yawn.

If men want similar opportunities for mentoring or support (outside of WISP), they need to create them themselves. Most of the programs Lott listed were created by students for students. There are not equivalent male organizations because nobody has created them, not because the college has decided that men shouldn’t have those opportunities. If you find there to be an issue Lott, I challenge you to create an organization to fill the void.

FYI: There used to be a group called the Men’s Project at Dartmouth 5-7 years ago, where Dartmouth men would meet for a round-table chat twice a month with a faculty member or House advisor leading the discussion. The attendance at these events was always less than a dozen, but those who attended it (including myself) appreciated it.

This article contradics itself and is factually inaccurate. If anything, this article tells us that “today’s man” is just as unaware of woman’s issues today then 50 years ago. (Or at least this man is). There are real concerns about men in society and this article doesn’t address them at all. This article contains so many fallacies, I don’t know where to start. I do believe that men need to look at gender and realize that they don’t have to be violent against each other and woman, to be “manly.” However, men are more likely to be victims of violence by other men, not by women. If men are physically abused, raped, sexually harrassed, etc. by women to the extent that women are by men….this article may have a point. This article should be used as an example of why woman need more of all the benefits listed above, and we need more support relating to issues of gender. I would expect a more factual and productive article from The Dartmouth than this.

As someone who has worked with feminist groups to try to encourage understanding of both male and female issues, I have indeed run into resistance discussing male issues, but not for the reasons that Mr. Lott believes. Many male students on campus tend to not believe that “gender issues” apply to them, so despite the fact that (as Mr. Lott points out) there are very real male issues, even at events aimed at men there is generally low male attendance (yes, I know they exist because I’ve helped organize some of them before), and not because The College only doles out funding to women’s groups. I’ve run into tons of trouble just trying to reach out to men and convince them that they are welcome to attend talks and events about gender. Groups like Link Up are, by the way, student-run. It just so happens that not many male students run such groups for men, not that the College is going around nixing funding to male-oriented groups. From a few College administrators I’ve talked to, there is actually quite a bit of interest in holding events about male sexuality and male issues – just not enough student interest.

Feminism works on issues that detriment both men and women, such as traditional gender roles. Feminism also goes far beyond “women’s advocacy groups”, and feminists are comprised of both men and women (case in point: “I am a Feminist Project” last year). Not all of the feminist events are organized perfectly on campus, but if he is genuinely concerned with men’s issues, I encourage Mr. Lott to start his own group or get involved with feminist groups on campus, which seek to benefit men too.

Roger makes “Lotts” of valid points. One can only wonder why the usual suspects will feel it necessary to attack him personally, with no factual basis, yet again. It may be that they think that they are the only permanent victims and facts that get in the way of their victim primacy must be harshly dispatched.

This is an excellent piece, very well-written and persuasive. Dartmouth has always devoted many resources to advising minorities and women, while ignoring the needs of white males. President Kim and his administration have a great opportunity here to increase programs available to men and improve their successes. The College spends hundreds of thousands of dollars on advising certain groups of students and providing preferential internships to them. How about a new program from President Kim called MIAH, Men In Art History. Or a Male & Gender Studies department? The world is in the 21st century. Dartmouth is living in the 16th century.

The issues in this article are complex, and it’s obvious that the writer is unaware of gender issues and their role on our society. I think the points that were made were full of fallacies and contradicions. Are men more likely to be victims of violence, yes, but by MEN. We should be offering men more services on issues involving how their gender roles are dangerous to both men and women, not take away important and much needed services for woman. If anything this article is the reason woman need even more support on campus. Thank you for posting this article, it proves that we still have a long and hard road toward equality for woman. Hopefully The Dartmouth can find an article that is both factually correct and helpful for issues that men do have on campus and in our world in general.

I know that this is the opinion of just one male, however, I don’t believe that this is the opinion of most males at Dartmouth. I really hope that an article will appear in the Dartmouth by a male student who is educated and familiar with gender issues. Maybe the author should look into why men are more likely to be the victims of violence. Is it because of the gender roles of women? Are women more likely to be the perpetrators of violence against them? There are so many issues and points in this article that are wrong and misleading, that I don’t know where to start. Men on campus do need support, but not the kind of support this author thinks they need. There are real pressing issues that concern men that need to be addressed, let’s hope we can address them before more men and women are hurt by them. I fully support men and believe that my sons can only benefit by the advancement of women at Dartmouth, in the U.S., and in the world.

To add on to what the second commenter wrote, my main issue with Mr. Lott’s article is that he ignores the fact that the vast majority of women’s group on this campus are student-run, or they were started by women who demanded support from the institution. So, instead of pointing fingers at the Dartmouth administration and making jabs at Dartmouth women, why doesn’t Lott use his valuable position as an Opinion writer for The D and raise a call to the Men of Dartmouth to form groups for themselves and demand similar support from the administration to help them help themselves? The largest formalized and wide-spread support system that men currently have at Dartmouth is the fraternity system, and that system does not give them the support that they need. Dartmouth men must demand more options for themselves.

Mr. Lott also ignores the very encouraging steps that are being taken by students and the administration to address men’s issues at Dartmouth. I was personally so encouraged by the formation of the Men’s Forum, started by two ‘11s last year. That group is a great example of an organization that can be a valuable resource for men on campus, and build positive leadership. I would hope that Lott would focus on these positive steps, and encourage more of the same.

I also have to address Mr. Lott’s idea about how a “Proud to be a Man Dinner” would be met. It just so happens that there is, in fact, a panel that happens every fall called “Men of Dartmouth”. This panel showcases a handful of senior men, who share personal and moving stories about their experiences at Dartmouth. Indeed, it began as a spin-off of the “Women of Dartmouth” panel, which happens every spring and features senior women. I strongly encourage Lott to attend Men of Dartmouth and see how close that panel gets to “garnering a flurry of accusations”. He would quickly realize once he stepped into the jam-packed, over-heated Collis Commonground that the Dartmouth student body is, in fact, a group that values hearing earnest male voices speak out and tell their stories.

This is a worthy subject, but Roger loses me in parts, particularly with his argument about evolution. In January 2010, the D published a perhaps more nuanced opinion article calling for the establishment of a group to discuss heterosexual male identity. http://thedartmouth.com/2010/01/19/opinion/proietti. I wonder how Rae Johnston, who seems to reflexively believe that any forum that benefits men is necessarily harmful to women, would react to a group such as MODEL (Men of Dartmouth Educating and Learning).

When I was at Dartmouth I took a course with Professor Travis called The Masculine Mystique and it was fantastic. It addressed a lot of the issues that Mr. Lott brings up and, luckily, Professor Travis is teaching it again this winter. Roger, you simply must sign up.

Roger Lott proves once again his complete failure to grasp the concept of institutionalized privileges that go far beyond an individual’s daily experience. Something only a white male could ever fail to see. It’s quite simple: unless a prejudice or inequality is institutionalized, it cannot qualify as racism, sexism, or classism. There is no such thing as “reverse” any of those.

And how do average life expectancy and rates of homelessness have a thing to do with the female vs. the male experience as a DARTMOUTH STUDENT? The violent crime statistic is just a slap in the face (not to mention outdated), given the woefully low percentage of sexual assaults reported. In addition, He blatantly ignores that men are also far and away the perpetrators of these violent crimes they are victims of! Why should a program exist to reduce the violence in men’s lives AT THE HANDS OF OTHER MEN? Wait, it does, it’s called the prison system. And I AM up in arms about anyone viewing a program such as WISP as evidence that women are “needy.” Hence this comment.

And oh my god, the paragraph on biology? Replace a few words and it’s a dead ringer for the outdated racist social Darwinist literature from the early 20th century. How does a “tendency” to have a “strong desire” to provide resources suddenly transform into an inherent biological difference? For years, sociologists have picked and chosen those primate species with male/female sex dynamics most similar to our own in order to claim essentialism, while ignoring much more closely related species whose gender roles did not reflect man-as-provider, woman-as-caretaker.

Patriarchy isn’t in the past; please briefly review a list of U.S. presidents and get back to me. The one thing I do agree with is that the fight against patriarchy should include men, as it also hurts them by forcing them into a narrow masculine gender role, which I really do believe is more rigid in contemporary times than the female gender role. Did you ever think it could be patriarchal male gender roles that account for that “strong desire” to be a provider, rather than “innate” biological differences?

Finally, supporting “men in power” (as opposed to just men) necessarily implies opposing women. If Roger can’t understand that, then we’re done here.

Get a clue.

Lott loves complaining, but he should at least attempt to complain about subjects in which he is well-versed. Yes, men are “victims” of early death, suicide, and violence now. But are women the perpetrators? This inequity hasn’t simply flipped as Lott suggests. His trolling in the D is getting a little old.

Even if Lott has a legitimate argument, it is effectively hidden in the rhetoric of male victimhood and male resentment. I think it would be one thing if he specifically focused on the particular struggles of males coping with masculinity in Dartmouth and the larger American society. But instead of painting a picture for us to urge us to think in a new way, he expends his time seeming to belittle efforts to compensate for discrimination against women and complaining about how victimized men are without really acknowledging the privileges they enjoy. I mean in the end of the piece, he sort of rebukes womens' movements and organizations for depicting women as “needy”, but at the same time he’s complaining about how defenseless and victimized men allegedly are. In reality, its quite arguable organizations that try to compensate for discrimination or help women neutralize societal disadvantages makes them “needy”. Yet, Lott takes this as a given and does not enlighten us with a more nuanced look at this debate (note: I don’t think it would have taken a great deal of space in the article to give credit to the complicated nature of the “fostering dependency vs. empowering” debate of social justice.

The author is right that we should look at gender as a relationship between the constructs of both masculinity and femininity and understand that each construct imposes restrictions upon the people that are categorized within them. The fight against sexism is never aided when men and women are position on opposite sites of a rhetorical blaming and shouting match. But the author not helping anyone by generating this “women are more oppressed, "no men are more oppressed” tug-of-war. All in all, the article seems petulant, resentful, a little contradictory and a little blind to the reality gender relations at Dartmouth and the US. Men’s issues should get more attention, but attention to women’s issues is not a calculated slight against men by conniving feminists, liberal elites or whatever invisible bogeyman one chooses to blame for the culture wars. He’s right that we should pay attention to men’s issues, but that does not mean that there’s anything wrong or unjust about the attention given to women’s issues. Instead of re-framing the debate, he seems to be “scoring points” for men against women—very typical of the resentment-baiting, alarmist, zero-sum political discourse that gets us no closer to solving social ills.

Great piece. Why should women students but not men be given special help in getting internships? I find it quite telling that none of the critical comments directly respond to this point.

Let’s say that the vast majority of women’s groups are student run, what does this have to do with the university aid that Lott is discussing that goes directly to only women students? His examples are “ the College devotes two weeks” or “Women in Business, the Society of Women’s Engineers, Women in Leadership and the Women in Science Program, which provides faculty mentors and paid internships to freshmen women.” Could someone please respond to his piece and address these subsidies that are only given to help women and not men? Why does “Dartmouth hosts an annual all-female ‘Proud to be a Woman’ dinner”?

You would think that people who demand equality would see that it should apply to everyone, men included…but they don’t. They are fixated on blaming men for everything that is wrong with their lives. Twice as many men suffer from violence as women? Who cares they say, mostly other men are responsible, so so what? Luckily the judicial system has not been completely shut down for men who have been victimized, but really smart morons at Dartmouth minds have been shut down because it suits their political power agenda to shut them down.

How can the Boys become “Men” if led around by some vacant “mentor” ?

A quick point on the comment in Roger’s article about the millions of years of evolution and biological differences that make men “protectors” and by logical extension women the “protected” (loving the passive status of women here). To my understanding, and I’ll admit it might be flawed as I am no expert, this is actually more a cliche than cutting edge view of how evolution may have impacted human behavior. If you consider hominid evolutionary history, for the vast majority of time our ancestors were hunter gatherers. Many current hunter gatherer societies show us that in such situations women typically provide the bulk of calories by gathering food in the forest or plains or wherever they are living. Men, who are engaged in the hunt, have a glorified and quasi-religious significance but contribute relatively little over time to the food supply. What is more, a system of obtaining food such as this usually means the sexes are separated for large periods of time and women would therefore also be “selected” for their ability to protect their children and each other. Maybe we would be better served to look to the advent of plow agriculture (requiring male upper-body strength) and the accrual of property, when men would become concerned with who will inherent their land/material goods (aka not children their wives had with other dudes) to an emphasis on “protector status.” Just a thought.

Moral of the story: let’s not use questionable and hackneyed interpretations of evolutionary biology to explain the absence of female engineers.

Rule #1 on being a man (or being a human being for that matter)

Don’t post anonymously.

If you have an opinion & wish to put it out in a public arena, at least have the courage of your convictions to post under your real name.

Anonymous = irrelevant.

If you care deeply about your post, you will stand behind it.