Anyone who has spent enough time at a peewee football game has heard the phrase “man up”. Regardless of its frequent usage “man up” has a very warped meaning. Often, the phrase is used to advise a person to suppress emotions and become aggressive. Two Harriton juniors, Nate Rush and Aaron Diamond-Reivich, are wondering what it means to “man up”. Often gender role inequality is strongly associated with the feminist movement as well as the LGBTQIA community. Nate and Aaron want to create an environment that is inviting specifically to men so under the Witness Act Inspire Club they are creating a conference that focuses on gender stereotypes surrounding men. They are working with Mr. Imaizumi to plan and legitimize this conference. Though they are yet to establish a date for the conference, Nate and Aaron have big plans for its future. We sat down with co-founder Nate Rush to learn more about the conference.

HB: What’s the conference that you’re planning?

NR: We’re planning what’s a men’s leadership conference. We’re going to get boys to gather at the school and discuss what it means to be a guy and gender roles in today’s society.

HB: What are some main points you’re going to touch on in this conference?

NR: Well there’s something called a man box in our society which essentially represents how guys feel they’re forced to act a certain way by their peers, teachers, coaches, etc. We want to talk about what it means to be a guy and if being a guy really means to act like you’re in this man box or stepping outside this man box and acting how you want to.

HB: So what inspired you to create this conference?

NR: Well me and my friend Aaron Diamond-Reivich who’s putting the conference on with me watched a Ted Talk on the man box and became very interested in the subject so we did a little more research and realized that there is a girl’s leadership conference but theirs no conference discussing male gender roles. So we did more research we talked to countless individuals on the subject, trying to figure out what we should do and how we should organize this in a way that would promote our overall goal.

HB: What sort of planning have you guys done so far?

NR: So far we’ve contacted 8 or 9 speakers; sadly we haven’t gotten as many replies as we’d hoped. We’ve talked to people in and out of our school. In addition, we contacted the Haverford School since they were an all male school until recently they have some people involved with gender studies.

HB: What types of speakers are you guys looking to get?

NR: Well we contacted the man who did the Ted Talk that inspired us but sadly they’re a pretty expensive speaker. We’re looking at getting a past speaker who came to our school, this guy named Mikey, who did a speech about not being a “Zebra”. We’ve also considered getting male leaders at our school to talk, for example, the captain of a varsity sport. We feel that having kids from our school talk about men’s roles in society would be very powerful.