Canada: A case for men’s studies

Article here. Excerpt:

'Search the University of Toronto faculty for experts on the study of women and you’ll find more than 40 academics with research interests including “women’s mental health,” “women and religion” and even “women’s fast pitch.”

Conduct the identical search for “men” as a research topic and discover two lonely academics, both of whom specialize in gay men.

Of the genders, it seems feminine distinctions have become overwhelmingly more fascinating to the academe.

Witness the well-entrenched women’s studies departments in universities across Canada and the United States — important academic centres of inquiry that have provided a steady pulse for the feminist movement.

Now have a look for men’s studies programs.

Or, don’t bother.

I looked.

As far as anyone in the field can tell, there’s only one in North America, located at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y. which offers a minor in the field.

Add to that barren ground an array of individual, off-the-radar courses here and there, usually located in women’s or “gender studies” departments.

It all amounts to male myopia in the ivory tower in which boys and men are studied through a distinctly feminist prism, says a group of North American academics who are taking their grievances public.

“The landscape has essentially been controlled by women’s studies,” says Dr. Lionel Tiger, a Canadian professor of anthropology at Rutgers University in New Jersey. “Men’s studies are a branch plant phenomenon when, and where, they exist.”

The overpowering orthodoxy of men’s studies is that if you’re male, you’re bad or in need of remedy, says Tiger, a native Montrealer who taught at the University of British Columbia for five years.'