CREATING A HOSTILE CLIMATE.

The Pope Center's Wendy McElroy is not impressed with the social constructivists.

In the 1970s, Women's Studies emerged on American campuses to promote research into and discussion of women's issues and history. Currently, close to 700 institutions offer women’s or gender studies courses, according to the National Women's Studies Association. Men's Studies wasn’t far behind; it is typically taught as a corollary to Women's Studies because men's liberation is viewed as a necessary and logical consequence of feminism.

Overwhelmingly, both disciplines adhere to a specific form of feminism that was labeled “gender feminism” by Christina Hoff Sommers, author of The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men. As Sommers observed, “somewhere along the line, conventional masculinity became politically incorrect. In some circles, it's treated as a pathology in need of a cure.”

A foundational premise of gender feminism (and thus a premise of Men’s Studies) is that male culture or “the patriarchy” oppresses women through institutions such as the free market and through dynamics such as the social construction of gender identity. Gender is considered to be a social creation, not a biological one, and traditional masculinity is seen as inherently abusive to women.

Men’s Studies programs generally focus upon the “social construction of maleness” within a patriarchal society and issues of “male privilege.” In other words, they embrace gender feminism’s complaints—but from a male perspective.

Not really. The men suffer from some combination of false consciousness and oppression by the same conventions, and they, too, must be liberated.

Some of us ignore such work, unless as a source of comic relief, or focus on producing theorems, or new applications for portable computers.  Others propose to expand the scope of so-called gender studies.

Now striding onto campus is a new development: Male Studies—a backlash against gender feminist theory and against the impact of gender policies upon male students. 

Lionel Tiger, an emeritus anthropology professor at Rutgers University, is a driving force. He argues that the biological differences between “male and female organisms” are inherent and significant. Moreover, he contends there is an “enormous relation” between biology and behavior. In short, Male Studies start with the premise that gender is biologically based even if manifestations of it are deeply influenced by culture.

Tiger further argues that Men's Studies are “wholly owned” by gender feminism, leaving males either without representation on campus or with a faux voice that denigrates rather than champions them.

He contends that the impact of denying “maleness” has academically devastated young men in two basic ways.

First, males are now underrepresented on campuses. A 2009 report from the U.S. Department of Education found that 583,000 women were awarded associate degrees compared to 319,000 men. Approximately one million women received bachelor's degrees compared to 700,000 men. From those data, Dennis Gouws, an associate professor at Springfield College, Massachusetts, concluded, “our education system is not supporting boys and men sufficiently, often with tragic consequences. Suicide attempts and completion rates [of suicide] among secondary- and tertiary-aged boys and men in the United States far outstrip those of girls and women.” (All of that is true, but it is hard to see how the institution of “Male Studies” programs changes any of the underlying trends.)

Second, males are academically devastated either by being excluded from curricula or by being included in a derogatory fashion. Thus the Foundation for Male Studies’ mission statement calls for “the creation of comprehensive programs and curricula at major research universities” to “address the gap in scholarship and scientific research that exists between the study of males and females.”

Ms McElroy is underwhelmed with it all.

All of this is rather amusing, but will introducing yet another layer of gender analysis into academia do anything to advance knowledge? Or is Male Studies, like Women’s and Men’s Studies before it, an attempt to turn political complaints and agendas into scholarly disciplines? If the latter, then the success of Male Studies on campus is likely to result in the professorial equivalent of food fights.

The food that's being thrown, unfortunately, represents a professor or two in economics or mathematics or the like.

Meanwhile, it's time to celebrate Rosa Luxemburg's birthday. Nationality, Gender, and the Transgressive Potential of the Narrative of (Im)Migration. The good news is that Fourth Turnings are eras of secular reconstructuring, in which transgressiveness is an act of war, not an act of production.

This panel will interrogate how the experiences of female immigrants and gender migrants achieve expression through works that combine genres. Individual papers will explore the social policing of boundaries--between genders, nations, and genres.

Egad.  Ph. D. candidates, no doubt socialized to interpret the reserve army of unemployed and underemployed culture-studies types as more evidence of the alienating and oppressive System.