Copy this CollectionIn response to the high incidence and increased visibility of sexual harassment and assault against women, programs have been initiated targeted at men with the goal of dismantling dangerous ideas of gender roles, sexuality, and consent. These programs are intervening in men’s lives at a variety of times—from adolescents who are just forming ideas of gender and sexuality to married couples caught in a cycle of violence. The programs examined in these collections have created effective avenues for education, often peer-to-peer, in regards to consent, sexual harassment, and sexual assault as well as therapy for those that are perpetrators of intimate partner violence.
Begun in 2015, the Talk Project collaborates with Los Angeles area high schools to have a peer educator teach students about consent—how it must be actively stated rather than implied and how it can be revoked at any time. Peer educators use skits and current events to connect with their audience, and demonstrate how received ideas and myths about masculinity and femininity can be harmful. In the three year since its inception, the Talk Project has engaged 3,000 teens in this critical conversation. In Boston a class teaching teenagers ‘porn literacy’ has held facilitated group conversations about how they are interpreting what they are seeing as they form their own thoughts about gender roles, intimacy, and consent. In this way, the conversations intervene against ideas communicated to male adolescents by some pornography about the primacy of male pleasure, dominance, and non-consensual aggression. The group One In Four educates male college students about consent, how to create a safe environment, and how to intervene if they observe an unsafe situation. A similar education is provided by No Means No, an organization founded by an artist and sexual violence survivor who was shocked to action by the rates of sexual violence in Kenya. In addition to education—including self-defense—for girls, No Means No provides education for boys regarding received ideas about gender, peer pressure, and bystander intervention.
