“Men’s Studies” has existed as an academic discipline for several decades now. Not surprisingly, most of those involved in it identify themselves as feminists – as people interested in studying gender tend to do. But not all of them: A couple of years back, a group of mostly anti-feminist academics and popular writers with an interest in gender decided to try to do a sort of end run around the discipline of “Men’s Studies” by conjuring up a whole new, altogether un-feminist discipline called “Male Studies.”
Recently, The University of South Australia announced that it would start offering postgraduate courses in Male Studies sometime in 2014; our old friend Eoghan/Sigil1 brought this earthshattering news to the Men’s Rights subreddit the other day, where it was greeted with … suspicion and hostility.
GotMyFrogHatOn wrote:
Great, now men have the same opportunity as women to waste their time and money on a worthless degree!
Liverotto was even blunter:
YES, because the cure to bullshit is… MORE BULLSHIT! /s
That’s right: Men’s Rights Redditors hate Women’s Studies, and Gender Studies, and apparently every academic discipline with the word “Studies” in it so much that they’ve transferred this hatred to a new academic discipline that could well have been (and sort of was) designed just for them.
But don’t worry, they still hate Women’s Studies the most:
What was I saying the other day about projection?
Color me not surprised.
OT, I’ll be in Pasadena for a week, starting tomorrow.
I don’t see what was wrong with Men’s Studies in the first place. I know the MRA’s don’t like him, but I think Michael Kimmel and other male feminists are already doing a great job discussing the ways patriarchy harms men in our society. What would the goals of Male Studies be, since Men’s Studies are already on the job? The only goal I’ve seen out of the proposed Male Studies is to just bash feminism. How can bashing feminism be an academic field of study?
So Women’s Studies programs now run for-profit DV shelters? Not clear on how this works.
I bet this is related to the conniving, exploitive racket that is the modern History department.
Just ask yourself—would anyone be interested in history if it weren’t full of violence, war, and oppression? What effective solutions has the discipline of History come up with for these problems? Think about that for a while.
[/redpill]
Miles Groth, one of the sponsors of the first Male Studies conference, endorsed the Principles 101 from Manhood Academy. I’m leery of anyone that believes anything from the Manhood Academy should be taught to college students.
Here is NWO as principal, or something.
My daughter was sent home for dressing like a slut
Maybe now they’ll stop asking why there’s no discipline called Men’s Studies… never mind that that discipline has been around, and thriving, since some time in the eighties!
I’m curious what “differences in communication and expectations” he wants kids taught about. I actually agree that teaching kids about communication and expectations would do a lot to fight rape, but I’m afraid the “differences” he wants taught are going to be evo-psych-tastic and involve a lot of telling girls that if they don’t scream “NO” then they’re consenting and shouldn’t complain.
…And it’s true, organizations that fight a problem would be out of work if that problem went away. Like how cancer organizations want more people to get cancer, and hunger organizations secretly want everyone to starve. This is why we should distrust anyone trying to solve any problem ever.
Become more self-aware? That’s not something Real Men do, apparently.
*sigh*
Oh, MRAs. *sigh*
it’s actually more that the goal is to teach ‘rape is bad’ instead of ‘rape is a slightly regrettable but totally natural consequence of the power of the almighty penis’ but w/e
these are the same guys who painstakingly try to intellectualize their rage, right?
Small detail, I know, but I haven’t heard a lot of feminists saying that violence against women is getting worse. Most I know of boast of a vastly decreased rape rate as a sign of feminism’s success. Of course, even that vastly reduced rate is far too high…
I was looking for more on what xavan would consider to be effective counter-rape information—comment histories are less helpful than one might think—and found slightly more context on what xavan believes about gender studies:
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/rsgxl/iama_mens_rights_advocate_ama/c48fur8
Yes, it’s all one big capitalist enterprise.
He also thinks this article is full of win, but I can’t take seriously something that actually suggests the human race is threatened ‘cos men are afraid of women.
Not going to pretend xavan is some kind of raving misogynists, as he says plenty of things with which I can agree, but he does have an odd fixation on the gender studies and child support “industries.” I’m sure the dough is just rolling in those fields.
You can learn a lot about someone’s concept of women by what they imagine a “Women’s Studies” class might teach. People who think Women’s Studies must be all about dumb, fluffy, useless stuff assume that women are dumb, fluffy and useless. People who think it must teach ball-busting, man-hating radical feminism think women are scary.
Here we have a bunch of guys who can only imagine Women’s Studies dealing in one thing: women getting raped and beaten. Because that’s what they think of when they think of women.
I’ve heard about Bible colleges (that is, usually unaccredited fundamentalist Christian colleges) offering “Female Studies” classes that just teach women traditional gender roles and homemaking. I guess this is the male equivalent?
By the way, I like David’s male study a lot better.
This last comment holds to a strange and confusing belief I see all across the moronosphere, which certainly intersects the manosphere. People who don’t like critical thinking very much. It’s most clearly embodied in all those adds for miracle diets/skin treatments/language programs that claim “[Some sort of relevant professionals] hate this!” It also comes up a lot among conspiracy theorists and wingnuts. Basically, the people who are professionally devoted to something want to suppress new ideas because it would threaten their jobs. And of course it does have some currency when there’s money at stake. See, for instance, the fate of the electric car and other green energy enterprises that various not-green energy lobbies have buried. But those are businesses. The point of businesses is to make money.
You do not make a lot of money as a college professor, and anywhere from nothing to a pittance as an activist. The whole point of pursuing knowledge or a political goal is to see it accomplished. Grant money isn’t something you get to use to install a swimming pool in your yard so you and the other academics and rabble-rousers can have awesome grant-funded sushi and champagne parties. You use it to fund your study or your campaign, which you are undertaking on a part-time retail salary because you care enough about the subject.
I’ve mostly encountered this strange conviction that organizers and professors live lives of luxury and jealously repress the truth so as to protect their fraudulent empires when the purveyors of junk science like creationism and homeopathy put the idea forward, but I’m not the least bit surprised that MRA’s enjoy this bit of illogic, too. Anyway, back to entering data. FRAUDULENT data. So I can keep my cushy, enviable position. Why, just a few months ago I got my very own desk!
(Disclaimer: Academics of the less ethical sort have, of course, tried to suppress their rivals’ theories, but if you’re scholarly rivals, you generally agree that there’s something to be studying. It’s intra-disciplinary bickering, as a rule.)
This. So much.
Just about every academic I know (I’m in science/tech) has skills that could make them a lot more money in the private sector.
A *lot* more money.
Let me emphasize that:
*A LOT* more money.
To the extent where some of my colleagues (tech field, again, this is not generally an option for humanities researchers) start companies as a second job. You know, because they want some of that money, which again, let me repeat, they’re not making as academics.
At the highest levels of academia, where you’re a Principal Investigator, each funded project generally only pays you a month’s salary. The other 9 months are teaching salary, which again is not very much money, and whatever little bits of grants you can get parceled out to you from other projects.
And in technical fields, pay is much higher than in the humanities. In the humanities you pretty much get paid crap. In music, my wife’s field, it was described as “a crumb every *other* month”.
Now to activists. Guess how much that pays? Squat. Most activists make exactly $0.00 per forever.
I find this “all gender studies are crap even the dude ones” attitude from MRAs is similar in a lot of ways to the “don’t call me a white person, I’m just a person” attitude. Both balk at the idea of what was once a “default” identity being labeled and scrutinized, as if that turns those identities into “just another” sex/race/whatever.
These guys want to be the “default,” with all the power and privilege that entails. Anything that questions that – even if it presumably supports their continued supremacy – is suspect.
My ex worked as a server. There was another server working with him who was also a physics researcher at one of the academic institutions in town. He served tables for the fast money, and did physics for the love of it.
As far as I know, he was single. I suppose that wouldn’t be sustainable if he had a partner or children.
i think it’s simpler than that. the mrm (and especially r/mensrights) is primarily young, white, male, irreligious and tech savvy- a population that by and large is openly hostile to the humanities, and assumes that because they don’t understand those fields, they must not be legitimate (see e.g. that one idiotic xkcd strip)
in the case of mras, i think there’s a bit of sour grapes to it, too. deep down, they know this shit is an integral part of the success of the social justice movements they’re trying to ape, but they just can’t do it, so they play paper games with statistics, get all pissy when anyone points out it’s more complicated than that, and above all make sure you know they hate hate hate your way of thinking.
I don’t get the SBS hate. Social sciences are about everyday human life; why shouldn’t they be studied? Politics affects law which affects criminology which affects sociology which affects everyone, every day, all the time. Why do people like to pretend these are less important than physical sciences?
I actually AM studying men’s studies a lot. (My school doesn’t have a dedicated program– it just has gender studies– but we have a big emphasis on men’s studies within that department.) I can see why MRAs don’t like it: it doesn’t blame everything on feminism and/or women.
The belief that professor is a well-paid profession is surprisingly common (possibly because many tenured professors ARE well-paid). My parents told me to become a professor because they get paid well and have lots of free time, and were extremely surprised when I pointed out that it’d be strictly better to be a barista than an adjunct professor: the pay is about equal and barista-ing doesn’t require a PhD.
When your authoritarian faith, your belief system, is as fragile as the MRMs, it is to be expected that one would rail against the very idea of investigating or studying the basis for that faith.
“Do not arouse the wrath of the great and powerful OZ”.
All of academia is men’s studies, basically. I’m always rather suspicious when men think that feminist study and women’s studies should be all about them as well. There’s a large risk of men’s studies type space turning into spaces about re-centering men (and expecting women to do the same) and male self actualization rather than learning how to be allies to women when it comes to ending sexist oppression of women.