edwin S. Shneidman, Ph.D., a pioneer in suicide research, once said that it's a bad idea to kill yourself when you're feeling suicidal. That's no joke: You're not solving problems well. You're unable to step outside your troubled mind. And those things make you a very, very dangerous man. Realization of the risk comes too late for many, from bottom-rung stragglers to men whose lives and achievements seem worthy of celebration, not self-termination.

Their final act perplexes family and friends. It saddens them, sickens them, and even angers them. And in the end, it worries the rest of us, too. Because any of us could be walking that bridge one day. The numbers are so gut-churning, it's like looking over a bridge railing. Nearly 26,000 men took their own lives in 2005. That's nearly four times the number of women who did the same thing, even though three times more women than men attempt suicide. (For every completed suicide by a man or woman, 25 attempts fail.)

Whereas a woman might swallow pills halfheartedly, a man is four times more likely to complete the act, mostly because men tend to use guns — and their aim is true. As grim as that sounds, it gets worse. Mark S. Kaplan, Dr.P.H., who researches suicide at Oregon's Portland State University, believes the suicide death toll may be up to 25 percent higher than officially recorded. Many single-car accidents seem mysterious. When an overdose occurs and toxicology results are ambiguous, as in the case of Heath Ledger, was it a tragic accident or an exit strategy? Some medical examiners will certify a death as suicide only if the victim leaves a note, and yet only about 20 percent of people who kill themselves do so. Sometimes insurance companies pay the survivors less, or nothing at all, in cases of suicide. The denial of friends and family is a factor, too: It's less painful to think a loved one didn't die by his or her own hand.
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Men's Issues Video...
Video... By proudguy  (YouTube ID) © 2008
Describes the existing gender culture and then shows the problems that need to be addressed by changing the existing gender culture.

Editors note. You may be requested to allow scripts or ActiveX controls in order to view videos.

Guest Article... Robert A. Glover, Ph.D. author of The Nice Guy Syndrome, ©2008
Emotional Integration, Part 4...
OK, something has triggered you into your lizard brain. You are in fight, flight, or freeze mode. You might be lashing out, hiding, or trying to keep an uncomfortable situation from getting worse.

If you have been practicing being an observer of yourself, you might even be conscious that you are not seeing everything clearly and that you could be overreacting. You observe yourself spinning in your brain and feeling victimized and reactive.

How do you take this awareness and do something different?
Once you become aware that your amygdala has been activated and you are in your lizard brain, how do you access a different part of your brain and become assertive rather than reactive?

In other words, how do you learn to think, feel, and act less like a reptile and more like a mature, calm adult?

Once you’ve become conscious and are effectively observing your lizard brain reactions, you are one third of the way toward emotional integration. Step two is to practice self-soothing.

The Nice Guy Syndrome is fundamentally an “anxiety based disorder”. Therefore, learning how to soothe anxiety is crucial for moving from a state of near constant anxiety to peace, calm and gratitude.
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Guest Article... by Marty Nemko
What the Hell is the Meaning of Life?...
When I was a teenager, I thought money was the answer. So, I took after-school jobs, and tried to buy my way into contentment: clothes, nice car, fancy stereo. That didn’t do it.

Then I tried noble work—teaching in the inner city. But the problems those kids faced were so big, so multi-dimensional, that despite my trying hard, very hard, I felt I wasn’t making much difference.

Next, I tried prestige: got a Ph.D. from Berkeley, became a professor. But in my social science field, I often felt like an emperor with no clothes. So much social “science” is poorly substantiated, politically motivated theory. My students ate it up but I felt I was often feeding them ersatz food.

I’ve been trying the values route: focusing on what did I most value: work. To that end, I decided to be a career counselor. I believed that helping people find right livelihood would make my life feel meaningful. But now, 22 years and 2,900 clients later, despite a 96 percent client satisfaction rate and the San Francisco Bay Guardian naming me “The Bay Area’s Best Career Coach,” that sometimes feels empty too. Some of my work—helping people to make the most of their current job—feels good. That helps them live up to their potential, and, in turn, their employer to provide good products and services. But too often, my clients, especially those ostensibly wanting a career change, come away with a plan they’re excited about but fail to execute.
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COYOTE... monthly column by Dick Prosapio © 2008
The Wild Life
One evening a week ago two deer, a young buck and a doe, were nibbling yucca blossoms about fifteen yards from my office window. I caught them both with a telephoto and got some nice shots. A few mornings ago I checked a live trap in our pump house and found the pregnant pack rat that had constructed a very nice nest of insulation materials festooned with decorative juniper branch tips. It was all set to be occupied but no sign of habitation yet. Might have been a "spec" nest. We re-located her about two miles south and she seemed happy to be there.

In between these two events came the discovery of a large meth lab hidden on the BLM land to our north. It was found by a prospective property owner who was inspecting a pending purchase of the forty-acre parcel. In a short time we had State Police, Sheriffs, local gendarmes of all shapes and sizes and, at 1:30 in the morning, the huge "Hazmat" truck came rumbling up our dusty road to collect the chemicals.

Over the years we have had a few criminal events around our place, we live in the wilds after all and that gives bad actors space to play out their dramatic lives. This is not counting our daughters ventures by the way, these other folks were not related to us.
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JEFF'S LIFE: Raising an Autistic Child... monthly column by Jeff Stimpson © 2007
The Mayor of Crazyland...
Ned put a bunch of stuff on a sheet of light-blue construction paper: a plastic slinky, a yellow toy totem pole, a toy car, a candle on its side, and a red canoe from the Lincoln Logs set. Each sat on the paper in its individual puddle of wet Elmer's glue. Then Ned shredded a "we care about your business" notice we got from our new bank, Chase-Wa-Mu, and added the shreddings as snow. Across the top of the paper, in pencil, he wrote "Crazyland."

So I came home last night ready to whip out my notebook and interview the mayor of Crazyland (I'm doing a big-fee story these days on Ned's sibshops, where he goes on Saturdays to be with other siblings of special-needs kids to play and talk about how they feel, and Ned is terrific interview). I find Crazyland devastated. Stripped of its the slinky, the car, the totem pole, the canoe and the candle, only skeletal circles, like the foundations of buildings, of dried Elmer's left in the wake of what must have been a miniature Hurricane Ike. Or Alex.

"Why can't you make sure he doesn't wreck my stuff?!" Ned demands. "He wrecks it all the time!"

I can believe it. Crazyland should've been on the top of the tall bookcase, along with Ned's latest Lego castle, the model airplanes we've been building, and Ned's home-made jack-o-lantern mask he wore on Halloween. But Ned put Crazyland in his room when he came home, well within the path of Hurricane Alex
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DADS, DON'T FIX YOUR KIDS... monthly column by Mark Brandenburg, M.A © 2007
Thirty Things That Really Matter for Fathers ...
In the chaos of modern life, it's easy to lose sight of many of the important things you can do as a father. Here's a list of some of the more important ones:

1. Leave something for them - a letter to them, some reflections on their childhood
2. Understand family systems
3. Tell them your stories
4. Have rituals in your family
5. Teach them your values
6. Avoid the bad mistakes - anger is often a culprit
7. Know the stages of your child’s growth
8. Be playful with them, even when they’re older
9. Know your child’s life intimately
10. Treat your wife very well
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LATEST REVIEWS

REVIEW: Men are Great: How to Build a Relationship that Brings Out the Best in Both of You
By By Karen Jones ©2007
Karen Jones, the most youthful-looking woman on the high side of 50 that you are likely ever to find, and a relationship trainer by trade, has written a deceptively simple book. (Full disclosure: At the Boys and the Boy Crisis Conference in Washington DC in July 2007, Karen and I spent some brief yet treasured time together in the company of other conference attendees.) Men are Great: How to Build a Relationship that Brings Out the Best in Both of You is a modest book. It’s a quick read and it is pretty much summed up by its title. Nevertheless, it is highly recommended for a number of reasons.
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REVIEW: See Jane Hit: Why Girls are Growing More Violent and What We Can Do About it
By James Garbarino, Ph.D. ©2006
Seven years after writing “Lost Boys: Why Our Sons Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them,” James Garbarino, Ph.D., professor of humanistic psychology at Loyola University Chicago, has published what could roughly speaking be described as a companion volume, “See Jane Hit: Why Girls are Growing More Violent and What We Can Do About It.” Garbarino writes well, and his book addresses a topic that has drawn significant interest in recent years, having been addressed in at least four other recent volumes. “See Jane Hit” is interesting reading for gender activists, since Garbarino writes from a more mainstream perspective that uncritically accepts some anti-male falsehoods, yet at the same time is a generally thoughtful and fair-minded commentator.
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REVIEW: Straight Talk for Men about Marriage: What Men Need to Know About Marriage (And What Women Need to Know About Men)
By Martin G. Friedman ©2006
The author has put together an appealingly presented, male-friendly guide to improving the quality of our marriages. As Friedman is the first to point out, this isn’t exactly rocket science. We need to learn to do the basics. A marriage is a path to learning about ourselves. Projecting our discontent onto our spouse doesn’t do either of us any favors.
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REVIEW: Self-Made Man: One Woman’s Journey into Manhood and Back Again
By Norah Vincent
Norah Vincent has produced a new book whose simple underlying concept nevertheless seems to possess all the potential power of, say, John Howard Griffin’s classic Black Like Me, in which the Caucasian author masqueraded as a black man and was astonished at the depths of the discrimination and barriers he discovered.  Author Vincent tries to do the same thing for gender, dressing in drag as “Ned” and entering various supposed male bastions to report on what she discovers.
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REVIEW: The Smart Couple’s Guide to the Wedding of Your Dreams:
Planning Together for Less Stress and More Joy
By By Judith Sherven and James Sniechowski
Judith Sherven and James Sniechowski, husband-and-wife psychologists and authors of three books previously reviewed by me in these pages (The New Intimacy, Opening to Love 365 Days a Year, and Be Loved for Who You Really Are) have just published a new book on their favorite topic, love and marriage. In a literal sense, The Smart Couple’s Guide to the Wedding of Your Dreams covers a narrower subject than any of their three previous books.  But actually, predictably enough given the authors’ excellent writing skills and tireless, creative devotion to promoting passion, their latest offering manages to transcend the limits of the genre of wedding guides.  Not seeing a book that went beyond the technicalities of wedding planning and touched the spirit of the event, they took the plunge and wrote it!
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REVIEW: Partnering: A New Kind of Relationship
By Hal Stone and Sidra Stone © 2006
Hal and Sidra Stone are, like Judith Sherven and James Sniechowski (whose latest book is reviewed elsewhere in this issue) a husband-and-wife psychologist team who have written a number of books and who travel the world giving workshops on their techniques for improving one’s life and relationships.  Partnering does not represent a stunning advance on the authors’ previous work but it does expand, in the specific context of relationships, on the work they have helped pioneer in exploring the multiple selves each of us contains through the voice dialogue technique.
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REVIEW: The Prodigal Father: A True Story of Tragedy, Survival, and Reconciliation in an American Family.
By Jon DuPre.
Jon DuPre’s achievement with “The Prodigal Father” is stupefying. What this correspondent for Fox Network News has done is so simple: He has told the story of his family of origin, consisting of two brothers, himself, and his mother and father. As a novel, the book would fail. For one thing, the plot would be utterly unbelievable! But “The Prodigal Father” is billed as an “autobiography,” and written with loving detail and self-revelation so honest and so deep that took my breath away. As such, it is utterly compelling and simultaneously completely credible.
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REVIEW: Gendercide and Genocide
Edited by Adam Jones © 2006
Apart from the rarest exceptions (such as the not-to-be-missed “Female ‘Circumcision’ in Africa: Culture, Controversy, and Change,” Edited by Bettina Shell-Duncan and Ylva Hernlund), edited volumes tend to be hit-and-miss affairs. It’s hard enough simply to find an appropriate topic, to accumulate contributions that are varied enough to provide interest but not so different that they work at cross-purposes, and to publish the work. Maintaining a razor-like focus as can easily be done with an individually authored book by definition becomes almost impossible with an edited volume.
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Archive of All Reviews & Interviews... by J. Steven Svoboda.

MILITARY HONOR ROLL... Pay tribute to the Veterans or Active Duty military in your life on our perpetual Military Honor Roll page
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FATHERS HONOR ROLL... Pay tribute to your father (grandfather, great grandfather, etc.) on our perpetual Fathers Honor Roll page
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MENSIGHT Magazine is another free service of The Men's Resource Network, Inc. (MRN). It has grown out of the response that we have received from articles posted on TheMensCenter.com (TMC), our official web-site. The first issue went on-line on May 1, 2000. (Archive)

MENSIGHT is dedicated to publishing diverse articles for and about men. We believe that there are valuable lessons to be learned from the advocates of all the various men's issues.

MENSIGHT will publish articles, stories and information that will be welcomed by many and controversial to others. We offer the magazine for your edification but you are free to disagree or reject what you do not like. Be advised that we do not necessarily agree with every position that is expressed here.

We hope that you will be entertained, informed, educated, stimulated, and/or motivated by what you read here. We seek to empower men to be the authority of their own lives. We do not seek to tell men what to think or feel.