My name is Jess Wilcox, I'm the program's coordinator here at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Arts. I want to thank you all for coming out today on such a beautiful fall day and choosing to be with us. And here this fascinating panel of discussion, Salander Moonquist, Challenging Stereotypes. It's also my pleasure to introduce and give you a few words about our extraordinary panelists that we have here today with us. First we have Michael Kimmel, one of the best known experts on men and masculinity in the world. Distinguished University Professor of Sociology at Stony Brook. He's the author of more than 20 books about men masculinity, including the bestseller Guy Land, as well as Manhood in America, Men's Lives, Misframing Men, the Politics of Manhood, and the Gendered Society. And the brand new, just out, Guy's Guide to Feminism. And as a little plug, I would like to mention that there will be a reading of the Guy's Guide to Feminism at Blue Stockings Tuesday, November 27th at 7 p.m. I think there's a brochure outside on the tables in the antechamber that you can pick up if you'd like to find out more about that. One of our second panelists, who was slated to come, Shelby Knox, best known as the subject of the education of Shelby Knox, a Sundance Award, award-webbing film, unfortunately is not able to be here due to travel complications. But we still have, as our third panelist, Jimmy Briggs, who we're pleased to have, the founder of Man Up Campaign, a global initiative to mobilize young people to stop violence against women and girls in their community through music, sport, and technology. Through extensive travels in Africa and the Middle East and Asia, Briggs has produced seminal reporting on the lives of war-affected youth and children soldiers, as well as survivals of sexual violence. He is the National Magazine Award finalist and recipient of honors from the Open Society Institute, National Association of Black Journalists for Work in Uganda and Rwanda, and the Carter Center. His next book is The War's Women Fight Dispatches from a Father to His Daughter. And last, but certainly not least, is Linda Stein, who will be our moderator today. She is an artist, activist, lecturer, performer, and video artist. The core of her work addresses issues of empowerment through gender justice. Stein's solo exhibition, The Fluidity of Gender, Sculpture by Linda Stein, is currently traveling the country through 2013. Accompanied by her feminist lecture, The Chance to Be Brave, The Courage to Dare, collaborative Stein gig performances by local community members and students, and exhibition catalogs. Stein is represented by Floemhaus Gallery in Manhattan and has her archives at Smith College. You can also see in the antechamber she has a series of catalogs out there which you can feel free to browse through but are also available on Amazon.com. So, with no further ado, I will pass it along to this fabulous moderator and get the program going. Thank you. Good afternoon. How are you all today? Did you get caught in the two-and-three train coming to Brooklyn? It's really a privilege to be here and I want to thank Elizabeth Sackler first for all the work she does for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. She was brave enough to use that word feminist in the title of her center. And Catherine Morris, Rebecca Taffel, Jess Wilcox. Thank you very much, Jess, for all the work you did. Massa has been here and Osario is handling the technical stuff today. And I want to thank our sponsors for taking part in this event by asking each of you to stand up and remain standing. And I'll call your name and your organization and we'll wait to have a round of applause when all the people are standing. Is Tata Triore Rogers from the Australia Foundation here? Allison Fisher from the Bella Absa Leadership Institute. Joyce Whitby, Gloria Jacobs from the Feminist Press. Len and Ellie Flomanhoft from my gallery, Flomanhoft Gallery. Jimmy Briggs from Man Up Campaign. Joan Sammelin from Men Can Stop Rape. The National Council for Research on Women. The National Organization for Men Against Sexism. Gabriel Kahn from On The Issues Magazine. Agatha Patterson from Third Wave. Voice Mail Magazine. Women of Color Policy Network. Stephanie Yassanda from Women's E-News. Thank you, thank you all. Appreciate it. So you have on your chair a couple of things. Panelist introduction and what I call a garf. I bet you don't know what garf is. Garf stands for Gender Alert Response Form. And I hope you'll take a couple of minutes afterwards to fill it out. You could do it anonymously if you'd like. Lisbeth Salinda, Mikael Blunkvist. Two main protagonists from Steve Lawson's Millennium Trilogy. And the subsequent Swedish movies. Two figures from pop culture who stand out as fictional characters. Who shake up, break up, unhinge, scramble, reverse, blend, blur, and challenge the binary stereotypes of masculinity and femininity. Reaching and stretching toward a mobility and fluidity of gender. Exploring beyond what is currently considered normal and acceptable. And opening the viewer to a multiplicity of emotions. Of simultaneous fascination and discomfort. There is in this trilogy a frightening excitement. An ambiguous and complex overlapping of strength, aggression, power, and sexual energy. Issues of sadism intersect, slam into fears of being held down, bound, trampled upon. Without agency, without defender, without selfhood. Come close at your own risk to the mesmerizing fantasies of omnipotence and libidinal domination. Or enter the terror of victimhood and vulnerability. Open up to your own oceanic waves of righteousness and transgressiveness. The oscillating feeling of being safe and then in an instant unprotected. In my art I can deliberate on antithetical emotions like these. I can be stirred up and naked in my exposure to the inner turmoil that I'm only just beginning to let loose. As an artist I can only be surprised by the relentlessness of my investigation and journey. The take no prisoners search and destroy need to reveal my own verboten emotions. As I create icons representing gender fluidity. Sometimes with a femaleness that stands in for all of humanity. Or sometimes looking to icons of strength and justice already in our popular culture. This is what brought me to this trilogy. So let's look at how these emotions play out and say this first story, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Let's see in the movie how stereotypes are challenged. How the viewer is challenged to accept the blurring and scrambling of binaries. Now I'd like to turn to my distinguished panelists, Michael Kimmel, Jimmy Briggs. Please come up on the stage and we hope we'll have an interesting conversation. He's working? We okay? So Michael let's start with you, Michael Kimmel, who will speak on how Michael represents a new prototype for masculinity. Michael. Thanks. Before I do I just want to say that was wonderful. This is the first time I've seen it so thank you. That was fantastic. I barely feel like I have anything to add to it. I want to talk off of an essay that I've written about whether a blunt quest represents a new model of masculinity and also talk a little bit about what some of the costs of that new model of masculinity might be. The first thing I want to say though is that these novels, this trilogy, perhaps the most widely read novels in the world over the past half decade, you know, struck some nerves. And I think one of the reasons that it struck a nerve at least for me is not sort of the sort of dark, cold Swedish winter part of it but rather the fact that these seem to be leftist political thrillers. The typical American political thriller, the Robert Patterson-Tom Clancy type, always seem to end up resolving in a kind of bushy and chanian world of, you know, if you see something say something, mutual surveillance and a police state. So I think that we liked, I think we kind of caught into the millennium trilogy in part because they were not only, because they were I think explicitly, you know, sort of at least social democratic, if not further to the left, but also explicitly feminist. Larsen himself said, described himself actually as a feminist starting as early as 1972. And I just thought I would tell you one little story about something. After he had died, in 2009, his life partner, Eva Gabrielson, cited a moment when his books won an award, cited a moment which she thought was decisive in Larsen's own development as a feminist man. In 2003, there was a very well-publicized murders of two women in Sweden. A Kurdish woman and also a Swedish model were both murdered that fall. And the media continually stressed the difference between the two. One was an honor killing, the Kurdish woman was honor killing, something completely foreign to Swedish culture. And the model was a crime of passion, a homicide. Larsen didn't buy that for a second. He called them, in an article that he wrote, sisters in death. And he stressed in fact the similarities between these two murders of these two women. And this is what Larsen himself wrote in an essay about these. He says, the forms of oppression differ, but not the cause of oppression. The forms vary dramatically between Sicilian honorary murders, burning widows in India, or battering of girlfriends or wives on Saturday nights in Sweden. The culture does not explain the underlying causes as to why the women of the world are being murdered, disfigured, circumcised, beaten, and forced into different forms of ritual behavior decided by men. The causes being that men in patriarchal societies oppress women. This is a systematic violence against women, but this is exactly what this is about. And it would be described as such, a violence of the same proportions were directed against trade unionists, Jews, or handicapped people. Feminism and anti-racism are two sides of the same coin. And remember this is a man writing in 2003, this is not Catherine McKinnon, not Andrea Dworkin, but perhaps the most popular novelist in the English-speaking world. So it's really quite telling that he described himself this way. So in the first book, which is, I'm sure everybody in this room knows, the first book, literal translation, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in English, was actually called Men Who Hate Women. It's literal translation in Swedish. So, and really it's a book about, in some ways, a contrast of masculinities using this punky feminist heroine on the one hand as a foil and also promoting a certain new model of masculinity in Blumkvist. So look at the evidence. There's a lot of male characters in this film, in these three books, sorry. There's the explicit villains, like the sexually predatory legal guardian, whom you saw in the video. His father, her father, who she tries to murder in that scene, pouring the kerosene and then lighting them on fire. There's her brother, who's sort of a maniacal cold-blooded killer. All of these are hyper-violent, selfish. So those are the explicit villains. But actually Lawson spends a lot of time talking about the complicit villains.  So these are the foils.  And against this, he posits Blumkvist as a kind of pro-feminist or proto-feminist man. On the one hand, he's utterly ethical. He's not at all exploitive of women. There's a scene early on in one of the books in which one of the interns, a young woman coming to the Millennium Magazine as an intern, shows up at his apartment late at night and virtually throws herself at him. And he rejects her. He's not exploitive. He's not predatory. He's obviously a competent lover. Erica Berger, the editor of Millennium, with whom he has an affair with the knowledge of her husband. This frees her husband to have dalliances with other men.  But on the other hand, there's some certain costs to this that I want to talk about. I think there's a certain desexualization of this new Swedish masculinity in the way that Larson portrays it. The affection that Michael Blumkvist exhibits is dispassionate. It's almost chilly and functional. Is this necessary? Larson seems to think so. But I ask the question, can pro-feminist masculinity also embrace a sexual desire that's neither predatory nor violent, but still remains hot? I'm not so sure that Larson would agree. For example, the scene that you saw was the only time that Lisbeth and Blumkvist actually have sex, those two scenes when they're in the cottage together. She buys him a Christmas present. This is in the first book. She buys him a Christmas present and she sees him with Erica on the street. She gets absolutely so freaked out by this. This is what Larson writes. He says, The pain was so immediate and so fierce that Lisbeth stopped in mid-stride, incapable of movement. Part of her wanted to rush after them. She wanted to take the metal sign and use the sharp edge to cleave Berger's head in two. She did nothing, as thought swirled through her mind. Analysis of consequences. Finally, she calmed down. And you may remember this pivotal scene, she throws the gift into the garbage. Momentary jealousy scares her. She's vulnerable and she has made it her life's project to be utterly impenetrable. She vows never, at this moment, never let anyone, including Blumkvist, back into her heart. She spends the next thousand pages, the next three volumes getting to a port where she can actually begin to trust him again. What I thought I would do is just, I'm going to read a couple of passages about this because I think there's something to this. Larson's answer comes, I think, closest to what you might call the sort of second-wave writers on sexuality, second-wave feminist writers like Andrew Dworkin or John Stoltenberg.  Erection signified domination, intercourse of violation and occupation. Under patriarchy, women's heterosexual desire is collaboration. Lesbian sex can be liberatory, but only if it in no way resembles heterosexuality. Men's sexuality can be politically unproblematic, only if it was denuded of what men had come to understand constitutes desire. Aggressive, energetic, possessive.  This is not the case among contemporary third-wave feminists, and like Elizabeth Salander herself.  Third-wave feminists have embraced a more masculine sexuality, more agentic, more pleasure-seeking as opposed to pain-avoiding. The encounter between Elizabeth, the epigrammatic third-wave feminist, and Michael, the embodiment of second-wave pro-feminism, encapsulates the dilemma. They constantly misinterpret each other. They vacillate between being lovers, friends, enemies, capture the contradictions of this particular historical moment, and provide part of the pleasure, at least for me, of reading the trilogy. Lawson resolves this tension temporarily, and in a way I think that at least leaves me feeling unsatisfied.  It's just not anything wrong with it particularly. They both enjoy it. Her husband's accommodated himself to it. It's just that there's no magnetic attraction that is enough to sustain it. It's somewhat passionless. And look, let's face it, an affair without passion is kind of hard to sustain. In the trilogy's final scene, the absolute end of the three books, Blomquist shows up at Lisbeth's apartment. Now remember, they've been lovers. You've seen it. But their affair was somewhat desultory, a bit of momentary comfort. He brings her, I like this being a Brooklyn boy, he brings her bagels and an espresso. He announces that he is, quote, just company, unquote. Now, however, Lisbeth has done something she has not done before, feels something that she has not felt since she was a little girl. She trusts him. He, and this is a quote, had in fact been a good friend to her over the past year, unquote. He was not a man who hates women. The cost, however, is their sexual relationship. This is a quote. She looked at him for a moment and realized that she now had no feelings for him, at least not those kind of feelings, unquote. She's no longer attracted to Blomquist as a lover. She's no longer vulnerable, doesn't love him like that. And when Lisbeth's salander opens her door and invites him into her apartment, she speaks for all the abused women who have shown themselves to triumph over their victimhood, who have steeled themselves to prove themselves resilient and indeed heroic. She also allows the possibility that the term feminist man is not an oxymoron, that men can be friends with women. Mikkel can actually become, quote, a man who loves women, unquote.  Thanks. Jamie Briggs. I was going to tell Michael every time I'm on a panel with him, I usually follow Michael, and he always says things that has me scrambling, scratching out notes, putting things back in, trying to catch up with him so that I can somehow add to analysis he provided. It's interesting, and I'm sure we'll get into this once we open the discussion up amongst the three of us, because it's always my reaction to the first novel, but the trilogy was somewhat different. I don't know if I saw Blumquist as much as a proto-feminist, a pro-feminist as anti-masculinist, because one of the things, throughout the series, but particularly the first one, we see a very striking pattern. Of course, it's easy to see this trilogy and the character of Salander as exercising some sort of revenge fantasy. But the thing about Blumquist that's very striking, he is a very moral right person. As a journalist, he protects the sources. He's very ethical. He never leaks information. He follows trails to a somewhat satisfying end. But he's never the one to take forceful action or respond in equal measure to the violence that's happening around him. That role was for Salander. I thought it was interesting, especially Mike referred to the incident, or the comments he made in 2003. What I thought was interesting was Larson's own background.  He never reported that gang rape, nor did he try to stop it. I thought it was interesting reading the trilogy and then learning that fact because throughout the series, it felt like, to me at least, in many ways that this character of Salander was really almost a tool of redemption. Or I guess sort of a fantasy based scripting of what happened in his adolescence. Linda asked me to talk about some of the parallels and some of the lessons that the trilogy and the character of Blancquist have in real society, contemporary society, particularly of late, with some of the most more high profile incidents we've seen with harassment and sexual assault. I'm sure this was intentional, but I thought it was interesting that we had this conversation, this specific conversation in the context of the 20th anniversary of Anita Hill's testimony. Because now, it's very much in all of our minds, those of us who can recall that time period and the troubling issues it raised, particularly with power dynamics around harassment and the lessons or responsive men.  All of the violence in these books comes from varied and infallible institutions of power, whether it's the Vonger family, this family dynasty, whether it's industry, whether it's sex traffickers, whether it's social services who ostensibly are meant to protect. In the case of Salander, they didn't protect, they actually failed to own over again. But for me, I think that the series really sort of highlights the banality of misogyny and harassment. Because most of, you know, in the real world, everyday real world, a lot of the harassment and violence that we see is, it is banal. It takes very, very rarely, if ever, does it reach the levels that we see in these books where women are mutilated so graphically in great detail as described by Larsen. This banality exemplifies itself in how, in the workplace, particularly the workplaces where men are in majority and the discrimination oppression women face in those situations, we saw it very strikingly in the Dominic Strauss Con case, where you had a white male figure, a very easily identifiable villain in these dynamics, you had a white male villain and then you had a black African working class survivor who, in the process, at least in terms of media representation, becomes voiceless as this typical in many situations of harassment or abuse, and Michael highlighted this, is individuated. And by that I mean, you know, a lot of times media coverage and readers or consumers of that coverage, we look for reasons to explain why it happened in that particular case. What made this special? How was this person different from me? What excuses can I find so that what happened to this person or what this perpetrator did is not the norm. And it somehow serves to affirm or provide comfort to the majority of men who don't harass, who don't abuse, don't oppress, at least not overtly, but do nothing about it, who are apathetic or somehow powerless to prevent or stop it, much like Larsen was at adolescence. I'm going to stop there because I do have some more points, but I want to actually respond to some of the things that Michael said in the conversation. Thank you. Let's go back to Michael for a second. You talked a little bit about the proto-feminist. I think it would be good to put a little more meat around that phrase. Can you elaborate a little bit more about what the proto-feminist would be like today? You mean like a pro-feminist masculinity, I mean, what it would be like now? Yes. Okay. Let me just say something about the term, okay? Yes. Because I'm asked this a lot. I suppose other people, Joe, you probably asked this a lot. Why don't you just call yourself a feminist? And to me, I think I've thought about this a lot over the years in the organizations that I've been involved with. I call myself pro-feminist in part because I think that feminism, politically, feminism really requires that you share one empirical observation. And from that empirical observation, you take a moral position. The empirical observation is really easy. Women and men aren't equal. That's the empirical observation. And I would suspect that virtually everybody in this room suspects that that's largely the case. The moral position is very simple also, and they should be. That's really all you need to support feminism. One empirical observation, one moral position. But to call yourself a feminist, I think for me, I always felt that that would be indulging in what I like to call premature self-congratulation. It's kind of like a little bit too hasty and a little bit too easy. I think in order to be a feminist, one has to experience that inequality in a particular way. And I don't. I'm privileged by gender inequality, not privileged by it. So it would be just as presumptuous for me to say that I'm a gay liberationist or a black militant, as it would be to say I'm a feminist, for the same reason. I think it would be appropriative. So rather than say that, I think, you know, look, I mean men have an important place in the movement for gender equality. I firmly believe that. But I don't think we can be the cavalry. I don't think we say, well, thanks for bringing this to our attention, ladies, but we'll take it from here. You know, I don't think we ride to the rescue. I think we are the gentleman to auxiliary. And I think that's a really honorable place to be. And so I call myself pro-feminist as a way to say I'm the support network. I'm the cheerleader for this. But it's not me. I don't claim to be that. I felt that way. I actually have to say, you know, when I was one of the founders of the National Organization for Men Against Sexism, you know, almost 30 years ago, I thought I felt this way. But I have to say now, you know, feminism has come under such relentless assault as a term for so long that I kind of loosened up a little bit about it. If a guy wants to stand up and say he's a feminist, I'm like, I'm down with that. It's really interesting as I go around to colleges around the country, and I really love talking to the students. But that word feminism is just such a hard word for them to put their arms around. And it's when we break it down and say, are you for equal pay for equal work? Every hand goes up, yes, I'm for equal pay for equal work. Are you for parity in the ability to run for office or something like that? Yes, everyone's for that. So then what's wrong with the word feminist? You know, everybody seems to embrace the word but have some difficulty with it. And Michael, you know, when you say an empirical observation and then a moral observation, I think that's great. I think that's really a great way of putting it because if people would, if men would say, you know, we aren't equal. And we start there. I think then there's a lot that can be accomplished after that. I like that very much. So man-up organization, Jimmy, do you discuss current events and what's going on with Dominic Strascon and that he got off the hook in America and facing things in France and kind of probably will get away with it there too. But that's the short range. I think the long range effect of what he went through is going to be significant for women and for men going forward. Is this the kind of thing you discuss with your man-up group? We do. And I was just thinking something that Michael said that men can't be the cavalry because I agree, I don't think men should be the cavalry, but at the same time, I think that men should and probably could easily say that, you know, there's not, that equality does not exist. But I think that the issue is, that's not the issue. I think the issue is helping men understand, creating the space to understand, to talk about why they should care that there's no equality. Men know there's no equality. And amongst themselves, they may even be pushed to say that. But I think it's a matter of curing why there's not equality and what impact it has on them individually and collectively. And it's really, you know, that's why I said the term before, anti-masculinist, which I think maybe could be synonymous with pro-feminist when men say it because I think that term anti-masculinist, it's really upending and challenging what manhood means and really offering and affirming alternative masculinities.   You know, almost to the point where I won't say it makes them weak or, you know, in terms of sexual terms, de-sexualizes it, but it really, it's a very stark contrast to what we're normally seeing. In terms, to your question, in terms of man up and even beyond man up, and Joe does, it's similar in the same, in the same word, in talking with young people, especially young men, adolescents, high school students, a lot of times, you know, you're having to struggle against this overwhelming, consuming tide of pop culture, whether it's music or literature, especially visual pop culture, videos and movies, which affirms this traditional negative masculinity, which becomes very easy for them. And the more power, the less power they have, whether, you know, or perceived less power, whether it's because of color or economics or geography, whatever language, you know, what society tells them is that, you know, when everything else, if you can't achieve power in these other pathways, financial, political, so forth, you always have your physicality and your sexuality. And that's what they hold on to that very tightly. So it's really, you know, it's really a painstaking process, and I was talking to Joe before about how, you know, the work that his organization is doing, the wonderful work they're doing is intergenerational, because it takes time to break down that profound socialization that happens really from birth, especially for young men. And Joe's organization, again, is men can stop rape. Michael? I wanted to just respond very quickly to something that you said, Linda, and then something that Jimmy has said, both in his first remarks and then just now.  They say, you know, it's your generation's issue. We won, you know. We've inherited it all of it. We can do anything we want. It's over, you know.  And then the butt is, as you say, you know, they actually agree with everything. If you gave a kind of top 10 policy initiatives that feminism offers, they would agree with every one of them, but they're not feminist. So I just want to say, I'm an activist and I'm an academic. And as such, temperamentally, I think, you know, as an activist and as an academic, as a professor, I'm an optimist. You know, it's sort of, it's a temperamental position. You know, I have to believe the world can get better. And I, so I focus on the butt part, not the, I'm not a feminist part. But I agree with everything they stand for. You know, that's not so bad. You know, glass is still half full. And I think we often do ourselves a disservice by saying that we focus on that I'm not a feminist part of the phrase. But I want to say something else about, to me, you said, Jimmy, that really struck me.  And then you and you were talking about Anita Hill. Clearly, every, you know, we all recognize now, 20 years later, that that was a turning point in the conversation about gender in the United States.  They did surveys, half of Americans believed her, half of Americans believed him. You know, now that it's like 88% believe her, the conversation changed as a result of her. And DSK, I think what you're saying is something really interesting. And that is the level at which his behavior, and this is uncontradicted, whether or not he did, you know, it was consensual with this maid or not, ridiculous, is he thought of it, basically it came, it was a perk that came with his position. It was the routinization of that behavior in every single hotel, with every single female intern, with every single female, you know, person that he came in contact with in any position. But it was a perk. As did Bjorman, the guardian in the trilogy. As does Teleborian. This notion that, well, of course I have sexual access to you. I have power over you. So it gives me that kind of routinized sexual access. And I think if you're, I think you're right. I think you're on to something here, that this may be a real turning point, not in the naming of harassment, but in actually exposing the routinized quality of men's sense of entitlement to women's bodies. And if that's the case, it will have served an enormously salutary sort of function in pushing that conversation forward. Twenty years from now, we're gathered here, and everybody says, you know, that DSK case, he got off, as did Thomas, he got off, but it changed the conversation. I think it'll have been a really valuable, you know, moment. I told you I'm an optimist. And I think it's important. I was at that Anita Hill conference, and boy, it was fantastic. How many of you here were at that? It really was breathtaking, I think, in its reach going forward. I think it's not only the men that accept male privilege, but the women, look, his wife said, so my husband's a seducer. I mean, all men, or all politicians, I think she said, are seducers. So we're all kind of buying into this ordinariness of privilege, male privilege. I was going to say the same thing a little bit. It's true, Anita Hill's, Clarence Thomas' wife defended him. DSK's wife stood by and defended him. But I was going to say, even just here, boiling down further here in this city, I think there are lessons that can be drawn and paralleled with Blomkwist and Larson's analysis through the emergence of the Slutlock. Yes, very much. Very interesting because early this year, two NYPD officers acquitted of someone who was intoxicated. And there was a certain conversation around that fast forward several months most recently with the sexual perpetrator here in Brooklyn. And the remarks and attitude of some within the New York Police Department that women should not wear short skirts, or they should cover their legs. And I think, again, it goes back to the modality question of, it is easy to look at Clarence Thomas or Dominic Strauss-Kahn, but I think the modality happens, and the average person and not just our attitudes, but how we do or don't support women and their choice of dress and their behaviors and our reaction amongst ourselves with those forces that would seek to dictate a particular gender role for them. Yes. Position to put all these baby blues on him and his black leather and tattoo, which Eva Gabberson, his Stig Lawson's companion, called Warrior Paint. So the filmmakers really went out of their way to reverse stereotypes. Would young men today, or maybe older men, see this as weakness, see Blunkfest as weak? Maybe passive. I don't know. It's hard because one thing is, as I said before, he really, I forget the phrase that Michael used, he's really the auxiliary. He's the auxiliary support to Salander. I mean, he's not holding accountable directly for this hyper surreal violence that they're committing against the female characters. I think this is an empirical question, being a sociologist, because as you know, you just watched clips from the Swedish movies, and most of what you watched actually was from the book one. It was all from the book one. All from the first movie, because in the second movie, she gets more punky and she saves her head, she gets a mohawk and she does a lot more. So this is the Swedish version. And in this version, you see Blunkfest in Baby Blue. He cooks with his children. He's passive sexually. He lives there. She fucks him. He wants to cuddle afterwards. She doesn't. Now, here's the question. This is coming out around Christmas time this year. Around Christmas time will be the American version, because Hollywood does not trust the American viewer to actually read subtitles. So they're actually going to have a trilogy of these movies in an Americanized version. So here's the empirical question. How will they image Blunkfest? Now, it's clear that they have an already made audience of young women that they think that they can spike up and punk up Elizabeth. But the question is, can they possibly get away with this Swedish, this Scandinavianized, nurturing, cuddly, passive masculinity, or will they have to butch him up? It's an empirical question, and I offer it to you as sort of when you go to the movies, check that out, because my hypothesis, he's not going to be wearing a baby blue v-neck. I agree with you. How many in the audience think they're going to butch McHale up in that next movie? And how many think that they're going to make more of a sexual object of salad? I'm almost afraid to see the movie. Well, we'll see. Come December. Don't make it much hotter. Yes. Well, they've already done that. I mean, there was a controversy earlier over the poster choice. Yes. You know, in the American version, Hooney Mara who plays Celander, you know, the poster image is a very provocative, seemingly sexual one, and also the casting of Blomquist. I mean, it's Daniel Craig. Daniel Craig is not this person and the Swedish interpretation. Even if he is in a powder blue v-neck sweater, it's not the same.  Otherwise, why cast him in that role? He's macho. Exactly. I'm almost afraid to see this next movie. There's a part of me that doesn't want to see it. But then again, you know, I'm curious and just to be able to say how bad it is, I guess I have to see it. So this is extremely, extremely interesting. So if we were to say that McHale is not weaker in this movie, he is, in fact, his ego is strong enough so he could wear baby blues and be a little bit more passive so that we don't use the word passive as a negative for masculinity. And we say that he can listen to her when she's smarter or more informed in some way and that doesn't make him less manly. There are other things that you would say for this new prototype of masculinity or what we're aiming for, what women would like, you know, but from a man's point of view, sorry, Shelby's not here, she would offer a 20s view of this also but she's in North Carolina now, her plane got canceled. So if we were to define this really strong, positive masculinity, what kind of words would you use? So that they're not weak, so that men don't feel weak by this? I think in the language, something Michael said when you think about this, we were talking about pro-feminist and feminist because maybe passive, passive isn't the right description for this character because that does convey at least a weakness in character. I'm not sexually passive in that scene that we saw. She walks in, she says, and he's sort of like, what? He's like surprised, like what's happening? He kind of seems to get into it but we're not clear, she comes, she leaves, we're not sure what happened with him. Talk about gender reversal. She doesn't even ask, was it good for you? She doesn't really care. She's gone.  But a little bit more throughout because she kind of takes the lead in solving the mystery and because she has this photographic memory and she's so assertive. I was trying to remember the name from yesterday. Yesterday there was a conference on masculinity. Cuny had it, the grad center. Anybody there from, yes I know Magda was there. And one woman, Jen Gabori was the name I was thinking of. She said, she talked about, now I never saw her, Betty Draper on TV. How many of you have seen this Betty Draper?  I think that's one of the things that so many women find so attractive in this trilogy that, gee, finally after, you know, seeing all those movies whether the girl or the woman is raped or battered or victimized in some way, here is a defender with agency and power and smarts and like Wonder Woman she doesn't have the lasso and the magic wristbands but she has all these other accoutrements of power, this photographic memory. I was going to say something, you know, I think in a way, maybe we're, I think we're talking around something by talking about active and passive and agentic and it takes them, you know, it takes them, you know, 1,800 pages but by the end of the book and if you remember how the different how the different mysteries and thriller parts resolve in book one, she comes in with the golf club, she rescues him. She's aware of his plight. She rescues him. At the end of the third book he rescues her. He's aware of her plight. He intervenes for her in a way that is quite unintrusive but quite, you know, but helps. And maybe what we're really talking about here is mutual dependency that they have to both acknowledge second, that they are friends and friends are equals. Think about friends, you know, we make friends with people who we consider our peers, not, you know, our servants and our bosses and maybe that that is what, it takes them 1,800 pages to actually get to the moment when he shows up at our apartment and we're actually witnessing a relationship that is founded on gender equality. They are mutually dependent. They acknowledge each other's strengths. There's no sexual tension any longer between them, right?  It takes them a long time to get there but they actually have recognized that they depend on each other. And it does, and needing doesn't require power. I love that, and I love that about state loss. Now, can we have that between a husband or wife? Could we have that where sex is involved? That, that's the goal, or one of the goals anyway. How about if we, unless Jimmy, did you have anything else? I guess for me, you know, I agree with Michael. I mean one of the things that just really hung you up, maybe partly because of my own personal experience with seeing violence in this woman here and abroad, I guess I just was thrown by the violence at the end of the trilogy. Because I felt like, I kept wrestling with myself, you know, there is this powerful female figure, thankfully, but I wasn't sure about the message that Larissa was telling women and telling men in the context of this violence. Yeah, I have this conversation with friends. I respect a lot. And the conversation from that point goes like, why would women mimic the worst in men?  Why? And it is a conundrum and I kind of wrestle with it myself. And that's why I said she defines herself Liz Salander by her own sense of morality. So this is a question of morality here. And I agree with those that say, well, why should women be violent like this? Isn't there another way? And I'm struggling with it. Maybe there will be some answers in the audience. Michael, did you want to say anything else? Otherwise I'd like if you would be a little different with us. How many have seen the trilogy? How many have seen all three? Okay. Ellie Flomenhoft, you had a question. That's great. Yeah. Right. You made your point anyway though. That's a very, very good point. That's a great, great question. That's a big question. Obviously we recognize maybe it's not obvious that justice is gendered. There is obviously the levels of impunity particularly as one the thing of one's social position and level of power. The degrees of impunity increase. I mean, I think I totally forgot about the Martha Stewart case. I guess because in my mind I'm distinguishing gender-based violations from financial ones. I mean, and I think there are examples of men going to prison as well for financial violations. But you don't see many men going to prison, especially at the high level of power where gender is concerned or harassment or sexual abuse. That's the problem because so many, I mean from almost some birth boys and then men are socialized that if you can get away with it why not do it? And society has enough examples of men getting away with it not just Donnie Strauss-Kahn but everyday citizens. I mean, women are so stigmatized that it's coming forward in the first place which is another reason why society is so profound. But as we see in some situations most recently with Dominic Strauss-Kahn becomes a he said, she said. You know, and somehow the perpetrator's narrative consumes that of the survivor. You know, we try to find as I said before, we try to find excuses for why why this happened. Strauss-Kahn was the president of IMF potential candidate for president France. There's no way he would, you know, sink to having to assault a domestic, especially a domestic from West Africa and that doubt starts to grow in your mind and then of course you know, because she wasn't the perfect victim you know, that gave us the easy out to kind of let it go away. But at the end, he was the perfect victim I mean, huge, the perfect witness.  I just want to say very quickly, I think your point is really well taken. I think you know, the Martha Stewart part it's a little bit complicated because Martha Stewart held herself up as somehow a moral arbiter of how people should behave and what good you know, being a good nurturer family caregiver would look like and we love to see people who hold themselves up as above us. We love to see them fall so in a way it was a little bit pushed by that but your larger point I think is quite telling and let me offer a counter anecdote that illustrates your point also and the point I want to make is that sexism is still so much more readily permitted than even racism is so let me give you one illustration of this because I think it's part again of the rootinization of this, you know, you shrug your shoulders boys will be boys, this is what guys do you know, everyone in power this is how they behave. Now some of you, you know, you probably it's hard for us in this kind of climate to remember that we actually had a primary competition in 2008 you know, before the the past three years of relentless assault on you know anything that resembled democratic politics um and during the primaries do anybody remember this during the primaries there was a moment at a Hillary Clinton rally when two men held up a sign that said go iron my shirt now how many of you remember that from the primaries a few of you now that's because it got virtually no media coverage at all it was absolutely sort of you know, quickly but there were these two guys that held up a sign at a Hillary Clinton rally and said go iron my shirt now what I'd like to ask you to do for a moment is to imagine if two white guys got up at an Obama rally and said go shine my shoes I think every, it would have been front page on every single newspaper, it would have been the lead story on every single evening news and every single candidate including John McCain would have said whoa, stop everything that's wrong because racism is still at least somewhat more visible and somewhat less permitted than sexism sexism was so routinized that that passed without even mention that only four or five of you even remember the event but I bet if that had happened in the other way everyone would have known about it yeah, very good point and if the Rutgers basketball players were white and Rush Limbaugh called whatever what? but the nappy headed hose and that whole racist comment got tremendous publicity so Ellie, your point is very well made and I think with DSK most people believe that he has a history of committing whatever we want, womanizing sexual abuse, I mean there's various takes on it but most people believe he at least has a problem with that some people call him an addict but however one defines that for oneself but what happened with the woman is that they picked all these little things that she did wrong and forgot the big picture that yes, this man probably did commit some kind of sexual assault in that room the survivor is thought to a higher standard than the perpetrator she had a lot of missteps in his background but because she made the mistakes that was enough to to color everything any other questions? yes, Judith Lawman yeah, with love and over and over again I mean I don't believe it very very much it's just, you know again also Stig Lawson might be saying that that the new man of the day we call him can be sought after by women and not be not have all these macho qualities I agree with you Michael, did you have a thought? sure I don't think that we disagree all that much Judith I think that the I think that the point that Lawson is trying to make is exactly what Linda just said you can be the new man which is to say more nurturing, more caregiving more cuddly, all of those things that we see and in fact that makes you even more desirable to the women so the new man is certainly is no less desirable but I think in the relationship with Lisbeth he recognizes that in order to be a real equal to her he recognizes as well that he's just company at that moment so that's all I was sort of arguing at that point I think there is a contrast between the predatory, entitled violent sexualities of the other men who hate women and then Blomkvist on the other hand and also by the way I think his name is Svensson the journalist who's killed in the book who has a very egalitarian relationship with his graduate student partner and it's quite explicitly stated that their gender equals so that's another a case sort of an example of that new masculinity that Lawson is trying to describe as terms of whether or not I think it's a semantic question at this point what I think we want I think what we need are to engage men to step up and recognize that gender equality is actually in their interest as men whether they, what they call themselves in so doing is not as much of an interest to me as the fact that they do it so the book that I just did with Michael Kaufman the guy's guide to feminism is really basically a book basically saying look guys, feminism is not that scary it's not really that complicated even you can understand this until we have a kind of lighthearted funny book about it it's just, I think the point is not what we call ourselves in that engagement the point is the engagement I think just as we're getting so many gender fluid terms and gender fluidity is is redefining masculinity and femininity I think it will be so different for a kid that's 4 years old today when he or she becomes a teenager it's going to be so different because I think our definitions of masculinity and what one needs to be masculine and the pressure we put on men men have this terrible set of rules they have to follow in order to be manly I think we're going to see a real change and I think the book you wrote probably is going to help it a lot Michael Magda Magda Thanks Magda Thank you so much for your comments I think some things just going back to the semantics conversation I think I agree with Michael that it's really about the actual transformation or the semantics itself I think semantics do matter because at least with the young men that I work with and talk to it's hard to say to them I'm going to work with you to become a feminist they shut down language doesn't matter especially in conversations like this men or young men don't see it as relating to them because of language they hear certain buzzwords like feminism or euphemisms like violence against women or interpersonal violence and they become so gendered they feel like it's not my issue especially if they don't see themselves as perpetrators or abusers they really don't feel like you're talking about them and so I feel like the semantics of it doesn't matter it's fine maybe a new term for men who support an ally with feminist and with women and stand up for them with women but I think the issue at your point is in terms of parenting and mentoring and Jill knows it's better than I do we're really working against this huge wave this all consuming wave that drenches all of us ourselves included with this negative masculinity and manhood and one of the things that I've been learning and we're doing with man up is we keep going younger and younger at first we started off working with high school age students now we're in middle school and hopefully the next year or two we'll be in elementary school because personally I feel like to start a conversation about equality and leadership and advocacy with high school students it's a positive thing but it's almost too late because by that point the adults they've been socialized 16, 17, 18 years it just takes that much more time to enact the transformation I think from the beginning when there are boys and girls we have to work with both of them individually and collectively in terms of interpersonal relations and issues of equality and it has to come from parents but in the absence of parents it has to come it has to be reinforced by the society of that child I mean if we're going into schools and making stop rape does this beautifully if we're going to schools and working through clubs academic situations the same message we're talking in the educational setting has to be reinforced at home it has to be reinforced on Sunday at church that's being reinforced by the peer group it has to be reinforced by pop culture it can't just be that hour once a week or twice a week because the message it may not stick it may not last and the conversation has to continue and as I went around to the colleges after a lecture one guy raised his hand said okay I get it what do you want me to do you know and this young woman raised a hand frantically and said look here's one thing you could do every time I go out on a date the guy does all the talking I'm not given a chance to say anything he doesn't even care about what I do or what I think one thing you could do and then she stood up like this and said one thing you could do is just listen a little bit more and so the conversation and groups like man up and what not is so so important and I have a question do you think this conversation is best held in gender segregated groups do you think the men open up more if it's boys only and the girls open up more if it's girls only or are you able in men against rape and men up well I guess yours is mostly a man's group so it is segregated to that extent I mean men can stop raping and Jo should be able to space this kind of a talk as well but men up is actually coed it is coed with young men and young women together but I know men can start rape it's mainly solely male kind of I'm agnostic on this question I've gone around on it for such a long time I think it's different and so what I would add is I think it made perfect sense from the 1970s to now for women to get together in sex segregated groups to talk about the kind of experiences that they have but it doesn't transfer willy-nilly to men in the same way that of course people of color would get together to talk about race issues but you know if you have a kind of like white group you know if you have a white group it's different from having a whiteness group that is to say if you have a group of white people talking about being white what you end up is we have it so hard it's unbelievable do you know what pressure we're under all the time and you know this as well as I do in May a big study came out that found that a higher percentage of white people in America believe that they are the victims of racial discrimination than black people so you know you have no idea how hard we have it man so that's one and I think men's groups had that kind of same quality which is when you get together it becomes a kind of fetch-fest but a whiteness group takes as its core principle racial privilege and starts there and says how does it feel what is your experience of having privilege now a men's group that would take as its core position and I have an idea of how to do this a men's group that would take as its core moment of origin men's privilege would be I wouldn't be opposed to that and the only way I believe we could do that is if it had men of different sexualities different races and different ethnicities and different ages and the reason is because then people would not be speaking from positions of privilege exclusively but also have some kind of movement between privilege and marginality so under those circumstances only because I'm asked this question all the time I testified for the government in the VMI and Citadel case so people would ask me are you against Wellesley and of course the answer is it's quite different when women a men's group is speaking to women it's a challenge to inequality and an all men's group can and often has been a way to perpetuate it but I want to can I just come back to one thing okay I wanted to address something that Magda said earlier and something that you said as well I'm the researcher so I want to tell you first I want to say that here's the bad news and I have some good news is this generation the current generation this is how much work we have to do the current generation of college age men subscribe to pretty much the same ideology of masculinity if you ask them we just did this some of my graduate students here we just did this the other day in class they had the same idea of what it means to be a man that I did when I was in college my dad did when he was in college it's really remarkable being stoic and shut down so there's the bad news that on the one hand the abstract ideology of what they think it means to be a man remains relatively the same here's the good news I think you're quite right Linda in the sense that we are coming to a moment in which these two forces are going to clash on the one hand they have very traditional ideas about masculinity if you ask them their abstract ideas about it on the other hand my male students survey after survey show they expect fully assume that their wives and partners will be equally committed to their careers as they are there's no more will you let your wife work for mad men sort of thing that's number one number two they fully expect and assume that they will be really involved fathers that's two and three they all have experience the biggest change going on among young people they all have experience with cross sex friendships 25 years ago when I started doing this teaching I would ask my students how many of you have a good friend of the opposite sex and I would get maybe 20% now if I get one hand raised when I say how many of you do not have a good friend of the opposite sex it's a surprise they all do and again my point about friendship is you make friends with your peers you have a good adult experience in everyday life of gender equality in a way that previous generations simply did not have now that's the good news it's going to clash with these traditional ideologies at some point and I'm hoping soon and on the garf that I hope you fill out there is that question do you have a cross sex friendship so I really am hoping you fill that out there was a very good point yes but that's a good point yes but it hit a nerve it hit a nerve with women that were not abused as well this movie and the trilogy and I think that's significant but we can't forget that she was an abused person yes good point I think her point is a good one about the issue of trauma and gender violence and oppression even with the movements we don't really talk about the response to those real concerns whether or not you've been physically abused or emotionally it does affect the relationships so you come from that PTSD yes we have 5 minutes so is there yes Joe no you yeah last question yes would that we could would that we could last question yes would that we could I like the phrase man that you used earlier when you said humanist I feel like that says it all right there it's self-explanatory it's all encompassing I agree with you because I think this is the whole language a lot of times and then unnecessarily it creates barriers to the work that has to happen I have to say I don't I don't agree and just at the risk of sort of ending this with a little bit of controversy I think it's giving in I think that the right wing has claimed words like the family to be pro-family is somehow to be sort of like anti-LGBT anti-feminist to be pro-boy these days is to be anti-feminist I'm just reluctant to give up the word I think it's valuable and I think it names something and I think it is part of humanism but I'm just reluctant to give it up I think it's giving in to the assault that has happened to feminists and to feminism as an ideology by the Rush Limbaugh's of feminazi world I just won't give up but I won't give it up that quickly but if we're asking men to evolve and transform why can't the language evolve and transform as well I mean why should we ask men to change but then maintain these definitions from 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago I think we change the content not necessarily the form I think we say you don't have to give up being a man you don't have to give up masculinity in order to embrace equality and gender justice and sexual equality you don't have to in fact what we need to do is instead say you know what the package of being a man actually includes things like doing the right thing, speaking truth to power having integrity behaving with honor for me when I was in sixth grade I remember reading Profiles in Courage it was a book that changed my life I read that book and it was about men who stood up, did the right thing and in every case it cost them they didn't get reelected and I thought that's what men do they stand up and do the right thing even if it cost them so I'm saying let's change the content not necessarily the package it comes in but those dignity, integrity, honor, courage, strength those are transcended terms feminism is not a term that transcends for like men I agree but what I'm saying is that so you fill the word with a new content rather than just say the package is wrong let's use a different one this is a great conversation and obviously we don't want to resolve it today but I wanted to throw a wrench into an emergent consensus that we all just want to get rid of the words I think on this note of passion I think we have to thank Michael Kimmel very much and Jimmy Briggs very much and thank you very much for coming out here today and please fill out the forms and Henry would you stand go to the back of the room and give them to Henry thank you


What's up everybody once again is Brandman Sean and we're here with the first of a new interview series called Brand or Die where we talk about people who have impactful brands have been a part of building impactful brands and have interesting insight on branding in and of itself. So first and foremost I gotta reintroduce you because it's not his first time on the Brandman channel to keep Dorsey. What's up man? Man, I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Everything's good. Hey man, like you have, you have managed what at this point you said about 20 influencers connected with you know 40 plus influencers of course the Robby worlds, Lit Twins and now you've even moved into management. You have in a very social world right a very social media landscape you have one of those unique perspectives where we hear so much on the front end from I want to be an influencer, I want to be an artist but you're one of those guys behind the scenes that have been able to help get an impact from not just the views but make money. And obviously you're needed because so many people don't know how to make that connection so I'm interested to hear first and foremost what, what made you get into it knowing that Robby world was a friend of yours but what made you truly pursue it and say I see this as a true business? Well, I guess the budget's got, the promos got bigger and more started to come and it was, it came, it started to be more just like a little oh can you shout me out type of thing like brands started to reach out. And what really shifted like everybody knows my story see my other videos of how like Robby world is my best friend and how he began to blow up on Vine and the rest is history. But like it really started to hit when I got my first budget from Atlantic Records the biggest bucket from a budget from Atlantic Records and we actually met Jordan and Justin over at, I met them at Rolling Loud in Miami that's why I will forever go to every Rolling Loud in Miami for the rest of my life because we met them there and then we got a big budget for Shulal Mafia and I was like wow and they say how much is it gonna cost for the main ones and I sent them this, this budget that was at this time a big budget and they approved it and I was like wow this is for real. This is for real so y'all we need to tighten up and we need to really start doing more of this and start and then it's like that's, it's a business now. You know a few promos that come to their DM for like smaller music artists that just want to put the song in the skit but that really hit all at once I was like I can continue to do this all over and over again and I was just, just what I thought for myself but they actually needed it. Like I had one email, one of my influencers, you know they, creators, artists, they don't like to do certain things, they don't like to check their emails so I just went in the email so let's go through this email to see what we get and it was a contact from Journey's. Journey's a shoe store. Journey's, yeah. Okay. One of my influencers that worked with Branding Godfans and I responded to the lady and they say yeah we want to get him out to, I think they flew him out to Philadelphia. Really nice check with other creators and he was in the winter 2017 I believe campaign for Journey's. He was on all the banners and all the stores, all the magazines that they sent out all over the United States. Wow. And that was a big deal and I was like man we have to go higher, we have to go bigger when it comes to this. Okay. And before I get into this next question I want to say it's not me, I mean it's not you, it's me. Can you reject a little bit just for the mics and the sakes? Absolutely. I don't know. I want to make sure they're good in the production. For sure. But you mentioned something that was extremely important to me. You said this isn't just like posting, paying for promo, this is a real business. How do you know that it's that transition or can anybody who's already getting a certain amount of, hey can you pay for my for a shout out type thing, can those people just transition into the business, how do you make that transition happen? Well I truly believe that anybody can do it, it's how you go about it. You can get a promo and it's like oh I'll just throw it up but let's really sit and think about how I can make this promo very creative and how I can put my thought into it and how you handle like oh yeah let's just do, just send me the money on Cash App. No, I had to send you an invoice. So it's just how you handle the situation. How you carry yourself.  You know if you look at it that way you'll start to attract the bigger things. Okay so you have to take the quality in mind, you have to start building the portfolio and then handle those back end systems like invoicing things like that so you can look legit to that other side of it. Even for myself to add this in, for a while and it worked, I was using a Gmail but now I got a business that's influencers at KeithDorsi.com and I realized like a lot of these bigger agencies won't even accept emails from a Gmail account overspun and now since I have my business email everything's looked like okay these people are running the business and it makes me as a manager to when I'm trying to negotiate things for them it makes me look professional like we know what we're doing. Got you. So that small stuff is very small, it can be a deck, a media kit, all that it just changes everything. I think it's important to hear because at that point people who already have a certain level of business things like that like getting your own email it's not that expensive right but when you're coming from an mentality of I'm just trying to make money and I'm trying to save money at the same time you really want to know is that really worth it because I'm still getting emails but that stuff like that too it really isn't a thing. Okay I mean that even makes me think about some of the emails that I use on certain parts of the business where I go. So what for you especially what's well actually you can kind of touch on this but it brings me back to the idea of the brand for the fans right and the consumer side of things and the brand in terms of dealing with business, the professional brand. How different are each of those things and how what's the polish look like on each side? Well it is a big difference now I always learn by trial and error when I first started to submit to labels like I used to like just send the links copy and paste but then they will come back these people didn't know shout out to Max at 300 ENT when I first actually started to do this they would respond and say could you put it together in like a PDF for me. So I had to polish it up and say actually create a deck that had all their pictures I spent like hours on this thing on publisher on my Mac and put their analytics together put this together and put their best in it and not just that but not doing pictures they took on the phone with professional photos headshots you know taking the Getty Image photos that they've gotten over the over the past year and put those things in there and polishing it up it changed it just it makes the presentation like everything's about presentation. You know even when we come into a when I bring them to certain places like the presentation of how you walk into the room how you guys work together even if when it comes on a going on a plane because people realize that. What does that mean what does that look like I like the fact that I mean it shows that you actually you know you do this like because you have such small details that you think about and notice what does that mean how we walk into a room. I make them look like the stars that they are so when we come in we're just not doing anything looks like okay they're on a mission they're their their book to be here you know they're already famous people know them but it's how we move about like I make sure that we're all together and we're there's different activations in the room I'll make sure that they're doing the activations they're taking the pictures I'll see who the photographers are even when it comes to music who see who the DJs are and get people who just watched different things and how I know because I get feedback even when it comes as small as it became like so subliminal now because on the plane we travel together like we always travel together and I had this it was kind of weird but there is this girl that sat next to me on the plane and like the day next day I got a DM for her I was like who is this she was like oh she sent this long message I don't know who you guys are but I saw how you work with with your with your group and how much how you took care of them how you made sure that they had their seats first how you make sure that it was just that small so I was like wow it was creepy at first but I was like how did she follow my Instagram but that happens all the time and people see they see me not necessarily demanding them to do things but how I'm working with them like pulling them to this like I'll do this all the time like this is what we're gonna do I prepped them before but this is what we're gonna do you're gonna walk into the room it's gonna be interviews as a red carpet this is how you do your red carpet because a lot of them is their first time doing this stuff it's new for them like I had two the two girls that I worked with their mom famous Ocean and Kung Fu they have a hit song called savage out call active get active and we were able to get activated through Fresh Empire for the BT hip-hop awards in Atlanta they booked them to come there and they walked through a carpet they had never done anything like that before on that scale so I say hey this is what y'all want to do when you're doing interviews you need to make sure that you're listening so it's like a development in a way you know and people really kind of noticed that so so I'm gonna switch gears a little bit because obviously there's all that that goes into management but when we get into the things that people see on the front end that people get so curious about influences from and that's these platforms from the artist standpoint from an influencer standpoint where how do you look at Instagram first and foremost because we hear everybody knows that most people are on there but then you hear people like Gary V saying Instagram is going down and then we start talking about other platforms how do you look at Instagram and what's the actual impact you've seen it had have on your business and moves well Instagram is definitely a household name and just like wake up in the morning is it is this automatically in that thing like you want to go to your team you want to check your Instagram that's pretty much I try to have your Instagram was to be tech your tech messages Facebook and Instagram you know but the thing is it's been big for us it's it has its own ups and downs like the algorithm you know but if you study it and you create make it a business and you make it a lifestyle and you keep up with it then you'll you'll go with the flow just like one of things oh we're removing views and likes everybody else going crazy my team we're studying it we look at it was like well it's going to be like story I was gonna hurt our brand and what won't because guess what you still get story promos and all the companies want to do is see the analytics now you know it's nothing's going to change so we're we have to be on top of you have to study it you got to be ahead of the curve because it's in it for me for business like I make sure it also helps me connect with other creators to like I easily can connect so easily like I have so many DMs especially from artists now who want to work with me I have I build relationships with other micro influencers and also artists who small but they have really good potential so I don't necessarily work with them like I keep the relationship I give them some tips and ideas is what you need to do I'm looking at your page you know so I'll do some free consult you know but it helps me to connect help me to actually stay relevant as well and for me knowing what's going on like it's my business to go down the timeline and see what's going on see what's going viral so I can filter that back to my group and to my life as well it also helps me with with business because I don't when other companies hit me up to hey when do this campaign all right this thing is going viral so let's use this when when it's time to create to help blow whatever product or brand that they have do you think there'll be any point where it starts to fall in terms of almost like a bubble right we know influencers become more and more expensive on a platform like Instagram over time as they start to learn the game they were super underpriced now they learn you know then they start to charge more as they get bigger more money comes in but then when Instagram starts to mess with this algorithm and of course if you're like you right y'all are learning it which like anybody should be doing that artist or whoever if you're serious about it you should take that approach but just a general macro perspective of it is let's go with other platforms so what do you think the price that y'all or a lot of influencers will have to charge will go down or what I think it's very competitive now okay because especially with a lot of labels like they some of them are like tight budgets but my group like tell them to adjust to who it is like we like Warner contacted us through TIG you think it's a game through Lucia's label and for her artist named POSA and they told me that we only have a thousand like we have more of course but we want to start with a thousand because I want to test it out so I said usually roughly a lot of the bigger ones they only got like maybe 300 dollars for the post and usually no less than 700 750 to a thousand and 2500 but I said you know just work with me they're gonna test it out they're gonna come back with more they did and guess what they did they came back with more so my group knows how to adjust and not just oh if it's not 5,000 for the post I'm not doing it you know depending on who it is you know now if it's somebody that's like small and like then of course they have to just kind of wait but they even if they are small they still work with them and they sometimes they they just do it because they like the song you know or they like the product but it just like I hate it because there are some influences who are just like aos and they just won't do anything if it's not like you don't have to do that you never know what's gonna happen you never know this person can blow up and then they're big artists and then now you like damn I missed out on opportunity I could have just posted it wrong like you're gonna make content anyway so just take the money you know I know you're not gonna undermine yourself like oh $50 for now you know but sometimes you just have to kind of work with people because it is it is super competitive there's a lot of influencers that are they're are getting paid and they are figuring it out so my group while we create long term like we've been working with these labels in these brands for years because they know how to just when it comes to price so that makes a huge difference I'm hearing because I definitely like doing influence and marketing things like that I've definitely ran into people or been working on something for an artist and seeing them hit a certain number or or the people say hey you got this and if you don't have that for that budget they don't even respond or like now this is it this is it and you know some people will do like test campaigns and things like that but what you said made me really think about is the fact that that long-term relationship over time yeah of course like you said you can't do it with everybody because even when people reach out to me for certain for certain things you can't do it with everybody you know DMs get flooded you got to still take care of yourself and what's going on but you never know what's gonna happen with somebody you know and where they're gonna be and also you never know what you're gonna need sometimes you'll have a tighter budget sometimes you'll have a greater budget for you as a manager is that kind of one of your did you feel like you ever had to train influencers to think that way okay because they don't know like a lot of them just blow up out of nowhere they have no business skill they will not respond to stuff they'll just do things very sloppy like a lot of my time I'm like really arguing because they're especially younger ones they don't know but I mean well and they know that and I'm we'll be going at it consistently but it's that and then we'll get to this later but like a lot of them they're like my brothers and sisters so it's like we have a relationship so I can do that like I'm like what y'all doing like I had some few creators over here they released a song but they see him dancing to another song say what the heck y'all here doing y'all release a song y'all even made not one trill on your own song you just done so I get to it like so it's just like I stay on them and I did is that could develop like you have artist development that's influencer development and that's something that we focus on too because I even when it comes to creating the content like make sure that you create it like because like they'll do a lot of things and they'll just put it up and then the people come back and they're like sometimes three or four times and they didn't like it I'm saying we'll put effort into it don't just just because even if it's I don't care if it's even if it's 300 if your $300 project should look just the same as your your your $10,000 project I always give quality no matter what it is and because people it's about your image you know right still they didn't they can't even decipher they don't know oh you got paid 10k for this one exactly like oh that was trashed that was nice keep it consistent and like 100 influencer he posted something and I said he's they always so some of them they have to censor for approval I said you know you know you didn't want to do that he's like you're right you're right I'm gonna redo it I'm like come on just do it right the first time and get out of the way yeah cuz they they a lot of them they so spoiled that they say oh even when it comes to YouTube videos like oh it's just look like a job time like what you don't do nothing you get up from your room now I would say it is work but you rather go work a Taco Bell or you would wake up out of your bed create a dope video and post it and get paid to your PayPal cash shop or whatever or wire transfer and you move on about your day you make a decision okay got you so as you found success personally how how have you changed right and your approach to game and how you see the industry as you start to work more and more with them music cuz you were you doing before music way before this I was I started as a like network marketer okay like I sold like all the superjuices all the weight loss stuff like I already had some of them I have that skills that that's the basis in my last interview I did that was that's the basis of my life I did that since I was 18 for like 10 years so all the personal development like I mean I feel so well I got BMWs from companies like so yeah and I was able to qualify several people on my team so that's where the the personal development came to be able to work with people and be able to cross-cultural communication because the companies were so big we would go like it's so many different international different nationalities a part of the company like I had to learn like always people from Japan these people from here so I had to learn to be able to communicate so that's where the communication came from yeah I mean that's straight up transferable then I can see that already then how have you adjusted as just a business person in general have you thought hey there's this greater level that you want to do with the music like is there still or entertainment is there a higher ceiling that you have there or are you trying to immediately start to flip into outside other industries um well I have other things going on which helps me focus on what I really love like I have an Airbnb business like in different real estate thing so I have other stuff that's operational and I still receive residuals from companies that I've done with network marketing but when it comes to influencers and the music like my goal like I'm shifting into the next level of things I'm learning like at A3C I was really learning like I'm learning from these I have several mentors in the industry that I look up to like you know QC like coach K and Pete I really look up to them to have several other ones that I am super close to like footy over he owns NEA never earlong studios they have artists 24 heavy cash talk in my so literally know they mentor me because I listen when they're talking I'm really listening and that's the thing is I don't know nothing about music I'm really listening even though I'm boo a cunts brother like he works with the girls that I work with as well and like I'm really learning I'm really listening like I'm quiet like I'm not I don't know nothing about music I'm not finished out like I do so they're actually mentor me they don't really know it so it helps me to go to the next level and I ask questions even I'm even working with Jason over at stream cut like I'm literally learning and I like they don't know that when I ask a question I'm listening you know and I'm gonna apply that so it helps polish me because I am going higher like my goal for 2020 is to get at least three of them signed to a deal three of the artists influences a lot of every one that I work with our influencers they just started to do you music now and it yeah some of the music and it's they're really talented they're really streams of going like it famous ocean conclude like their song savage has over a million streams on Apple music and like 900k on Spotify like they release this stuff and then one of the videos has four million views on music videos four million views on YouTube so they release stuff it's good and they put the same quality of working as like these bigger artists in and how the industry is a lot of the artists big artists or trying to do the social media trying to get the social media but they already got it so a lot of labels are signing them just because of that and they're getting bigger deals and the best deals that make sense because they bring our value yeah so for me what changed me like I'm shifting from this all just doing this to creating a solid management company in a solid label to where the ones who are managing I'll be able to shift them to the label and getting you know how all those different layers of things work however that works I'm still learning it's gonna happen trust me because a lot of them already being contacted by and I'm facilitating a lot of a lot of the label stuff when it comes to that so I want to ask you about a business philosophy because it sounds like it's what you're doing or how you think right primarily you work within the influencer market with translating that into music right and it sounds like that's the business that takes most of your day-to-day attention yes and but then you mentioned other things you're doing Airbnb business the residual income from network marketing and maybe any other thing it sounds like you have put energy into other things but the other thing where you put your money elsewhere it doesn't require your attention is that correct right so it's like you always want to have unlimited like streams of income multiple streams of income so I for the first part of my life I focus on one thing and then guess what it begins to become a base and every now and then I'll just kind of like go in and do small things to kind of keep it going the Airbnb business like it's just automatic for me like it's really easy to do as long as I make sure that I'm managing it but this is like my main focus because things go up and down excuse me even when it comes to the influencers there's different phases of different markets like sometimes it's high market like like first of the year spring summer summer like boom it and then like right now it's kind of like it's like it's not super slow it's like not as much because they reach out to me you got any promos no I'm working on them nobody's especially when they have the music industry flows like when it comes to the end of the year nobody's really kind of dropping campaigns because they want to wait to the first of the year to do that run so I'll make sure that like my businesses are because once one business here the other business can hear and keep it going you know and then in the best world all I'm doing you'll be all over the place but you have to put people in place to kind of run different things so like for my Airbnb business I have cleaners that I can hire to come in here and do all these things you know so yeah it is it's super important to make sure you have all that but that helps me focus on because I'm super passionate about the management business and the social media influencer management artists because like everyone I work with there's I've been knowing them for like five years four or five years and because Robby has I've been knowing the longest but I'm it's a passion when it comes to it like I really want to see them win because they're connecting me that's like somebody who I just met not like some people some people actually go out to find people to manage like oh let me go here I'm gonna manage this person no they all came to me or we all knew each other and we figured it staying out that's how do we make this work you know and it becomes a different approach a different passion it hits different when you're you family with who you work with yeah so you it's almost like building from a lifestyle standpoint philosophy it's like I've built my life so I can focus on the areas that I'm most passionate about yep and fortunately the area that you're passionate about is also good business yep exactly okay all right so what do you we've talked about these these platforms and obviously you know tiktok and triller we had that conversation which one do you have a favorite one on one over the other and then if so why in terms of just your personal use not necessarily saying the other platform is bad um when it comes to like ice just starting to really use I like tiktok because you can really get kind of creative triller I like because it's for the it's like more like for the culture like a lot of the artists are using triller and not just to be biased but like the triller of fam messes with us like they work together so like I like I kind of like triller they took us to the office there and we they you know told us about you know and it's simple I like because the platform is very simple and anybody can use it even like an older person can use it and I think that's why a lot of the artists even a lot of the bad veteran artists are jumping on and they can just use it or click this you get the song boom unlike tiktok is like all these different things you got to put all these it's just it's crazy that you really have to learn about once you learn it you'll you'll do it so I mean I would go with triller first because it's it's a lot simple and it's like more for the culture and more really for what we do you know I work with a lot of the dancers you know when it comes to social media and it's the way to go but they're jumping on tiktok now and they're getting a million followers and like a mom going to one of them created as soon as she created she was at 10,000 followers in an hour really yeah I mean did she like announce to the people or she just post she just start posting and announced it once on her story and boom it just started to explode yeah but tiktok is this the next wave I like it because it really can take you to that next level of content but don't ignore triller because it's a result set oh yeah each one is just different it's gonna do something different I believe got you so all right what about YouTube also I got to ask about YouTube yeah definitely YouTube you like YouTube will change your life and it's told it's like nine day though because like I didn't see this come on I had to say it I do it's night day because I deal with a lot of these real-life youtubers and real-life Instagramers and sometimes the youtubers look down on creators like Instagram creators like because it's one of my bros just Shay Frost and like Robbie they were all friends and Shay shout out to the Shay he'll why are you doing this like you just they don't they don't like there's too much work on Instagram they believe for a little of nothing because they see it differently but like if you are a creator you are created a lot of the Instagramers look at the youtubers like oh they look douchebags who do nothing and have no creativity you know so it's like night and day like and they battle each other and it's like clicks like oh this is YouTube click Instagram click oh we don't click together like it's so we're like you'll see this shit like and go to LA you'll notice it but they all still friends but it's like this is like now we have the YouTube exactly so it's like it's night and day but YouTube will I've seen it bro Instagram has changed lives but I've seen a lot of the creators get on YouTube and I mean they're making 20 30,000 a month like I watched the shade like I saw others do this but I watched the Shay like literally go for nothing to jump on buying a new G-Wag moving his family from one part of LA to a best part of LA and we're all apart it's cuz we like we're seeing this and I'm like bro I'm so proud of you just out of nowhere just start to blow up even a lot of the I'm running a lot of the the two girls famous Ocean and Kung Fu the two sisters like they have literally they did nothing they went to they had like almost 300,000 subscribers on YouTube and they didn't even create but they just started to create these dope videos and like one hit we did a prank actually this scar last week came from a prank she did like this prank on her boyfriend he got really mad he was like he's like I tried to get him down and this happened but that video is about to hit a million yeah about to hit a million views is that 600 maybe 700k now in like a few days and that one video has made is making like thousands of dollars and I'm like y'all you see if you create creating can't keep pumping it she pumped the next video it went like 100,000 like two hours like using like keep pumping y'all keep pumping keep pumping cuz that's money entirely y'all have these goals y'all want to buy G wagons y'all want to move your family here y'all want to live in these condos it's so easy to do because YouTube and came to become like that residual base of your life where you know you're going to get 5,000 to 10,000 a month and then you can go and create yeah just all that video and doing those videos that's going to make you go viral they're already going viral just to copy you know it's so easy to do you sit here and put a ring light up and do whatever it is and just pranks challenges vlogs that because people want to their fans can see another perspective of their life they see the inside they really want to watch that you know and that's why YouTube is it's hard though it doesn't convert don't think you're gonna go on Instagram and then blow up your YouTube no it's a whole nother different algorithm it's a whole nother different way of doing things and once you figured it out you could master you could really do some big things with YouTube but I mean then you still have the sponsorship opportunities exactly yep because they just did one for the first time the famous ocean kung fu and they had to do what I'm called lash bae with these lashes and they want it like this 30 second 10 second clip in the front and it was like I was like well it goes in the front as like and it was like how do I say it how do I do it so they mean they got paid a couple of thousands to do that there's a lot of artists right that have a perspective against doing what your influencers are actually doing right there's this conversation where a lot of artists feel like you can't translate over from an influencer to an artist it's not true I don't understand how they still get themselves to believe that the proof is in the pudding but yeah but what do you I don't know what do you say to a statement like that well it's not true like I know for a fact because a lot of the because you could take in like you can notice like a lot of the influencers who are artists they blow it like Lil Nas X technically wasn't influencer technically yeah troll that's why he does the things he does because that's who he is you know and you master and you put things out on certain platforms is gonna blow up and they're really they talented there's no I mean even if you are not talented you can get a writer and you can go into the development phase and get a dope beat and it can go right you know it's just because anything can be created nowadays but and then a lot of them were really passionate about music so if you're passionate about it it's nothing you can they can do it you know and they got some good stuff in the streams and there I mean I have an influencer that I work with Lovato like he was weighing the freaking Philippines doing he was on a YouTube stage sponsored event in Asia like from a song like it's crazy got verified and blowing up as an artist and with no label none of that just management do you think so obviously he's moving a lot of people might not know him right but do you think that maybe that might kill a lot of artists before they even get started by trying to seek that type of popularity and for approval that you don't really have to have like oh this art what the guy you're talking about oh he's killing it and what he's doing and he and there's more growth to happen but another artist might say oh well this isn't a little baby right and I'm trying to be a little baby and I hear and I want to have this this traditional type of record label proper popularity that I've seen growing up you know what I mean well the world is so big and if you leave that concept alone you'll make you'll do well you look at artists like Russ like a lot people don't even know who he is but he has stadiums that are packed out and he's making money and without being like this mainstream name he has a mainstream name but like mainstream in certain niches like it's weird I never knew he was like it's weird because the world is so big like there's a lot of artists who probably like when they come from they have a million followers and they do a show and people show up like your fan base long as you focus on catering to your fan base and everything else will take off and it's good to be like a little baby name or like like that whatever the big names are it's good to be that but you know sometimes if you set your own goal and you set you get what you want like you may just your goal may just to perform in front of 30,000 and make you know enough money to live like a superstar and you happy in that then do that somehow I don't think some people want to be like like super superstars but if you talented you really where some point is gonna come to that point you know the talent will really take you to the next level yeah I think that's important this whole idea that people are still in prison by their own like local geography we're in a world where you don't have to do that right and if you have the talent like you said you can find your fan base and not even monetize it without even going in overseas if you don't really want to but of course then going overseas get touring checks or whatever kind of show you can do give your just an influencer but that's it's interesting that people are still confined to those ideas where it's like the the door is open a year but you look in the other direction yeah okay my last question that I would like to do is like brand what does that word mean to you and how do you protect it okay so brand is super important so it's like it's like a speaker spotlight that amplifies the perception of what you're doing not necessarily so a product but like how it's perceived overall to people and it's also like a culture in a way like the experience so the brand is like a culture experience that is like a speaker that's speaking that's amplifying everything about you or what you're doing or what you have to offer with a spotlight on it got you okay that spotlight part is important right because you're kind of choosing that amplification area versus the other aspects of you as well you know I want to put this side of myself out there right just like Apple in a way Apple brand is not the iPhone or the iPod is the brand is the coolness of the product the way it's perceived like oh I'm going to get an apple because this is the best for creating this it goes beyond the product even the boxing oh this phone looks cool or the camera like it goes beyond just what it is change the game with those like just open something they just feel right different okay with what that means how do you protect the well you protect your brand by knowing well first doing what's right and serving the way you should serve and providing like a product of service to people the right way if things happen handle it because all brands go through a phase where there's bad press but you just handle it respond you know or fix a lot of people take like different reviews and different things that they're saying that's wrong offensive no it helps you to become a greater greater product a greater brand a greater person so like I mean you protect that by responding the right way in and adjusting and also being putting yourself in a position to where you could stay relevant there's a lot of these brands like go obsolete because they don't adjust to what's going on just like blockbuster and Netflix you know you have to be ahead of the curve you have to understand keep watching and keep studying what's happening in the world and shift what your brand to roll with the flow appreciate that man well everybody is Keith Dorsey once again really dope social media influencer manager but obviously an artist manager now and I think he's gonna be somebody that this is gonna be one to watch over the years and obviously the people connected with them because he's already killing it already with your IG is young CEO young gun young gun CEO I know I'm forget a part of it so I'm gonna put all that you know on the bottom of the screen make sure y'all follow them reach out to them hope they don't flood you too hard you know man look it's all look just do what you need I can handle it I can handle it but this is the first of a series brand or die again we've talked to meaningful and individuals who've been a part of building a great brand or have great insights on branding themselves thank you once again appreciate it everybody stay tuned