Splitting Up the Sexes

By Raza Rasheed, Staff Columnist

Published on Tuesday, April 13, 2010

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Tiny Wagner College in New York recently created a small firestorm by announcing the creation of a “Foundation for Male Studies” with the intent of offering male studies as a full-fledged academic discipline. While many worry Wagner’s program is just a cynical attempt to legitimize anti-feminist screeds, the idea of a Male Studies discipline is not, in and of itself, a bad idea. At the right institution and in a disciplined, level-headed and intellectually vigorous environment, Male Studies could offer a valuable and important contribution to academia. As just such an institution, Dartmouth should seize this opportunity to show progressive leadership, much like it did by creating the first Women’s and Gender Studies program in the Ivy League years ago, and separate Male Studies from Women’s and Gender Studies, endowing the field with its own department.

The field of Gender Studies is dominated by feminist critiques of patriarchy. This is fitting and proper considering the tremendous oppression that women worldwide have faced and continue to face, and given that for centuries women were completely ignored in mainstream academics except by the occasional crackpot espousing ignorant theories of female inferiority. However, this focus on women’s issues has largely pushed out serious discussion of men’s issues, which while not as grave in magnitude, are important and worthy of consideration nonetheless.

For instance, American men commit suicide at almost four times the rate of women, are twice as likely to be alcoholics and are more than three times as likely to have some mental illnesses such as Antisocial Personality Disorder. Men have also fallen starkly behind women in most educational indicators in recent decades. Boys in high school have substantially lower GPAs, are twice as likely to be suspended and are half as likely as high school girls to be proficient in writing. At the collegiate level, women now account for 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees and 62 percent of master’s degrees, and make up such a dominant portion of the applicant pool that some colleges even practice a kind of “affirmative action” to avoid skewed gender ratios — as Blair Sullivan ’10 wrote about recently (“Too Few Good Men,” Feb. 22).

None of these trends are well understood, but all are serious and all are under-researched. This is at least in part due to the fact that Male Studies have been, by and large, rolled into Women’s and Gender Studies, where men’s issues must compete for attention with global women’s issues and are often smothered by the environment that pervades the discipline, which is not by and large conducive to such discussions. This is not to say that professors, students and researchers within Women’s and Gender Studies are inherently hostile toward or dismissive of men’s issues. But realistically, it is often difficult to broach the concerns that men face in the wake of an emotionally charged discussion about misogyny, sexism or sexual assault.

There is a valid concern that splitting Male Studies into its own field might devolve into a reactionary, anti-feminist quagmire, but that just makes it all the more important that schools like Dartmouth show leadership, get out in front and set a positive tone to discuss men’s issues. The discipline will never grow into anything legitimate if it’s monopolized by those who would use it solely to critique feminism, and Dartmouth is one of the few schools with the scope to be able to do this field justice without harming the existing Women’s and Gender Studies program or giving undue voice to those whose only intent is to torpedo vibrant discussion of gender issues. The endeavor would almost certainly be awkward at first, but being progressive about a contentious issue is rarely a cakewalk, and the results could be tremendously important.

The global culture of patriarchy has too long worked to the detriment of both genders — females in the obvious sense, and males in that it has become fashionable to assume that men face no serious issues worthy of discussion or study. It is time to correct this damaging imbalance by extricating Male Studies from the shadow of Women’s and Gender Studies and legitimizing it as a field unto itself. This must be done without removing funding from Women’s Studies, not only for political purposes, but because both genders face important issues that deserve full and vigorous attention. Gender studies should never again be a zero sum game.