Since feminine studies and gender studies have been with us for decades, it was only a matter of time before someone proposed masculine studies.

Cathy Young of Minding the Campus reports.

Uh-Oh–Here Come Masculinity Studies

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my quest to track down a shocking “fact” from an acclaimed gender-studies textbook, The Gendered Society by Stony Brook University sociologist Michael Kimmel–that American teenage boys typically say they’d rather kill themselves than be a girl–and my discovery that not only was this claim based on a misreading of a thirty-year-old survey, but the book abounded in other factual inaccuracies and tendentious interpretations.

A few days later, on May 20, Stony Brook announced the launch of a new Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities, funded with a $300,000 start-up grant from the MacArthur Foundation–headed by none other than Kimmel, whom the press release lauded as “one of the leading researchers and writers on men and masculinity in the world today.”

The Center, which will open this fall and will host regular seminars and forums as well as an international conference in 2015, is clearly meant to play a major role in  the emerging field of “masculinity studies.”  With this in mind, another look at Kimmel’s work and outlook is in order.

Like most academic work on gender, Kimmel’s writings are based on the premise that all traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity are socialized and oppressive.  While this is a debatable perspective that has an unfortunate tendency to turn into gender-studies dogma, it need not be anti-male; authors such as Warren Farrell, author of The Myth of Male Power (1993), argue that gender-role pressures and stereotypes limit and harm both women and men.

Ostensibly, Kimmel agrees (though for him, such pressures on men come only from other males and patriarchal structures); at times, as I noted in my analysis of The Gendered Society, he also stresses similarities between men and women to counter notions of a fundamental Mars-Venus gap.