Men’s Studies as Mindless Gender Gibberish

In the halcyon days of my youth, I studied women’s studies at university. I must say, the content and delivery was never ‘anti-male’ but rather, focussed on addressing structural inequalities as they affected not only women but also other disenfranchised groups: Indigenous people, disabled people, gay and lesbian people, culturally diverse people and elderly people. I found this learning to be highly inspirational and deeply influential on confirming my social justice mindset, a mindset to which I have not yet sold out and probably never will. My time in sociology world also rescued me from the harsh social control regime that was social work downstairs. I recall with a shudder what a brutal bunch of middle-class punishers they were. Think Donzelot, a lot…

Then along came men’s studies…

To declare my own interest in this topic, men’s studies is the broad church in which the PhD upon which I slavishly toil resides. However, I swear that I have never gathered around a prickly gum tree with a bunch of po-faced, teary-eyed men, beating their chests as they try to work out ‘how’ and ‘why’ they so inadvertently came to inflict the patriarchy on womankind. To me, men’s studies equates with trying to increase our understanding of why so many men in developed countries suffer from such poor physical and mental health. It is neither a naff ‘extension’ of women’s studies nor a creepy misogynist rant a la men’s rights movement. My take is that the primary purpose of critically analysing and discussing ‘men’ is to improve our collective health and well-being.

I like it when Leah McLaren, here, refers to men as being ‘the latest special-interest group to receive the doting intellectual attention of critical thinkers everywhere’. Moreover, I am struck by the relatively quick turn around, from men being doting tree huggers to angry revisionists who ‘rah rah rah’ on anyone who dares to question the absurdity of their claims. At the core of this hideous shite mountain is the ludicrous chant that ‘women done us wrong’. Anything and everything that afflicts the male of the species is, according to this shared delusion, because women done us wrong. Every bashing, every stabbing, every failed relationship, every drunken crash, every angry outburst, and every plunge off the twig has at its source one demonic, destructive element: women…

Of course, late at night as it now is, I blame fatigue for confusing me into conflating the men’s rights movement with the men’s studies movement, noting that the former and the latter are seldom cheery bedfellows, right? That the academic study of men has the potential, as Ms McClaren forebodes, of collapsing into a mindless puff of gender gibberish, should not be sufficient reason to cast it adrift and move onto the next special-interest category. We have so much to learn about how and why men think, act, and react the way we do, especially in those areas in which we cause harm to ourselves, or others. If anything, those specific areas are calling out for purposeful, academic study. I say ‘purposeful’ to distinguish that approach from any tawdry, intellectual wank…