Why no Male Studies?

Lots of colleges have Women's Studies departments. Some pursue Gender Studies. What about Men's Studies?

I was just alerted to a web site that announces the following:

A gathering of academicians drawn from a range of disciplines will meet on April 7, 2010, at Wagner College, Staten Island, New York, to examine the declining state of the male, stemming from cataclysmic changes in today's culture, environment and global economy.

At first I wondered if it was a joke. Evidently it is not.

The colloquium will be led by Lionel Tiger, an anthropology professor at Rutgers University.

(Lionel Tiger? Wait, maybe it is a joke. Oh, no, I guess not.)

It appears that a group of scholars want to open a serious discussion of the challenges facing men in today's society -- inability to go to college being one -- as well as the phenomenon of misandry, the hatred of males, a term I confess I had not heard before today.

Women's Studies departments seem to have arisen in the 1970s as part of a wave of feminism and feminist theory, with gender equity the underlying goal. Men's Studies? Well, the assumption has been that men are the group in power. Most of what is studied in universities is, in essence, men's studies.

The group promoting Male Studies suggests that there is need for a study of "the male human being," and of such sub-topics as the deterioration of boys' educational attainment, the prevalence of certain psychological disorders in boys and men and the "remarkable" rate of suicide among males, according to the web site.

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