It has been awhile—I know. I’ve been busy.  Many of you are new here—welcome. You have been drawn here to try to figure out more about the author of the Denzel Principle and maybe get some idea of what kind of crank would write a book like that.

Lessons last longer than advice. There is good and bad advice, but what you learn from lessons never changes. Ever. The Denzel Principle is a book of lessons from an experienced man, without any filters. Steve Harvey wrote a great book of funny advice… with the fabulous Denene Milner co-writing. Hill Harper also wrote a good book, where a bachelor talks to other people’s advice and tells you what he thinks about what they think about relationships. My approach was  to be honest with women without any filters or co-writers and be courageous by drawing the story and the lessons from my personal life. The Denzel Principle” is a book of lessons.   As I re-animate my personal blog, I may or may not get to that. But I got one thing on my mind that I do want to talk about.

I think the first thing to do is to address my oft-mentioned “misogyny,” “misogynist screeds,” “relentless misogyny,” me, the “resident misogynist” and the like. Sexism and misogyny are different: Sexism can be and often is discriminatory, but is most often pro-information and pro-empowerment for a particular gender. Misogyny is oppressive, hateful and destructive towards women.  Both are pretty subjective.  However, we could safely call me a sexist in the same manner that you could call Oprah Winfrey a sexist. Sexism Oprah has a distinct, passionate point of view drawn from her life in her skin, and so do I.  Unlike Oprah, I sometimes choose to use plain talk (what I like to call “barbershop language”) to underscore ugly truths. I write the way many men talk when they have nothing to lose by being frank and honest.  I recognize that style doesn’t resonate with everyone, but what can you do? Well, if you’re a woman, sometimes you call me a misogynist, and use this label to taint everything I say. It’s the same tactic black people use when they call some white racists, or gays use when they call some heteros homophobic. But we’ll get to that later. Suffice it to say that here, there and everywhere many of the critics have written about the book, citing The Denzel Principle as an ugly addition to the canon of essays I’ve written for The Root.com that attack, oppress and degrade black womankind.

Ok. First, let’s figure out what we are talking about.

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March 18th, 2010 | Uncategorized | No comments

With all the talk about Chris Brown and Rihanna, I’ve been talking and writing a lot about domestic violence. Chris and Ri were not married, are not related or cohabitating, so their incident comes more accurately under the heading of assault or another term I am hearing a lot of lately –Intimate Partner Violence.

I’ve been trying to broaden the conversation because I have been assaulted by women, and I know how helpless you feel as a man caught up in it. Every man I know has a “crazy bitch” story, as in “that crazy bitch tried to punch/cut/stab/club me. “ I don’t know what happened between Chris Brown and Rihanna, but I know that studies suggest that women instigate these crack-ups more times than we think. I really feel Byron Hurt’s attempt to get at men who abuse women, because we can all agree those “men” are sub-human. But while he wrote out the 10 excuses men use for hitting women, I kept waiting for the women’s list. I’m still waiting. I dig B’s idea, but I think we have addressed the equation from one end for long enough and found that it doesn’t work. The numbers haven’t gone down, and there has been no change. So it may be time for a new approach. Shaming, blaming propping up the double standard and polarizing the conversation doesn’t move it forward. We have to not just acknowledge that women hit men and that it is wrong, but figure out how to stop it. Trying to emphasize he frequency or disparity in the numbers misses the point, since some much of IPV involving women hitting men goes unreported. I think we have to agree that it’s wrong or agree that there is a double-standard.

First, let’s figure out what exactly we’re talking about.

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March 24th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 4 comments