DeVon Franklin Joins Angela Yee’s Book Club Discussion On ‘The Truth About Men’
Angela Yee’s Book Club, Kickin’ It From the Stoop, typically holds monthly meetings in Brooklyn, but for the first time, the club met at the historic Schomburg Center in Harlem as producer, writer, and public speaker, DeVon Franklin introduced his new book, The Truth About Men.
The faithful book club members (judging by their familiarity and participation during the event) enjoyed the controversial highlights of DeVon Franklin’s new book, which included topics about relationships, trust, communication and an intimate Q&A with the audience.
Inclusive in the book structure are tips on how to maintain and sustain healthy interactions, and practical advice on how to resist impulsive/lustful desires.
In the book, DeVon Franklin takes on the thought-provoking task of searching within to understand and reveal men’s behaviors that typically go against their own moral code. DeVon says, “this is the realest book because I had to be the most truthful, the most transparent, the most honest. And I can’t write and encourage anyone that knows what I do and who I am to be truthful and transparent and I’m not doing the same thing. So as a man, it required me to look in the mirror and make some decisions: who am I, what are my struggles, why do I struggle, where do they come from? So I really had to go back into my history.”
What makes this book a remarkable read is not just its truthful component, but its transparency. DeVon continues: “As I began to look deeper into me, I said, a-ha, here’s the problem; it’s lust. We have this impulse, we have these urges, we have these desires that are unhealthy, that are unholy, that are destructive, and here’s the problem–not only do we have it, we don’t talk about it. We suppress it.”
As he searches his own heart and behaviors for pinning the struggle down and overcoming the urges that men have alike, he uses an analogy to better explain his theory, with the hopes of helping his readers: “So when I began to actually articulate what lust feels like, the best way I could describe it was like an untrained dog. I say in the introduction, men are not dogs, but I think that analogy, and I love to use metaphors, [is used] to describe how to get control and how to articulate the problem. But that’s how it feels. It feels like there’s this animal thing in us that lust makes us feel like and that’s impulse driven, that’s pleasure driven, that doesn’t want discipline, that doesn’t want accountability, that just wants to do what it wants to do, whenever it wants to do it. And I felt using the analogy of mastering the dog was a great way to say here’s the problem, but here’s how we can get control. Because then, through that analogy, you get it. You’re like oh, here are the commands and if I don’t master the dog, this dog’s gonna master me. And that’s why I used it; it worked. It was never intended to demonize or vilify. I’m saying that I struggle. Here’s my struggle and here’s what I do about it every day.”
