‘One day, you could love me to death’
Men’s conference urges fundamental change in relationships with women as a result of #MeToo movement
A group of 100 men sat silently Saturday at the Ray-Cam Community Centre in east Vancouver, heads tilted and arms crossed, dwelling on the role they play in violence against women.
Inside Ray-Cam’s gymnasium, pacing back and forth beneath a basketball net, Joseph Fossella told them about his own violent past, which time and time again threatened to destroy his marriage.
During his first attempt on his wife’s life, he couldn’t find the bullets for his gun. After the second, when he tried to strangle her in her sleep, she looked up at him in terror.
Realizing what he’d just done, Fossella apologized, just as he’d done many times before. But the look on her face told Fossella, co-founder of the Warriors Against Violence Society, that this time she didn’t believe him, he told the men, who had come to discuss ways men can prevent violence against women at #HowIWillChange: A Conference for Men to Deal With Our Sh!t.
“Yes, Joe, I know you love me,” Fossella’s wife told him. “But one day, you could love me to death.”
As the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements bring forth a wave of public allegations of past sexual harassment and abuses by men against women — most recently against members of the Vancouver rock group Hedley — men like those at Ray-Cam on Saturday are grappling with how to hold other men accountable and understand their own complicity.
Fossella said it was decades into his marriage before he understood the effects of witnessing the violence of his ancestors — survivors of residential schools and the ‘60s scoop — as well as his own rape by a man when he was four years old.
It wasn’t until he finally took accountability by joining a program called Change of Seasons that he ended the cycle of abuse, sharing his life story with other men and changing his own behaviour for good.
“We need to pull those stories out,” he said, “and look at them, talk about them, so we can connect with those feelings and emotions once again.”
Conference organizer Irwin Oostindie, of Ray-Cam’s Men’s Accountability Project, said the event came in response to the movements and the pressing need for men to make change for the sake of their communities, relationships and families.
“A lot of men are trying to figure out, ‘Where to now?,’ Oostindie said. “Instead of leaning on the women in their lives for answers, men need to get habituated, get some practice talking to other guys, and stop using the labour of women to unlearn their own sexism or the patriarchy.”
Chris Huffine, executive director of Allies In Change, was keynote speaker and identified factors linked to men’s violence such as toxic masculinity, pro-abuse belief systems, internal distress, sexism and privilege.
Huffine, a psychologist from Portland, Oregon, said rigidity in gender roles — telling someone to “act like a man” or “act like a lady” — and the expectation that men be tough and guarded, while women be weak and emotional, is at the root of the problem.
He encouraged abandoning those roles in favour of adopting traits traditionally associated with the opposite gender.
For men, he said, that means those which allow them to embrace their own emotions.
This work needs to be done on a global level so that it combats patriarchy, sexism and other systems of oppression, and on a smaller scale between men, Huffine said. On the individual level, men who identify another man engaging in harassing or abusive behaviour need to intervene in a supportive way, Huffine said.
“It’s not enough to say, ‘Hey, cut that out or we’ll keep an eye on you,’ ” he said. “You’ve really got to instil change.”
“A lot of men are trying to figure out, ‘Where to now?’” — IRWIN OOSTINDIE RAY-CAM MEN’S ACCOUNTABILITY PROJECT