Interview: Male CNA

I interviewed Brian Sanders, 21, of Bangor, Maine. He has been working about a year and a half as a certified nurses assistant. When asked what got him interested in this work, he explains that it was one of the only trades he was interested in and is fond of caring for people.

Brian confirms that he works in a female-dominated field, but he enjoys and socializes with his co-workers outside of the veteran’s home. When asked how he gets along with his patients, Brian said:

“Oh god, they love me. Being one of the few guys there, they know who I am and they tell me all the girls look the same.”

Throughout the interview we talked about the kind of work Brian’s job entails and the sometimes physically, almost always mentally laborious nature of this work, caring for the elderly and disabled. It is interesting to examine a male perspective in doing this work. Old gender stereotypes might suggest that women are better suit for these nurturing roles, but my interviewee proves that men are capable of nurture and are finding just as much satisfaction in this field.

I asked Brian if he ever felt pressure to “move up the ladder” so-to-speak, or to become a doctor. His response: “Oh yeah, all the time.”

This is consistent with “the glass escalator” effect, described in a study cited below, titled, The Glass Escalator: Hidden Advantages for Men in the “Female” Professions. The phenomenon of men who work in female-dominated fields being fast-tracked to higher-paying positions is not unique to Brian. What was fascinating about Brian’s case is the fact that his supervisors are not the only ones who encourage him to go back to school and become a doctor. He says that many of his patients advise him to as well:

"Some of them are very, very old school, and they don’t think it’s very proper [that he’s a CNA]."

All in all, Brian notes that he is keen of his job and he is not interested in becoming a doctor. In explaining why, he says that doctors just don’t have time for the patients, and helping these people one-on-one is what he loves to do.

Here is a link to a transcript of the interview and below is the study referenced in this article

Kimmel, Michael S., Michael A. Messner, and Christine L. Williams. "The Glass Escalator: Hidden Advantages for Men in the ‘Female’ Professions." Men's Lives.  9th ed. Boston: Pearson, 2013. 152-65. Print.

Beneath the Harvest Sky, review. [SPOILER ALERT]

The overall aesthetics of the film were fresh and captivating. The storyline was an important one – two young men who work potato fields and hustle prescription drugs in Northern Maine, saving up for future investments. The emphasis on male friendship was raw, more real than the mainstream Hollywood bromance. This male friendship and their desires to succeed, dreaming for a better life, these were all positive aspects of the film and it really shed light on some of the struggles young men face in poor, rural communities. There was definitely some value to this film in terms of exposing these hidden lives.

Casper and Dominic are the main characters of the film. Dominic seems to be raised by a single mother, while Casper’s family is dysfunctional and he winds up smuggling drugs over the Canadian border for his father. What drives these guys to work in potato fields and smuggle drugs is their desire to move out of rural Maine to the big city of Boston. This story is full of hope and really hits home in terms of the realities of life in Maine. So many of us declare in high school that we are going to get out of Maine as soon as we graduate, as if life out there is better than this small-town stuff.

I was expecting to bear witness to more of the realities around drug use in these rural communities. The film did a great job of exposing drug trafficking as a legitimate source of income, but it did little to shed light on addiction or the reasons why people, and men, use in Maine. I’m guessing this was probably for the sake of the story and the fact that the actors were actually very involved in getting to know community members of Van Buren. You have to be sensitive to the generalizations you make about these small towns when filming so intimately with them. The two main characters smoked pot, but the whole culture of drug use was really missing from this film about hustling drugs.

One aspect of Beneath the Harvest Sky that pissed me off had to do with Casper’s girlfriend. At one point in the film, the two are hanging out at in a bedroom. She has already revealed her supposed pregnancy. In one part of this scene Casper is telling her that he is going to take care of her, financially, thanks to the drug money. But then the scene turns rape-y. He demands that she take her pants off (and I must’ve missed something that explained his intentions before this part) but she protests, and it is declared that she is lying about being pregnant because she is on her period. I was pretty dissatisfied with this scene because I feel like it confirms some stereotypes about women lying to men to keep them around and that men really can’t trust women. This sort of thing probably does happen in reality, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Sources:
http://youtu.be/oz8xmCSGRG4