Portland high school’s Healthy Masculinity Club is ‘a place for guys to not be ‘guys’’

Article here. Excerpt:

'Once a week during lunchtime at Portland’s Cleveland High, chemistry teacher Brian Fain’s classroom becomes part consciousness-raising circle, part support group, as several dozen boys sit together to consider American manhood, circa 2024.

Their Healthy Masculinity Club — part of a nascent national movement at high schools around the Portland metro area and the country — resists pigeonholing. It’s both a club intended just for boys and the radical opposite of an old boys network.

Freshman Ephraim Goodness sums it up thus: “It’s a place for guys to not be ‘guys.’”

Fain, the club’s adviser, began brainstorming the idea for the group in a post #MeToo world, intent upon unpacking — and, ideally, reversing — the tendency of male students to disrespect his female colleagues but respond deferentially to his authority.

There was inherent discomfort, some club members acknowledged, in reading aloud about the harm caused by young men while being male.

“It’s hard to not be offended when people are saying that white men are hurting or attacking them, because, like, that’s me. But that doesn’t mean I’m doing the attacking,” Balmer said. “You have to acknowledge and realize that there are other people causing pain and violence and it can be hard to acknowledge that when you fit that category.”'