Campus Misandry

By Pavel Stankov: Imagine yourself in an academic setting where somebody makes an offhand remark that male writers tend to be self-centered. With no evidence or argument, this statement is biased and uninformed, but people are entitled to their opinions.

Now further imagine that the same person then says that the first person singular “I” in the writing of male authors is like an erect penis directed at us from every page.

This incident happened the week before spring break in a discussion at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. 

For most in higher education today, an event like this would hardly be surprising. However, what made the scene difficult to believe is that nobody challenged it: We let it pass as though nothing had happened while a few heads nodded in polite approval.

This is a problem because complacency perpetuates and legitimizes injustice. For the sake of harmony, we should speak against bigotry in all forms. Disparaging men is just as wrong as degrading women or any other demographic. Crossing this line is where freedom ends and hate-speech begins.

DOUBLE STANDARD

Much of academia’s “man problem” carries over from times when it was warranted to speak against patriarchy. Scholars made careers by discussing legitimate issues of male privilege and asymmetric gender relations. Social conservatism and chauvinism were acknowledged. As the movement gained momentum, however,  people became comfortable with below-the-belt qualitative statements, like the one above.

Imagine if someone made a comment connecting female genitals with literature by female authors. There would be confusion and outrage. How can it go the other way and pass as a casual remark?

Moreover, this was no isolated incident. A friend of mine, who is a faculty member at a local university, recounted how the chair of his department detested merging with another department on the respectable grounds that “there are too many men there.” While my friend may have been fired on the spot for the corresponding remark about women, passive-aggressive comments against men barely get noticed.

The entertainment industry seems to participate wholeheartedly in conformism. Sitcoms from “Everybody Loves Raymond” to “Two and a Half Men” and “Rules of Engagement” present men as bumbling idiots, perpetually horny husbands and overall inadequate human beings.

What do such negative stereotypes have to offer to boys and young men? Is this who they are? Why must the “other,” the foil of the joke, so often be an entire gender?

Perhaps the real question is not how wholesale gender profiling is possible in only one direction, but how it is possible at all in 2015. We’ve had enough of this overcompensation. 

WHY EQUALITY?

There are individual differences that all members of our society have but can’t change. They are not social constructs like education, wealth or religion, but physiological facts like ethnicity, sex, gender and sexual orientation.

Imagine that we had the chance to create a perfect society. Provided we must also participate in that society we are designing, but don’t know which of those unchangeable categories we would be assigned, wouldn’t we create an equal world? Would we not also realize that the physiological features we were born with have no bearing on our value as human beings?

Political philosopher John Rawls suggested this thought experiment 45 years ago, and it quickly became a mainstay of liberalism. It’s scary to see how these enlightened principles were hijacked by movements that identify themselves with the political left.

Remember, we were born male or female, of one ethnicity or another, straight or gay, and it is deeply unjust to be ridiculed or dismissed because of those attributes. Having a “Y” chromosome is not a deficiency, nor can it be the butt of a joke. The current atmosphere of legitimizing misandry in schools is anti-equality. 

LIBERAL VALUES

The statement about personal pronouns is symptomatic of this shift. Prejudice has infiltrated some academic circles. Intellectual honesty is stifled and bullying institutionalized as though reversing the wrong would make it right.

The sentiment may have reached the point where dissent threatens professional blacklisting. When discussion and challenge are no longer welcome, it’s a failure of nerve, and it’s happening in college campuses all over North America.

Take as an example the actions of belligerent demonstrators in Canada two years ago, who attempted to silence a lecture by McGill University’s Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young. The speakers (a gay man and a straight woman) wanted to give a talk titled “From misogyny and misandry to intersexual dialogue.”

Preventing the mere discussion about issues whose existence one denies is undignified at best. It is also totalitarian, creepy and a remnant of conservative patriarchy.

THE GOLDEN RULE

We should stop tolerating questionable comments, not just in our classes and discussions in school, but in principle. Here is a test that might be helpful: Let’s always ask ourselves, “Would that be an okay statement if the roles were reversed?” If it wouldn’t be then, it probably isn’t now.

“Would it be hurtful, if that statement were made about me?” It is not hard to transpose ourselves as the “other” and try to guess what it would be like.

What if we apply the Golden Rule not just to individuals, but entire groups? How do the dynamics change? Let’s also ask, “Is the statement true? Does it make the world a better place?”

Psychological studies repeatedly emphasize how both genders constitute the same species. There can be no room for competition or “othering” in an enlightened society, and there doesn’t have to be a zero sum approach to our relations. The liberation of one does not have to be at the expense of the other.

We participate in the world in our unique ways, and we make it better with our differences. They should be celebrated, not trivialized or subjected to prejudice. School is precisely the place to appreciate diversity and human equality.

We shouldn’t tolerate double standards in education. Those principles become internalized for a lifetime, potentially creating a  generation of self-deprecating people.

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