Faux Feminism: Denying Positive Masculinities

Article here. Excerpt:

'I awkwardly used the leading feminist theory to discuss my findings from the first-ever account of the experiences of openly gay male athletes in high school and colleges at the turn of the millennia. Here, I found gay men accepted, on their teams, not stigmatized. I questioned how homophobic heterosexual men could be, or as hyper-masculine as gender scholars claimed, if they were unbothered by the sexuality of their teammates.

This research was followed by multiple studies showing sympathy, not antipathy, toward gay males on the part of straight males in sport. In short, I was showing that whereas homosexuality was stigmatized among adolescent males in the 1980s and 1990s, it was homophobia that was stigmatized in the new millennia.
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Inclusive Masculinity: The Changing Nature of Masculinities, my book exploring the way modern young men really were, was a shot across the feminist bow to the stakeholders of feminist gender studies. Stuck between his kinship with me and my blasphemous results, my mentor’s endorsement of the book principally described it as “hopeful,” a subtle way of casting doubt onto the multiple studies that informed it.
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I struggled to publish for a few years, until I employed a new strategy. Rather than writing an article and submitting it solely, I wrote several, saved them up, and shot-gunned them to the journals all at once. Not even the most stalwart gatekeeper had enough spare time to review five articles.

My strategy and my persistence paid off. My articles began to be reviewed not by gatekeepers, but by graduate students. They found my theory reflected their own experiences. I began to publish, both inside and outside the canon of journals from which the feminist politics of masculinity are at play. Over the next decade I produced a dozen PhD students, and dozens of further studies in multiple countries showing that young straight men had left homophobia behind. Thus, a rift in masculinity scholars was born between those wedded to an ideology that views heterosexual men with disdain and those vested in a more impartial, data-driven social-scientific study of men.'