Today’s idea: Feminism gets in the way of the study of men, some scholars say — hence the new Male Studies Foundation, which sets the subject apart from feminist theory.

Education | The academic gender wars got a bit more spirited last week, Inside Higher Ed reports, with the creation of the above-named interdisciplinary effort, announced at a conference at Wagner College on Staten Island, to study malehood in all its power and powerlessness. Quote:

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Lionel Tiger, a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, said the field takes its cues “from the notion that male and female organisms really are different” and the “enormous relation between … a person’s biology and their behavior” that’s not being addressed in most contemporary scholarship on men and boys. “I am concerned that male-averse attitudes are widespread in the United States and that masculinity is becoming politically incorrect,” said Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of “The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men.” The culprit, said Dr. Tiger, is feminism: “a well-meaning, highly successful, very colorful denigration of maleness as a force, as a phenomenon.”

But Robert Heasley, president of the nearly two-decade-old American Men’s Studies Association, who steered clear of the event, said the “new” discipline isn’t really new: “Their argument is that they’re inventing something that I think already exists.”

“It’s kind of a Glenn Beck approach,” he added.

Let the fun begin. [Inside Higher Ed, Forbes Work in Progress, National Post, Foundation for Male Studies Facebook page]

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