Imagine the howls
of social justice outrage if a major university’s Men’s Studies Department (if
that were even a thing) created a program for
women to re-examine and deconstruct their toxic femininity, or if a White
Studies Department (bear with me here) launched a program for blacks to rethink
and dismantle their toxic blackness, or if the campus straight community hosted
an event for LGBTs to reject their toxic sexuality, and so on. The architects
of such offensive programs would be tarred and feathered.
A culturally
acceptable version of these scenarios, however, is precisely what is beginning
to spread on campuses across the country now. The Duke Men’s Project, launched
this month and hosted by the Duke University Women’s Center, offers
a nine-week program for “male-identified” students to address such “toxic”
masculine issues as male privilege, patriarchy, the language of dominance, rape
culture, pornography, and machismo.
One member of the Men’s
Project leadership team said
the goal is to create a safe space for male students in which to “critique and
analyze their own masculinity and toxic masculinities to create healthier
ones.” Another member of the leadership team said the program would help men
“proactively deconstruct our masculinity.”
The Duke program is
patterned after a similar one at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill –
co-sponsored and supported by the Carolina Women's Center – in which
participants are asked to consider how masculinity plays a harmful influence in
their lives. The goal of that program is “to shift the culture of masculinity
toward more non-violent norms,” suggesting that violence is the norm among men.
On the other side
of the country, at Claremont College last week, a group called 5Cs Thrive hosted
a “Masculinity + Mental Health” event. “Masculinity can be extremely toxic to
our mental health, both to the people who are pressured to perform it and the
people who are inevitably influenced by it,” say the workshop’s organizers, stating
outright that masculinity is some sort of mental illness.
