Every time I hear about a college doing anything regarding masculinity, I cringe. I can’t help it. You see, none of them are really interested in actual masculinity. They’re trying to attack a strawman version of masculinity, where men supposedly feel driven to attack women rather than protect them.
Take, for example, Duke University’s “Men’s Project.”
PJ Media contributor Toni Airaksinen notes at Campus Reform: “In a recent call for applications to join the nine-week program, the Duke Men’s Project touted itself as a ‘great way for men and masculine-of-center people on campus to engage with issues of gender equity on campus and beyond.'”
She added, “Now in its third year, the project has hosted numerous events dedicated to helping men ‘begin the work of unlearning violence.’ Last semester alone, the project hosted six public events on campus, including one arguing that ‘all men’ promote rape culture.”
The group also seeks to “destabilize masculine privilege,” and to combat so-called “toxic masculinity.”
Of course, as someone who has spent a fair bit of time studying masculinity, and even wrote a book on the topic, I’m trying to figure out just what “privilege” they believe men actually have. The privilege to be the gender required to sign up for a draft?
Being 3.5 times more likely to kill ourselves than women?
Being 11 times more likely to die at work than women?
Are those the privileges they’re talking about?
How about the privilege of knowing that you can be accused of rape or sexual harassment by a female colleague and have your career ruined even though you never did anything?
This mythological “privilege” doesn’t really exist anywhere in this country beyond the minds of Leftists who think every disparity that has ever existed was an intentional act of bias. Unless the disparity benefits women in some way, in which case it’s ignored.
Feminists never complain about the gender disparity in garbage collection or coal mining. They never complain about too few men in teaching or nursing, either — where a good argument could be made that male candidates are discriminated against.
The Duke Men’s Project is nothing more than radical feminism — a push for gender superiority, not equality. They make their case by pretending that masculinity is something that it’s not.
Maybe someday, a school will start a men’s program that points out the truth about masculinity, not the so-called “toxic” masculinity these sexist feminists ascribe to anyone with a Y chromosome.
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