Last Friday turned out to be a great evening for those of us who participated in the Masculinity Movies LIVE event. Read more about the fourth MM LIVE evening.

Thanks for coming guys. It is always an honor.

Masculinity Movies LIVE #4 took place on Friday, November 26. The featured movie of the evening was the award-winning documentary “Beyond the Call,” a dramatic documentary about the three crazy gringos Ed Artis, Jim Laws and Walt Ratterman who travel the world to deliver relief aid to war-torn regions so dangerous that no-one else would venture there.

“These are our rules, we are not into God business, we don’t want to change your politics or your religion. It must be high adventure, it  must be humanitarian. And it has to be in an area where few want to go. If it doesn’t hit those criteria, we’re not interested.” – Ed Artis

The discussion revolved for a short while on whether their aid work was motivated by selfish desires for adventure and satisfaction or if there were actual benevolent motives involved. This was somewhat of a meta-perspective on what was an intensely personal story, which is why I directed the conversation into a more intimate and subjective territory after a while. I did that because I find that it is always easy to step out of our personal experience to take the analytical approach, weighing pros and cons. It is perhaps more useful to check in with ourselves about how our own background elicits our responses and judgments in the observance of another’s.

This is always a balance I have to strike when I write about movies – zooming out into the collective, analytical meta-world or staying in an intensely personal space. This evening turned out to be about that and also the importance of speaking truthfully about our own personal experience, no matter if it elicits favourable feedback or not. Our personal truth is too valuable to be held back for fear of negative responses.

I’m grateful to find again and again that the MM LIVE container is strong enough to hold disagreement and provocation in the larger embrace of brotherhood and mutual respect and care. This, it seems to me, is what we need to generate in our relationships with other men in the time ahead.

To the eight of you who came, thank you for making it such an enriching evening. My sense is that next time will be even richer – and with a bigger group too. Interest is growing.

Be well,
Eivind

You need to know about this. This is important.

Ah, I’ve been trying to embed their video in this blog post for the last half hour, but can’t make it work, so screw it. Just go to the Getting Her World blog and watch the movie there.

This feels to me to be “the next step” in course material for men who want to have better relationships with women. It’s profound.

Arjuna Ardagh has posted a video blog that continues the important conversation that has been going on on Masculinity Movies for the last couple of weeks based on my criticism of his manifesto (see below).

He mentions me in it, in a way which doesn’t really represent very well what actually happened. I was never outraged, though Arjuna believes I was – which made him angry (which is pretty obvious if you read his comments on my website). He hates David Deida so he decided to hate me for having translated his book. Only for a short while though. And he apologized for that so all is cool. I criticized the manifesto with the wish to open up a dialogue around how it could be improved. I believe I achieved my goal.

Unfortunately, Arjuna has at this point chosen to keep me out of the debate, choosing not to approve a comment in which I acknowledged his heart for the work and how there are points of improvement, but I’m not too bothered by it. What’s important is that this debate is proving very valuable for me as I’m getting closer and closer to the core of what is subtly wrong about his approach, despite any wonderful healing it is currently providing (which is obviously a good thing). And it involves the importance of understanding the path from boy to man fully.

But I’m lead to believe that perhaps the manifesto for conscious men was never primarily about building men’s self esteem and sense of worth, maybe it was more about healing women. Good if any of that happened, even better if healing could become an inclusive process.

I will return to this when it all gets clearer.

Back in September, I had the privilege to sit down and interview Aboriginal Elder Bob Randall about initiation rites in Aboriginal culture. In this half hour, I was granted a privileged insight into what is essentially a secret tradition of transitioning boys into manhood. Some of what I learned surprised me. Some of what I learned confirmed what I have learned by people such as Robert Bly. Everything was interesting and powerful.

This is the first interview I’ve ever done for Masculinity Movies. I was a tad nervous when I did it and not fully embodied after a hard day at work. That had me avoid finishing it for a while. But when I reviewed it, I realized that there is a lot of good stuff in here. So you will just have to enjoy my boyish charms instead of my fully embodied masculine presence and enjoy Bob Randall’s gift.

Enjoy!

Initiation in Aboriginal culture: An interview with Bob Randall from Eivind Figenschau Skjellum on Vimeo.