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Activism is a huge part of feminism, helping others understand their cause.

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A way that feminists on campus show their activism is through events such as the Vagina Monologues that raises awareness about violence against woman and the struggles they go through.

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The slut walk is another way that people have tried to spread awareness.

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Representations of Violence in Media and Transnational Feminism

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"the conception and planning of a new action in response to an environmental demand.

feminist praxis praxis done from a belief system involving ideas of mutual nurturance, nonviolence, and small groupsworking for change, with attention to emotions, communal life, reciprocity, and the development of persons over time. Seealso feminist theory."

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SAGE Journals: Your gateway to world-class journal research

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Subscription and open access journals from SAGE Publishing, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

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The image helps show how everyone is different, yet one.

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Helps show how complex the issue is.

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This women is the person who coined the phrase, so I had to include her.

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Get a daily email featuring the latest talk, plus a quick mix of trending content.

By subscribing, you understand and agree that we will store, process and manage your personal information according to our Privacy Policy

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Kimberlé Crenshaw: The urgency of intersectionality

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Now more than ever, it's important to look boldly at the reality of race and gender bias -- and understand how the two can combine to create even more harm. Kimberlé Crenshaw uses the term "intersectionality" to describe this phenomenon; as she says, if you're standing in the path of multiple forms of exclusion, you're likely to get hit by both.

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I included basic information, because this is an unfamiliar topic to many.

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Each week, In Theory Kimberlé Crenshaw is the executive director of the African American Policy Forum and a professor of law at Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles, law schools. takes on a big idea in the news and explores it from a range of perspectives. This week we're talking about intersectionality. Need a primer? Catch up here.
Intersectionality was a lived reality before it became a term.

Today, nearly three decades after I first put a name to the concept, the term seems to be everywhere. But if women and girls of color continue to be left in the shadows, something vital to the understanding of intersectionality has been lost.

In 1976, Emma DeGraffenreid and several other black women sued General Motors for discrimination, arguing that the company segregated its workforce by race and gender: Blacks did one set of jobs and whites did another. According to the plaintiffs' experiences, women were welcome to apply for some jobs, while only men were suitable for others. This was of course a problem in and of itself, but for black women the consequences were compounded. You see, the black jobs were men's jobs, and the women's jobs were only for whites. Thus, while a black applicant might get hired to work on the floor of the factory if he were male; if she were a black female she would not be considered. Similarly, a woman might be hired as a secretary if she were white, but wouldn't have a chance at that job if she were black. Neither the black jobs nor the women's jobs were appropriate for black women, since they were neither male nor white. Wasn't this clearly discrimination, even if some blacks and some women were hired?

Unfortunately for DeGraffenreid and millions of other black women, the court dismissed their claims. Why? Because the court believed that black women should not be permitted to combine their race and gender claims into one. Because they could not prove that what happened to them was just like what happened to white women or black men, the discrimination that happened to these black women fell through the cracks.
[Intersectionality: A Primer]
It was in thinking about why such a "big miss" could have happened within the complex structure of anti-discrimination law that the term "intersectionality" was born. As a young law professor, I wanted to define this profound invisibility in relation to the law. Racial and gender discrimination overlapped not only in the workplace but in other other arenas of life; equally significant, these burdens were almost completely absent from feminist and anti-racist advocacy. Intersectionality, then, was my attempt to make feminism, anti-racist activism, and anti-discrimination law do what I thought they should - highlight the multiple avenues through which racial and gender oppression were experienced so that the problems would be easier to discuss and understand.

Intersectionality is an analytic sensibility, a way of thinking about identity and its relationship to power. Originally articulated on behalf of black women, the term brought to light the invisibility of many constituents within groups that claim them as members, but often fail to represent them. Intersectional erasures are not exclusive to black women. People of color within LGBTQ movements; girls of color in the fight against the school-to-prison pipeline; women within immigration movements; trans women within feminist movements; and people with disabilities fighting police abuse - all face vulnerabilities that reflect the intersections of racism, sexism, class oppression, transphobia, able-ism and more. Intersectionality has given many advocates a way to frame their circumstances and to fight for their visibility and inclusion.

Intersectionality has been the banner under which many demands for inclusion have been made, but a term can do no more than those who use it have the power to demand. And not surprisingly, intersectionality has generated its share of debate and controversy.

Conservatives have painted those who practice intersectionality as obsessed with "identity politics." Of course, as the DeGraffenreid case shows, intersectionality is not just about identities but about the institutions that use identity to exclude and privilege. The better we understand how identities and power work together from one context to another, the less likely our movements for change are to fracture.
[Why Equal Protection may not protect everyone equally.]
Others accuse intersectionality of being too theoretical, of being "all talk and no action." To that I say we've been "talking" about racial equality since the era of slavery and we're still not even close to realizing it. Instead of blaming the voices that highlight problems, we need to examine the structures of power that so successfully resist change.

Some have argued that intersectional understanding creates an atmosphere of bullying and "privilege checking." Acknowledging privilege is hard - particularly for those who also experience discrimination and exclusion. While white women and men of color also experience discrimination, all too often their experiences are taken as the only point of departure for all conversations about discrimination. Being front and center in conversations about racism or sexism is a complicated privilege that is often hard to see.

Although the president's recent call to support black women was commendable, undertaking intersectional work requires concrete action to address the barriers to equality facing women and girls of color in U.S. society.

Intersectionality alone cannot bring invisible bodies into view. Mere words won't change the way that some people - the less-visible members of political constituencies - must continue to wait for leaders, decision-makers and others to see their struggles. In the context of addressing the racial disparities that still plague our nation, activists and stakeholders must raise awareness about the intersectional dimensions of racial injustice that must be addressed to enhance the lives of all youths of color.
Explore these other perspectives:
This is why we continue the work of the #WhyWeCantWait Campaign, calling for holistic and inclusive approaches to racial justice. It is why "Say Her Name" continues to draw attention to the fact that women too are vulnerable to losing their lives at the hands of police. And it is why thousands have agreed that the tragedy in Charleston, S.C., demonstrates our need to sustain a vision of social justice that recognizes the ways racism, sexism and other inequalities work together to undermine us all. We simply do not have the luxury of building social movements that are not intersectional, nor can we believe we are doing intersectional work just by saying words.
Latoya Peterson: Intersectionality is not a label. Lauren Sudeall Lucas: Why Equal Protection may not protect everyone equally. Alyssa Rosenberg: How 'Orange Is the New Black' wins at illustrating identity
Brittney Cooper: Black lives matter - all of them.

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Opinion | Why intersectionality can't wait

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Each week, In Theory Kimberlé Crenshaw is the executive director of the African American Policy Forum and a professor of law at Columbia University and the University of California, Los Angeles, law schools. takes on a big idea in the news and explores it from a range of perspectives.

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Men continuously harass women in the work environment. Most of the time it has repercussions for the woman and not the man.

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By Joseph Pleck, PhD

Printed with permission

MEN'S POWER WITH OTHER MEN

In recent years, we have come to understand that relations between men and women are governed by a sexual politics that exists outside individual men's and women's needs and choices. It has taken us much longer to recognize that there is a systematic sexual politics of male-male relationships as well. Under patriarchy, men's relationships with other men cannot help but be shaped and patterned by patriarchal norms, though they are less obvious than the norms governing male-female relationships. A society could not have the kinds of power dynamics that exist between women and men in our society without certain kinds of systematic power dynamics operating among men as well.

Men do not just happily bond together to oppress women. In addition to hierarchy over women, men create hierarchies and rankings among themselves according to criteria of "masculinity." Men at each rank of masculinity compete with each other, with whatever resources they have, for the differential payoffs that patriarchy allows men.

Men in different societies choose different grounds on which to rank each other. Many societies use the simple facts of age and physical strength to stratify men. Our society stratifies men according to physical strength and athletic ability in the early years, but later in life focuses on success with women and ability to make money.

In our society, one of the most critical rankings among men deriving from patriarchal sexual politics is the division between gay and straight men. This division has powerful negative consequences for gay men and gives straight men privileges. But in addition, this division has a larger symbolic meaning. Our society uses the male heterosexual-homosexual dichotomy as a central symbol for all the rankings of masculinity, for the division on any grounds between males who are "real men" and have power, and males who are not. Any kind of powerlessness or refusal to compete becomes imbued with imagery of homosexuality. In the men's movement documentary film Men's Lives, a high school male who studies modern dance says that others often think he is gay because he is a dancer. When asked why, he gives three reasons: because dancers are "free and loose," because they are "not big like football players," and because "you're not trying to kill anybody." The patriarchal connection: if you are not trying to kill other men, you must be gay.

Another dramatic example of men's use of homosexual insults as weapons in their power struggle with each other comes from a document which provides one of the richest case studies of the politics of male-male relationships to yet appear: Woodward and Bernstein's The Final Days. Ehrlichman jokes that Kissinger is queer, Kissinger calls an unnamed colleague a psychopathic homosexual, and Haig jokes that Nixon and Rebozo are having a homosexual relationship. From the highest ranks of male power to the lowest, the gay-straight division is a central symbol of all the forms of ranking and power relationships which men put on each other.

MEN S POWER WITH WOMEN

The relationships between the patriarchal stratification and competition which men experience with each other, and men's patriarchal domination of women, are complex. Let us briefly consider several points of interconnection between them. First, women are used as SYMBOLS OF SUCCESS in men's competition with each other. It is sometimes thought that competition for women is the ultimate source of men's competition with each other. There is considerable reason, however, to see women not as the ultimate source of male-male competition, but rather as only symbols in a male contest where real roots lie much deeper.

Second, women often play a MEDIATING role in the patriarchal struggle among men. Women get together with each other, and provide the social lubrication necessary to smooth over men's inability to relate to each other non-competitively.

A modern myth, James Dickey's novel Deliverance, portrays what happens when men's relationships with each other are not mediated by women. According to Heilburn, the central message of Deliverance is that when men get beyond the bounds of civilization, which really means beyond the bounds of the civilizing effects of women, men rape and murder each other.

A third function women play in male-male sexual politics is that relationships with women provide men a REFUGE from the dangers and stresses of relating to other males. Traditional relationships with women have provided men a safe place in which they can recuperate from the stresses they have absorbed in their daily struggle with other men, and in which they can express their needs without fearing that these needs will be used against them. If women begin to compete with men and have power in their own right, men are threatened by the loss of this refuge.

Finally, a fourth function of women in males' patriarchal competition with each other is to reduce the stress of competition by serving as anUNDERCLASS. As Elizabeth Janeway has written in Between Myth and Morning, under patriarchy women represent the lowest status, a status to which men can fall only under the most exceptional circumstances, if at all. Competition among men is serious, but its intensity is mitigated by the fact that there is a lowest possible level to which men cannot fall. One reason men fear women's liberation, writes Janeway, is that the liberation of women will take away this unique underclass status of women. Men will now risk falling lower than ever before, into a new underclass composed of the weak of both sexes. Thus, women's liberation means that the stakes of patriarchal failure for men are higher than they have been before, and that it is even more important for men not to lose.

Thus, men's patriarchal competition with each other makes use of women as symbols of success, as mediators, as refuges, and as an underclass. In each of these roles, women are dominated by men in ways that derive directly from men's struggle with each other. Men need to deal with the sexual politics of their relationships with each other if they are to deal fully with the sexual politics of their relationships with women.

MEN'S POWER IN SOCIETY

At one level, men's social identity is defined by the power they have over women and the power they can compete for against other men. But at another level, most men have very little power over their own lives. How can we understand this paradox?

The major demand to which men must accede in contemporary society is that they play their required role in the economy. But this role is not intrinsically satisfying. The social researcher Daniel Yankelovich has suggested that about 80% of U.S. male workers experience their jobs as intrinsically meaningless and onerous. They experience their jobs and themselves as worthwhile only through priding themselves on the hard work and personal sacrifice they are making to be breadwinners for their families. Accepting these hardships reaffirms their role as family providers and therefore as true men.

Linking the breadwinner role to masculinity in this way has several consequences for men. Men can get psychological payoffs from their jobs which these jobs never provide in themselves. By training men to accept payment for their work in feelings of masculinity, rather than in feelings of satisfaction, men will not demand that their jobs be made more meaningful. As a result, jobs can be designed for the more important goal of generating profits. Further, the connection between work and masculinity makes men accept unemployment as their personal failing as males, rather than analyze and change the profit-based economy whose inevitable dislocations make them unemployed or unemployable.

Men's jobs are increasingly structured as if men had no direct roles or responsibilities in the family-indeed, as if they did not have families at all. But paradoxically, at the same time that men's responsibilities in the family are reduced to facilitate more efficient performance of their work role, the increasing dehumanization of work means that jobs give men only the satisfaction of fulfilling the family breadwinner role.

The relative privilege that men get from sexism, and more importantly the false consciousness of privilege men get from sexism, play a critical role in reconciling men to their subordination in the larger political economy. This analysis does not imply that men's sexism will go away if they gain control over their own lives, or that men do not have to deal with their sexism until they gain this control. Rather, the point is that we cannot fully understand men's sexism or men's subordination in the larger society unless we understand how deeply they are related.

Ultimately, we have to understand that patriarchy has two halves which are intimately related to each other. Patriarchy is a dual system, a system in which men oppress women, and in which men oppress themselves and each other. At one level, challenging one part of patriarchy inherently leads to challenging the other. This is one way to interpret why the idea of women's liberation led so soon to the idea of men's liberation, which ultimately means freeing men from the patriarchal sexual dynamics they now experience with each other. But because the patriarchal sexual dynamics of male-male relationships are less obvious than those of male-female relationships, men now face a real danger: while the patriarchal oppression of women may be lessened as a result of the women's movement, the patriarchal oppression of men may be untouched. The real danger for men posed by the attack that the women's movement is making on patriarchy is not that this attack will go too far, but that it will not go far enough. Ultimately, men cannot go any further in relating to women as equals

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Understanding Patriarchy and Men's Power

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By Joseph Pleck, PhD Printed with permission MEN'S POWER WITH OTHER MEN In recent years, we have come to understand that relations between men and women are governed by a sexual politics that exists outside individual men's and women's needs and choices.

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The gender pay gap is a huge example of this. Women have been paid less than men for years and little has changed.

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Men still earn more than women with the same jobs

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Income inequality between men and women, also known as the gender pay gap, is stubbornly persistent in the workplace.

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Why Do So Few Women Hold Positions of Power?

IPR briefing examines potential and challenges for women leaders

Alice Eagly (center) discusses the obstacles women leaders must overcome to negotiate the "labyrinth" of gender
inequality with panelists Brigham Young political scientist Christopher Karpowitz and IPR economist Lori Beaman.

Only 19 percent of U.S. congressional members, less than 5 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs, and only two out of the current crop of U.S. presidential candidates are women.

Clearly, "women are profoundly underrepresented in the United States in truly high-powered roles," said IPR psychologist Alice Eagly at a December 4, 2015, IPR policy research briefing in Chicago.

Before nearly 90 attendees, Eagly, IPR economist Lori Beaman, and Brigham Young political scientist Christopher Karpowitz dove into an interdisciplinary discussion of this issue and what might be possible to ensure that more women attain-and maintain-positions of power.

"This panel makes it clear that in society, in academia, in scholarship, in politics-there's an awful lot of promise, but also an awful lot of work we have to do together" to encourage gender equality, said IPR Director .
Negotiating the Labyrinth
Gender stereotypes are holding women back, Eagly argued. Americans tend to think of men as "agentic," people who are assertive and take charge. They think of women as "communal," individuals who are nice, friendly, and caring. But Americans think of leaders as being more agentic than communal.

Women who want to be leaders, therefore, run into two problems: The first is the "double standard": A female candidate for a powerful role has to put her agentic side on display to reassure people that she can take charge, which is hardly ever an issue for men. The second is the "double bind": When women in leadership roles do act tough, there is a backlash against them for being too tough."You can see a problem here," Eagly said. "The men and leaders match in our general stereotypes, and women and leaders don't match as much."

There is evidence, however, that the United States is moving in the right direction when it comes to fixing these problems, Eagly finds. People's perceptions of what it means to be a leader have changed in the past 40 years to incorporate more communal traits, like social skills. People are more open to having a female boss. And women today are more open to being bosses than women in the past.

So rather than seeing female leaders as pushing against a "glass ceiling," we should instead picture them as navigating a labyrinth, Eagly said-finding the right path is a challenge but persistence and careful thought pay off.
Gender Inequality in Deliberative Participation
Madeline Albright, America's first female Secretary of State, once spoke about how she would think about making a comment and then refrain because people would find it "stupid." "And then a man would say exactly what I had in mind and the other participants would find it brilliant," she reminisced.

Karpowitz decided to investigate what happened to the many women who, like Albright, participate in groups in which they are "vastly outnumbered" by men-from school boards to corporate boards and the Supreme Court.

He went on to discuss the research from his book with Princeton sociologist Tali Mendelberg, The Silent Sex: Gender Deliberation and Institutions (Princeton University Press, 2015), that examines how the male/female make-up of groups and their decision-making process affect women's and men's participation.

IPR associate, law professor, and psychologist Shari Diamond
asks the panelists a question.

In groups that make decisions by majority rule, women "not only talk less than men, but they talk much less than their presence in the group [would otherwise indicate]," Karpowitz said. In other words, if women make up 20 percent of a group, the amount of their participation in the conversation typically falls short of 20 percent.

In unanimous-rule groups, however, women who were outnumbered by men came closer to making up an equal share of the conversation because every person had to agree in order to reach a final decision.

Women who spoke more also reported more confidence in their own influence, and in groups where women were empowered by numbers or decision rule, they also experienced "greater respect and more positive feedback" from the men in the group.

This is good news for majority-woman groups or women in groups that make decisions by unanimous rule, he continued. But, as most often seems to be case, when women are in the minority in a majority-rule group, they are less likely to speak up. This means no one will hear or vote on their policy preferences, and they will not earn this respect.

"If we care about authority, we ought to care both about who's in the room and the norms and rules for decision-making," Karpowitz concluded.
Women's Political Empowerment
Another possible mechanism for bettering the ratio of female-to-male leaders involves the thorny topic of quotas. Beaman described several studies of social experiments she has led, looking specifically at how quotas might have helped increased the number of women in positions of power.

In India, a constitutional amendment requires that one-third of village council president positions be randomly reserved for women. In the short term, Beaman discovered that quotas led to more women being elected.

She also finds long-run impacts: In villages that had a woman leader for more than a decade, voters tended to be less prejudiced about woman leaders overall. In one experiment, Beaman had men and women recite the same political speech word for word, and then asked villagers who listened to it about the speaker's effectiveness. In places that had not had a woman leader, villagers were likely to say the female speaker was ineffective when compared with the male speaker. However, in those that had a woman leader, "that prejudice vanishes," Beaman explained.

In places where quotas had been in effect for 10 years, women were much more likely to run for election and more likely to win their races than in places that had only had woman politicians for a short time, or not at all.

But perhaps one of the most important long-term effects of the quota system was that in villages where a woman had led for at least 10 years, teenage girls, and their parents, were more likely to hold higher aspirations for their education and their careers than were girls in places that never had a female leader.

"By influencing aspirations, these woman leaders might be able to have a big influence beyond just their direct policies, by serving as role models for future generations of girls," Beaman said. Given the U.S. political climate, Beaman doubts whether quotas would ever be possible here, but "there's a lot that we can learn from India's experience, even in the U.S.," she said.

Njoki Kamau of Northwestern University's Women's Center closed out the Q&A portion of the event by asking a question on everyone's mind: Will Hillary Clinton become the United States' first female president?

While both Eagly and Karpowitz noted that the answer to this question mainly depends on who she might face if nominated, Eagly remarked that Clinton has already been responding to the backlash against woman leaders by conveying both strength and warmth at the same time. "I think she is very aware," she said.
Alice Eagly is James Padilla Chair of Arts and Sciences, Professor of Psychology, and an IPR fellow. Christopher Karpowitz is associate professor of political science at Brigham Young University. Lori Beaman is assistant professor of economics and an IPR fellow.

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Why Do So Few Women Hold Positions of Power?: Institute for Policy Research - Northwestern University

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IPR briefing examines potential and challenges for women leaders Alice Eagly (center) discusses the obstacles women leaders must overcome to negotiate the "labyrinth" of gender inequality with panelists Brigham Young political scientist Christopher Karpowitz and IPR economist Lori Beaman. Only 19 percent of U.S.

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In an article by "Buzzfeed", it investigates the effect society view of masculinity has on boys.

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PARK CITY, Utah - Early on in the documentary The Mask You Live In, which premiered Jan. 23 at the Sundance Film Festival, the idiom "be a man" is identified as one of the most destructive phrases in the English language. That might be shocking to those who believe in adhering to traditional gender roles and the need for boys to learn about masculinity at a young age, but the documentary uses psychologists, coaches, and men of all ages to demonstrate the damage American culture's rigid definition of masculinity has had on society.

It's a subject close to writer-director Jennifer Siebel Newsom's heart. After making her 2011 documentary Miss Representation, which focused on the negative portrayal of women in the media, Siebel Newsom founded an organization called The Representation Project. In the course of the organization's research, Siebel Newsom and her team found startling statistics that indicated that the problems young women face start - and could perhaps end - with young men. It's that notion that prompted The Mask You Live In.

Joined by her husband Gavin Newsom, lieutenant governor of California, Siebel Newsom sat down for an interview with BuzzFeed News to discuss tackling a subject as broad as masculinity - and the controversy involved in challenging long-standing cultural norms.

Where do you even begin with a topic as huge as masculinity?
Jennifer Siebel Newsom: We really started with the research and trying to comprehend and understand, Is there really a boy crisis going on? And when you compare boys to girls, boys are more likely to drop out of school, be prescribed prescription meds, binge drink, commit a violent crime, and/or take their own lives. And when you hear those statistics you go, Oh my gosh, it's not just that our girls and women are suffering, but our boys and young men as well. And so, that sort of spurred further investigation with thought leaders in the different areas that affect boys' lives - not only looking at sociologists and psychologists, but then going into the education system and understanding what's going on with boys there, and also looking at sports culture and media culture. So that's kind of the process.
When you were making the film, did you see it as being controversial? To some people, surely, the idea that the phrase "man up" is damaging might be harder to understand.
JSN: I believe that it will make some men uncomfortable and some women uncomfortable, because many of us have been taught our gender roles. Because they're so ingrained in us, we assume they're biology, and we don't understand epigenetics and we don't understand socialization, and it's much easier to bifurcate gender the way we have done. It's almost easier and safer for a lot of people. So I definitely think there are going to be people who are uncomfortable. But I try to make films, or at least this film, tonality-wise, a bit more gentle. I like to bring the viewer in.

I'll just bring my husband in here. We had so many focus groups and test screenings early on because it was critical that we brought men who weren't necessarily aware of gender being a social construct or even aware of their hypermasculine or machismo attitudes or behaviors. We wanted them to be compelled to see the film and we wanted to draw them in. [Gavin] was the one who was like, in the very beginning, with earlier openings, providing really helpful feedback saying, "You cannot open with that scene," or "You cannot open with that character." Finally, I feel like opening with Joe Ehrmann, the former NFL star who also coaches boys, it just felt like that was the right way to make the film more palatable for the majority of Americans.

Obviously, Gavin, you're coming at this from a different perspective as a man, even if you are aware of the ideas and themes of the film. What kind of input did you have?
Gavin Newsom: Every week that she was in the process of doing this, there's a new report on college campus sexual assault. Every week there was something going on, particularly near the end, the critical editing period, in the NFL, from Ray Rice to Adrian Peterson, to everything that was going on even in our town with Ray McDonald. And then, of course, when we had that kid from Santa Barbara [Elliot Rodger] who did that video that's in the film. So we've gotta go there, we've gotta go here, we've gotta go here. Violence, social isolation, all these things. Taking on the gun violence without ever bringing up the NRA, which was interesting, taking on some of our core constructs around the idea that we never talk about gender in the context of gun violence. I loved all that. The art of all this was creating a compelling narrative that connects those dots. I think she did.

But Jen's point about getting Joe Ehrmann, I just thought it was important. I don't know. Maybe it's the guy thing. She had these other characters that started, but I wanted something that was gonna get the person in the Midwest, that was gonna get someone off the Coast, and get someone that's always believed that "man up" is a good thing, and be able to capture that voice. And I thought Joe was the one guy who could do that - literally, his voice and his example, his history in the NFL, all of that. If there's any contribution, I hope it was that. Otherwise, I was useless in the process.
Jennifer, you draw a clear line from our cultural fixation on masculinity to misogyny and homophobia. Why was it so important to you to show that influence?
JSN: Because they're all related and interconnected. Every film that I get behind - because I'm also an executive producer on The Hunting Ground and I was an executive producer on The Invisible War - they're all interrelated. Just looking at the feminine and the masculine, it's about the fact that we so have been taught, not just young men but young women, to devalue the feminine, not just in others but in ourselves. And so, it was so important for me to call that out in a way that people could hear and that was so applicable to so many young boys and men who are struggling and suffering because they're gay or just more earnest.

So many young men, even if they're not gay, they're bullied because they're earnest and that's associated with femininity. At the end of the day, we've put young boys and men in a straightjacket, forcing them to conform to a construct and disconnect from who they really are so as not to be alienated or isolated or ostracized. And ultimately, what happens in the process is, by disconnecting from themselves, they are isolating themselves and contributing to a life that is lonely and depressing. You had to look at both sides of the coin and really, it all comes down to how we've been taught at such an early age to devalue the feminine. One wonders why we have the culture we have? Well, there you go.

As a woman talking about feminism, have you gotten a lot of vitriol?
JSN: The one thing that I think we as an organization [The Representation Project] have done pretty well, I think we try to come from a place of curiosity and, yes, we have conviction, but curiosity and compassion, and we try to deliver with facts. We love men, just as we love women, so it's really about, How can we make a better society? How can we create a healthier society? How can we make life easier for people? How can we help people to stay true to themselves and fulfill their human potential?

GN: I remember early on with Miss Representation, you got that [criticism] all the time.

JSN: Well, you get snide remarks here and there. We did have someone say the other day, "Why aren't there any male EPs on the film?" And I said, "Oh, so we were gonna wait around to make the film until a male decided to invest $100,000 in the film?"

GN: Someone really said that?

JSN: Yes! A male donor, who had the capacity to invest in the film. But I share that just because really, you can't wait around for people to give you permission to tell a story that's important.
There are some great discussions in the film about the way that race informs varying perceptions of masculinity. That's not usually part of this conversation.
JSN: It's critical because we live in a melting pot and we live in interracial communities. This is just the beginning of us unveiling that conversation, but the intersectionality of gender, race, and class so contributes to who we are and how we think about ourselves and how we perceive others. And I think, as a culture, we have to have those larger conversations and recognize that people come from different places, have different circumstances, have different opportunities in life, have different situations, and we all have to have a lot more empathy as well.

The boys at Fremont High in Oakland, who are struggling because, in the case of a few that we interviewed, fathers are in and out of jail, a father just died, mother's on crack cocaine, they're having very different circumstances and are being fed a slightly more extreme notion of hypermasculinity than, say, this kid over here. However, this kid over here is playing those violent video games and watching hardcore porn, and he's developing his own misogynistic tendencies. So they're all being fed some notion of what it is to be a man, and again, it's a scale, but it's not a healthy scale.

Gavin, how do the messages in this film impact your politics?
GN: I think this is profound. You think of everything we're trying to fix, societal ills, violence against women, all these issues that we're just bringing up, there's one common denominator: men. We tend to focus on what's happening, the "what" and sometimes the "how," but not the "why." So this is the "why" film. We haven't had this conversation, this discussion. And it's profound in every respect.

I'm already trying to incorporate this into everything I'm framing from a public policy perspective, including just last week at Cal Berkeley, talking about athletes and scholarships and academic incentives versus athletic incentives, and again, this whole notion of hypermasculinity. Just using this language, everyone's looking at me like, What the hell is going on? He's spending too much time with his wife, which would be a good thing for all of them, anyway. I don't have a very cogent response to your question except to say that this is deep, and I think it's fabulous we're talking about everything that's going on with women and women's rights, but let's get underneath the why women are making 77%, let's get underneath why women are portrayed in media a certain way, because the number of men on these boards, the number of men behind the cameras, the number of men writing these screenplays, the number of men who are perpetuating these stereotypes -

JSN: Because men hold the purse strings too. And the question you asked earlier, why delve deep into the misogyny and the homophobia, it's because there is so much pain and suffering in the world, and I don't want people to suffer. Miss Rep for me was, I didn't want young girls to suffer the way I did. If I could create a healthier culture for future generations, that's so important to me. We have a son, and I don't want him to suffer and be in pain and feel alienated or isolated or ostracized because he's different, because he just wants to stay true to himself - he doesn't want to conform, he doesn't want to be a misogynist, he's a creative soul, whatever he is. Nor do I want him to be part of the problem, and that peer pressure is really, really toxic.

Do you think we can ever truly get away from this widespread fear that we're becoming too feminine as a culture, that we're not separating the genders enough? It's a very old-fashioned notion that somehow still persists.
JSN: I think every person that's afraid of it is afraid of themselves, and clearly, they're hiding something. This film hopefully can encourage them to kind of go inward and do some inner work. Anyone that's like that, to me, they're obviously wearing a mask and that's gotta be exhausting. Hopefully the film will help them to go inside, take off the mask, look beyond the mask, and do some real soul-searching.

The most beautiful thing for me - because I like emotion and I want to encourage obviously that emotion in films - is so many adult men who are sobbing during the film. And it's because of their relationship with their own father, or it's their relationship with their son, or it's something that happened to them growing up. And so many young men have come up to me after screenings, I would say men in their early twenties, who are like, This film shattered me, this film transformed me, I completely feel like there's this whole new world out there. And that to me is like, OK, we've done our job. We're making an impact and we're helping people. I want to move them, I want to educate them, but I want to help them.
This interview has been edited and condensed.

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The New Documentary That Shows How Our Obsession With Masculinity Is Destroying Young Men

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PARK CITY, Utah - Early on in the documentary The Mask You Live In, which premiered Jan. 23 at the Sundance Film Festival, the idiom "be a man" is identified as one of the most destructive phrases in the English language.

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Gender announcements like the one shown create the idea that girls are dainty and can not play sports such as football.

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How do you ask about transgender issues without coming off like a jerk? And how do you talk about someone who existed one way in the past but is a different gender now so is it "he" or "she" and what's this all about, anyway? The good news is, it's much simpler than you think. Here's a little transgender 101.

[Before we go any further: sex isn't the same as gender. You maybe, probably already knew that. If not, no worries.]

Graphics by Chris Ritter for BuzzFeed

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Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Transgender People But Were Afraid To Ask

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How do you ask about transgender issues without coming off like a jerk? And how do you talk about someone who existed one way in the past but is a different gender now so is it "he" or "she" and what's this all about, anyway? The good news is, it's much simpler than you think.

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Having the idea that men are more important than women is why sexism exists.

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Why is the girl being portrayed as not liking math or computers? The answer to the is because our society associates math and computers as being used by smart people who are assumed to be men. Women are assumed to be the housekeepers who cook and clean, thats all.

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Laci green reflects and reinforces gender being a social construct

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more than 2 sexes? whawhaaaaa let's be facebook friends! http://www.facebook.com/officiallacigreen twitter - http://www.twitter.com/gogreen18 Tumblr for gifs & pics! (SFW) - http://lacigreen.tumblr.com REFERENCED What is intersex? http://www.isna.org/faq/what_is_intersex What it's like to be intersex (by intersex folks!) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAUDKEI4QKI How do hormones work?