Misandry, Male Studies, and Staten Island. Good God, Wow.
Today, we trekked to Staten Island. Dear readers, with no offense to the borough, it feels like a foreign land. For starters, you have to take a boat to get there. And when we went to the ferry’s taxi area, we were literally rushed by dozens of cabbies desperate to drive us. We chose, natch, the only woman in the bunch. Her cab turned out to be a minivan, and her mother and daughter were already in it.
It was, however, a perfectly fitting way to arrive at Wagner College, where we were attending a symposium on “Male Studies: A New Academic Discipline.” (When our driver learned why we were there, she threw her head back and cackled.) Man, was it a wild day.
For the record, men’s studies, or masculine studies, is a totally valid field of research and examination. Gender roles and expectations will never cease to fascinate us. But most of what we heard on Staten Island today, well, it blew our minds. Some highlights, below. (And many more, including an explanation of the above image, to come soon):
- The awesomely named Lionel Tiger, a professor at Rutgers, said that the “academic lives of men are systematically discriminated against.” Yes, boys lag behind girls in school, but is this really because of active discrimination? Later, Professor Tiger bemoaned the roles of both rape educators on campus (who teach boys that they’re “predators” as soon as they begin college) and violence against women organizations (who, get ready, don’t track statistics on violence against men).
- His co-moderator, Christina Hoff Sommers, from the American Enterprise Institute, said that feminists “constantly try to knock down doors that are already open and it’s young men who pay the price.” She also said that the majority of the voices in women’s studies programs and doing research on women are not “fair minded,” and that professors in those fields routinely present fabricated statistics.
- An online commenter said, during the discussion, that the reason women haven’t admitted that they’ve won the battle is, “were feminists to declare victory, they would lose their eternal status as victims.”
- We rode the ferry back with Roy Den Hollander, the semi-notorious lawyer who’s on a crusade against women’s rights. There is a LOT more to his story, and to say about him, but the short version is that when he wasn’t talking about how he prefers the term “feminazis” to “feminism,” he’s actually a really lovely guy. We sorta think he’s just heartbroken.
