Inner Work and Gender
Justice
~An Interview with Aaron Kipnis and Elizabeth Herron
by Bert H. Hoff
Reprinted with kind permission from
MenWeb
Aaron Kipnis,
author of Knights Without Armor and one of the most respected
voices in Men’s Work, has teamed up with his partner, Elizabeth
Herron, to write Gender War, Gender Peace (republished as
What Women and Men Really Want: Creating Deeper Understanding and Love
in Our Relationships).
Bert and Bernetta
Hoff took the opportunity to spend a morning with them while they were
in Seattle doing TV and radio appearances about their book.
Bert: I
described your book Knights Without Armor as one of the best and most
comprehensive books on Men’s Work. There, a group of men in recovery
put down their poker cards and started talking about, then feeling,
men’s issues.
Now you and
Elizabeth have teamed up with Gender War, Gender Peace,
describing a week-long retreat into the Sierra wilderness with a group
of men and women. How did the one evolve into the other?
Elizabeth:
We actually started thinking about this book while Aaron was working
on Knights, really, from the time we started being in a
relationship. We had ideas for this work and actually started holding
workshops and councils together while Aaron was writing that book.
Aaron:
Often I felt I wanted to focus my energy just on men because a lot has
been said about women. For every title dealing with men’s issues there
are about 50 titles that deal with women’s issues. But Elizabeth and I
had been having this dialog for a while, even while I was writing
Knights.
This book is
like Knights Without Armor meets Women Who Run with the Wolves. At
some point, as men, we must come back into the world which is
co-inhabited by women. It’s not sufficient for the men’s movement, for
us just to meet alone in our own council. Any more so than it is for
women, any more, to just meet alone.
Ultimately,
without giving up any of the gains, psychological, emotional and
spiritual, that we get from the solidarity of being with our same-sex
group, we also need to forge better relationships so we can have
better families, communities, romantic relationships, and work
relationships with the other sex.
Elizabeth and I
saw there was a pressing need, not just for a new book, but for some
people out there planting the stake and saying, "Let’s have peace
talks." Bringing groups of men together, into open dialog with each
other. It’s a very different thing than what's been happening for the
most part.
So far it’s been
about men and women standing at opposite sides of the gender gap and
shooting missiles at each other. There are certainly gains from
warfare. Certain issues get communicated. Territory gets claimed. But
war is not the only solution to our problems. We’re trying to move
more into a language of diplomacy between women and men, so we can
move to a new stage, what we’re beginning to call "gender justice."
This is a very different idea than "men’s rights" or "women’s rights."
Bernetta: What I was curious about, after reading your book,
was what impact the week-long wilderness retreat you described had on
the participants
Elizabeth: Everybody, to differing degrees, was able to use
the material when they went back into their lives. They got the
opportunity because they had the experience, the felt sense, of what
it feels like to sit together with the other sex, feel safe, and feel
they can speak the truth.
This is something that needs to be brought into power in our
culture, in our personal relationships, at work, or wherever. They all
walked away with a rekindled sense of hope. Now they’re all struggling
over how to keep this sense from going away.
Inner Work and Gender Justice ~ Page 2
Aaron: We found that the issues that the characters in the book faced,
in their small group, are the same issues that we hear over and over
again in our larger groups. We’re meeting with 200, or later this
month, a thousand women and men at a marriage and therapists
association conference. We’re working with government agencies and big
businesses, applying the same principles that we did for the gender
council in the woods.
We find that the techniques for gender diplomacy and gender
reconciliation, and the kinds of stories and issues that came up in
small groups, are the same issues that we’re grappling with in society
as a whole. The lasting impacts we hear about from the participants we
wrote about in the book, are the same impacts that we hear from people
who come to a one-day training.
We deal with a large number of counselors and human resource
specialists. They say, "We’ve been through ten or twelve years of
university training, and have worked in our field for ten or 25 years,
but this is the first time we have ever sat down in a room, women and
men, faced one another, talked about our real issues, and talked the
truth."
That’s amazing to us. It’s such a simple thing, just to get together
and talk.
Bernetta: Everything gets so confused between women and men.
Elizabeth: Mostly what we hear first is anger. It’s the quickest
reaction to come up, when women and men get together. It explodes.
There’s a lot of hurt, and continued wounding. The skill of learning
how to be vulnerable with each other seems to be one of the most
significant things that we’ve discovered through this work. If we
bring together people who are angry with each other, and get them to
talk about how they’ve been hurt, how difficult it is to be a man or a
woman in this culture, and have the other sex just listen to that, all
of a sudden a lot of the anger, the walls, the issues, begin to melt.
Women begin to see how men are hurt.
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