Lace Curtain Research and the Funding It Finds

Now that men are in the minority in college (45%), and doing worse in almost  all subjects except math and science in high school, and dropping out, committing suicide, and suffering learning disabilities at much higher rates, we would expect special financial aid to be available to boys – perhaps even more than to girls. Not the case.

Although women dominate the humanities, grants to study male-female issues given by the National Endowment for the Humanities are given almost exclusively to study only women, and from only a feminist perspective. For example, $27,500 for “Witchcraft Beliefs and the History of Thought in Ancient Mesopotamia.”[16]  What is distinctly missing are studies relevant to both sexes knowing how to improve their lives, such as “The Impact of Stepdad vs. Biological Father Involvement in Divorced Families.”

The pattern is the same with the National Endowment for the Arts using, for example, $37,500 of our money to fund exhibits titled “A Woman’s Life Isn’t Worth Much,”[17] but virtually nothing on men’s lives.

Other studies are conducted more directly by the government, such as the Census Bureau. Let’s look....

Remember the headlines we read telling us how little men pay in child support, based on Census Bureau figures? All these Census Bureau’s figures are based on the reports of women. And only women.

Only recently did the government commission a special survey including men. The men reported paying almost 40% more than the women reported receiving (between 80% and 93% of what the court had ordered),[18] plus more payments in full and on time.[19]

Why haven’t we seen any “Men Pay 80%-93%” headlines? Because as soon as the men’s perspective was discovered to be so different, the Family Support Administration had the study discontinued – it was not released.[20] Which is another way of saying “censored.”

Another example. The National Longitudinal Survey provides the basis for thousands of articles about women every year. It is perhaps the most important study of how Americans’ lives change during our lifetimes. Well, no longer. Since 1983, men have been dropped from the study.[21] It is now the most important study about how women’s lives change. 

How was the dropping of men justified? Men are harder to study. Wasn’t that was one of the reasons the medical community gave to feminists when feminists asked why women had been left out of many medical studies? The feminists rightly protested, “Go the extra mile – we have the right to know what does and doesn’t apply to us.” The feminists were right, but the men are silent. The government can’t hear what men don’t say.

The Murder of All Justice

In the chapter on domestic violence, much of the censorship I discussed emanated from the US Department of Justice. It was the Department of Justice that censored abuse by women from a 1979 poll. Finally some professors discovered the data on the original computer tape.[22] The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ “Murder In Families” stressed women-as-victims although its own raw data showed 55.5% male and 44.5% female victims of family murder.[23] Similarly, it issued a report on Violence Against Women,[24] but none on Violence Against Men – despite the fact that two-thirds of the violence is against men. We saw also how the FBI hides the female method of killing by contract by calling it a multiple-offender killing.[25]

I am unaware of a single government source with a focus on family or gender that does not now have a strong feminist bias. Some are bureaus of feminist bias....

Labor in The Women’s Bureau

You’ve probably read that men earn more than women for the same work. Most of us believe it. That statistic evolves from data compiled by the US Department of Labor. But the Department of Labor has only a Women’s Bureau, not a Men’s Bureau. Thus we are given raw data that tells us women earn 77 cents for each dollar earned by men, but no Men’s Bureau looks beyond the surface to show us what’s missing....

What’s missing? In the research for a forthcoming book (25 Ways to Higher Pay), I discovered that men behave differently toward the workplace in 25 different ways. All these ways lead to men earning more, but for very different work (more-hazardous jobs, more technical professions like engineering or brain surgery, etc.), very different behavior at work (longer hours, working night shifts, etc.), and very different efforts to obtain the work (working in much less enticing locations [Alaskan oil rigs, coal mines], commuting further, relocating more, working overseas), and so on.

The Women’s Bureau gives us breakdowns by all the categories in which men outearn women, but these 25 differences that tell us why men earn more aren’t mentioned; and areas in which women outearn men (e.g., entry-level engineers or mechanics) do not become press releases or stories in our local paper. The biases are reinforced by an American school system in which only 58% of high school students in 1999 understand even the very basics of supply and demand.[26] So it does not compute to 42% of students that when men choose labor that fewer people want to do (because of those 25 types of hardships), it means their pay will be higher because of supply and demand, not discrimination. (And higher pay is usually why the men choose that labor.)

Once this Lace Curtain bias (reinforced by a women’s bureau without a men’s bureau) is in our psyches, it creates the political justification for others: Equal Pay Day is established.[27] Vice President Gore not only says that women are paid less for the same work, but that more-competent women are deprived of jobs before less-competent men. He doesn’t mention affirmative action as the legal requirement for the opposite to be permitted. Then the Council of Economic Advisers reports women earn only 75 cents to men’s dollar.

This confluence of misinformation creates the political atmosphere which allows President Clinton to announce tripling the mechanisms to enforce penalties for discrimination against women for the fiscal 2000 budget.[28] A public service campaign will inform women of their rights. Enter a new millennium of lawsuits. For what are the lawsuits a substitute? Women knowing the other 25 ways they can receive higher pay. These would make their company need them more rather than fear them more. That’s the difference between victim feminism and empowerment feminism.

The Office of Research on Women’s Health...and the Deaths of our Sons, Husbands, and Dads

There is no misuse of the lace curtain that is killing our fathers and their sons more than its misuse in the area of men’s and women’s health. We all benefit from more research on both sexes’ health. So why have we been focusing on women’s health during the past three decades to such a degree that we have an Office of Research on Women’s Health but none on men’s health? Because we were told by government leaders and feminist activists that women’s health research received only 10% of all health research funding. We were not told men’s research receives only 5% of government funding (the other 85% is for non gender-specific research, such as cellular, blood, DNA, etc.).[29]

In certain areas women’s health research was neglected. We were led to believe that is because we didn’t care about women. The opposite was true. Men, and especially male prisoners, military men and African-American men, were the most likely to be the guinea pigs for the testing of new drugs because we cared less if men and prisoners died. That is, we used men for experimental research for the same reason we use rats for experimental research.

Two points are important here: What neglect there was of women came from protecting women too much. A core theme of this book is the “female protection paradox”: that protecting women hurts women. This is just one example. Second, the neglect was limited to certain areas of women’s health – overall women’s health research has long exceeded men’s.[30]

Notice, though, that we are not being told that we needed to pay attention to women’s and men’s health. The women’s health message has, ironically, been a competitive one: women neglected, men not. And it has been a blaming one: The male medical community cares more about men.

The result? Most of the world assumes women just “naturally” live longer than men. They are unaware that in 1920, for example, American men died only one year sooner than women; today, they die seven years sooner.[31] While dozens of studies are being done on the possible damage of silicone breast implants, the causes of men dying seven years sooner are virtually ignored. Nor are most of us aware of how quickly men’s health is deteriorating. When I wrote The Myth of Male Power in 1993, the gap between male and female suicide was 3.9 to 1; now it is 4.5 to 1 (see table). In Great Britain, there is a recent 339% increase in male suicides by hanging alone.[32]

Even as we are increasingly hearing that women die of heart disease as often as men, we are not hearing that when most women die of heart disease, men have been long dead. Here are the age-adjusted death rates for the ten leading causes of death[33]...

	Male to Female Ratio
1. Diseases of heart	1.8 to 1
2. Cancerous cysts	1.4 to 1
3. Cerebrovascular diseases	1.2 to 1
4. Obstructive lung disease	1.5 to 1
5. Accidents and adverse effects	2.4 to 1
6. Pneumonia and influenza	1.6 to 1
7. Diabetes Mellitus	1.2 to 1
8. AIDS (HIV)	4.3 to 1
9. Suicide	4.5 to 1
10. Chronic liver disease and cirrhosis	2.4 to 1

In a sense, our sons, husbands, and dads pay a “10% disposability tax” when they are born male. And more importantly, something can be done about it. Men are less likely than women to have healthcare coverage, a gap that has widened again recently.[34]  And 94% of those dying from work-related injuries (e.g., on construction sites, or as truckers, roofers, cab drivers) are men,[35]  yet the United States has only one job safety inspector for every six fish and game inspectors.[36]

What is the US government doing about this disposability of almost half its population? It is identifying women as the at-risk group in its draft of “Healthy People 2010,” the blueprint for legislation and funding for the first decade of the new millennium. It is treating women’s eating disorders as more important than men’s suicides, or men’s heart disease, or men’s occupational deaths, or men’s seven-year-shorter lifespan. More precisely, it is virtually ignoring the causes of men dying. Overall, it specifies 38 health objectives for women, two for men.[37]

The blindness to males at risk hurts our sons. Testicular cancer is one of the most common cancers in men age 15 to 34. When detected early, there is an 87% survival rate.[38] We educate women to examine their breasts, but few parents even know how to teach their 14-year-old son to examine his testicles. Girls’ suicide rate is decreasing and boys’ is increasing. As boys experience the pressures of the male role, their suicide rate increases 25,000%.[39] The suicide rate for men over 85 is 1350% higher than for women of the same age group.[40]

Each of these groups of men would benefit from media that ran articles educating men, or the establishment of hotlines for men contemplating suicide, along with Public Service Announcements letting men know the symptoms of suicide, or of testicular cancer....

What could “Healthy People 2010” be identifying as an agenda for men’s health? Here are 34 neglected areas, for starters. Notice the leading cause of death among men – heart disease – is not on here because that is not a neglected area (perhaps because it is also the leading cause of death among women?). And notice also how many of these areas we’ve barely heard of and, therefore, have little emotional investment in doing something about. That’s just the point – we can’t care about what we don’t hear about...

1. a men's birth control pill

2. suicide

3. PTSD (post-traumatic stress syndrome)

4. circumcision as a possible trauma-producing experience

5. the male mid-life crisis

6. dyslexia

7. autism

8. the causes of male violence

9. criminal recidivism

10. street homelessness among veterans (85% of street homeless are men; about 1/3rd veterans)

11. steroid abuse

12. colorblindness

13. testicular cancer

14. prostate cancer

15. BPH – benign prostatic hyperplasia

16. lifespan. Why the male-female gap increased from one to seven years; solutions.

17. hearing loss over 30

18. erectile dysfunction

19. non-specific urethritis

20. epididymitis (a disease of the tubes that transmit sperm)

21. DES sons (diethylstilbestrol, a drug women took in the 1940s and ‘50s to prevent miscarriages; the problems it created in daughters were attended to, while the sons' problems were neglected)[41]

22. hemophilia

23. ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder) – alternatives to ritalin

24. workplace deaths (93% men)and injuries

25. institutions turning backs on HGH (human growth hormone) abuse among male athletes/body builders, the damage of artificial turf...

26. concussions, and the cumulative damage from multiple concussions (football)

27. male testosterone reduction between 50 and 70

28. infertility (40% of infertility is male; NIH has increased female infertility research, but has no research for male infertility)

29. depression (women cry, men deny; women check it out, men tough it out; women express, men repress). Rand Corporation finds 70% of male depression goes undetected

30. being victim of domestic violence; unwillingness to report battering

31. chlamydia as a creator of heart disease in men between ages of 30-60[42]

32. estrogen transference to men during intercourse[43]

33. Viagra’s effect on heart disease, stress, and marital communication

34. LSD (lower sexual desire) Syndrome (seen in more than half of men between 25 and 50)[44]

In some of these areas, such as sexually transmitted diseases, we think of women being more at risk. Yet men are more at risk than women for chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis,[45] and are over four times as likely to die of AIDS. Other areas, such Viagra and erectile dysfunction, have been in the news a lot lately, but we’ve only begun to understand the effects of Viagra; and erectile “dysfunction,” as I explain in the chapter on helping men express feelings, is often quite functional.

The chance of a man in the U. S. dying of prostate cancer is now about 20% greater than the chance of a woman dying of breast cancer.[46] Yet the government spends almost four times as much money on breast cancer as it does on prostate cancer.[47] This has, at least, improved from the almost 7 to 1 ratio I announced in 1993 in The Myth of Male Power. Advocacy for prostate cancer has had an impact.

However, government spending creates only part of the prostate cancer/ breast cancer gap. It is impossible to get a figure on the private spending gap, but I estimate it to be approximately 20:1. And this does not include the “special efforts gap,” such as the US Post Office printing special 40-cent stamps to raise more than $25-million dollars for breast cancer research.[48] No stamp raises money for prostate cancer research.

How does this impact the life of our dads? Consider one thing ^[1]: In the 1920s, a new operation for an enlarged prostate replaced the old method. For 60 years, no one studied the records to determine if the new operation was as beneficial. When they did, it was found that the new operation resulted in a 45% greater chance of dying within five years of surgery. When this was discovered, it was discovered by a Canadian researcher – no US taxpayer spent a penny on it.[49] If breast cancer researchers did not have funds to check for 60 years which form of surgery killed more women, the outcry would have been ferocious, and justifiably so.

Can a Lace Curtain Government Examine Itself?

The states cross-examine their criminal justice systems by forming commissions on gender bias. These commissions invariably find the criminal justice system guilty of discrimination against women. However, these “government” commissions are not really government commissions – they are feminist commissions. That is, the government pays the feminist National Organization for Women and the mostly feminist National Association of Women Judges to choose which issues to research and which to ignore.[50] They are government commissions only in the sense that they are paid for by the government – meaning us. Even the key staff members are typically feminist activists.[51]

Here are some of the ways their conclusions are reached. Data: For the same crime, women are more likely to go free on probation; men are more likely to get prison sentences. Conclusion: Women are victims of discrimination because women receive longer periods of probation![52] Fallacy: Duh....

Data: There are fewer women’s prisons than men. Conclusion: Women are the victims of discrimination because this forces relatives to go farther to visit them. Fallacies: Women receiving probation and shorter sentences for the same crime is part of what leads to fewer women’s prisons. Second, there is rarely any need for more than one women's prison near a city because so few women are in prison; if more women than men were in prison the commissions would doubtless claim this is a result of women’s poverty and downtrodden status – discrimination in the society against women. Third, locating a prison away from a city makes it much easier to create a setting that is more like a country home, and set up open grounds for women and children to play. And yes, there is a tradeoff – as a result, there are fewer women’s prisons near cities and relatives do have to travel farther.

 Similarly, the commissions were able to see how women's prisons need to pay attention to problems unique to women, but not problems more common among men, such as guards turning their backs on male-to-male rape;  they focus on the overcrowding in women's prisons while barely acknowledging the more intense overcrowding in men's prisons.

When I wrote of these biases on the Commissions’ part in The Myth of Male Power, a Philadelphia TV station decided to do an expose of my book by showing how much worse the situation was for women. To their credit, they acknowledged that everything I had mentioned was true; off the air, they revealed to me that they had set out to disprove the book.

Sadly, when a Philadelphia TV station investigates, it has little impact on policy. The New York Times, with more than enough staff to investigate these conclusions and have an enormous impact on policy, instead reports these conclusions without questioning them.[53]

A feminist government commission on gender bias is the equivalent of a Republican government commission on political party bias. If a political party did this, we’d call it a scandal; when feminists do this, it’s called official. It is one more example of the way feminism has become gender politics’ one-party system.

While feminists gain credibility from the government’s labeling of feminist findings as official, the government itself adds to its credibility by giving grants for the research to be done by feminists in top universities. In turn, feminists who obtain these grants become sources of income for universities, and their publications become sources of promotion for the feminist professors. All of this is happening despite it being against the law, in the same way McCarthyism happened despite the constitutional guarantee for freedom of speech....

Because statistics can be so easily manipulated, it is necessary for them to always emanate from sources in which there are balances of power. Men do not speak up, organize or publicize, so biases against women are eliminated and biases against men remain. I would object as much if government statistics were written up only by masculist writers who felt women’s methods of killings were the only ones worth highlighting.

The government funding gender studies almost exclusively by feminists is like the Department of Agriculture funding tobacco studies almost exclusively by Marlboroists. To be a scholar is not to pre-define a perspective. Saying “feminist scholar” is like saying Republican scholar.

Education or Ms. Education?: Where the Lace Curtain is woven

Title IX theoretically prevents gender discrimination in education.[54] Yet universities openly discriminate in favor of women even though girls are now both entering and graduating from college at a rate of 55% compared to boys’ 45%.[55] If sexism against girls were the issue, African-American girls would not receive 57% of all professional degrees awarded to African-Americans.[56]

Despite this, universities have special programs that not only favor female students, but also female staff and faculty. Even in majors like education, in which men are desperately needed, we have Centers for the Education of Women, but no Centers for the Education of Men.

For example, at the University of Michigan, the Michigan Agenda for Women was designed to help only female faculty and staff be promoted and retained, and to help only female students get special assistance and scholarships.[57] This Agenda for Women is the umbrella for many men-need-not-apply programs at the University of Michigan. Some examples...

The Center for the Education of Women; for only the female faculty, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender annually offers forty research awards at $5,000 each (obviously to do research on the various ways in which women are subjected to gender discrimination!).  For undergraduate women only there is a residential program called WISE (Women in Science and Education); for junior-level female faculty a program called SHARE (Senior Hiring and Recruitment Effort) permits departments to promote thirty-one junior level female faculty to the senior level; and a program on Women of Color in the Academy specializes accordingly.

There are no equivalent special programs only for men. At the University of Michigan or anywhere else. Even in fields in which our sons are in the minority, such as all the arts, humanities, social sciences, and languages.

“We Don’t Need Men’s Studies...History Is Men’s Studies, Right?”

Women’s studies courses are the seeds from which the forest of feminism has grown. They are the lace curtain’s womb.

Over 30,000 women’s studies courses are currently offered at American universities. There are about 700 majors or minors offered on American campuses.[58]  If we’re looking for predictors for the next millennium, try California: The entire California State University system requires women’s studies courses as part of their curriculum. Nationwide, between a quarter and a third of the universities now require women’s studies courses for graduation.

A study of college courses at 55 major universities found that every Ivy League school, with the exception of Princeton, “now offers more courses in women’s studies than economics, even though economics majors outnumber women’s studies majors by roughly 10-to-1.”[59]       

The University of Pennsylvania offers “The Feminist Critique of Christianity,” but none of the 55 universities studied offers a “Christian Critique of Feminism.”[60] Typically, universities have been critical of religion for believing they had the only answer – for maintaining believers were superior to non-believers. Ironically, feminism has become the religion it is critiquing.

The feminist objection to men’s studies sounds convincing: “history is men’s studies.” Here is why no mother should agree with that. The function of women’s studies and men’s studies is to question roles so our children have options, not channel our sons and daughters into stereotypical roles without regard for their individuality. Women’s studies’ original purpose was to do this for women, but history courses do the opposite for men. Traditional history courses are the history of both sexes’ traditional roles – roles without options.

          History is not men’s studies because traditional history courses reinforce the traditional male role of performer.  It is hard to find a single man in a history book who is celebrated for not being a performer. (He may have performed as a rebel, but he’s in the history book because he was ultimately a successful performer.) In contrast, women’s studies courses celebrate women for role deviance (Madame Curie, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Tubman, Marion Evans [aka George Eliot]). As performers, the women were deviating from their traditional role.

          History books trap men into stereotyped roles even more than they trap women because when we celebrate and appreciate someone for playing a role, we are really bribing them to keep playing that role. Appreciation keeps the slave a slave.

Men’s studies is currently needed more than women’s studies exactly because men’s role has been less-questioned. But even more important, without men’s studies, the universities are teaching our children that men have always had options, women haven’t, instead of helping them understand that none of our grandparents had options, they had obligations. Our grandma’s role was raise children; our grandpa’s role was raise money (or raise crops). Both had roles, and therefore neither had power.[61]

Women’s studies without men’s studies means there is no questioning of the process that resocializes, scholarships, and affirmative actions our daughters into enrolling in the traditional fields of both sexes while men remain psychologically closed out of women’s traditional fields of liberal arts. Why? Without men’s studies, neither our son nor our daughter is taught to question the process of our daughter “marrying up” and, thus, our sons don’t question the process of programming themselves to raise money to obtain love. Since they know the most pay comes in engineering, physics, math, medicine, business and law, they will continue to avoid the liberal arts and use the university as a vocational school.

Without men’s studies, our daughter ends up with three options (work full time; children full time; some combination of both) while our son ends up with three “slightly different options” (work full-time; work full-time; work full-time). When we have women’s studies without men’s studies, we create an Era of the Multi-Option Daughter and the No-Option Son. Which is what we have done.

The anger emanating from women’s studies has infiltrated all the top universities. For starters, more than 200 universities currently have “speech codes.”  For example, at the University of Michigan, the phrase “Women just aren’t as good as men in this field” is specifically included in the speech code as an example of an offense.[62] Saying “Men just aren’t as good as women in this field” is not prohibited. Students violating the speech code might be put on probation and even sentenced to mandatory community service. And of course that can be used against them for life (especially if they should run for political office or desire a government or university position). Speech codes prohibit speech which women or minorities might consider offensive, but not speech which men might consider offensive.[63]

The students at the University of Michigan are damaged in other ways. Lynne Cheney, chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, discusses six University of Michigan professors who were charged with sexual harassment for offenses that included “not greeting a student in a friendly enough manner” and “not having read a certain novel....”[64] Some of the charges were, of course, more damaging, but the fact that these were even mentioned gives us a sense of the atmosphere. And they send a message to other professors that they are hostage to female students in general and feminists in particular.

Even those who joke, leer, or stare are now subject to campus discipline for “creating a hostile environment.” And on college campuses, no less. The founders of the Free Speech Movement must be turning in their graves – or, should we say, turning on their gray hair.       

The codes would be less offensive if they were a two-way street, but even that would be undermining the purpose of a university to prepare our children to create dialogue about what offends them, not lawsuits. When speech codes are a one-way street, however, they boomerang against our daughters’ preparations for the workplace. By giving women more-than-equal protection under the law, they turn women into a protected class. This overprotection infantalizes our daughters. It also turns them into a privileged class. Because they haven’t earned this privilege, they learn to feel entitled – a setup for when something goes wrong: blaming and suing rather than looking within and confronting. This undermines our daughters’ preparation to be effective employees and fair employers.    

These codes are also damaging our daughters’ personal lives. Why? The less men express their feelings, the more the male-bashing seems justified. They graduate thinking of their rights, but not men’s. Thus, our daughters graduate with a college education of anger toward men, including a lack of appreciation for their dad. A woman who does not appreciate her dad does not feel loved. And that affects her ability to love her husband and raise children. In the process of stifling men’s feelings about women, but not women’s about men, the codes become divorce training. A setup for children being raised by a single mom who is overwhelmed and angry.

From the perspective of our sons in college, it looks even worse. If your son or daughter told you he’d been kicked out of a course for objecting to its anti-semitism, how would you feel? Well, I was doing a show in Seattle called Town Meeting. Also invited was Pete Schaub, a senior at the University of Washington in Seattle. Pete had enrolled in a women’s studies course. When he objected that all men were not wife beaters, child molesters, and potential rapists, he was classified as sexist. When he persisted with such challenges, he was asked to withdraw from the class. Pete was not your political protester-type, not by a long stretch, but this was too much even for him. He reminded the school that the course description advertised the course as encouraging “vigorous, open inquiry.” To him, it felt more like a vigorous inquisition. The associate dean, caught between feminism and free speech, did “the waffle”: He officially reinstated Pete, but told him it was best to not attend the class![65] (It’s the type of waffle that gives the word “administrator” a bad reputation!)

In brief, the speech codes emanating from the atmosphere created by women’s studies maketh neither a happy marriage, a good mother, an effective employee, nor a fair employer. (Otherwise, they work great!) Aside from this, such codes are blatantly unconstitutional.

These speech codes do not come out of nowhere.  They are justified by a philosophy core to many of the women’s studies classes, one of Marxist feminism, in which men in industrialized nations are seen as part of the dominant class, of a capitalist patriarchy, and women are seen as being treated in this system as the subordinate class, as second class citizens, or the property of men. The theory goes that the dominant class under capitalist patriarchy must keep quiet and non-critical in order to have any hope of women making the transition from subordination to equality. In brief, the censorship of men is seen as a prerequisite to equality. Just as censorship of Soviet citizens was seen as a prerequisite to equality. Instead it created a third world nation.

Isn’t it true, though, that criticizing women, tasteless humor, and teasing create a hostile environment that inhibits women from learning? In the beginning, yes. But part of an education’s purpose is to overcome that response, to use criticism as a growth opportunity, to know how to handle people with different values and senses of humor, which includes knowing how to communicate your perspective as well as to listen to theirs. Which is why the solution is not to include man-bashing in the speech codes’ censorship. The solution is to use conflict between the sexes to teach both sexes how to listen to each other. (To practice Part I of this book.)

One positive contribution of early radical feminists was their focus on the value of the process, not just the end product...the college degree. A university is a laboratory for learning how to work through our disagreements, not for learning how to put a muzzle on the sex already less likely to complain and stir anger in the sex already most likely to complain.

What is the status of men’s studies? In its current form, men’s studies is feminist studies. It does focus more on men, but on men as the problem. It is more likely to be taught by a man, but with a few exceptions, it is taught from a feminist perspective. Men’s issues, from anything close to the perspective in which I discuss them, is a portion of about 3% of the courses.[66]

In contrast to the 700 majors and minors in women’s studies, there is but one minor in men’s studies.[67] In it, “feminist theory is the dominant interpretive discourse,”[68] yet a professor assumed that more women were enrolled because men did not want to confront men’s problems, but women did.[69]

The goal of men’s studies, though, is not men’s studies. Nor should the goal of women’s studies be women’s studies. Both should ultimately be leading to Gender Transition Studies. And both should be integrating the perspectives of more traditional men and women. Either women’s or men’s studies isolated from the other is the use of taxpayer money to subsidize mistrust between the sexes. Gender Transition Studies is the preparation of the sexes to understand each other.

This doesn’t mean we can jump right into gender transition studies. If we do, the agenda will be set by women’s studies: Domestic violence will assume men-as-oppressor; contributions to the family will measure women’s housework and neglect men’s work; discussions of dating will not challenge women to risk sexual rejection, just blame men when they do it wrong; men’s health will be neglected, the lace curtain go undetected....

The use of public institutions to subsidize sex discrimination is unconstitutional. As of the turn of the millennium, though, no college student has used Title IX to file a suit against his or her university for not having a genuine men’s studies department or for not having in its department of gender studies an equal number of courses on men’s issues from non-feminist perspectives.[70]

FOOTNOTES