<p>ROFL...It's soooo hard to take single cell organisms seriously!</p>
<p>Some courses that are not part of men' studies program:</p>
<p>History of Baseball (perhaps there are some female baseball players?) Yeah, I know there was a movie about a team. But c'mon. I've been told that it's not just about men bonding, but about economics, about class, about.... anything but men and masculinity.</p>
<p>The Congress of Vienna and the Versailles Conference. Any women there?</p>
<p>The American Presidency: If Hillary Clinton gets elected, maybe it will earn an asterisk in Women's Studies programs. Otherwise it is about men (and some of them behaving badly).</p>
<p>Should we go on?</p>
<p>^^^^</p>
<p>I told my niece about a book I just read called "The Female Brain" that is written by a UCSF prof/Harvard/Yale/Berkeley grad doctor who starts her book by pointing out that all brains in utero start out female. It's the hormones in the womb that determine male or female and it's hormones that determine a lot of kinds of behavior after that.</p>
<p>When I recommended the book to my niece, she held that differences are owing to socialization that is often very subtle and starts really early. For her, society makes women what they are and apparently subjugates them. I thought this was actually a disrespect to women, that they would be so tabula rasa. But it seems politically incorrect to suggest otherwise.</p>
<p>monydad: Know you are being facetious, but just barely. I don't like the whining. Definitely NOT a feature of my course. My course is an analysis of the changing material culture from foraging to gatherer/hunting to agriculture to post-agriculture and how these changed impact(ed) gender roles. NO MALE BASHING ALLOWED. GENDERS COLLABORATE TO CREATE CULTURE.</p>
<p>At my first class I tell students that men have always been my greatest weakness (sex, drugs and rock'n'roll yeah!). My heterosexual openness is usually more controversial than my feminist ideas.</p>
<p>Please see my earliest post: I know men are treated like crap at times, and by women too (as are women and children. As a child abused by her mother I know from which I speak. But please see posts about how women were (are) treated like crap in the professional world. THIS IS NOT WHINING.</p>
<p>P.S. I watched all Yankee games with my son. H thinks sports are stupid.</p>
<p>BedHead: I agree with you. I think it is silly to deny all biological influences on behavior. I am the horror of my department that INSISTS totally on social construction of identity. After having raised a daughter and a son I am sure it 'aint so.</p>
<p>Adore both of them.</p>
<p>"but just barely"</p>
<p>No, not just barely.</p>
<p>(Whoever that was...)</p>
<p>Please read nothing into those posts whatsoever, which would be in keeping with their true content/intent value.</p>
<p>Believe me, you don't want to be responding seriously to this level of inanity.</p>
<p>BedHead, a mounting pile of evidence agrees with you. Your niece's opinion is a bit outdated, IMO, though I know that many non-science departments still espouse it.</p>
<p>I thought guys tend to like discussing war and the military?</p>
<p>I think that violence could be greatly reduced in this world if more men majored in men's studies. I mean, its goal would not be just to study men for the sake of studying them but to improve society in the process. Personally, I think the people I know who are excited by sports fights could benefit from taking a men's studies course.</p>
<p>A few years back, I attended a one-evening seminar on Mens Studies. The speech was delivered by Rob Becker (PhD?) with video accompaniments. Some of you may have seen his excellent presentation which probably played at a theater near you. It was called "Defending the Caveman." If you haven't seen the presentation, take a look at the link below. And if you did see the show, also look at the link below and relive the hilarity of Professor Becker.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Why is there a "Women's Studies" major? What's the point and what are the job prospects of one with a BA degree in it?
[/quote]
mythmom and others - thanks for your thoughtful responses. You too monydad!</p>
<p>I took a gender studies (sex roles in society) class as an elective in college. The one thing I didn't like about the class was that it seemed like the students, for the most part, took everything so seriously, lacked any kind of humor, and were, in general, mostly angry young women (I think there might have been one or two guys in the class- don't know though because they didn't dare open their mouths). I generally don't like to be around negative people with chips on their shoulders. Never did.</p>
<p>That was about 25 years ago. Classes like that may be different now (different generation).</p>
<p>As an undergraduate, I took a course with Kenneth Waltz, a leading light in the field of international relations. Here is an excerpt from his Wikipedia entry:</p>
<p>
[quote]
Waltz's initial contribution to the field of political science was his 1959 book, "Man, the State, and War", which classified theories of international relations into three categories, or images. The first image explained international politics as being driven primarily by actions of individual men, or outcomes of psychological forces. The second image explained international politics as being driven by the domestic regimes of states, while the third image focused on the role of systemic factors, or the effect that international anarchy was exerting on state behavior. "Anarchy" in this context is meant not as a condition of chaos or disorder, but one in which there is no sovereign body that governs nation-states. These images also became known as "levels of analysis".
[/quote]
</p>
<p>And here is the Amazon.com description of a new book about the implications of the gender imbalance in China and India:</p>
<p>Bare Branches: The Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population (BCSIA Studies in International Security) (Hardcover)
by Valerie M. Hudson (Author), Andrea M. den Boer (Author)</p>
<p>
[quote]
"Biologists, sociologists, and anthropologists have long assumed that scarcity, whether natural or man-made, is the chief catalyst for both social competition and social conflict..." (more)
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I don't like either feel good sessions or whine fests.</p>
<p>Yes, lack of humor is an anathema to any class. I know that I got invited to lunch by every guy (my cute colleagues) in our critical theory group when I was the only woman to vocally disagree with Andrea Dworkin's characterization of heterosexual sex as rape. We went dutch of course.</p>
<p>I tell my classes that if I'm late it's because I am talking to a cute colleague. A middle-aged woman doesn't get that many chances to flirt.</p>
<p>I also don't like any academic setting in which conclusions are foregone. That's indoctrination. Women's Studies is a fine line but one well worth walking.</p>
<p>At the risk of supporting angry people (I am also not thrilled with them) nothing would have changed in the 60s and 70s if some people did not get really riled up. It is the passion and the anger that moved things forward. It's no different for any other group that is sidelined. I remember the days when feminists took it to the extreme but I also remember that many women at that time said "no" but weren't heard. If a woman dared to report an incident she was accused of misleading the guy, leading him on or "enjoying it" and not believed at the police station, etc. Many women were pressured into having sex in the office or tolerating sexual comments or overtures, harassed by their bosses, etc. It's sometimes hard to remember that those situations were actually quite common and I don't think having a sense of humor about them was much help. I personally remember a boss I tried to humor away who was relentless and who made me quite uncomfortable. Women back then did not have any "rights" or anyone to go to for support. No boss would have fired a male worker (or derailed his career) for touching a woman's butt or commenting on her breasts or pressing up against her at the copy machine, etc in those days, never mind pressuring her to have sex for her job.</p>
<p>Ah, this has been a great thread. I'm a (straight, and not angry/angsty, haha) girl and going to a sophomore in college pursuing a major in Film with a double major in Gender Studies and a minor in Psychology.</p>
<p>The reasons I'm interested in it are varied. It's an interesting combination of history, theory, psychology, sociology, cultural studies, etc. While I think girls of my generation read texts such as "The Feminine Mystique" in a more historical context, just talking to my mom about her experience reading it in the early 70s really showed me how far we've come in just the past several decades. I've definitely gained a greater appreciation of the opportunities and choices that I have as a young woman today.</p>
<p>But I also do find it very relevant to current issues, especially those relating to the media and its portrayal of woman and the effects of that on young girls and women. Especially in my own college experience, in terms of double standards between boys and girls, you know such things as guy's being considered players where girls are "slutty" if they participate in the same behavior. When we go out, who are we really dressing up for? Ourselves? Men? Other women? And it's also becoming more relevant in an increasing age of globalization, where we're interacting with Arab and other countries where their views of woman are so far backwards. I've also always been very interested in and supportive of gay, as well as transgendered, rights, so my studies are also relevant to that.</p>
<p>I know in my school's department there are classes ranging from historical feminist theory to contemporary queer theory to classes about women in the middle east/africa to african american women's studies. I definitely believe you can't downplay the role of biology in gender, socialization, I would say, plays the upper hand. But I still have a while to go in my studies so my ideas and beliefs are definitely changing.</p>
<p>I'm planning on going into film in some capacity, so while I won't be directly using my major, I'm sure it'll have an impact not only on how I lead my life, but perhaps the projects I choose to work on. I also hope to do a senior thesis focusing on women in film/media.</p>
<p>Rileydog:</p>
<p>You are right that people who want to push for change need to be strong advocates. And the strongest advocates are often angry (for good cause) and a bit humorless. As the women's studies field has evolved, it has become more mellow and less tightly linked to advocacy. The subfield of men's studies has benefited greatly from the pioneers of women's studies. Part of the reason is that scholars realized that to make full sense of women's experiences, men must be studied as well.</p>
<p>I talked to two scholars, one a male political scientist, the other a woman and a feminist historian. Both were working on how people remembered some cataclysmic events that took place in the same decade. The male scholar had not thought to control for gender either in terms of experience or remembering. The female scholar had started interviewing only women (she wanted to document women's experiences) and found she needed to interview men as well. And she found that the milestones men and women used to recall events were different. Men and women experience war differently. The new president of Harvard, Drew Faust, wrote a great book, Mothers of Invention, about how Southern women coped during the Civil War. Such a book would be difficult to imagine being written before the advent of feminism (there's always Lysistrata, of course).</p>
<p>^^^^ Interesting post, Marite.</p>
<p>I do think that a Men's Studies course is at least as valuable as a Women's Studies course now. I think that the pendulum has swung the other way in America and men are faced with more difficulties than women. Examples:</p>
<p>-the feminization of schools has allowed women to succeed more easily then men; school boys who act boyish are considered to have ADD and are drugged.
-men are very reluctant to report spousal abuse or sexual harrassment because of the social stigma attached to it
-there continues to be a draft for men only
-women are far better at getting their causes funded. For example, the gov't funds more breast cancer research than prostate cancer research, but prostate cancer is more of a problem in our country.
- unfair divorce laws. Even if the woman cheats, she is still likely to end up with the kids, the money, the house, etc. A recent study found that women cheat on husbands more than vice versa, despite popular belief.
-men are at a big disadvantage when it comes to child-rearing. A recent lawsuit was about a man who was promised by his girlfriend that she was infertile. When, surprise, she wasn't, despite her promise, and got pregnant, she decided to have the kid. He wanted an abortion and would have used condoms were it not for his girlfriend's promise. He still got stuck paying child support. </p>
<p>So there are some issues to discuss in a Men's Studies course. At some level, Women's Studies course are just about complaining about how bad women have it and how terrible it is to be a woman. (Yes there are other facets, but that is what it boils down to often...and my friends (girls) who have taken such courses are the first to admit it to me). It strikes me as ironic because the only reason women are at all disadvantaged these days is because they often want to feel disadvantaged, and these courses give them the excuse to do so. I'm not sure how popular a Men's Studies course would be because most guys I know would think, "why do I want to spend time complaining about how bad it is to be a man? Instead of complaining about it, I'll use that time to try and change what I think is unfair."</p>
<p>There's so much wrong with that post that it's hard to figure out where to begin. As with the ballyhoo about affirmative action, for all the people who complain about it, I've never seen someone who said, even as a thought experiment, that they'd "switch" for the alleged benefits.</p>
<p>Patriot I am glad you pointed out the part with who gets to make choices about the kids. It's terrible that a women can get rid of the kid without asking the father, which might ruin his life (could get very depressed). And they also decide that she wants, when he doesn't, and demand money, which could also ruin his life. </p>
<p>But none of that ever happens, since we live in a perfect world where everybody gets along.</p>