Thursday, April 08, 2010

The Male Studies



Inside Higher Education tells us of the founding of a new academic field: male studies. The name is interesting, is it not? You can guess what the studies will cover:

Lionel Tiger, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, said the field takes its cues "from the notion that male and female organisms really are different" and the "enormous relation between ... a person's biology and their behavior" that's not being addressed in most contemporary scholarship on men and boys.

"I am concerned that it's widespread in the United States that masculinity is politically incorrect," said Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men.

The culprit, said Tiger, is feminism: "a well-meaning, highly successful, very colorful denigration of maleness as a force, as a phenomenon."

Paul Nathanson, a researcher in religious studies at McGill University and co-author of a series of books on misandry -- the hatred of men and boys -- conceded that "there is some critique of feminism that's going to be involved" in male studies. "There are some fundamental features of ideological feminism over the last 30 or 40 years that we need to question."

He also decried "the institutionalization of misandry" which, he said, is "being generated by feminists, [though] not all feminists."

The MRA wearing an academic cloak! This should be great fun. Do read the comments to see what proponents of this approach think. One example:

As LSBeene pointed out, you're using a Frontman fallacy in assuming that just because most police are men, then they must favor men. You know, the same old threadbare, paranoid "patriarchy" song and dance we've been hearing for decades. In fact, I believe the opposite is true, i.e., that male police are harder on men than women as part of the behavior socialized in men to protect women. And indeed this seems to be borne out by the observations of some police officers and court personnel that female police, prosecutors and judges tend to be harder on women than their male peers. Perhaps this is because women are more likely to see through female strategies to manipulate others, etc. Who knows?

However, what this comment thread clearly points out is that there are logical, valid male-friendly viewpoints that are outright taboo in contemporary academia because ideologically and politically strident feminists have monopolized the so-called "gender studies" endeavors. Therefore, this to me is irrefutable proof male studies is desperately needed. Now, do I believe that it will come to pass any time soon? No, and I think the blame lies squarely with the academic faculty and administration who share the vigorous resistance and outright hostility to male-friendly scholarship that is clearly demonstrated here by entrenched feminists.

Men are socialized to protect women and women are manipulative.

What I have sometimes wondered is this: How would the world look like if the MRA activists alone could determine it?

It would not be a world of equality, that's for sure, because many of those sites argue that men are inherently dominant and must be allowed to have that role. My reading suggests that rape charges would not be allowed because some charges are false accusations, child custody cases should not allow discussion of domestic abuse because women (but not men) lie about it and all types of domestic violence, from mean words or slaps to murders should count as equal.

I should probably note that different MRA sites do differ. Some are gathering places for truly nasty people, others are fairly polite sites, and I don't want to generalize to all of them.

But Lionel Tiger really is a male supremacist.