YesAllMen2021

A few years back, a couple of close friends shared their master plan with me.  They would save enough money to buy some land, away from any major cities or towns; build a small wooden house self-powered by natural resources and tend the land to provide enough plant-based food to both live and trade locally.  Within a few years they would be totally off-grid, no longer complicit in a society they viewed as fundamentally unfair, unsustainable and unsuited to flourishing life.  I admired the simplicity and purity of their ambition.  They would no longer have to make any compromises in the way they lived, no messy trade-offs, no moral conflict.  They would live lightly on the planet, their individual footprint contained, doing no harm.  And yet they would also be doing very little to change society itself.  The world would continue on its unsustainable path.  My friends could feel satisfied that it wasn’t their fault; but they couldn’t claim to be making anything substantially better eit

On the morning of Saturday 13th March I was in bed reflecting on the awful events of the week with the abduction and murder of Sarah Everard. I like many other men were voicing our concerns about men's violence on social media, but we all know that social media activism alone is not enough. It will not do much to change the day to day realities of women's lives.  I was also furious that the response from some men - just like we saw All Lives Matter in response to Black Lives Matters - was to say Not All Men.  We know that men's violence is about all men. Every single one of us.  And we also know that we as men have to do the work to challenge the sexism and misogyny in our everyday lives. We have to be responsible for our own behaviours and for challenging the behaviours of other men. We have to speak up, sometimes we have to shut up and we have to recognise that however nice we think we are, if we are not actively reflecting on our own actions and seeking to challenge thos