The men's studies Profs quoted in this article are decidedly pro
third wave feminist and are sycophants towing the 3rd wave line that men
are abusers and women perpetual victims. They are pro-gender studies
in terms of males but their focus is gay males. If you visit their web
site you will find them decidedly pro-gay, pro feminist but only on
their terms. Masculinity for heterosexual males is not on their agenda.
The
Profs who arranged this first historic seminar are very brave and have
received copious criticism from feminists who see their entitlement
based agenda as a zero sum game. In Ontario boys in JK to 12 seldom
get a male teacher and may be feminized by the time they get out of high
school. In the age group 20-30 female teachers outnumber men by over
4-1 and the trend is toward greater disparity. Boys are suffering from
this and need a different teaching regime to deal with their energy not
medication like Ritalin or more punishment.
Here are a
few stats. Men are outnumbered in degrees grant by about 60%-40%, the
federal and provincial public service is 55% female and with their
emphasis on minorities white males are less inclined to be favoured,
health care is dominated by females, social work is 95% female and this
includes child protection, the latter are aligning themselves with the
VAW feminist camp which will further marginalize dads, moms get 90% sole
physical custody, dad is marginalized as a visitor but pays through the
nose, but the boyfriend can move in for 24/7 access to the kids raising
the chances they will be harmed. Single moms are the most likely to
kill or harm the child. Its time for a new paradigm dealing with
equality of gender not Zero Sum identity politics.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Small
step for men
'Male studies' the answer
to overcoming 'lace curtain,' scholars say
Janet
Whitman, National Post
Retrodisk
Worried about "the declining state
of today's male," a group of leading scholars gathered at the bucolic
campus here this week for a mini-conference to tackle the problem.
But
before the panellists could begin their discussion on the increasing
powerlessness many men and boys feel, the symposium got pushed from its
planned venue to make way for the announcement of a new men's
basketball coach.
Miles Groth, a Wagner professor
specializing in the psychology of being male and the event's host,
shook his head.
"We planned this thing three months
ago," he said on the sidelines of the alternative site as the
conference was gearing up to go live online to participants in five
different continents.
The ironic indignity might just
be the first of many slights and obstacles as the academics attempt to
establish what they say will be a first for modern man: a male studies
program. Their hope is to begin offering degrees in the new academic
discipline at a major research university -- perhaps a Harvard, a
Columbia, a Stanford --within the next couple of years.
When
word of the conference started spreading on the Internet last week,
some observers wondered whether it was an April Fool's joke. After all,
isn't most of what people read in newspapers, watch on the news and
study at university about men?
But Wagner's Prof. Groth
said that view fails to appreciate the well-documented decline of the
state of men and boys, particularly those under the age of 35, over the
past 15 to 18 years.
"It's just now beginning to
surface in the job market, in academe and in the offices of counsellors
and psychologists," he said. "[Male studies] is not to look at a few
men who are CEOs and have a tremendous amount of money. I'm talking
about what Australians call a bloke. Today's five-and six-year-old boys
into their 20s just don't know who they're supposed to be."
While
not exactly an endangered species, men are in danger of becoming an
underclass, the panel of PhDs specializing in boys and men warned.
In
the latest recession, 82% of pink slips handed out in the United
States went to men, and a good chunk of those jobs won't be coming
back. Boys and young men commit suicide at a rate of more than four
times that of girls and young women. Boys are far more likely to be
diagnosed with ADHD and put on Ritalin. In the United States, women
outlive men by an average of seven years. In Eastern Europe the gap is
15 years. At universities in the United States and Canada, women make up
about 60% of the student population, men only 40%, a dramatic reversal
from the early days of feminism.
Amid this growing
divide between the sexes, 90% of the academic resources for gender
studies are devoted to women, said Prof. Edward Stephens, chairman of
the newly launched Foundation for Male Studies, which aims to raise
US$2-million or more to endow a chair for the discipline at a major
university.
"What are the ethics of devoting 90% of
academic resources to one gender?" he asked the gathering and the
roughly 250 participants listening in via videoconference. "What are
the unintended consequences of the failure of our academic institutions
to consider the 21st century needs of males?"
As a
young psychiatrist, Prof. Stephens gave his daughter a gender-neutral
name -- Jarret -- so that she might have an easier time breaking
through the so-called glass ceiling many women encounter as they try to
advance in the workplace.
Now, he said, there's a new
phenomenon: "the lace ceiling" or "the lace curtain."
"We
as men and males can see through it, but we can't get through it," he
said.
Christina Hoff Sommers, a scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute and author of The War Against Boys: How Misguided
Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, told the story of how her son went
to a camp where the kids were asked to go off each on his or her own
into the desert with a pencil, a notebook, a candle and matches to
write a journal about their feelings.
The girls did
exactly as they were told, while the boys went in a pack and built a
bonfire with the notebooks and pencils.
The
creative-writing sensitivity trainer "thought they were sociopaths,"
Ms. Hoff Sommers said. "I'm concerned that male-averse attitude is
widespread in the United States, that we're in a society where
masculinity is politically incorrect."
Enter the need
for male studies.
Only in its infancy, the proposed
field of study has already attracted some dissention -- from men.
Specifically, from professors in "men's studies," an academic subfield
that started emerging in the 1980s as part of women's and gender
studies programs.
Robert Heasley, president of the
American Men's Studies Association, rejected an invitation to sit on
the panel because of what he viewed as a combative attitude toward
feminism. "If what they're presenting -- that feminism has hurt men and
oppressed boys -- had some data to support it might be fine," he said
in an interview. "It's not like men don't have challenges, but they
tend to present it in a way that says feminism has done this to men.
Men's rights are like having whites' rights."
Panellist
Rocco "Chip" Capraro, director of Men's Studies at Hobart and William
Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y., said vast teaching and research about
men already is underway and ought to remain "pro-feminist" so the
reality of sexism is acknowledged.
The rest of the
panel scoffed at both notions. They argued men's studies is generally
limited to sociology and filtered through a feminist lens. The upshot:
Boys can't necessarily just be boys. Instead, they argued, boys and men
are considered to be inadequate girls and women.
The
scholars of boys and men behind the proposed male studies program said
they have no interest in replicating women's studies or men's studies
programs.
Unlike men's studies programs, male studies
-- assuming it ever gets off the ground -- will be offered as a major
course of study. It will not only include sociology, but also take into
account biology, evolution, history, literature, anthropology,
education, law, medicine and psychology.
The program
will have to do a certain amount of bashing of some strains of
feminism, particularly the ideological kind, said Paul Nathanson, a
professor of religious studies at McGill who cowrote books on misandry
-- the hatred of boys and men.
"The fact is that much
of this misandry is being generated by feminists," he said. "Not all
feminists. [But] there are some fundamental features of ideological
feminism over the last 30 or 40 years that we need to question."
Even
egalitarian feminism can unwittingly deny men the possibility of
establishing a healthy collective identify because, by saying men and
women are equal, the implication is that men and women should be the
same, Prof. Nathanson said.
Women's studies programs
got their start in the late 1960s as part of the second wave of
feminist activism. But they've been on the wane in the past several
years. Some programs such as Guelph University's have shut down
altogether, while many others have changed their names to add more
inclusive words such as "gender," "sexuality," and "social justice."
The
male studies advocates on the panel said that women's studies programs
and women's institutes are still going strong and can pose a danger to
men and boys because they often teach that women live in a state of
siege.
One of the first things teenagers get when they
leave home to go to college is a rape seminar, said Lionel Tiger, a
Montreal native who is the Charles Darwin Professor of Anthropology at
Rutgers University in New Jersey and author of The Decline of Males and
Men in Groups. "Male students are informed right at the outset that
they are predatory and dangerous organisms, and women are informed that
they are potential victims."
He described feminism as
"a well-meaning, highly successful, very colorful denigration of
maleness as a force, as a phenomenon."
Ms. Hoff
Sommers, the author of The War Against Boys, said although she's
critical of the feminist establishment, male studies proponents could
learn a lot from its members.
When girls had a serious
deficit in math, for instance, feminists galvanized around the problem
and test scores in the subject strengthened.
By
imitating feminists, in the same way, boys could become stronger in
reading and writing, she said. "But we don't have to imitate the
ideological extremes in denigrating the opposite sex."
Meghan
Carboni, a senior psychology major with a minor in gender studies at
Wagner, said she found the college's gender studies program too focused
on females.
Wagner offers only one male studies class:
the psychology of men, taught by Prof. Groth.
"It's the best
course I've ever taken. That's what made me realize what's being left
out," Ms. Carboni said. "Everyone loved the course. They didn't realize
how big an issue it was."
Prof. Stephens, the Male
Studies Foundation chairman, said the group plans to wait until it has a
US$2-million cheque in hand before approaching colleges about having a
chair endowed for the program and a faculty established.
"Two
million is on the low side. I've been thinking bigger numbers because
the work to be done is so immense," he said in an interview. "What's
happening right now because of this lace ceiling is you can't even get a
hearing."
In the meantime, the foundation is putting
together a marketing plan and will hold its first major conference in
early October at the New York Academy of Medicine. The group will
introduce Male Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal next year.
jwhitman@nationalpost.com
© 2010 The National Post Company. All rights
reserved. Unauthorized distribution, transmission or republication
strictly prohibited.
Posts
