The 2nd Conference on College Men brought about 100 professors, student affairs professionals and counselors to the University of Pennsylvania this week. Frank Harris’ list of citations offers some insights into why they came: Research showing lower rates of enrollment, persistence and graduation among college men in comparison to college women; the underrepresentation of men in campus leadership positions, in study abroad, career services and civic engagement programs; and their overrepresentation among campus judicial offenders.
“When we think about acts of violence, sexual assault, sexual harassment on college campuses, overwhelmingly the perpetrators of those acts on our campuses are men. When we talk about how to convince our colleagues that we need to be engaged in these discussions, these are some of the ideas we need to share with them, particularly this last one,” said Harris, an assistant professor of postsecondary education at San Diego State University.
[i]Edwards and Harris also recommended providing opportunities for critical self-reflection about what it means to be a man – “to disrupt the functioning of hegemonic masculinity†– including through facilitated student affairs programming and academic courses (a course in women’s studies, for instance).[/i]
It is important to understand that being “male” is a problem, a kind of disease to be treated. That is the core message, as we know. It seems to me that surgery is a more honest approach than the Orwellian one now undertaken at our institutions of Higher Learning. Hormone treatment, brain surgery, medication, and perhaps castration would be so much more direct. It really is a sickness to be treated.
I would suggest if they want to help men on campus that instead of sending them to “women’s studies” courses they increase dramatically the number of varsity and intramural sports opportunities for men. Men are indeed, speaking in general, more aggressive and competitive than women. Give young men a positive way to be men together rather than trying to feminize them.
Katherine,
But it is important to understand that a tenured Feminist in the Women’s Studies Department of San Diego State University is the apex of evolution. We must move forward for the sake of the race — “by whatever means necessary.”
It’s no secret that the so-called feminist movement made things “better” for women. In so doing the movement royally messed up things for men. The whole secular culture has gone in that direction. Why else do we have a metrosexual in the White House?
If this weren’t serious, one would think it was parody. A bunch of administrators from colleges get together to scratch their heads over the undeniable phenomenon of men fleeing from their sort of schools, and they are wholly unable to contain their disdain for men of the usual variety. Their solution to the problem is to make men less so, so then they might fit in with what they think a man should be–that is, not a real man at all. It never occurs to them that their bigotry toward men, and their turning colleges and universities into places where men [i]qua[/i] men simply are not welcome, has anything to do with the flight of men from colleges. Why should men go someplace where from day one all they hear is how they need to be emasculated (get rid of that “hegemonic masculinity”), how they should be guilty for all the sexism of those who went before them, how how in essence they are all (unless they are gay, a preferred state) merely rapists in waiting? It should be no shock that they go elsewhere, and take their tuition dollars with them.
Ah, yes, and the continuation of “the race” is really going to be helped by creating all of these emasculated males. I don’t think most women actually want such men. The (mostly) lesbian women’s studies professors don’t, of course, but that’s another story.
Buried away in the sixth paragraph, with no further comment:
“Edwards and Harris also reported finding that the students had limited relationships with other men, particularly their friends and fathers, and experienced a loss of self.” (Don’t know how to get that nifty block thingy)
A stable family necessarily involves authenticity and mutuality; of course, there isn’t a facilitator at family dinner so the outcomes can’t be controlled. Can we still teach marriage as the practice of mutual responsibility and maturity, asking the best effort and commitments of each? It’s, of course, a vision that’s different in kind from that of a world of abandoned and isolated people whose lives are defined by broken trust and relationships — but maybe that world has something to do with, “loss of self”.
Of course, the exploration must never be permitted of how men might likewise find living with women a pain in the rear. Fortunately, though, they have “internalized their oppression.”
[blockquote] “The men in both studies really described external pressures to perform hegemonic masculinity,†said Harris. In other words, they felt external pressure to be unemotional, calm, cool under pressure, to be competitive, aggressive, self-assured; to not be gay, feminine or vulnerable. [/blockquote]
The question is why this should be after a generation (plus) of entertainment and news media propaganda in favor of being “gay, feminine, or vulnerable”? Constant celebration of those qualities as being desirable should have created a youth that is “authentic”.
I should have said “a youth that is happy to be ‘authentic'”.
Now that you mention it, #7, I wonder how “limited relationship” with other males is defined. Does that mean they really don’t have male friends, or does it mean their relationships are not like female friendships?
Good question, Katherine.
I wonder if a most fruit discussion on campus would be the cultural amnesia that has fallen since 9/11. I remember vividly how the burley Firemen and Cops were National heros for about a year and a half. We put them on magazine covers. We wrote of how they were our often overlooked, unsung and desperately needed heros. They were, of course, all testosterone guys from Brooklyn.
But then we felt safe again, and behold the feminist silliness reasserted itself. After all, there are men to be regulated, the gender thesis to be written, and tenure to be achieved. Thank goodness we are back to normal and forget that embarrassing time.
[i]Ah, yes, and the continuation of “the race†is really going to be helped by creating all of these emasculated males. I don’t think most women actually want such men. [/i]
Actually, Katherine, in my experience they do marry them. And then they spend the rest of their lives torturing them for not being what they want.
Albany+,
I almost never agree with your postings but find these spot on.
Young men reflecting on what it means to be a man and being sent to feminist classes reminds me of the reeducation of humans in Planet of the Apes. I used to have a portrait of John Wayne in my college office. The feminists didn’t like him and called him a chauvinist. I believe that they were clueless because his relationships with women were frequently contentious but if you take his films as a whole, he respected women, treated them as equals and protected them when necessary. John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara and John Wayne and Katherine Hepburn had relationships worth understanding and emulating. I frankly don’t care what women think about John Wayne, but to me, he portrayed in films men who exhibited the best men have to offer. This is also portrayed again and again in the Western dramas in movies like Quigly Down Under, The Man from Snowy River, Open Range, Lonesome Dove and Broken Trail. Since there is essentially no “masculine” section in the bookstore (when compared with feminist literature), the college men could watch these movies and learn a lot about men and relating to women. When men stopped working alongside their fathers and began being raised by their mothers, they forgot who men are.
I am retiring next month. One of my proposed post-retirement projects has long been returning to school and (finally) finishing up my anthro degree at SDSU. However, the presence of such “educators” as Harris has increasingly led me to reconsider, as the possibility of having to take “make-up” G.E. courses in Feminist Basketweaving or whatever is enough to give me the screaming fantods.