Becoming Men is the story of 32 boys from Alexandra, one of Johannesburg's largest townships, over a period of twelve seminal years in which they negotiate manhood and masculinity. Psychologist and academic Malose Langa documents in close detail what it means to be a young black man in contemporary South Africa.

The boys discuss a range of topics including the impact of absent fathers, relationships with mothers, siblings and girls, school violence, academic performance, homophobia, gangsterism, unemployment and, in one case, prison life. Deep ambivalence, self-doubt and hesitation emerge in their approach to alternative masculinities premised on non-violent, non-sexist and non-risk-taking behaviour. Many of the boys appear simultaneously to comply with and oppose the prevalent norms, thereby exposing the difficulties of negotiating the multiple voices of masculinity.

Providing a rich interpretation of how emotional processes affect black adolescent males, Langa suggests interventions and services to support and assist them, especially in reducing high-risk behaviours generally associated with hegemonic masculinity. This is essential reading for students, researchers and scholars of gender studies who wish to understand manhood and masculinity in South Africa. Psychologists, youth workers, lay counsellors and teachers who work with adolescent boys will also find it invaluable.

Two long-time friends share an intimate and urgent conversation about life, music and their enduring love of America, with all its challenges and contradictions, in this stunningly-produced expansion of their ground-breaking Higher Ground podcast, featuring more than 350 photographs, exclusive bonus content, and never-before-seen archival material.

Renegades: Born in the USA is a candid, revealing, and entertaining dialogue between President Barack Obama and legendary musician Bruce Springsteen that explores everything from their origin stories and career-defining moments to their country's polarized politics and the growing distance between the American Dream and the American reality. Filled with full-colour photographs and rare archival material, it is a compelling and beautifully illustrated portrait of two outsiders - one Black and one white - looking for a way to connect their unconventional searches for meaning, identity, and community with the American story itself.

It includes:

• Original introductions by President Obama and Bruce Springsteen
• Exclusive new material from the Renegades podcast recording sessions
• Obama's never-before-seen annotated speeches, including his "Remarks at the 50th Anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery Marches
• Springsteen's handwritten lyrics for songs spanning his 50-year-long career
• Rare and exclusive photographs from the authors' personal archives
• Historical photographs and documents that provide rich visual context for their conversation.

Obama and Springsteen discuss marriage and fatherhood, race and masculinity, the lure of the open road and the call back to home. They also compare notes on their favourite protest songs, the most inspiring American heroes of all time, and more. Along the way, they reveal their passion for - and the occasional toll of - telling a bigger, truer story about America throughout their careers, and explore how their fractured country might begin to find its way back toward unity.

In a world where misinformation distorts the essence of manhood and societal expectations push men into emotional incarceration, bestselling author and founder of the Cave of Adullam, Jason Wilson, offers a path to freedom.

The Man the Moment Demands will empower you to become the right man in every moment by embodying the ten characteristics of the comprehensive man: the Fighter, the Provider, the Leader, the Lover, the Nurturer, the Gentleman, the Friend, the Husband, the Father, and the Son. With The Man the Moment Demands you'll learn how to:

• unpack the impact of your past and unlock the power to shape your future;
• embrace transparency and express the full spectrum of your emotions while maintaining self-control;
• evolve beyond the “alpha male” myth through example, not intimidation; and
• answer the question “Who are you?” to strip away the facade and live authentically.

This is not just a transformative book; it's a blueprint. A rite of passage for those ready to rise and rediscover what it truly means to be a man—authentically human. One that will empower you to be the man the moments demands.

A fusion of conversations, observations, and personal reflections on his own experiences, work with men, and scholarship, Why Men Hurt Women and Other Reflections on Love, Violence and Masculinity is Kopano Ratele’s meditation on love, violence and masculinity.

This book seeks to imagine the possibility of a more loving masculinity in a society where structural violence, failures of government and economic inequality underpin much of the violent behaviour that men display. Enriched with personal reflections on his own experiences as a partner, father, psychologist and researcher in the field of men and masculinities, Why Men Hurt Women and Other Reflections on Love, Violence and Masculinity is Kopano Ratele’s meditation on love and violence, and the way these forces shape the emotional lives of boys and men.

Blending academic substance and rigour in a readable narrative style, Ratele illuminates the complex nuances of gender, intimacy and power in the context of the human need for love and care. While unsparing in its analysis of men’s inner lives, Ratele lays out a path for addressing the hunger for love in boys and men. He argues that just as the beliefs and practices relating to gender, sexuality and the nature of love are constantly being challenged and revised, so our ideas about masculinity, and men’s and boys’ capacity to show genuine loving care for each other and for women, can evolve.

Men who act abusively have their own story to tell, a journey that often begins in childhood, ripens in their teenage years, and takes them down paths they were hoping to never travel. Men Who Batter recounts the journey from the point of view of the men themselves. The men's accounts of their lives are told within a broader framework of the agency where they have attended groups, and the regional coordinated community response to domestic violence, which includes the criminal justice workers (e.g., probation, parole, judges), and those who staff shelters and work in advocacy. Based on interview data with this wide array of professionals, we are able to examine how one community, in one western state, responds to men who batter. Interwoven with this rich and colorful portrayal of the journey of abusive men, we bring twenty years of fieldwork with survivors and those who walk alongside them as they seek safety, healing and wholeness for themselves and their children. Women who have been victimized by the men they love often hold out hope that, if only their abusers could be held accountable and receive intervention, the violence will stop and their own lives will improve dramatically as a result. While the main purpose of Men Who Batter is to highlight the stories of men, told from their personal point of view, it is countered by reality checks from their own case files and those professionals who have worked with them. And finally, interspersed within its pages is another theme: finding religious faith or spiritual activity in unlikely places.

In Spectacular Men, Sarah E. Chinn investigates how working class white men looked to the early American theatre for examples of ideal manhood. Theatre-going was the primary source of entertainment for working people of the early Republic and the Jacksonian period, and plays implicitly and explicitly addressed the risks and rewards of citizenship. Ranging from representations of the heroes of the American Revolution to images of doomed Indians to plays about ancient Rome, Chinn unearths dozens of plays rarely read by critics. Spectacular Men places the theatre at the center of the self-creation of working white men, as voters, as workers, and as Americans.

What does it mean for men to join with women as allies in preventing sexual assault and domestic violence? Based on life history interviews with men and women anti-violence activists aged 22 to 70, Some Men explores the strains and tensions of men's work as feminist allies. When feminist women began to mobilize against rape and domestic violence, setting up shelters and rape crisis centers, a few men asked what they could do to help. They were directed "upstream," and told to "talk to the men" with the goal of preventing future acts of violence. This is a book about men who took this charge seriously, committing themselves to working with boys and men to stop violence, and to change the definition of what it means to be a man. The book examines the experiences of three generational cohorts: a movement cohort of men who engaged with anti-violence work in the 1970s and early 1980s, during the height of the feminist anti-violence mobilizations; a bridge cohort who engaged with anti-violence work from the mid-1980s into the 1990s, as feminism receded as a mass movement and activists built sustainable organizations; a professional cohort who engaged from the mid-1990s to the present, as anti-violence work has become embedded in community and campus organizations, non-profits, and the state. Across these different time periods, stories from life history interviews illuminate men's varying paths-including men of different ethnic and class backgrounds-into anti-violence work. Some Men explores the promise of men's violence prevention work with boys and men in schools, college sports, fraternities, and the U.S. military. It illuminates the strains and tensions of such work-including the reproduction of male privilege in feminist spheres-and explores how men and women navigate these tensions.

How did gender shape the expanding Jesuit enterprise in the early modern world? What did it take to become a missionary man? And how did missionary masculinity align itself with the European colonial project? This book highlights the central importance of male affective ties and masculine mimesis in the formation of the Jesuit missions, as well as the significance of patriarchal dynamics. Focusing on previously neglected German actors, Strasser shows how stories of exemplary male behavior circulated across national boundaries, directing the hearts and feet of men throughout Europe toward Jesuit missions in faraway lands. The sixteenth-century Iberian exemplars of Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier, disseminated in print and visual media, inspired late-seventeenth-century Jesuits from German-speaking lands to bring Catholicism and European gender norms to the Spanish-controlled Pacific. The age of global missions hinged on the reproduction of missionary manhood in print and real life.

Gary Miller shares more heralded articles that have appeared in newspapers and magazines throughout the nation in this fourth volume of Outdoor Truths. Each entry is brief and stands alone from the other articles. It is the perfect deer-stand or coffee table book that can be enjoyed at different times. While some people may think of these articles as devotionals for hunters and fishers, the author has never viewed them that way. The reason is because he's never envisioned his audience as only faithful Christians but instead as people who may be unsure about Christianity or the church. The only thing he's always been sure about his readers is that by and large, hunters and fishers are not atheists. They see the handiwork of someone bigger whenever they spend time in the woods or on the water. These articles will help you navigate what you already know. If you love the outdoors, aren't sure about faith, but believe in God-or if you're a dedicated Christian-then you'll treasure these writings.

Much has been made of the complex social arrangements that girls and women navigate, but little scholarly or popular attention has focused on what friendship means to men. Drawing on in-depth interviews with nearly 400 men, therapist and researcher Geoffrey L. Greif takes readers on a guided tour of male friendships, explaining what makes them work, why they are vital to the health of individuals and communities, and how to build the kinds of friendships that can lead to longer and happier lives. Another 120 conversations with women help map the differences in what men and women seek from friendships and what, if anything, men can learn from women's relationships. The guiding feature of the book is Greif's typology of male friendships: he dispels the myth that men don't have friends, showing that men have must, trust, just,and rust friends. A must friend is the best friend a man absolutely must call with earthshaking news. A trust friend is liked and trusted but not necessarily held as close as a must friend. Just friends are casual acquaintances, while rust friends have a long history together and can drift in and out of each other's lives, essentially picking up where they last left off. Understanding the role each of these types of friends play across men's lives reveals fascinating developmental patterns, such as how men cope with stress and conflict, how they seek and offer help, how notions of masculinity shape their relationships (platonic and romantic), and how their friends can keep them active and happy. Through the lively words of men themselves, and detailed profiles of men from their twenties to their nineties, readers may be surprised to find what friendships offer men-as well as their families and communities-and are sure to learn what makes their own relationships tick.

That men don't dance is a common stereotype. As one man tried to explain, "Music is something that goes on inside my head, and is sort of divorced from, to a large extent, the rest of my body." How did this man's head become divorced from his body? While it may seem natural and obvious that most white men don't dance, it is actually a recent phenomenon tied to the changing norms of gender, race, class, and sexuality. Combining archival sources, interviews, and participant observation, Sorry I Don't Dance analyzes how, within the United States, recreational dance became associated with women rather than men, youths rather than adults, and ethnic minorities rather than whites. At the beginning of the twentieth century and World War II, lots of ordinary men danced. In fact, during the first two decades of the twentieth century dance was so enormously popular that journalists reported that young people had gone "dance mad" and reformers campaigned against its moral dangers. During World War II dance was an activity associated with wholesome masculinity, and the USO organized dances and supplied dance partners to servicemen. Later, men in the Swing Era danced, but many of their sons and grandsons do not. Turning her attention to these contemporary wallflowers, Maxine Craig talks to men about how they learn to dance or avoid learning to dance within a culture that celebrates masculinity as white and physically constrained and associates both femininity and ethnically-marked men with sensuality and physical expressivity. In this way, race and gender get into bodies and become the visible, common sense proof of racial and gender difference.

Research has traditionally shown high schools to be hostile environments for LGBT youth. Boys have used homophobia to prove their masculinity and distance themselves from homosexuality. Despite these findings over the last three decades, The Declining Significance of Homophobia tells a different story. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews of young men in three British high schools, Dr. Mark McCormack shows how heterosexual male students are inclusive of their gay peers and proud of their pro-gay attitudes. He finds that being gay does not negatively affect a boy's popularity, but being homophobic does. Yet this accessible book goes beyond documenting this important shift in attitudes towards homosexuality: McCormack examines how decreased homophobia results in the expansion of gendered behaviors available to young men. In the schools he examines, boys are able to develop meaningful and loving friendships across many social groups. They replace toughness and aggression with emotional intimacy and displays of affection for their male friends.Free from the constant threat of social marginalization, boys are able to speak about once feminized activities without censure. The Declining Significance of Homophobia is essential reading for all those interested in masculinities, education, and the decline of homophobia.

Each day’s reading includes teaching and encouragement, a Scripture reading from both the Old and New Testaments, and a thought for the day to draw you closer to God the Father and His purposes for you. Explore the nature and role of men as God intended, addressing such issues as: What does the Bible really teach about men and women? What does it mean to be male? What are the purpose and design of the man? How is a man uniquely different from a woman? What is a man’s role as a husband and father? What are a man’s sexual needs? How are men and women meant to relate to one another? How can a man build a better life for himself, his family, and the world?

Through this devotional, you can strengthen your relationship with your heavenly Father as you discover how to fulfill your destiny and potential as an integral part of His eternal purposes.

Biographies of America's greatest humorist abound, but none have charted the overall influence of the key male friendships that profoundly informed his life and work. Combining biography, literary history, and gender studies, Mark Twain and Male Friendship presents a welcome new perspective as it examines three vastly different friendships and the stamp they left on Samuel Clemens's life.
With accessible prose informed by impressive research, the study provides an illuminating history of the friendships it explores, and the personal and cultural dynamic of the relationships. In the case of Twain and his pastor, Joseph Twichell, emphasis is put on the latter's role as mentor and spiritual advisor and on Twain's own waning sense of religious belonging. Messent then shifts gears to consider Twain's friendship with fellow author and collaborator William Dean Howells. Fascinating in its own right, this relationship also serves as a prism through which to view the literary marketplace of nineteenth-century America. A third, seemingly unlikely friendship between Twain and Standard Oil executive H.H. Rogers focuses on Twain's attitude toward business and shows how Rogers and his wife served as a surrogate family for the novelist after the death of his own wife.
As he charts these relationships, Messent uses existing work on male friendship, gender roles, and cultural change as a framework in which to situate altered conceptions of masculinity and of men's roles, not just in marriage but in the larger social networks of their time. In sum, Mark Twain andMale Friendship is not only a valuable new resource on the great novelist but also a lively cultural history of male friendship in nineteenth-century America.

Boys are 50% more likely than girls to fail at all three key school subjects: maths, reading and science In the US, the wages of most men are lower today than they were in 1979, while women's wages have risen across the board In the UK, suicide is the biggest killer of men under the age of 45 Boys are falling behind at school and college because the educational system is structed in ways that put them at a disadvantage. Men are struggling in the labour market because of an economic shift away from traditionally male jobs. And fathers are dislocated because the cultural role of family provider has been hollowed out. The male malaise is not the result of a mass psychological breakdown, but of deep structural challenges. Structural challenges require structural solutions, and this is what Richard V. Reeves proposes in Of Boys and Men - starting boys at school a year later than girls; getting more men into caring professions; rethinking the role of fatherhood outside of a nuclear family context. Feminism has done a huge amount of good in the world. We now need its corollary - a positive vision of masculinity that is compatible with gender equality.

A nonfiction investigation into masculinity, For The Love of Men provides actionable steps for how to be a man in the modern world, while also exploring how being a man in the world has evolved.

In 2019, traditional masculinity is both rewarded and sanctioned. Men grow up being told that boys don’t cry and dolls are for girls (a newer phenomenon than you might realize―gendered toys came back in vogue as recently as the 80s). They learn they must hide their feelings and anxieties, that their masculinity must constantly be proven. They must be the breadwinners, they must be the romantic pursuers. This hasn’t been good for the culture at large: 99% of school shooters are male; men in fraternities are 300% (!) more likely to commit rape; a woman serving in uniform has a higher likelihood of being assaulted by a fellow soldier than to be killed by enemy fire.

In For the Love of Men, Liz offers a smart, insightful, and deeply-researched guide for what we're all going to do about toxic masculinity. For both women looking to guide the men in their lives and men who want to do better and just don’t know how, For the Love of Men will lead the conversation on men's issues in a society where so much is changing, but gender roles have remained strangely stagnant.

What are we going to do about men? Liz Plank has the answer. And it has the possibility to change the world for men and women alike.