Frustration with the neglect of women’s accomplishments — call it phallocentrism if you like — was what led to women’s studies, which has lately morphed into gender studies on some campuses. Women’s studies also gave rise to something called men’s studies, which is essentially pro-feminist. You can’t exactly major in men’s studies, but roughly 100 universities offer courses that fall under the umbrella, and the field has produced influential thinkers like Michael Kimmel, who is a professor at Stony Brook University and author of “Manhood in America: A Cultural History.”
The academic turf devoted to sex and gender these days is so crowded, in fact, that the prospect of a newcomer, a discipline called male studies, has generated a minor controversy.
Male studies, largely the brainchild of Dr. Edward M. Stephens, a New York City psychiatrist, doesn’t actually exist anywhere yet. Last spring, there was a scholarly symposium at Wagner College on Staten Island, intended to raise the movement’s profile and attract funds for a department with a tenured chair on some campus. A number of prominent scholars attended, including Lionel Tiger, an emeritus anthropology professor at Rutgers, who invented the term “male bonding,” and Paul Nathanson, a religious studies scholar at McGill University, who specializes in the study of misandry, the flip side of misogyny. Both are on the advisory board of the Foundation for Male Studies, which Dr. Stephens founded last year.
There will be a second conference in April at the New York Academy of Medicine — right on the heels, as it happens, of the annual conference of the American Men’s Studies Association — and the two groups have already begun jousting.
Robert Heasley, a sociology professor at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and president of the association, has accused the new movement of “inventing something that I think already exists.” And at the Wagner College conference, Rocco Capraro, a history professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, said much the same thing. Men’s studies had been around for 30 years, he pointed out, and was “an emerging interdisciplinary field concerned with men’s identity and experience in the present, over time, across space.”
His definition was sufficiently vague, in other words, that it seemed to cover just about everything male-related, and he suggested that the differences between men’s studies and male studies were mostly ones of emphasis.
Actually, the differences are a good deal deeper than that. One argument that male studies advocates make is that men’s studies has essentially been co-opted. According to Professor Tiger, the trouble with men’s studies is that it’s “a wholly owned branch of women’s studies.”
There is also a political dimension to the split. “I’d like to get away from this terminology but it’s true,” Professor Heasley said in a recent interview. “It’s left wing/right wing.”
But ultimately the differences have to do with radically different notions of what it means to be a man in the first place.
The people in men’s studies, like those in women’s studies, take a mostly sociological perspective and believe that masculinity is essentially a cultural construct and that gender differences in general are fluid and variable. To Professor Kimmel, we live in a world that is increasingly gender-neutral and gender integrated and that this is a good thing for men and women both. “That ship has sailed — it’s a done deal,” he said recently, dismissing the idea that men and women are as different as Martians and Venutians.
The male studies people, on the other had, are what their critics call “essentialists” and believe that male behavior is in large part biologically determined. Men think and act differently from how women think and act because that’s how evolution shaped them. In the most extreme formulations of essentialism, men are basically still Neanderthals: violent, clannish, sexually voracious and in need of female domestication.
Professor Tiger, who has a somewhat more benign view of men than that, nevertheless worries that the changes that have allowed women to control their own reproductive process have unnaturally and disastrously altered the balance of power between the sexes.
But the biology vs. culture argument has been going on for years, and the male studies movement is less an expansion of that debate than a response to a specific crisis, the nature of which both sides agree on: academically at least, young men are in trouble.
Charles McGrath is a writer at large for The Times.
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