Iceland recently announced that it will hold a “‘Barbershop’ conference in January 2015 where men will discuss gender equality with other men, with a special focus on addressing violence against women. This will be a unique conference as it will be the first time at the United Nations that we bring together only men leaders to discuss gender equality.”
Although excluding women from these sort of conferences doesn’t typically fly anymore, I think their heart was in the right place. In an interview with Newsweek, Suriname’s (who was co-sponsoring this conference with Iceland) UN Ambassador Henry Mac Donald said that the original purpose of the male only conference was “to create a space for men to talk openly among themselves and figure out how to end violence against women.”
Why would that be such a bad thing? Afterall, it’s been proven that male-only rape prevention programs are more effective in changing attitudes and behaviors than mixed gender programs. Typically men have the power to change behaviors in other men due to the strong influence of group culture. Men learn from men.
In similar studies, which “evaluat[ed] the impact of a program whose primary intervention method was to depict a female survivor increased men’s rape myth acceptance; one such program even increased men’s reported likelihood of sexual aggression.” So what did researchers do? They instead showed the participants a (heterosexual) male survivor of male on male rape. This time, the participants were able to empathize with the survivor which “significantly improved men’s attitudes toward rape and/or lowered their behavioral intent to rape.”
It’s unfortunate that this barbershop conference wasn’t able to happen as intended. It would have been interesting to see what might have come out of it since rarely do men get a chance to talk openly and honestly with other men in male-only spaces. Women have taken our fraternal lodges, our barbershops, our bars, and now our UN sanctioned gender relations conferences. What’s next, ladies?
“Christoffersen’s Barbershop (1918)” Image courtesy of The Municipal Archives of Trondheim. Creative Commons License.
