Living in the COVID World ... and Beyond #58: Men's Childcare Collective and OASIS
Happy New Year! Welcome to 2025.
Maybe it is because of the turning of the year, but whatever the reason, I have been doing quite a bit of reminiscing over recent weeks. Today’s blog is a result of some of that remembering of the past.
By the end of the 1970’s, I would have described myself as a feminist man who was against sexism and for the equality of the sexes. At college, I had formed and led a men’s consciousness raising group (modeled on what I had heard that women were doing at that time) and when I got to the Boston area after college, I actively involved myself in the Boston Men’s Center and joined an affiliated men’s group to deepen the conversations I was having about men’s roles and sex role stereotyping.
This activity helped me to grow personally. However beneficial it was for me personally, it did nothing to address the broader societal issues about sexism that I observed and that I thought needed to be challenged. I started looking for ways to take my personal growth and learning and apply it in a broader context.
Men’s Childcare Collective
The Boston Men’s Childcare Collective had formed in the mid-1970’s and I joined it in late 1979. Its expressed purpose was to free women up from childcare responsibilities so that they could more actively participate in the political and social spheres. This was accomplished by the Men’s Childcare Collective providing free childcare at women’s political events. This was a win-win-win. The women were able to more actively participate in meetings and other activities, the men providing childcare were able to develop their nurturing skills and build relationships with young people, and the young people themselves got to know a group of thoughtful, sensitive gay and straight men (and many of those children were being raised by single women or lesbian couples). I thoroughly enjoyed my participation in the Men’s Childcare Collective – we were doing something to set the world right and having a meaningful and enjoyable experience while doing so.
OASIS
While the Men’s Childcare Collective was an existing group with history and practices when I joined it, OASIS was a non-profit organization that I helped to form. OASIS stood for Organized Against Sexism and Institutionalized Stereotypes (you can see why we usually reverted to just using the acronym). Several of us who had participated in men’s consciousness raising groups got together in 1980 with a desire to more overtly challenge sexism as we saw it demonstrated in the broader society.
Over the first few years of OASIS’ existence, we tried many things:
- In the middle of the night, we would spray-paint billboards that we thought had sexist advertising with phrases like: “Stop Sexism.”
- We created Stop Sexism bumper stickers that we distributed widely for people to use wherever they are saw something offensive.
- We organized a men’s walk against rape and violence.
- We organized and led several events at which speakers and musicians would provide perspective and song about women’s liberation and changing men’s behavior and roles.
And then we saw a slideshow video that Jean Kilbourne had put together on images of women in advertising entitled: Killing Us Softly. We decided to develop a companion piece about men’s images in advertising, first as a slide show with us delivering a public lecture and then as a narrated video entitled: Stales Roles and Tight Buns: Images of Men in Advertising.” This video was probably the most widely used educational tool about male sex role stereotyping through the 1980’s and 1990’s, and still gets used today. If you ever get to see it, you’ll hear my voice as one of the narrators.
The men with whom I participated in the Men’s Childcare Collective and OASIS are amongst the finest men I have ever known. Many of them are still my good friends today, 40 years later. And we are still growing and figuring out how to make that vision of ending sexism and male domination and having true equality of the sexes into a present-day reality.