Today I’m very excited to talk to Dr. Joseph Gelfer who is the founding editor of Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality, and the creator of the Future Masculinity online course and Director of Masculinity Research.

He also created the Five Stages of Masculinity model, which is used to view a person’s understandings of masculinity. This model is the basis of the Masculinity Research organization directed by Joseph Gelfer which offers ” insight into men and masculinity in three key areas: Market research for products and services, Social research for non-profit and governmental policymakers [and] People and culture development for businesses and organizations.”

The five stages, which you can find here, are briefly described as such: The stages are 1: Unconscious Masculinity

1: Unconscious Masculinity

2: Conscious Masculinity

3: Critical Masculinities

4: Multiple Masculinities

5: Beyond Masculinities

And to learn these would be an important primer to the conversation that we’ll be talking about today, which delves a lot into how we as people who talk about masculinities. We talk about the current problems of the discourse involving masculinities and how we can move beyond just talking about the opposite of “toxic masculinities” and how we as a society are stuck in stage 3 of masculinites.

Dr. Gelfer has written these books:

Numen, Old Men: Contemporary Masculine Spiritualities and the Problem of Patriarchy (Equinox Publishers, 2009)

The Best of Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality (Gorgias Press, 2010)

The Masculinity Conspiracy (Online, 2010). This is a free ebook.

2012: Decoding the Countercultural Apocalypse (Equinox Publishers, 2011)

Masculinities in a Global Era (Springer, 2013)

And currently, writes for many publications including The Good Men Project

The Dates for Northwestfest’s “LunchPods” which are available for anyone who has a Northwestfest pass are: