“I’m a MAAN.”
That was the message boasted from T-shirts at Wednesday’s “MAAN Up” event, hosted at the CoHo by the all-male group Men Against Abuse Now (MAAN) as part of V-Week, a campus effort to raise awareness about violence against women.
Donnovan Yisrael, MAAN’s faculty advisor and a manager for relationship and sexual health programs at Vaden Health Center, introduced the event sporting both a thick mustache and a skirt.
“What is Donnovan wearing…on his upper lip?” Yisrael asked. He said that while growing mustaches has nothing to do with violence against women, the questions they generate do help to raise awareness. His skirt also highlighted the serious undercurrents of the event.
“Try putting on a skirt if you’re a man and see how you feel,” Yisrael said. “The feeling that you feel — that shame or the embarrassment — is tied to the pain and guilt we feel like when we’re not acting like a man.”
The event tried to adopt a humorous atmosphere “to find a way to get us to laugh at ourselves,” according to Yisrael.
“We use humor to catch people’s attention and to attempt to bring men in to the dialogue, as men sometimes feel with the issue of sexism that they are being blamed,” said Ted Westling ’12, president of MAAN.
Performances included pieces read by members of the Stanford Spoken Word Collective, short speeches by MAAN members and skits about not being a “bystander.”
“The prompt was, ‘Why are you involved?’ and I had never put that down in words. It was empowering,” said speaker and MAAN member Trac Dang ’12. “And I think the variety of different approaches [the event] took helps the message.”
During his reading Dang said, “I’m a man because of the men in my life…men who, like me, are not perfect. I will never know what it’s like to be anything other than a man in this world — a world [that], as men, we are responsible for changing.”
This echoed Westling’s explanation of MAAN’s mission: leading men to join women in ending violence against women.
“It’s not about us, but about joining a movement,” he said.
The group also tried to raise money throughout “Manuary,” a mustache-growing contest that began in January and ended last night. Initially, participants planned to auction off the opportunity to shave off their facial hair, but for hygienic reasons, canceled those plans.
Westling and Yisrael hoped that the event at the CoHo would spread the message to a new audience. Yisrael said that he believes that relationship abuse and violence against women are serious problems on campus.
“When you start opening up lines of reporting, you find out that everybody you know or their friends has been in a situation that is borderline or is actually relationship abuse,” Yisrael said.