By Beyoncé Knowles-Carter
We need to stop buying into the myth about gender equality. It isn’t a reality yet. Today, women make up half of the U.S. workforce, but the average working woman earns only 77 percent of what the average working man makes. But unless women and men both say this is unacceptable, things will not change.  → Read More

In the MMA community Frank Shamrock isn’t just considered a former champion; he’s considered a pioneer. Many (self included) believe him to be the first prototype for what a complete mixed martial artist should be. Needless to say, I was inspired by him long before I knew about his story of struggle, of bouncing in and out of juvenile detention centers, of not feeling loved or wanted in this world even when he was a young man.  → Read More

Men’s roles are changing almost faster than we can keep up with the change. Here are ten reasons that make the conversation about men so incredibly important.  → Read More

I want my boys to be compassionate towards those around them – those in their family, those in their class or in their work place, and also those in the community that they do not know personally. Here are some simple ways I am working to develop compassion in my young sons on an everyday basis.  → Read More

After witnessing men in my graduate Women’s Studies classes drop out like an epidemic, I was curious how to make the program more inclusive.  → Read More

Not too long ago, a group of activists at my university were organizing an annual event called “Take Back the Night“, which is an internationally held march and rally intended as a protest and direct action against rape,rape culture and other forms of sexual violence. As the organizers wrote, “Take Back the Night” will be an opportunity “to heal, resist, and speak out and is for those of you who are constantly silenced and harmed at this school… to reclaim voice in spaces that keep trying to suppress it, spaces keeping you unsafe”. I was following a Facebook feed that the organizers had started and was soon frustrated by how dark the comments turned. The context of the recent well-publicised attacks on women added fuel to the fire. What struck me as particularly frustrating were the responses by mostly men who were arguing, reasoning, shaming, shouting, pleading and blindly clawing their way out of any sense of shared responsibility for what was happening on campus.  → Read More

I like numbers. I really do. But there’s one particular number that I’ve got a real problem with. It’s the U.S. Census estimate on the current number of stay-at-home fathers, or SAHDs as they are occasionally called. I came across the estimate last week, while reading a news story about a particular stay-at-home dad. That the story had “Mr. Mom” in the headline was bad enough, but the real offense here was the article’s final line.  → Read More

In my search for accurate descriptors of my role in my family’s life, I have settled on this one (for now): primary parental unit. It is clear and descriptive. I am a father, a parent, but without the traditional absentee breadwinner connotation that ‘father’ holds. While my wife backs me up as a co-parent, I am the primary lead on most of the home-making and child-rearing stuff.  → Read More

Silence sets in. The sounds of little voices and happy giggles no longer fill my car. I look in the rearview at their empty car seats and my eyes begin to well up. It’s going to be a long week without them. Saying goodbye to my children for a whole week is the result of choices I’ve made. Questions arise and self-doubt creeps in. “Did I do the right thing by ending it?” “Could I have done anything differently?” “How are my kids handling everything?”  → Read More

In doing a Google search on the word co-parenting, I quickly found that co-parenting is a word we reserve for divorced families, not intact ones. Isn’t it strange that in 2012 we don’t have a word—a common vocabulary—to describe mothers and fathers fully sharing in the care of raising their children? Instead our collective norm has been to become co-parents only after the love relationship has ended and the heartache and expense of divorce have transpired.  → Read More