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COMMENTARY... by Warren Farrell 
The Divorced Dad Volcano...
With Columbine and Virginia Tech, we asked “Why?” implying a collective responsibility for the male-style suicides shouting to be heard as massacres. Perhaps, if we ask “Why?” of Alec Baldwin with equal openness, we can understand the divorced dad volcano and defuse potential suicide-homicides that are not uncommon among divorced dads.

When Alec Baldwin feels powerless to prevent his own child from being turned against her own father, he can be “strong” and repress his feelings. But men’s weakness is their façade of strength. And the pressure will build. Anger is the mask of vulnerability. Hence everyone who loves is vulnerable to “losing it.”

Tens of thousands of divorced dads identify with Baldwin’s powerlessness. Many moms want equally-involved dads after divorce, but when a mom doesn’t, most dads find the system’s bias against dads as difficult to remove as syrup is from a pancake.

The good news is that any woman can learn to out-earn men should she be willing to make more of the twenty-five trade-offs than the average man makes.
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More articles by Warren Farrell on the "Pay Gap."
1.  How I began the Discovery that Men Earn Less than Women for the Same Work
2.  Farrell’s Research Challenges Labor Day Myth: “Men Paid More for Same Work”
3. WHY MEN EARN MORE: A Personal Introduction
Warren Farrell video clip from The Third Men's Equality Congress

Article... By Glenn Sacks © 2007
When Dad Does It, He's a Deadbeat and a Deserter, When Mom Does It, She's a Hero
The Orlando Sentinel article below sings the praises of a mother who abandoned her baby at a fire station. I don't exactly fault the mother--she's young and probably distraught and confused--but I think the labels of "bravery" and "courageous" are a little absurd. If it were a father who had abandoned a baby at a fire station, even a young father, the words for him wouldn't be nearly as kind.

I've often wondered why women who give their children up for adoption are often considered heroic ("they gave the child life and then allowed it to go to a good home"), but fathers who feel unequipped to take care of their children are vilified as "deadbeats" and "deserters." I discussed this double standard some in my co-authored column Respect a Man's Choice, Too (8/1/06), written for the left-wing website AlterNet.
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Glenn Sacks video clip from The Third Men's Equality Congress

Article...By Jed Diamond
Sex in the Sixties vs. Sex in the 60s
Born in 1943, I moved into my sexually active years as a teen in late 50s and early 60s. What boys learned was that girls weren’t much interested in sex. Since boys were very interested, it was our job to break down her resistance and get her to go along with our desires. Sex was mostly about "scoring." If you were very lucky to find a girl you could coax, you did everything you could to get to "first base." If successful, you tried to steal second. After that you were in "no man’s land." You weren’t quite sure what you were supposed to do next. But you knew it was incumbent on you to try and make it all the way.

There seemed to be an agreement between the boys and the girls. It was the boy’s job to try and score. It was the girl’s job to continually remove your hands and keep her virtue intact. Pleasure and joy never seemed to be part of the package.

Most of my young sexuality wasn’t spent with girls at all, but with airbrushed images from magazines and imagined scenes from forbidden books like Peyton Place. In my fantasies these dream lovers would do all the things that real girls, I had come to believe, didn’t want to do. Masturbation became a much more consistent means for expressing my young sexuality.
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COYOTE... monthly column by Dick Prosapio
Old vs. Current Realities...
I've been avoiding the obvious topics, top among them the tar baby we're entangled with in Iraq because there are so many really good, well informed and intelligent people out there doing what must be done to cover all of that I have nothing to add. Besides I'm so tired of bitching about it, about oil, the health care system and factory farms and water and kids that I want to take a vacation to Scandinavia. And I don't even know anybody there.

Then there's our own "tar baby" our eighteen year old going on four who is drinking herself into oblivion almost every night. Many of us did that I know, but she is also driving and she is not a conscious drunk. I know this first hand as a result of a version of "the phone call" that came in at 6:30 a few mornings ago. I've heard the opener a few times over the years. I goes like this, "Mr. Prosapio, we have your daughter here" and it goes on from there. So far it hasn't been the "and she's been badly injured in an accident." Or worse.

This one was the "Please come down and get her" call. We live in the mountains; she was in town of course so it was forty minutes to the scene of the crime. She had been walking up and down the street in a residential neighborhood, yelling obscenities at the top of her lungs at five in the AM. Understandably perturbed, the neighbors called the cops and when they arrived on the scene they found our little darling passed out inside her locked car. They had to break the back window out to get to her to make sure she wasn't dead.
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ARTICLE... by Hans Bader
Gender Bias in the Courts — and in The Washington Post...
For a glaring example of gender bias in the courts (and the media), you need look no further than a recent Washington Post story  by Tamara Jones, in which she commiserates with convicted felon Teressa Turner-Schaefer, who spent a mere 11 months in jail for killing her husband after an argument.

Now Turner-Schaefer gets to collect $400,000 in life insurance for killing her husband. In a plea bargain, she pleaded guilty to the crime of involuntary manslaughter, which, amazingly enough, doesn’t bar you from collecting life insurance taken out on the person you killed.

It’s not surprising that the prosecutors let her plead guilty to involuntary manslaughter, even if they thought she deliberately murdered her husband. Prosecutions of wives for killing their husbands are among the most difficult for prosecutors to bring, since judges and juries invariably assume that the victim must have done something to deserve it, even if the victim was blameless.
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JEFF'S LIFE: Raising an Autistic Child... monthly column by Jeff Stimpson
Didn't Hurt a Bit...
Alex's previous dental appointments included the doctor wrapping him in a papoose (a kind of zipped-up sleeping bag for autistic kids who really can't take the exam), and, needless to say, screaming. "Well," said that dentist, a sweet guy named Lee, "at least when he screams it's easy to look in his mouth." I liked Dr. Lee. He was the one who pointed out that we need to switch toothpastes often because bacteria builds up immunity to one brand. I did not know that.

There's a hitch at the door for this day's appointment, which is with Dr. Lee's replacement who is also named Dr. Lee. "Everyone's gone. She's not there anymore," the receptionist tells Jill at 10 to five. Our appointment was for 4:30. Would the new Dr. Lee like to know how many doctors have keep me waiting a whole lot more than 20 minutes throughout Alex's lifetime?

"She said she called you," the receptionist insists.

"She never did!" Jill replies.

We've brought Alex here today, Ned in tow, because he's overdue for a checkup, and because he's been grinding his teeth. Jill thinks Alex may be grinding his permanent molars down to the gums. Jill thinks Alex may need caps. In those earlier appointments of the papoose and the screaming, Alex was just getting his teeth looked at. What's he going to do when they try to wriggle caps onto his pulverized back molors? I should say here that Alex has been a pretty cooperative tooth brusher since he saw that dental segment of Elmo's; Elmo is the only person Alex really listens to.
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DADS, DON'T FIX YOUR KIDS... monthly column by Mark Brandenburg, M.A
What is Your Importance as a Father?...
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a four-term U.S. Senator, passed away a few years ago. But his view on the necessity of fathers lives on. He said: “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century Eastern seaboard to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history: a community that allows a large number of young men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future - that community asks for and gets chaos.”

In fact, the U.S. Census Bureau shows the importance of fathers in its statistics on children who grow up in homes without a father.
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LATEST REVIEWS

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.