PROPAGATING A HOSTILE EDUCATIONAL ENVIRONMENT FOR MALE STUDENTS: How Higher Education “Studies” Men.
In sum, it is an ideological rather than a scholarly project.
The center has held several seminars, among them a talk about “the need for further regulation on pornography” in the European Union. It has sponsored a white paper, “Men as Allies in Preventing Violence against Women,” in which Bob Pease lays down the law: men should take part in such violence prevention, but because of their “dominance and privilege and…structural gender inequalities,” they should play only “a supporting role…under women’s leadership” rather than seeking to be “leaders or equal partners.”
Pease makes another point: women deserve “women-only spaces,” but men-only spaces are verboten, because excluding women “reinforces the notion of male authority” and men “need to learn how to communicate outside of traditional frames of masculinity and male sociality.” (Pease, as it happens, is the author of a book called Recreating Men, which argues that men need to undergo fundamental change for the sake of women’s equality.)
The Men’s Center, in short, is not about understanding men’s psychological and emotional development and their personal and professional lives; it is about encouraging young men to feel guilty about being born male, to check their own natural male impulses and interests, to emulate (as best they can) the manners and mores of women, and to subordinate themselves, in all ways and all circumstances, to their female friends, relatives, and colleagues.
The center has a blog, which is full of whining about “toxic masculinity” and about men’s lack of respect for women. After Trump’s election, it featured a letter addressed to “White Men.” It read, in part: “This is on us. And now it’s up to us to undo it. I keep hearing us say: ‘we’ll be fine.’… [But our] friends of color, our Native American friends, our Muslim friends and Latino friends, our LGBTQ friends and the women in our lives are not fine…. They are afraid of what is to come. And they will be, and already are, under attack. If you’ve ever questioned the existence of the concept of privilege, being able to say ‘we’ll be fine’ is painful proof of its existence.”
One big piece of news from the blog is that the Center is in the process of developing the first MA program in masculinities studies. Stony Brook, it should be noted, is a major international research university that turns out top-flight physicists, chemists, biologists, and engineers who make a real difference in this world. It is a puzzlement, and a disgrace, that this splendid institution should want to institute an advanced degree program in identity studies that involves not education but indoctrination and that doesn’t prepare graduates to do anything other than spend their lives whining about gender inequality.
Indeed.