A few years ago, a long-time Vermont high school teacher told Myles Jewell ’05, that he was concerned about young men. He noticed a pattern in his classrooms—and it wasn’t good. This was before Josh Hawley published Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, before Richard Reeves wrote Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It.
“He was feeling like they weren’t finding a place,” says Jewell, a filmmaker and lecturer in UVM’s Department of Community Development and Applied Economics. “So, I started paying attention. … I grew up one of four boys, played lacrosse [at UVM], was a student-athlete. I never really fit inside that dynamic, but I lived alongside of it.”
So, when Chad Ervin, a former editor on PBS’ Frontline, reached out to Jewell about filming “Gone Guys,” a documentary blending data about the declining health and education outcomes of men with the experiences of young people, he was already familiar with the topic. Still, it wasn’t an easy sell.
“I wanted to know how it was going to be approached,” Jewell explains. “What is the angle? I was not super interested in flying in, flying out. … With any project there’s always some type of moral compass involved.”
As an ethnographer, he thinks a lot about the ethics of representation and the responsibility of a storyteller to avoid inflicting harm on the participants. Jewell has worked for a decade in Vermont education circles and as a mentor for immigrant students. He didn’t want to look at boys through a stereotypical lens and talked with Ervin to understand the trust-building that would be used to produce “Gone Guys”—because people are complicated. They often don’t fit inside the tidy boxes society constructs.
For Jewell, serving as co-director of photography on “Gone Guys” was an opportunity to expand the depictions of manhood to include traits of tenderness, humor, and vulnerability. The film features various local support groups for male-identifying students, such healthy masculinity classes in Vermont schools and UVM’s My Meaning of Masculinity program.
“Lord knows, if our lived experience is being shaped by what we watch and what we see, think about what mainstream media or what social media is putting out,” he says. “It is not giving us a very nuanced or very contradictory view of how we should be.”
The film was funded by the Vermont Community Foundation and the Tarrant Foundation and designed to be watched in small settings to encourage conversation—it was never intended to be the final word.
“We’ve been wanting to do projects that are not about likes or views but about the community building thing that can happen,” Jewell explains. “This film was not supposed to provide an answer, but it was supposed to spark discussion.”
But it can be a difficult discussion nonetheless, particularly amid concern of a backlash against women.
“It’s very hard to find the correct language that’s not going to become ‘either/or’ very quickly,” Jewell says. “We have to keep reminding ourselves in this discussion that it’s not that we put too much resources into [women] … It’s that some people are getting missed and we need to find new ways to reengage. And part of that reengagement is by having discussions and finding the language.”
The discussions also need to involve diverse voices. The screening Jewell attended was concerning—he and Ervin were the only men in the room, he says. “It was all women and moms.”
This echoes the mentoring gap experienced by boys at Burlington’s King Street Center that is highlighted in the film. Jewell hopes viewing “Gone Guys” makes people show up for adolescent boys in their communities and recognize that work remains to be done for women and girls.
Let’s not forget that,” Jewell says. “ … Let’s roll up our [expletive] sleeves.”
