'Uh-Oh--Here Come Masculinity Studies'

Article here. Excerpt:

'A few weeks ago, I wrote about my quest to track down a shocking "fact" from an acclaimed gender-studies textbook, The Gendered Society by Stony Brook University sociologist Michael Kimmel--that American teenage boys typically say they'd rather kill themselves than be a girl--and my discovery that not only was this claim based on a misreading of a thirty-year-old survey, but the book abounded in other factual inaccuracies and tendentious interpretations. A few days later, on May 20, Stony Brook announced the launch of a new Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities, funded with a $300,000 start-up grant from the MacArthur Foundation--headed by none other than Kimmel, whom the press release lauded as "one of the leading researchers and writers on men and masculinity in the world today."
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Like most academic work on gender, Kimmel's writings are based on the premise that all traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity are socialized and oppressive. While this is a debatable perspective that has an unfortunate tendency to turn into gender-studies dogma, it need not be anti-male; authors such as Warren Farrell, author of The Myth of Male Power (1993), argue that gender-role pressures and stereotypes limit and harm both women and men. Ostensibly, Kimmel agrees (though for him, such pressures on men come only from other males and patriarchal structures); at times, as I noted in my analysis of The Gendered Society, he also stresses similarities between men and women to counter notions of a fundamental Mars-Venus gap. Yet his work is pervaded by sweeping assumptions of male power that easily translates into knee-jerk male-blaming. When Kimmel talks about men and boys--at least ones unreconstructed by feminism--it is often in a tone that ranges from ironic condescension to scolding rebuke and outright antipathy.'