Toronto Star article: Can Male Studies Help Men Improve Our Lives?
A case for men’s studies
Guys get short shrift at North American universities with a lack of male-focused courses and programs
Men’s studies are a branch plant phenomenon of women’s studies, says Dr. Lionel Tiger, a Canadian professor of anthropology at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “The courses are structured in order to try to make boys not boys, that is, to turn them into well socialized non-male creatures.”
Search the University of Toronto faculty for experts on the study of women and you’ll find more than 40 academics with research interests including “women’s mental health,” “women and religion” and even “women’s fast pitch.”
Conduct the identical search for “men” as a research topic and discover two lonely academics, both of whom specialize in gay men.
Of the genders, it seems feminine distinctions have become overwhelmingly more fascinating to the academe.
Witness the well-entrenched women’s studies departments in universities across Canada and the United States — important academic centres of inquiry that have provided a steady pulse for the feminist movement.
Now have a look for men’s studies programs.
Or, don’t bother.
I looked.
As far as anyone in the field can tell, there’s only one in North America, located at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y. which offers a minor in the field.
Add to that barren ground an array of individual, off-the-radar courses here and there, usually located in women’s or “gender studies” departments.
It all amounts to male myopia in the ivory tower in which boys and men are studied through a distinctly feminist prism, says a group of North American academics who are taking their grievances public.
“The landscape has essentially been controlled by women’s studies,” says Dr. Lionel Tiger, a Canadian professor of anthropology at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “Men’s studies are a branch plant phenomenon when, and where, they exist.”
The overpowering orthodoxy of men’s studies is that if you’re male, you’re bad or in need of remedy, says Tiger, a native Montrealer who taught at the University of British Columbia for five years.
“The courses are structured in order to try to make boys not boys, that is, to turn them into well socialized non-male creatures.”
The repercussions of all this are troubling and increasingly evident say researchers, citing poor performance of boys in school and higher university graduation rates for women.
Seventy-five per cent of girls graduated from publicly funded high schools in Canada in 2006-’07, compared to 68 per cent of boys, according to Statistics Canada.
Nearly 61 per cent of degrees, diplomas and certificates from Canadian universities in 2007 were awarded to women “continuing a long-term trend in which female graduates outnumber their male counterparts and their proportion continues to increase,” says StatsCan.
In desperate times, some American academics are proposing a schism in the already low-profile men’s studies discipline that would give birth to a bolder, less guilt-inducing approach dubbed “male studies.”
The Foundation for Male Studies proposes a conference and a journal as well as full major university programs that encompass history, sociology, anthropology, psychology and literature among other disciplines.
Not so fast, says the pro-feminist Chip Capraro, director of the lone North American men’s studies program and associate dean at Hobart and William Smith Colleges.
“Girls are not to blame for what’s happening with boys.”
And the academy isn’t nearly as female-centric as it appears, he says.
“If you went through the bookstore at the University of Toronto and did a content analysis of all the books and the authors, I think you’d find a substantial number of men’s experiences in the academy.”
Finding even a single course devoted to male-focused subject matter in Canadian universities is like hunting for dinosaurs. And those that do exist are located in women and gender departments.
That’s where you’ll find the University of Winnipeg’s “Boys, Men, and Popular Culture” course.
“I would question whether women’s studies cast men in a negative light,” says the course’s professor, Pauline Greenhill, who acknowledges that “in the best of all possible worlds” the course would be taught by a male.
Jason Laker, who teaches a course on masculinities in Queen’s University’s gender studies department, is perched on the fence between the two sides.
“(A ‘male studies’ approach) has the potential for valuable exploration. My concern is that they seem to be rather hostile toward other gender study approaches . . . Can’t we all just get along?”
All of this is, of course, about representations of power and the curious modern intersection at which we’ve arrived.
Patriarchy is an archaic looking glass from which to view modern gender relations. Race and class have made the power formula far more complex. And the impressive successes of girls and women are shifting the power scales.
While men as a group may still hold social power over women as a group, we do not feel very powerful, Capraro observes.
Consider, he suggests, pornography.
For many women, that cinematic art form is about achieving men’s pleasure through the oppression of women.
But for men, pornography is about “sexual scarcity, rejection, and most of all, shame,” he says.
The truth about men, like all great truths, finds clarity only in the individuality of perspective.
But perhaps we could agree, amid feminism’s worthy accomplishments and the falling fortunes of boys and men, the academe’s imbalanced gender interests are cause for reconsideration.
Is Supreme Court Justice Nominee Elena Kagan A Lesbian? Does Sexual Orientation Still Matter?
Comments about Elena Kagan’s sexual orienation from the internet:
ddscorp1
May 13th 2010
Let’s say Kagan “cried and got drunk over election results” because her “party” didn’t win. Would that matter? Yes, it shows a flawed character who will have trouble putting her personal feelings and emotions aside and following the law and Constitution! By the way! That is exacltly what Kagan did when her “team” lost elections, she “cried and got drunk”! Can you say emotionaly unstable!?
gopcorrupts
May 12th 2010
Most and formost, the million dollar question should be, is she competent?
Can she do the job for which she was nominated?
What she does behind closed doors is her and only her business.
Get a life people.
Gayblackcanada 