International Mens Day Special

With special guests:

• Dr. Elizabeth Celi
• Dr. Jerome Teelucksingh
• Diane A. Sears
• Jason Thompson
• Frank Crump and
• Uma Challa  

We dedicate the whole of this weeks’ program to International Men’s Day, which is finally and deservedly starting to get more recognition and traction around the world. Warwick Marsh, from Dads4Kids who is the Global Coordinator for IMD, set the scene last week on Dads on the Air when he spoke about some of the events taking place in Australia and around the world to celebrate this important International event.  

Our guests this week are from 3 different continents, representing millions of good and decent men around the globe, who currently witness themselves being publicly and relentlessly maligned on a daily basis. While there are exceptions to every rule, these should never be used to misrepresent the whole group in the way we now see men being portrayed.  

We commence our International lineup of guests with Australia’s Dr Elizabeth Celi from Quality Living who is the keynote speaker at the  IMD function to be held at Australia’s Parliament House in the Nation’s Capital, Canberra, on the 19th November. Dr. Celi is a strong supporter of the rights of men to be treated as an equal in a modern society, instead of having to face the daily injustices that confront them in many sectors of our community.   

Next we speak with Dr. Jerome Teelucksingh from Trinidad in the West Indies, who is the founder of IMD and described the event in the following manner, “International Men’s Day is about addressing the challenges and problems that men face; improving gender relations between men and women; promoting gender equality; highlighting positive male role models – not just movie stars and athletes – but “everyday working class men who are living decent, honest lives”; and creating a safer and better world”.  

We then speak with Diane A. Sears, IMD Coordinator in the USA, who puts it this way, “We must work together as a team. International Mens Day provides us with a great opportunity. Strong fathers create and sustain efficiently functioning family units which positively shape the minds and souls of our children – our future – our bridge to the future. After all, isn’ t it really about our children?”  

The person responsible for Global Promotions, who is also the Historian and Coordinator for IMD is Australia’s Jason Thompson and our next guest, who would like to take this opportunity to ask individuals and organizations who are planning an event to contact him with the details at: soulgany@bigpond.com

The following guest is Frank Crump from the USA and UPI Education, who with  IN SEARCH OF FATHERHOOD® have entered into a partnership in observance of International Men’s Day 2009 on Thursday, 19 November 2009. UPI Education is asking students, faculty, and administrators to observe International Men’s Day 2009 through one moment of silence beginning at 11:19 A.M. (EST) and ending at 11:20 A.M. (EST) to commemorate and contemplate the sacrifices and contributions that Men have made throughout the world. UPI Education is also soliciting essays, articles, and poems from students and adults which identify the positive male role models that have influenced their lives. These essays, articles, and poems will be published on IN SEARCH OF FATHERHOOD®’s blog.  

We conclude our program interviewing  one of the hardest working and passionate promoters of equality and justice for all, Uma Challa from India. Uma Challa is the IMD Coordinator for India. She made the point that, “International women’s Day is celebrated the world over every year but we also need to have a celebration every year to recognize and honor men: our fathers, brothers, partners, sons, male friends and colleagues; for the numerous services they render and the innumerable sacrifices they make to ensure the health and well-being of the family and the society.”

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Family Law, Marriage and Men

With special guests:

• Sue Price
• Ian Purdie and
• Warwick Marsh. 

This week we present an extensive discussion with Sue Price of the Men’s Rights Agency, on the topic of the proposed roll back of Australian Shared Parenting laws. These laws which are only three years old and which presented a tiny glimmer of hope for the nations’ children to continue to maintain regular contact with both parents, following their parents’ separation, are now again under threat by a Labor Government.

Next our own Ian Purdie from Ian Purdie dot com, speaks about his recent trip to Las Vegas, where he was best man at his mates’ wedding. While some would regard this type of wedding as somewhat bizarre and plastic, Ian enjoyed every minute of it and speaks about being driven to the wedding in a stretch limousine, seeing the names of the bride and groom in neon lights and watching the wedding ceremony being performed by Elvis.

The final guest this week is Warwick Marsh from the Fatherhood Foundation. Warwick speaks about the upcoming International Men’s Day celebrations planned for the 19th November, and of his work to bring this event to the attention of our Parliamentarians and the community. This International event will also be the main feature of our program next week, when we will speak with International organizers of this event from India, Australia, Trinidad and the USA.

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Men's Business

With special guest:

• Ian Watson.    
  

A leader in the field of mentoring his fellow man, Ian Watson is a shining light of hope and encouragement to those suffering at the hands of agenda driven zealots, who are hell bent on destroying the resilience and natural inner strength of men and boys. 

He runs popular monthly men’s gatherings where men talk men’s business. Ian’s well attended “Transit Lounge” gatherings, provide a welcome sanctuary from the many real life experiences men suffer at the hands of government sponsored agencies and the media, whilst many of their kids are forced to live in fatherless households.

While the gender war against men and boys rages unabated around the globe, we see an apathetic and ignorant community laughing at all the demeaning anti male advertising propaganda, that sees them easily drawn into joining the “all men are perpetrators ” domestic violence hysteria. 

However, there are encouraging signs that men have just about had enough, and are collectively starting to show their enthusiasm for more pro-active engagement with one another. Mentoring is fast becoming the accepted new communication tool to support those that have fallen victim to some of the worse excesses of male bashing persecution, the world has ever witnessed.
 
We also broadcast a recording made at the National Men’s Health Convention recently, of the presentation made by psychologist Drew Cowen who works in the Family Court in Newcastle, and who’s theme was “Giving Kids the Best Dad they can have: Helping Fathers and Kids to have strong healthy relationships when they don’t live in the same home”.
 
Now on the face of it, such a caring sounding title would indicate an understanding of what fathers and their kids are forced to endure , as they desperately try to keep their parent/child relationships intact following separation. But to many dads in the audience it appeared that the one preaching to them, was part of the problem and not the solution.

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Men Caring For Men

With special guests:

• Paul Elam and

• Prof. Robert McLachlan.  

First up we speak with Paul Elam, who is the Editor–in-Chief of the world’s leading men’s website  Mens News Daily and the publisher of A Voice for Men.

Paul worked as a men’s rights advocate for two decades in the mental health field, advocating on behalf of men that were affected by misandry and feminist doctrine in clinical treatment settings. Paul focuses his efforts now on exposing the mendacities of modern feminism, especially in their impact on the daily lives of men.

Our second interview is with Professor Robert McLachlan who is a Principal Research Fellow at Prince Henry’s Institute and is Deputy Director of Endocrinology at the Monash Medical Centre as well as being the secretary of the International Society of Andrology.

He specialises in the area of male reproductive medicine and has made significant contributions to the research in endocrinology, infertility and andrology.  He combines his academic career with active clinical practice as a consultant in these fields.

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Iron John

With special guest:

• “Athol”.  

This weeks show deals with American author, Robert Bly’s insightful interpretation of the Grimms brothers fairy tale “Iron John”.  “Iron John” tells the story of a boy who is mentored by a wild man thru various trials and tribulations to emerge a hero and eventually marry the King’s daughter.  

Iron John is also the name of a men’s group based in Sydney that meets regularly and deals with issues arising in its member’s lives. We are privileged to interview one of the members of this group who identifies himself as Athol. 

In his book, ‘Iron John; a story about men’ Bly interprets the original tale, explaining its relevance to the development of the pre-industrial male psyche whilst lamenting the failures of modern society to correctly initiate boys into manhood and the subsequent disastrous impacts upon the lives of modern men and women.

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Democracy At Work

With special guests:

• Neil Humphreys
• Sue Price 
• Michael Woods and
• Benjamin Easton.

This week we range across a wide variety of subjects, talking first up with the ever lively author of a new book on becoming a dad, Be My Baby Neil Humphreys. From the cheery to the rational, we then talk with Sue Price, the founder of the Men’s Rights Agency, arguably the most articulate supporter, of the rights of men in our modern society.

This is followed by a fascinating interview with academic Dr. Michael Woods  UWS, as we take a revealing look at the way the real statistics on Domestic Violence and Child Abuse have been kept from the general public, and how many Government Policies appear to be formulated based on inaccurate information.

We close the show talking with Benjamin Easton a Political Busker, who is participating in a demonstration outside the Bank of New Zealand, protesting their outrageous portrayal of all men as bashers and all women as victims, clearly themselves the victims of domestic violence hysteria. Somewhere along the line they forgot that half their customers are male and most of them object to being portrayed as Neanderthals.

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What Lies in the Hearts of Men

With Special Guests:

• John Simpson
• Sue Price
• Warwick Marsh
• Greg Andresen
• Robert Gordon.

This week we covered a great deal of territory, from a fascinating interview with the creative director of a powerful new movie Men’s Group, to International Men’s Day to the debate which has erupted over the potential jailing of men who dare to get a DNA sample of their children without the mother’s permission.

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Save the Males

With Special Guests:

• Kathleen Parker and
  
• Peter Burns

Author Kathleen Parker has created a furore around the world with her new book Save The Males. Don’t miss this fascinating interview. So disenfranchised have men become, that only a woman can state the bleeding obvious, that the extreme sexism of gender feminism has done a great deal of harm to men, women, children, and society as a whole.

One person who knows all about the brutality of the modern state is Peter Burns, one of the leading members of the fathers’ rights movement in NZ, he hosts a very successful website http://dad4justice.blogspot.com/ where he dispenses a wealth of information from around the world to do with fatherhood issues.

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Exploding Gender Myths

With Special Guests:

• Professor Mark Wooden
• Warwick Marsh and
• Professor Richard B. Felson.

Prof Mark Wooden, social researcher at the University of Melbourne, is a very courageous man. Last week he was the only male taking part in a National Press Club panel discussion on the gender pay gap. Faced with a mostly female audience, he dared to challenge the myth that the pay gap between men and women in Australia is mainly due to discrimination, instead suggesting that it has “got a lot to do with the fact that women are not prepared to work longer hours.”

Other widespread myths concern the issue of domestic violence. One of them is that husbands engage in more marital violence than wives because they are more controlling. The other is that societal norms permit violence within marriage and that gender roles encourage violence by males moreso than females. Richard B. Felson, Professor of Crime, Law, Justice and Sociology at the Pennsylvania State University in the US, has published extensive research that challenges both of these myths.

Also on today’s show we speak to Warwick Marsh from the Fatherhood Foundation about the proposed laws in NSW that will remove the word ‘father’ from birth certifcates and consign the term ‘paternity leave’ to the dustbin of history.

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Are Our Sex Discrimination Laws Sexist?

Elizabeth Broderick

With special guest

• Elizabeth Broderick, the new Federal Sex Discrimination Commissioner and Commissioner Responsible for Age Discrimination.

The Commissioner and her staff have spent the last few months undertaking a National Listening Tour to ascertain the views of Australians on three key themes: economic independence for women, work and family balance across the life cycle, and freedom from discrimination, harassment and violence.

To date the Commissioner and her staff have run men’s and women’s focus groups, spoken to men and women at workplaces, unions, business round-tables, academic round-tables, community groups and public consultations, in both city and regional areas. Information collected from this consultation will be used to inform the agenda for Ms Broderick’s five year term.

It will be a real honour to have the Commissioner on our program to discuss various issues of concern to men, boys and fathers. She is on the record as being very supportive of men and their issues, believing that “working towards gender equality is not about a battle of the sexes.” The question is whether her hands are tied by administering a sex discrimination act that defines discrimination as “discrimination against women”.

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The Woman Racket

With special guests:

• Steve Moxon and
• Sue Price.

Steve Moxon is the English author of a new book called “The Woman Racket - the new science explaining how the sexes relate at work, at play and in society”. Notwithstanding its provocative title, The Woman Racket is a serious scientific investigation into one of the key myths of our age - that women are oppressed by the “patriarchal” traditions of Western societies. Drawing on the latest developments in evolutionary psychology, Moxon finds that the opposite is true - men, or at least the majority of low-status males - have always been the victims of deep-rooted prejudice. As the prejudice is biologically derived, it is unconscious and can only be uncovered with the tools of scientific psychology. The book reveals this prejudice in fields as diverse as healthcare, employment, family policy and politics: compared to the long and bloody struggle for universal male suffrage, women were given the vote “in an historical blink of the eye”

Also Sue Price, from the Men’s Rights Agency joins us to talk about the new Child Support Agency scheme to go through old income tax records in an attempt to bring some additional pennies into its coffers.

Plus the 5th and final instalment of the radio drama Hero Joe, produced especially for Dads on the Air.

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The Best of 2007 - Part 2

With special guests:

• Dr Warren Farrell, famous social commentator and author of best selling books including Father and Child Reunion: How to Bring the Dads We Need to the Children We Love
• Dr. Amy J.L. Baker, US author of Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome: Breaking the Ties that Bind. The world’s first study of child victims of Parental Alienation Syndrome
• Terry Hicks, a special father who loves his child unconditionally, and has dedicated his life to help protect his son, David Hicks from harm and appeals for “a fair go” for his child
• Christina Hoff Sommers, author of Who Stole Feminism and The War Against Boys interviewed at the Boys and the Boy Crisis conference in Washington DC
• Eric Burch, US serviceman and musician

Plus the Dads on the Air speech given at the Lone Fathers National Convention at Parliament House in Canberra in August 2007.

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Post-Election Variety

With special guests:

• Diane Winterling, Bronwyn Hudson and Ann Cheek from Belair Primary School in Adelaide, talking about how they’ve made their school more “boy friendly”. Interviewed at the Working With Boys, Building Fine Men conference in Newcastle in July
• Tom Golden, author of Swallowed by a Snake: The Gift of the Masculine Side of Healing, talking about how and why males and females differ in processing emotion and stress. Interviewed at the Boys and the Boy Crisis Conference in Washington DC in July
• J. Steven Svoboda from Attorneys for the Rights of the Child, talking about protecting boys from infant circumcision. Also interviewed at the Boys and the Boy Crisis Conference.

Plus an Australian Federal Election wrap-up and post-mortem.

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Examining Misandry

With special guests:

• Dr. Paul Nathanson and Dr. Katherine Young, authors of two very important books that uncover the underlying contempt for men and boys in our culture today: Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture and Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination Against Men.
• Simon Hunt, from Parents Against Institutionalised Child Abuse. A unique voice in the Australian Fatherhood movement by dint of refusing to shut up. Hunt has distilled the problems with the Family Law system down to one key issue: equal time parenting after separation - the solution that removes the problem.
• Sue Price, from the Men’s Rights Agency, talking about the bizarre news that the Child Support Agency has been given an award for it’s work in the area of suicide prevention!

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The New Australian Spinster

Prof Gordon Finley

With special guests:

• Professor Gordon Finley, from Florida International University, talking about the social implications of the current gender imbalance in Higher Education.
• Max, from a new website www.taxfundedprejudice.com
• Warwick Marsh, from the Fatherhood Foundation, reporting from the National Summit on Marriage, Family and Fatherhood at Parliament House, Canberra
• John Pierson, Canberra bureaucrat, recorded at the Lone Fathers National Convention

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Suburban Heroes

With special guests:

• Allan Turner, Chief Executive of the Zaidee Rainbow Foundation, urging all families to sign up for organ transplants.
• John Ashfield, author of a number of books including Matters For Men, The Nature of Men and Looking After Your Family and
• Harry Hill, author of a new book He Was My Father.

As well our researcher Greg Andresen will be calling in from the UK, where he has been interviewing a number of leading figures in the fatherhood movement and a fortnightly new segment, Research Central with Tom Mok will kick off with a look at a new paper De-constructing the Essential Father.

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What Men Don't Talk About

With special guests:

• Maggie Hamilton, author of What Men Don’t Talk About says “writing this book… was prompted by my growing unease at the many assumptions I had made about men. While I’d been happy to believe that… men were never vulnerable, when I took a closer look at men, I began to realise this wasn’t the case… I realised that the many dilemmas men grapped with, the pain they felt, were largely invisible.”
• Nick Gleeson from Vision Australia has two children, lost his sight when he was seven years old after colliding with a supermarket door. After successfully competing in the gruelling Comrades 90km marathon run in South Africa in 2000, he climbed the challenging Mt Kilimanjaro, highest peak in Africa and was the first blind Australian to make it to the summit.

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Dr Warren Farrell - Part 2

Dr Warren Farrell

With special guest:

• Dr Warren Farrell, leading US social commentator of our time and celebrated Author. In the 1990s, Dr. Farrell felt the misunderstandings about men had become dangerous to the survival of families and love. He confronted the misunderstandings head-on with the award-winning The Myth of Male Power. His most recent book is Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap - and What Women Can Do About It. It documents why the pay gap is not about discrimination but about 25 differences between men and women’s work-life decisions.

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Dr Warren Farrell - Part 1

With special guest:

• Dr Warren Farrell, famous social commentator and author of best selling books including Father and Child Reunion: How to Bring the Dads We Need to the Children We Love.

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