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Thanks to the UTMIA, it can take a lot of courage
the students who organized something like this, see the kind of opposition you're facing
another thing, to the university of toronto
but there's a link here because as I studied the study of religions and my major field is india. I had to learn techniques such as empathy
how do you get to understand another group
how do you cross cultures
how do you communicate
once you learn that from experience with other culture it becomes very similar
to think about communication between men and women.
but then I did a lot of work in comparative religion, as the issues on women became important
I began to write on women in hinduism
and then did a number of books on women in different religions
in writing on a number of different women scholars
and men scholars who contribute to those volumes
well I trace my interest in this topic
to my childhood, in the first place I had a difficult relationship with my father
he was a very engaging father, but because we were really quite different
and I didn't really understand why, until many years later when it became clear thats I was gay
my father was actually very supportive in terms of my being gay
and before he died a few years ago, we had many conversations, not only about that
but about the other ways in which we were different
and in which communication was hard for us
parents of bullies going to school the bullies in court
I'm listening to all this stuff going on in the background
my message to them is you know what, I'm not (?)
I'm here, I'm going to say what I want
You know that taught me something
another reason I mention the bullies
once again I have to ask myself what it meant to be a man
I didn't know from my father exactly what it meant to be a man
he was compared to my mother I would say he was somewhat unhappy
although he was an engineer and he built house
we weren't rich but we were reasonably successful
but he was not happy because he would have preferred to do research
he became a builder mainly because he had a wife and family to support
and so you know the bullies were telling me that I was no good at a boy
by the way I should add the bullies were both boys and girls
I was not aware of any differences
so then this will tell you somewhat about my age
I was about in my twenties when I went to Columbia to study art history
and that was in 68 and that was the height of the Vietnam war
so suddenly I was confronted with the direct possibility of being drafted for combat
I discussed that with a number of the other boys at Columbia
I noticed a very interesting reaction
They were clearly uncomfortable they certainly had no intention of going
they all had student deferments this was before they established a lottery to decide who was going to go
but they were uncomfortable about talking specifically about (?)
i was interested in what manhood had to do with, you know, soldiers
that was something that was kind of off bounds, they didn't want to discuss that
I came back to canada
ten years later on the tenth anniversary of Vietnam suddenly it was all over the news again
by that time I had the emotional and intellectual resources to try
and figure out on my own what this was all about
and what it meant to be a man and so that's approximately when I met katherine and so we went into business together
Well katherine ha already mentioned her research on women
and the fact that she found that you don't understand women
very well unless you understand men and how they interact
for me I was in religious studies and my interest was popular cultures
particularly in which popular culture, including secularity, interacts with
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