{"id":125030,"date":"2014-07-02T09:00:45","date_gmt":"2014-07-02T13:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/getreligion\/?p=125030"},"modified":"2014-08-29T13:31:19","modified_gmt":"2014-08-29T17:31:19","slug":"wpost-writer-wears-too-many-hats-at-mens-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/getreligion\/2014\/07\/wpost-writer-wears-too-many-hats-at-mens-conference\/","title":{"rendered":"WPost writer wears too many hats at men’s conference"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Remember Dr. Seuss\u2019 story, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins?<\/em><\/a> Whenever Bartholomew took off one hat, another appeared beneath it.<\/p>\n

Well, the fictional Cubbins has nothing on the real-life Monica Hesse. She covered the two-day International Conference<\/a> on Men\u2019s Issues near Detroit for the Washington Post<\/em>. And in her writeup, she constantly switched hats: sometimes narrator, sometimes editorial writer, sometimes judge and jury.<\/p>\n

Although this is supposed to be straight coverage \u2014 it\u2019s not marked as commentary or opinion \u2014 attitude glares from the very headline: \u201cMen\u2019s rights activists, gathering to discuss all the ways society has done them wrong.\u201d At least it\u2019s accurate for an article that veers from scornful to sympathetic to clinically detached to argumentative.<\/p>\n

Hesse paints the 200 men at the conference as self-absorbed, playing victim while ignoring actual violence against women. She mentions the current discussion at the White House on sexual assault, plus the shootings in California by the young man who felt spurned by women. Meanwhile, at the men\u2019s conference:<\/p>\n

\u2026 there was a parallel discussion of gender issues: Men, attendees believed, were the ones under threat of attack. This conference was their response, their rallying call to action.<\/p>\n

\u201cMen are second-class citizens,\u201d said Gary Costanza, a pleasant gray-haired man from Long Island. He was particularly interested in divorce issues, saying that custody should always be split and financial child support should not exist. He just wanted the same rights as everyone else.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s all any of them said they wanted. The same rights as the \u201cprivileged women,\u201d as various attendees described the female gender. The entitled, increasingly \u201cnarcissistic women.\u201d That\u2019s all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She flirts with the usual stereotypes of meetings about which liberals disapprove. She describes the early arrivers as \u201ca wispy trail of men \u2014 mostly white, college-through-retirement-age.\u201d Another interviewee is a \u201cpleasant gray-haired man from Long Island.\u201d Interestingly, the two women she quotes are spared any physical descriptions.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Hesse quotes Paul Elam, the head of A Voice for Men \u2014 sponsor for the conference \u2014 as a \u201ctall, polite, drawling figure \u2014 he\u2019s from Houston.\u201d Then she reports on his violent, woman-bashing rhetoric that caught the attention of the Southern Poverty Law Center two years ago, though he apparently doesn\u2019t repeat any of it at the conference.<\/p>\n

Some of her coverage is almost sympathetic, though she doesn\u2019t withhold judgment:<\/p>\n

They\u2019re not unsympathetic issues. In fact, when men are talking about wanting shared custody of their children, when they are talking about wanting to reshape the culture to make it acceptable for men to be primary caregivers instead of just primary breadwinners, when they want to raise awareness about the military industrial complex that sends mostly boys to die in wars \u2014 then, they don\u2019t sound like angry white misogynists. They sound like they could be feminists.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a kernel of something in this tiny, peripheral movement that might speak to larger questions: regarding our expectations of modern masculinity, regarding how to truly measure equality. But the kernel gets rhetorically buried in paranoia and anger, which, at this conference, created a wounded echo chamber of nebulous statistics.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But for a piece of 2,100+ words, the article is surprisingly short on named sources. Besides Elam,\u00a0they include a NOW expatriate, a psychologist and a columnist \u2014 a conservative<\/em> columnist, Hesse feels the need to specify \u2014 for the National Post<\/em> in Canada.<\/p>\n

Hesse also picks out two conferees: a Long Islander who complains about custody and child support, and a real estate broker from Toronto who says his ex turned their children against him. She also quotes a few people without giving names.<\/p>\n

That leaves the last third of her article without a named source. Hesse wants space to argue with the conferees, using stuff she\u2019s dug up:<\/p>\n

Presenters used historical laws as \u201cproof\u201d that women have always had special privileges \u2014 access to their husband\u2019s bank accounts, for example \u2014 but didn\u2019t mention that during the aforementioned time period, women didn\u2019t legally have the right to vote.<\/p>\n

Discussion centered on the fact that men are financially destroyed by divorce while their exes live lives of luxury, but never pointed out that according to a recent census population report, the poverty rate of custodial mothers is 31.8 percent, compared with 16.2 percent of custodial fathers.<\/p>\n

Participants lambasted the media for deliberately ignoring the high percentage of male rape victims \u2014 38 percent \u2014 and also lambasted Slate journalist Hanna Rosin for writing a \u201cmisandric\u201d book about the \u201cend of men\u201d \u2014 but didn\u2019t note that Rosin recently wrote a lengthy article about the high percentage of male rape victims.<\/p>\n

One presenter, a military veteran speaking on the treatment of veterans returning from war, put up a PowerPoint slide alleging that 70 percent of men returning from war get divorced, and 90 percent do so within five years. When asked about the source of this statistic, he said, \u201cThat particular statistic is from my personal observations. I\u2019m just speaking here as a dude.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

OK, she got \u2019em on the stats, except for the first one: Women, of course, for decades have had the vote and<\/em> access to their husbands\u2019 bank accounts. But shouldn\u2019t all that have been put in a sidebar? Or should the whole story have been rebranded \u201ccommentary\u201d? Is \u201cnews\u201d coverage the correct forum to trade a press badge for a judge\u2019s gavel?<\/p>\n

And if Hesse wants to raise past issues about Paul Elam, it\u2019s fair to ask about hers as well. In 2009, some Post<\/em> readers accused her of a \u201chomophobic agenda\u201d for her profile of an opponent of same-sex marriage. In reply, Hesse offered a novel defense:<\/a> that she herself was married with a woman for two years, before choosing her current male partner.<\/p>\n

So she beat that rap, as they say in old crime movies. Then she covers 2,000 men who complain of discrimination and second-class citizenship. Could she just possibly be harboring attitudes that affect her story \u2014 a story with liberal dashes of criticism?<\/p>\n

Oh, maybe, maybe not. It\u2019s a judgment call. Just like the judgment she handed down on the conference.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Remember Dr. Seuss\u2019 story, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins? Whenever Bartholomew took off one hat, another appeared beneath it. Well, the fictional Cubbins has nothing on the real-life Monica Hesse. She covered the two-day International Conference on Men\u2019s Issues near Detroit for the Washington Post. And in her writeup, she constantly switched hats: sometimes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1568,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,58,12,4,1],"tags":[215],"class_list":["post-125030","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism","category-marriage-family","category-religion","category-social-issues","category-uncategorized","tag-washington-post"],"yoast_head":"\nWPost writer wears too many hats at men's conference<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Remember Dr. Seuss' story, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins? Whenever Bartholomew took off one hat, another appeared beneath it. 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