Mx MEN: Festival of Positive Masculinity
Mx MEN was a three-day festival of art, conversation, and community, which asked the question: What does positive masculinity look like to you?
For three days the Ugly Duck venue in London was filled with work from artists looking at positive and new masculinities. Talks, performances, and workshops filled the programme thanks to the incredible collaborators and volunteers who agreed to be a part of the event, and the general public joined us in engaging in difficult, powerful, joyful, and liberating conversations about the many questions which intersect with masculinity. It was a deep pleasure to be a part of those moments, and to learn collectively.
The idea for the festival came largely from frustration that the conversations about masculinity in mass media mostly seemed to focus on toxic masculinity. Toxic masculinity is something we as global societies need to wrestle with, talk about, and deepen our understanding of, but if we’re going to change negative patterns we also desperately need to develop some idea of what the positive alternative is. As I write this in February 2020 I’ve just done a quick web search of the current top news stories on masculinity. Out of the 10 top results, 7 either mention toxic in the headline, or are focused on negative behaviours.
One New Yorker article asks if masculinity has any future at all: Can Masculinity be Redeemed? the headline asks. I’d recommend the article. In it writer Isaac Chotiner quotes author Peggy Orenstein, author of Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity, who says: “Boys, too, then, need a strong counternarrative to develop grounded, realistic perspectives on women, men, sex, and love.”
I began having conversations with the people around me on masculinity, and it became clear that very few people knew where to begin with answering the question ‘what does positive masculinity look like?’- myself included. And so the festival was a way to create a space to get people asking that question.